Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Each year, The Institute of Psychoanalysis in London hosts the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival. This year’s will be the Institute’s sixth run. Bernardo Bertolucci, the Academy Award winning Italian filmmaker who has been involved in projects such as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Last Emperor, is the festival’s Honorary President. This year’s festival will take place from November 3^rd through the 6^th.

Andrea Sabbadini, the Director of the festival, discussed this year’s theme of border crossing, migration and the immigrant’s experience. The immigrant, Sabbadini says, traverses mental borders as well as physical ones. The films this year will attend to this multi-faceted theme in various ways. In particular, they will demonstrate two kinds of spaces that immigrants occupy once they’ve been uprooted: the transitional space and the bridge space.

Sabbadini references the 20^th century psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space–otherwise known as a comfort object, like a child’s security blanket. This is a developmental phase between the psychic and external reality which facilitates the interaction of these two realities. In relation to an immigrant, for instance, a transitional space might be clutching to the memory of home in order to find comfort in a vastly different location and situation.

The bridge space, says Sabbadini, “is the passage going from one condition to another—whether a psychological condition, or moving physically. It is what happens to individuals when they do [migrate]. It seems to me one thing that always happens is that there is a loss. Sometimes a very major loss, sometimes a very traumatic loss. It could be a loss of language, a loss of identity, a loss of status, a loss of family, and a loss of one’s country of course.” Sabbadini elaborates on the immigrant’s experience of loss, in particular the transition from possession to dispossession. He claims that loss needs to be mourned. “If that mourning process is not possible,” says Sabbadini, “or interfered with or denied, then problems often ensue.”

Festival themes in the past have included children and Eastern European films. Hollywood films are excluded not because they are not worthy of the festival, but rather because they have far greater access to international distribution than do European films. Many European films do not find their way out of their countries of origin.

The Institute of Psychoanalysis, home of the British Psychoanalytic Society, is a center for training psychoanalysts, exploring psychoanalytic theory and treatment techniques. It is also the source for new publications in the field, further research, and the dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas through public lectures and events.

Click here for more details and as well a video of a press conference given by Director Andrea Sabbadini.

 

 

 

 

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Lee Siegel wrote a funny article he titled An Unexpected Alliance for More Intelligent Life. The alliance he references was that of T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. An alliance is an odd word for friendship, but odd might be the best word to describe a friendship between two idiosyncratic icons.

Marx and Eliot are not the likeliest friends. One was a comedic actor, a man who adored being outrageous and provocative, while the other was a banker, an anti-Semite and a generally stoic man. One starred in thirteen feature films, had a career in vaudeville, and was a successful radio and game-show host. The other had a limited oeuvre since he never quit his day job to focus on writing. However, the two began to correspond in letters—somewhat randomly—in 1961 when Eliot wrote Marx, wondering if he could have a autographed portrait of the man. Eliot promised the actor that the photograph would be placed in proximity to portraits of other famous contemporaries and friends, including W.B. Yeats and Paul Valéry. The portrait Marx sent along was, ironically, not to Eliot’s liking, so the poet asked for another—one that displayed the iconic Marx with a cigar and thick mustache–and at the same time invited the actor to dine one night.

Groucho’s comic humor was, says Siegel, “uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic.” Siegel continues, “Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilized taste, the crux of Groucho’s humor was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste.” For instance, Marx once said to a host, “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” Marx even mocked Eliot, who believed in the necessity of art and knowledge: “Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.”

After sending along a second portrait, Marx asked one of Eliot in return. The photograph that Eliot sent came with a somewhat humorous note, which was odd for the poet since he was renowned for his serious demeanor. “I like cigars too but there isn’t any cigar in my portrait either,” he wrote. Marx thought this was hilarious.

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Jan Fleischhauer, an editor for the leftist German magazine SPIEGEL, wrote an opinion piece titled Political Thinking Shouldn’t Be Left to Novelists. He discusses Günter Grass‘s decades old penchant for inserting himself into various political debates, believing himself to be possessed of a leader’s voice. Fleischhauer–somewhat caustically–bemoans the fact that an author such as Grass is continually permitted by his supporters to assert his opinion when it is often incorrect, or, as the case may be, inconsequential. He writes: “Grass has subscribed to a belief widely held among Germany’s cultural elite, one that prompts him to emerge from the dark recesses where he does his writing to make political appeals and to attest to his political ‘engagement.’”

Read more »

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Photography in the 20^th century gave artists new power to eternalize singular instants in time. Rebecca Lepkoff and Ruth Gruber–both native New Yorkers–are photographers who led successful careers at home and abroad.

Lepkoff was born in 1916. She was raised in the Lower East Side in a tenement that no longer exists. She began photographing the streets there in 1938. Lepkoff is well known for her belief that in olden-day New York, “there was always something happening…life took place on the street.” She once likened Lower East Side streets to theater, which is evident in her photography. The everyday bustle of businessmen, neighborhood butchers and vendors, and children at play in the streets are all elements of a scene unfolding on an urban stage.

