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Moscow | Contributors | News | Tidbits
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Habitus translator wins PEN grant
by Habitus · 06/21/10
Congratulations to our friend and collaborator Peter Golub, who has won a PEN translation grant for his work with Russian author Linor Goralik. Peter began this project as a commission for our Moscow issue. PEN says:
Peter Golub for a collection of flash fiction by Linor Goralik, an underground Russian author beginning to make a name for herself in the literary mainstream. These very short stories catch their characters in midflight, like strangers on an airplane, combining the mythic with the banal to startling effect, as when the wolf, disobeying doctor’s orders, steps out for one last visit to the three little pigs. (No publisher)
Publishers, take note!
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Events | News
July 14: NYC event with André Aciman
by Habitus · 06/16/10
Is New York City the Diaspora?
A Conversation with Joshua Ellison and André Aciman
July 14, 7pm
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place
New York, NY
Join Habitus editor Joshua Ellison for a conversation with celebrated author André Aciman.
Together we will explore a provocative question: Is New York the Diaspora? With its enormous Jewish population, its creativity and culture, and its unparalleled array of options for Jewish living, should we really think of New York City as part of the Jewish Diaspora; or is it just another kind of homeland?
André Aciman has chronicled a life’s journey across continents and has also emerged as one of contemporary New York’s most astute literary observers. He writes: “New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere…a shadow city.” We will talk to André about being a stranger at home in New York, about the place of the city in his recent work, and what it means to be a Jew here.
André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and, more recently, Call Me By Your Name and Eight White Nights. He is a Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of New York.
Joshua Ellison is the editor and founder of Habitus: A Diaspora Journal.
Tidbits
Sh’ma Magazine on the Diaspora
News
Internships available
by Habitus · 05/05/10
Habitus: A Diaspora Journal, a Jewish magazine of international literature, art, and culture, is looking for interns for the summer and fall.
The ideal candidate will be a student or recent graduate with a strong interest in Jewish culture, literary publishing, and international travel. The intern will participate broadly in the organization, including:
-Blogging
-Researching new writers and international cities
-Supporting staff at events
-Assisting with distribution and sales
-Contributing to the grant-seeking process
Our interns will be exposed to a wide range of literary and cultural opportunities, participate in exciting events, learn many intricacies of the publishing business, and encounter writers and artists from around the world.
The internship is part-time (flexible hours) and unpaid. Our offices are in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Please send resume and CV to jobs (at)habitusmag.com. No phone calls, please.
Buenos Aires | Contributors | Multimedia
VIDEO: Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky: Once 9:53 – a fotonovela
by Habitus · 04/28/10
Last year, Habitus editor Joshua Ellison introduced Mexican American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans to Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. Soon afterward, the two began a collaboration, re-imagining the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book that was once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary.
Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building. As the story unfolds, photojournalist Roli Gerchunoff stumbles across the bomb plot—and realizes that he may have a chance to change its outcome.
Stavans and Brodsky have shared an early draft of the book with Habitus, and in the video below speak about their work on on the project, their reasons for reexamining the AMIA bombing, and their enduring affection for the fotonovela.
Tidbits
PEN World Voices Festival 2010
by Habitus · 04/21/10
Here at Habitus we’re excited about next week’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Among the more than 150 participants speaking and reading at some 50 events around New York City you’ll find Habitus friends and contributors Ariel Dorfman, Arnon Grunberg (who’s lately been doing some blogging for PEN), Rodrigo Fresán and Aleksandar Hemon. While the entire festival is always intriguing, Habitus readers might be interested in a panel on war writing and reportage, with Grunberg and Philip Gourevitch; a discussion of the recent biography and graphic novel about the life of Anne Frank, and a conversation between Ariel Dorfman and Gabriel Sanders, and readings from Sasha Hemon’s new anthology of the Best European Fiction. We’re also looking forward, naturally, to the panel on literary magazines around the world, which includes our contributor Rodrigo Fresán.
Budapest | Elsewhere
Extremely Hungary continues
by Habitus · 03/03/10
Our friends at the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York produced a very ambitious and impressive year-long festival in 2009, Extremely Hungary, that brought an unprecedented array of Hungarian culture to New York and Washington, DC.
The year is over, but the excellent offerings have not stopped. On March 18th, the HCC will screen a film that promises an interesting perspective on Hungarian Jewish life: The Fidesz Jew, the Mother with No Sense of Nation and Mediation
Can differing political views break up a marriage? Eszter Hajdú’s 2008 film is a pioneering effort to disclose the underlying mechanisms of the political conflict that has divided Hungary since the hopeful political changes of 1989. It is the story of a broken friendship and a family that has fallen apart under the strain of differing political convictions. In one narrative, two Jewish friends are torn apart when one of them became a right-wing party (Fidesz) representative…The other story focuses on Zsuzsa, who separated from her husband in 2002 after they had stopped talking to each other, and politics pits even child against mother. “There isn’t a drop of patriotism in you,” Zsuzsa is told by her daughter, “you’re unfit to be a mother!”
Moscow | Elsewhere
Most Russian speakers outside the FSU are Jews?
by Habitus · 03/02/10
If you are wondering what you are going to do in November, 2011, Harvard will be hosting a very interesting conference on the Russian-Jewish Diaspora. Not exactly timely information yet, but this statistic from the program description is quite remarkable:
Almost two million Russian-speaking people, most of them Jews, live outside the former Soviet Union (FSU). In January 1989, when the last Soviet census was taken, 1,449,000 people identified themselves as Jews.
Such a an amazing statistic doesn’t necessarily reflect the inherent challenges of defining a Jew. For example, the contention that all 1.1 million Russian speakers in Israel are in fact Jewish is, to say the least, subject to debate. Would also be interesting to know what defines a Russian speaker (i.e. second generation?). All the same, it helps to illustrate the remarkable imprint of Jews on the Russian-speaking world.
The organizers are accepting paper proposals through May, 2010.
Elsewhere
Tony Judt and ‘edge people’
by Habitus · 02/26/10
The always-provocative Tony Judt has been wrestling aloud with his own past and self-definition in the NYRBlog. Today, he takes on the problems of identity and affiliation directly:
As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan.” But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.
He speaks of his affinity for “edge people” and “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.”
In our latest issue, our own Yuri Slezkine sketched out his own biography in somewhat similar terms, in an essay he titled “How I Became Multicultural.”
I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”
I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.
Kosher Chinese and the Power Elite
by Habitus · 02/25/10
Perhaps inspired by recent neoconservative angst over the WASP aristocracy’s waning grip on the levers of political power, SFGate’s Jeff Yang excavates an old meme, wondering whether Asians are indeed the “new Jews”, and investigating whether—as Daniel Golden claimed in his 2006 book on Ivy League admissions policies:
Asian Americans are disproportionately harmed by current admissions standards, to the point where an effective quota system exists, capping the number of Asians admitted at a virtually fixed level — for private colleges, generally well south of 20 percent of the student body — and forcing Asian applicants to compete for slots against other Asians. In short, the environment Asian American candidates face is remarkably similar to that of Jewish applicants in the Fifties and Sixties, when Ivy League colleges had a policy of preventing an “excess” of Jews in their student body.
Yang looks into the apparent contradiction of Asian American support for affirmative action, and finds inspiration in the integral role Jews played during the civil rights era. His sources seem a bit out of date, but the piece is worth a look, if only for the attention it calls to a series of programs and exhibits on the experience of Jews in China, taking place around San Francisco this Spring
