Threads And Chains Poem by gershon hepner

The threads that join us sometimes met-
amorphose into chains, the sort
of metamorphosis we ought
to think of every time we let
ourselves be bound to others in
relationships that are a bind
as soon as our cocoons begin
unraveling, and leave behind
a creature that is so transformed
no chains can bind it, and he stings,
like insects that had never swarmed
before they sprouted insect wings,
the person who used a thread
to bind him and now learns
that threads turn into chains when shed,
and cause the deepest burns.

Richard Eder reviews with considerable disdain a book by the German writer Ingo Schultze, “New Lives” (“East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushes by Capitalism, ” NYT, October 30,2008) :
Born and educated in East Germany, where he began to write, he has directed his fire at two targets. One is the harsh and (almost worse) stultifying Communist regime. The other is the capitalist tide that flooded in from the West once the wall came down, overpowering a ravaged and demoralized society and buying up quite a bit of it. In two brilliant collections, “33 Moments of Happiness” and “Simple Stories, ” Mr. Schulze artfully sketched the humanity as well as the shaming distortions of life under an inhuman system. Anger is there, delivered on shafts of wit, yet there is also a forbearance that only makes the anger more telling. This is not words hurled at a target; it is the target speaking, both with wry insouciance and as confession, though a confession devoid of self-pity. For the post-wall West German ascendancy, on the other hand, he has only anger. To Mr. Schulze what happened was not reunification but something closer to colonization. Bad as things were in the East, he has suggested, there were certain values that grew up against the distortions, like plants sprouting, marred but tenacious, through rubble. The Western bulldozer crushed them with a mix of exploitation and incentive. A minor character in “New Lives, ” a die-hard leftist holdout in the reunified nation, makes an argument for the old Communist states: “We, in the East, had been the guarantors that capitalism in the West had worn a human face. But that was all over now.”…
It is mordant comedy. “New Lives” has other such scenes, along with passages vividly portraying the daily Leipzig demonstrations that, together with the spreading effects of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s glasnost, helped bring down the system. Largely, though, the novel is a failure. Its unrelieved bitterness is part of the problem, particularly because it extends through so fat a book. Purging should not go on too long. The narrator’s voice, contained in the letters, is of an unvaried chill. That he strips himself bare while he is stripping others is no help: confession demands penance, and here it is the reader who makes it. Frequent footnotes by an unseen commentator provide, instead of elucidation, a steady, scornful disputing of the text; this metafictional device distances us even further. Virginia Woolf once wrote that even an experimental novel requires a thread running through it for the reader to take hold of. Here the

10/30/08