In capturing the rhythm of New York streets, L trains, children at play and business men en route to their various occupations, Lepkoff stitches together a pattern in her photographs that is totally anonymous and yet easy to identify with.

“I went outside and at that time, people lived in the streets—everything happened in the streets,” Lepkoff recalls. “People would go out and sit with baby carriages. They sat on the stoops. People lived in the streets because the apartments were so small. You didn’t have to worry about the safety of kids—they’d play stickball and jump rope in the streets.”

In 1945, Lepkoff joined The Photo League, an organization that coalesced around the sociopolitical function that photography served: documenting life and the human condition. Lepkoff and other members of the League believed that the photograph could be a powerful tool for implementing social change and for uplifting working-class Americans. The League was originally formed by members of the Berlin-based Workers International Relief, a communist group. The Photo League’s connection to a communist organization is a reason why, in part, it was disbanded in 1951 during the McCarthy-era Red Scare.

An exhibition at the Jewish Museum titled, “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951,” will feature some of Lepkoff’s work beginning November 4^th . The Lo-Down, a Lower East Side magazine, features a slideshow of Lepkoff’s work and as well an article on her life. The Museum of the City of New York, National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Tisch School of Art-NYU all feature Lepkoff as well, as do countless other museums and organizations.

Ruth Gruber was born in 1911 in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. At age twenty, she won a fellowship that allowed her to study at the University of Cologne in Germany where, after one year, she received a Ph.D in German Philosophy, Modern English Literature and Art History. She became the youngest person in the world to receive a doctorate. She was commissioned by The New York Herald Tribune while she was in Cologne to write features on the situation of women living under fascism and communism in the 1930s. This would become a major theme in all of Gruber’s oeuvre—literary, photographic and political: suffering and displacement and the injustices of governments, war, bureaucracy and terror.

In 1944, Gruber traveled for two weeks on a U.S. Army transport ship called the Henry Gibbins. There were 1,000 Jewish refugees onboard seeking asylum in the United States, many of whom had just recently escaped or been liberated from concentration camps. Gruber interviewed many of the refugees on board, documenting their experiences. Gruber’s interviews and photographs were published in Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America.

In 1947, she documented the British Royal Navy as it deported 4,500 Jewish refugees to Germany. These refugees had come to the harbor in Haifa, Palestine, aboard the ship Exodus 1947. The Royal Navy siphoned passengers aboard the Exodus 1947 into three prison ships–in high cages lined with barbed wire–and then deported the displaced refugees to France. In France, the refugees staged an eighteen day standoff which resulted in several cases of physical abuse by the Royal Navy. The exasperated British then sent the refugees up to Germany. Gruber witnessed the violent events as they unfolded. She followed the refugees from Palestine to France, even traveling with them aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park. Gruber interviewed the refugees and her most famous photograph: the imprisoned refugees angrily raising a Union Jack flag painted with a swastika.

Gruber’s career in photojournalism took her all over the world. She photographed extensively in Alaska, the Soviet Arctic, Siberia, Europe, Ethiopia, in Israel and the Middle East. She was a personal friend of Virginia Woolf’s, on whom she based her doctoral dissertation, writing: “[Virginia Woolf] is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it.” She wrote many books, including Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched the Nation (1999) and recorded the condition of Jews in Ethiopia in Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews (1987). Gruber’s biography, Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story, was published in 2007.

Click here to listen to an interview with Gruber by NPR. See a feature in Lens by The New York Times here.

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

The Mina Gallery in Cooper Sq. will host a new exhibit titled Imaginary Homelands. The exhibition runs from October 28^th to December 6^th. The featured artists–Noa Charuvi, Gil Even-Tsur, Leor Grady, Yael Hameiri, Ohad Matalon, Rachel Papo, Benjamin Tritt, Eitan Vitkon—have all demonstrated in their various works how they experience life under two identities: Israeli and American. The exhibit will feature photography, architecture, painting, sculpture, installation, and paper and video works.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Salman Rushdie’s collection of essays titled Imaginary Homelands in which Rushdie contemplates the Diaspora experience. The immigrant, the exile and the member of diaspora are all figures whose existence is predicated upon finding a balance between their past and present, home and the illusion of stasis. The collection includes seventy-five essays that delve into the issues surrounding migration, national identity, religion, racism, politics in literature, and even literature itself.

