Schocken, Goethe’s Faust and Rabbi Nahman

Salman Schocken died alone in one of Switzerland’s

hotel rooms, clutching two outstanding books,

Reb Nahman’s stories, Goethe’s Faust, in his two hands,

as if kabbalah and Kultur, contrasting cooks

this literary broth for him prepared.

Goethe I can understand, but what

was it that Schocken found in Nahman, that he shared

his fatal final moments with a man a lot

of Jews who are assimilated choose as guide

to lead them back to God from great Kultur?

Could he have on Reb Nahman as his Faust relied,

to find for his well-published past a cure,

as in Leipzig for his future Werther, loving Gretchen,

Schocken’s Schubertian death shared with a rabbi, not a Mädchen?

David Remnick (“The Dissenters: Haaretz Prides Itself on Being the Conscience of Israel. Does It Have a Future?” The New Yorker, 2/28/11):

The patriarch of Haaretz was Salman Schocken, a department-store magnate from Germany who was so imperious that Hannah Arendt once called him “Bismarck personified.” Born in 1877, Salman Schocken was the son of a poor, unlettered owner of a drygoods store. He had only a grade-school education, but he was a relentless autodidact, consuming Goethe and Nietzsche even as he worked as a travelling salesman. In the Saxon city of Zwickau, he and his brother Simon started the first of what became one of the largest chains of department stores in Germany, offering quality goods at reasonable prices. As he began to make money, he accumulated a vast library of rare German and Hebrew books. This, as Schocken’s biographer Anthony David points out, was the seed of his true ambition. Like the merchant princes of the Renaissance, Schocken meant to put his stamp on his time as a cultural and political impresario.