Habitus

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!”

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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.

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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.

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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

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by Habitus · 02/25/10

Our friend Osvaldo Golijov will bring his music to Toronto next week at the TSO’s sixth-annual New Creations Festival. Golijov was also the subject of a nice profile in The Star.

Each of Golijov’s compositions is different. The influences include South America, the synagogue and the shtetl, wrapped in a life-filled tonal shimmer.

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by Habitus · 02/25/10

Our contributing editor Ilan Stavans has a piece in the Forward about the Jewish-Argentine poet Juan Gelman. Stavans writes:

He makes me think of the Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement who came to Argentina seeking a Promised Land but rapidly found disillusionment. Gelman isn’t an immigrant, but his parents and siblings were born in Ukraine of martial stock. His father fought in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Growing disappointment with the promise of a new life in the New World is Gelman’s theme. It culminated in 1976, at the peak of the Dirty War, when police kidnapped his 20-year-old son, along with the son’s pregnant wife; they were never to be seen again. Theirs became two more names added to the long list of desaparecidos.

For more from Buenos Aires and Ilan Stavans, take a look at Habitus no.3.

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by Habitus · 02/23/10

The inaugural issue of the Jewish Review of Books has a historical artifact that should be of interest to Habitus readers. The autobiography of “sage and heresy-hunter” Jacob Emden (1698?-1776) touches on two of our previous destinations, Budapest and Sarajevo. Emden tells the story of his father, a “wealthy man” in Buda and later a rabbi in the “holy city of Sarajevo.”

My revered father escaped from there through a miraculous and wondrous event when the city first came under siege. A fiery ball from a large fire barrel called a cannon came and fell upon the house in which my revered father of blessed memory dwelt. It smashed the house into chips and splinters, and the [cannon] ball killed his first wife together with the young girl he had by her. He was in another adjoining room in the house and it did not harm him at all. He was saved by the mercy of God upon him (Gen. 19:16); it was a miracle. From there he fled and escaped (1 Sam. 19:18) … He was [then] accepted as rabbi in the holy community of Sarajevo and served that congregation, which treated him with great respect, until the siege of Ofen ended. When the city of Sarajevo’s time approached and it too came under siege by the armed forces of the [Prussian] king, may his majesty be exalted, and when he heard that his father and mother were captured, my revered father left and departed from that country and came to the land of Germany.

Best of luck to the Jewish Review of Books on their new venture.

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by Habitus · 02/23/10

February 23 is Man’s Day in Russia, also knows as Defender of the Fatherland Day. In Habitus editor Joshua Ellison’s introduction to our Moscow issue, he describes the scene in Red Square at last year’s celebration:

February twenty-third used to be Soviet Army Day. They’ve kept the holiday as a generic celebration of masculinity, sometimes called Man’s Day. One quasi-official explanation goes like this: “All men and boys are praised as eventual defenders and helpmates.” There was a celebration in Red Square, near the ice rink where average-looking teenagers mindlessly showed off Olympic-style maneuvers.

The festival had a revivalist tone: not for the Soviet era, but for a stylized Russian folk culture with costumes, food, and dancing. A teen pop group in Cossack garb sent all the young concertgoers into a frenzied dance. In too-high heels and too-tight jeans, they made large circles and moved in traditional steps. Some of the rowdier boys went into the center, folding their arms and kicking their legs, half-dancing and half-sparring. Even though it was below freezing, a few boys took off their shirts.

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by Habitus · 02/23/10

Habitus contributor Rodrigo Fresán has published an autobiographical essay in Granta, in which he tells the story of the time he thought he had killed Borges.

Upon turning a corner (my girlfriend ran fast, she was already a long way ahead; she belonged to a gym, did aerobics, was in much better shape than me) I barreled into a lightweight old man. The man flew through the air, clutching his stick and uttering choked little cries. He fell face up and then I discovered that the man was Borges and that I, maybe, had killed Borges.

Thankfully, the great man survived, and Fresán went on to his own distinguished life of letters, including a long-standing friendship with posthumous literary superstar Roberto Bolaño.

For more from Borges, read our own never-before-translated interview.

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by Habitus · 02/23/10

Our friend and adviser André Aciman has a new novel out, a follow up to his “hot” Call Me By Your Name. The first chapter is excerpted in the New York Times, so read it here.

Aciman is best known for his memoir Out of Egypt, recounting the story of his Alexandrian-Jewish family’s exile. He revisited some of its themes last year, after Obama’s speech in Cairo, in a fascinating op-ed called “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.”

He will be speaking about his new book tonight at the New York Public Library.

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