From the website:

Rushdie spoke of this attempt to find balance between multiple cultures that is felt by every immigrant, member of a diaspora or victim of exile. In our contemporary culture of mobility, this framework is now a universal motif for both individuals and countries alike. America, an exemplar, is a country of immigrants whose residents and citizens have roots in many countries throughout the world, while also forging connections with their adopted country. Their homeland becomes something that doesn’t truly exist in the physical; it becomes an amalgam of the cultures that make them. Mina Gallery is pleased to announce “Imaginary Homelands” curated by Sascha Crasnow, an exhibition that presents a particular group of artists that is bridging cultures—American-Israelis. Both the US and Israel are unique, in that their national identities were born of exile and assimilation. Each artist’s works reveal attempts to navigate “imaginary homelands”—formed from unique multifaceted backgrounds.

See Rushdie’s official website here.

 

 

 

by Daniel Bloch · 11/01/11

Few people have managed to both witness and influence history like Emma Goldman. Her causes–anarchism, workers’ rights, and birth control, to name only a few–were as diverse as her influences, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Whitman. She experienced many of her century’s watershed moments: the Homestead Strike, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Born in 1869, Goldman arrived in the United States in 1885, was deported in 1919, and devoted the rest of her life to dozens of causes until her death in 1940. Since then, Goldman’s image and writings have been invoked by the major social revolutions of the past fifty years.

Vivian Gornick, in a passionate and thoughtful essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, explores how Goldman navigated the “distinct division between the anarchism of collective living and that of the individual.” In particular, Gornick focuses on Goldman’s insistence that “to feel transformed by sexual passion was to be in touch with the primeval at the heart of her politics.” For a more comprehensive look at Goldman’s legacy, check out Gornick’s book, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, published last month by Yale University Press.

 

by Daniel Bloch · 10/28/11

While Samuel Beckett’s characters are not necessarily known for their action and decisiveness, several newly published books reveal that Beckett himself was quite the activist, especially against the Nazi machine. Benjamin Ivry, writing in The Forward, considers the illuminating details of Beckett’s personal crusade against anti-Semitism and his involvement with the French Résistance, as depicted in Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, published by Cotinuum this past June, and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956, recently released by Cambridge University Press. Did Beckett identify with Jews because of his friendships with Jewish artists from across Europe, along with his experiences as an Irish writer in exile? Was his anti-Nazi fervor a reaction to the Third Reich’s hatred of otherness? Together, Ivry writes, these two books give a “fuller understanding of Beckett’s motivation for his pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi activism,” and also “underline how profound Beckett’s ties were with the Jewish people.”

by Daniel Bloch · 10/28/11

Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” may be the most famous text affixed to an American monument, and certainly one of the most evocative poems about immigration, yet Lazarus herself has always remained a bit elusive. In 2006, a comprehensive biography by Esther Schor, professor of English at Princeton, brought the brief but vibrant life of Emma Lazarus–a native New Yorker whose Sephardic ancestors helped settle the thirteen colonies–into focus. Now, just in time for the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty’s official dedication, Schor has teamed up with Nextbook Press to create an interactive online version of Lazarus’ poem.

Besides being an entertaining feat of multimedia craftsmanship, Schor’s annotations provide fascinating bits of relevant miscellanea; for example, did you know that the face of Lady Liberty was modeled after the mother of Frédéric Bartholdi, the statue’s designer? Also, Schor reveals, Emma Lazarus not only wrote about the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she helped teach Russian Jewish immigrants English and wrote exposés about their inhumane living conditions.

For more on the legacy of Emma Lazarus, take a look at a recent New York Times article, which includes a copy of Lazarus’ seminal work written in her own hand.

by Daniel Bloch · 10/18/11

“There are no words in my mouth,” realizes Blanca Hammer, the heroine of Until the Dawn’s Light, the latest work by acclaimed Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. A life full of tragedy has taken its toll on Blanca, and the novel finds her criss-crossing Europe by train in the 1910s with Otto, her four-year-old son. What exactly is Blanca escaping from and where is she headed? Appelfeld answers such questions only partially, but two recent reviews of the book offer some fascinating insight.

Hailing the book as “masterful,” Julie Orringer—author of The Invisible Bridge—writes in the New York Times that Appelfeld “captures a larger sense of longing for a Jewish homeland,” and that, through Blanca and Otto’s wanderings, the reader feels “the losses of an entire nation, and the terrible cost of its triumphs.”

Shoshana Olidort, in her review for the Forward, considers the weight of Appelfeld’s own life on his characters. “One senses that Appelfeld is not mining his imagination to concoct tragic stories,” she writes. “Rather, he is simply telling and retelling the story of his life as a child survivor of the Holocaust.”

by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, the author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, as well as the 2010 novel Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is a National Jewish Book Award winner and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee. Recently, the Harvard research associate and Westchester native sat down with Rationally Speaking, the blog wing of New York City Skeptics, a non-profit promoting “critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education among the general public.” Goldstein spoke at length with co-bloggers Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci about engaging with “Spinoza’s God” and the danger of ideologies, among other fascinating topics.

To learn more about Goldstein, check out her website.