The Immanent Jew

THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN by Romain Gary. 244 pages. World. $5.

Genghis Cohn, a Yiddish music-hall comedian, is on his last stage. The stage is Auschwitz, and his audience is a German firing squad. But he seizes the opportunity for a last punch line. He turns his naked rump to the executioners and says: "Kush mir in tokhes!," which in Yiddish means "Kiss my ass!" Herr Captain Schatz, the man who has been placidly shooting Jews down on order, is so shaken that he accords Cohn the unusual respect of examining the corpse and ordering it clothed. Seeing an opportunity to keep his act going, Cohn's ghost slips into Schatz's dank subconscious.

On this unlikely premise, Romainian Gary has constructed a wildly funny, and ultimately mordant picaresque novel. The time is 20 years later, and Schatz has become police chief of a German town, though still captive straight man to Genghis Cohn's raucous spirit. "It has been my fate," says Cohn, "to add a new dimension to the legend of the Wandering Jew: that of the immanent Jew, omnipresent, entirely assimilated, forever part of each atom of the German earth, air and conscience." Night after night, he sits on Schatz's bedpost, teaching him Yiddish and the art of Jewish cooking. But he also discovers that being part of a Nazi means that the Nazi is part of him. Both are humans; both are part of "the very semen of the species."

Unobtainable Goal. It is a predicament that requires considerable explanation, a job Gary attacks with relish, inventiveness and sardonic wit.

Schatz, accompanied by his ghost, is confronted with the murders of 22 men, all of whom were discovered with their pants off and beatific smiles on their faces. "It's the crime of the century," says Schatz. Cohn, as a representative of 6,000,000 slaughtered Jews, looks at him reproachfully.

The murders revolve around the book's two other supersymbols. The first is Lily, a flawless Aryan beauty who represents the unobtainable goal that drives idealists mad and causes them to commit atrocities in her name. Florian, her cynical panderer, is Brother Death himself. Lily's problem is that she is a nymphomaniac who is unable to achieve orgasm. Florian brings her an endless string of ardent customers whom he kills while they are trying vainly to satisfy the great ideal.

Gary attempts to explain not only German history but most of the history of Western civilization with this morbidly fascinating sexual metaphor. It is insufficient to the task, but somehow that does not seem very important when matched against the savagery of Gary's vision. Lily is described by a German admirer as "a being of exquisite sensitivity. Culture! That's what she lived for. She walked in beauty! She inspired heroism and sacrifice! Our students were taught to love her, even in kindergarten!" To which Genghis Cohn replies sardonically with a reminiscence of the moment when he and his fellow victims were digging their own grave before their execution: "Sio-ma Kapelusznik moved a bit closer to me, winked, and then said: 'Culture is when mothers who are holding their babies in their arms are excused from digging their own graves before being shot. We both had a good laugh. I'm telling you, there's no funnyman like the Jewish funnyman."

Need for Cleanliness. Cohn is not quite satisfied with this. He broods about it, and some years after his death comes upon a newspaper report of atrocities committed by the savage Simbas in the Congo. "The civilized world was indignant. So let me put it this way. The Germans had Schiller, Goethe, Holderlin, and the Simbas of the Congo had nothing. The difference between the Germans, heirs to an immense culture, and the savage Simbas is that the Simbas ate their victims, whereas the Germans turned theirs into soap. This need for cleanliness, that is culture."

Gary, who is part Jewish himself, ends his novel with his Jew falling victim to the very fanaticism he mocks. As a Christlike apparition, Cohn starts hounding Lily. The message is that both Jew and German, Schatz and Cohn, victim and killer, are contained in each other and subject to the same aberrations. But ultimately, Gary seems to conclude, no reminder of man's fallibility has ever deterred anybody who is sure he is right. As Florian says to Lily at one late encounter: "It's only your Jew, peach. Never mind Him--nobody does. He's never been in anybody's way."

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