Memory Shot Through With Holes

My place here is somewhat paradoxical. I am supposed to speak, yet I have nothing to say. No lesson to teach, no advice to give, no message to deliver, no strategies to propose. I bear tidings neither of war nor of peace. Like everyone else, I have opinions about everything, but my opinions are no more interesting than anyone else's. There is one thing of which I can speak: my work as a writer. I do not necessarily believe that a writer is best suited to speak of his work. A careful, somewhat impassioned critic can do just as well, perhaps even better. But I can shed some particular light on one aspect of my writing: the Jewish concerns that run throughout. The paradox I mentioned-my speaking while not having anything to say-is not simply a more or less gratuitous rhetorical figure. The paradox becomes clear to me as I think of when I began to write, or rather, first decided to write. I had an overwhelming desire to write, which has never left me, yet at the same time I felt I had nothing to say. The theories of the novelists appealed to me. They took delight in repeating that they had nothing to say, that they needed to devise new forms of fiction. I thought I was attracted to such theories for purely ideological or esthetic reasons, but that was not at all true. Some years later I came to understand that I did not have nothing to say. Like many others I could have said, or written, just about anything. Rather, I had to say nothing, which is not the same thing. As the years went by, as I wrote more, I discovered that the nothing I had to say, to write, to