Alexander Dolinin's essay on "Signs and Symbols" seems to me a real breakthrough.

Just one point troubles me here, continuing something that always troubled me in the story. This Jewish couple don't behave as if Friday evening (and Saturday until dusk) is the Sabbath. The woman buys fish when it is already dark, whereas a traditional Jewish woman would have prepared the Sabbath meal long before dusk. True, they have a festive midnight tea which is a real celebration of their loving transcendence of hopelessness, and this is in the spirit, if not the letter, of Shabbat.

But I have always wondered whether Nabokov meant his readers to register this. If he was simply unaware of it, or overlooked it, it seems insensitive; and that does not seem like him. I suspect that this a further problem he is setting for the reader. Is their assimilation and apparent alienation from religious roots part of the story?

Despite the brilliance of Alexander Dolinin's pioneering interpretation, it, too, "jarred" with me when he apparently casually, unreflectingly, called Saturday the "sixth day" rather than the seventh (see below).

I am deeply grateful to him for making such sense of this short story that has puzzled me so long. But I just wonder if this apparent treatment of the Jewish seventh day as if it were merely the Christian or post-Christian secular sixth is another deliberate device of Nabokov's intended to disconcert the reader into discovering a different dimension.

Anthony Stadlen

<< In the context of "Signs and Symbols," with its emphasis on numerical sequences and patterning, the transmitted six acquires several meaningful connections and implications. It should be noted at once that the ciphered message comes after midnight, when Saturday, the sixth day of the week, has already begun. The Holocaust background of the story suggests an association with the Star of David, a six-pointed symbol that signifies a union of man with a divine principle. The cipher obviously alludes to the photo of the boy "aged six <...> when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man," which not only evokes his dream of a flight and a bird-headed Sirin, but also echoes the old man's insomnia during the immediate present of the narration. What is even more significant, though, is the relation of the sixth slot on the ten-digit telephone dial to the set of ten jars and, by implication, to th e future of the boy and his parents. It parallels the sixth, unread "eloquent label" of the series that comes after "crab apple" and presumably promises a sweeter continuation21--the next stage of metamorphosis that will follow the misery of madness, persecution, old age, and despair. The cipher seems to tell the old woman (and the reader) that her fears (and ours) for "the fate of tenderness" and love in the world are premature, and that her thinking of death as "monstrous darkness" is shortsighted. In other words, it informs her (and the reader) of the central event of the fabula--the eventual death of the boy, though not as annihilation, the meaningless and empty zero, but as transformation, the mystery of rebirth (hence the motive of birthday and the "conspicuous" birthmark in the final paragraph), the meaningful, albeit unnamed "sixth step" in the open, incomplete, unfolding sequence. >>