Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

In 1922, Sioma Lifshitz set off for China. He was a twenty-year-old Russian who became disillusioned with the political aspirations of the 1917 Revolution. He would spend the next thirty years in Shanghai, launching a career as a high-class photographer under the pseudonym Sam Sanzetti. Today, Lifshitz is heralded by many as one of the best photographers ever to have worked in Shanghai. When he left for Israel in 1957, he carried in his suitcase some 20,000 photographs that he had taken during his career.

Lifshitz–calling himself Sanzetti–opened his own photography studio in 1927 on Nanjing Road, a commercial street near the Bund, the tourist center and financial district in Shanghai. He photographed all manner of people: celebrities, film stars, young couples, children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lifshitz is famous for saying, “You could have found me in Honolulu, if that happened to be the destiny of the ship.” He was speaking of his decision to leave Russia when, quite impulsively, he boarded the next available ship to somewhere. In Shanghai, he apprenticed under an American photographer who taught him the craft, and soon thereafter Lipshitz began to work as Sam Sanzetti.

Lifshitz died in Israel in 1986. For years, his photography was unavailable for public viewing and his name had all but faded from memory. Now, the Israeli consulate in Shanghai has headed the effort to reinvigorate Sanzetti’s name and well-deserved fame in Shanghai.

The consulate hopes to find the stories behind the photographs. They’ve posted many of Lipshitz’s photographs on their Weibo—a Chinese version of Twitter—in hopes that someone will recognize who is in the photograph. Within days, the Weibo post has had thousands of hits and the consulate has received many calls with possible leads.

Oren Rozenblat, the deputy consul general of Israel in Shanghai said of the project: “It will be beautiful to see at the exhibition a very old lady standing in front of her picture as a young bride.”

Visit the Israeli consulate in Shanghai’s website on the digital exhibition here. Satellite Voices, an international photography forum, features some of Lipshitz’s work as well. Read the related article in the China Daily here.

by Habitus · 11/21/11

This conversation between memoirist, novelist, critic, and scholar André Aciman and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison was recorded last summer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, at an event entitled, “Is New York the Diaspora?”

Diaspora is not a word you use a lot in your writing, but exile is a concept you return to again and again. So, I ask, as a beginning: are Diaspora and exile the same thing?

An exile is someone who has been forcibly evicted or dispossessed. Force is inherent to the displacement of an exile; otherwise he is just an immigrant. Therefore, as an exile, you are a wanderer until you find a home—if ever you do. Diaspora is a condition of dispersion that applies to more than one individual; you cannot have one person being diasporic. You cannot be a Diaspora unto yourself. This is an important distinction because the experience of solitude defines exile but does not necessarily have any kind of repercussions in a Diaspora. For example, you could dismantle an entire ghetto in Vilnius and transport it to Brooklyn. Those people are in the condition of Diaspora but they are together. They bring with them their own history, a set of cultural values, and artifacts that keep bound them together.

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by Konrad Bercovici · 11/21/11

This essay by Romanian-born Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961) was published in in the September 12, 1923 issue of The Nation.

There is an old European saying that every country deserves the kind of Jews it has.

If so, New York does not know what it deserves, for it has every kind—gangsters, social workers, philanthropists, corrupt politicians, patriotic capitalists, preaching socialists, anarchists, bigots, atheists, ignorant illiterates, highly educated men. Every kind of Jew, from the lowest strata of humanity to the peak of culture, is represented here—a complete nation. The only way to purify water is to sterilize it. The only way to purify a nation is to kill it. You can kill a Jew but you can’t kill the Jews. Spain has learned that. Russia has had her lesson. Poland has tried to solve her Jewish problem in a river. Hungary has imitated Poland. Rumania has tried to imitate them. Germany is doing it now. But it all comes down to one and the same thing. You can kill a Jew, ten, a hundred, a thousand, but you can’t kill the Jews. They cannot even be absorbed. No sooner has the inevitable process of absorption begun in a country, after two generations of tolerance has put the national or racial consciousness to sleep, than an anti-Semitic outbreak in that country or in another awakens the consciousness in the Jews and the reluctance to absorb them in the non-Jews. And the would-be alloy separates like non-mixable chemical matter, a little tarnished but not welded.

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/09/11

The work of Marcelo Brodsky merges the historical with the personal. In his career as a photographer, Brodsky has created an enormous archive of powerful images engaging with the nuances of his identity as an artist, a Jew, an Argentine and the brother of a desaparecido–a disappeared. Marcelo’s brother Fernando is one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 Dirty War, victims of an exceptionally cruel apparatus of state-sponsored terrorism which targeted  suspected “subversives.” Many, like Fernando, were barely out of their teens and allegedly linked, however tenuously, to anti-dictatorship political and social movements. Once detained, the majority were never heard from again, their bodies never recovered, thus literally disappearing by the thousands from their families–a horrific technique replicated during the same era by dictatorships across Latin America, especially in Chile and Uruguay.

In a conversation that appeared in the Buenos Aires issue of Habitus, Marcelo Brodsky recognized the importance of his family’s experience not only to his art but to a larger conversation about collective healing and memory in Argentina. Brodsky said:
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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Gertrude Stein’s reputation is that of a literary maverick and an American ex-pat in Paris. Yet she is hardly known for being a staunch Franco supporter, a disdainful detractor of Roosevelt, nor is she known for suggesting in 1934 that Hitler merited the Nobel Prize.

Eric Banks, a New York based writer who is the current president of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the relationship Gertrude Stein held with Bernard Faÿ, a Vichy bureaucrat directly responsibly for the death of at least 550 freemasons in France after 1940. The article is titled “Wars They Have Seen: How an Unlikely Friendship With a Vichy Collaborator Complicates Our Understanding of Gertrude Stein”.

She believed in the collaborationist policies of Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Marshall of the French State from 1940 to 1944—Stein even translated several of his speeches into English. Stein wrote in the introductory text to the speeches that the Méréchal was similar to figures like George Washington and other great leaders who, as a knight might, arrived in time to rescue his country and people. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1970 that Stein’s less reputable past was made available for public scrutiny with Richard Bridgman’s biography, Gertrude Stein in Pieces.

Stein’s politics did not wend their way into her writing. Instead, her political predispositions were visible only in her personal relationships she held with figures like Bernard Faÿ, who whisked her through the bureaucratic red tape necessary for translating Pétain’s speeches. John Whittier-Ferguson, an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, discusses this distinct lack of politics in Stein’s oeuvre:

“Most people don’t have enough reference points around her late writing from the war to engage with why it might matter to figure this out.” he says. “With Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, the story about their politics has been told and worked over more consistently and for longer,” says Whittier-Ferguson. “The narrative we have to tell ourselves about Stein’s politics is not really yet formed, which makes it harder to say what you’re going to do with this material on politics when she doesn’t seem to do much with it in her own texts. Glance at it, look off to the side, what do you do with that? But that’s what makes it very interesting, and challenging.”

Bernard Faÿ, Stein’s excellent friend who was deeply involved with the Vichy government, was an unlikely collaborator: an academic, an American history buff and Roosevelt fan, a homosexual. Faÿ pulled strings to keep Stein and Alice B. Toklas–Jews–safe together in the Northern French countryside once the Nazis began the Occupation; he arranged a lecture tour of the United States for Stein and worked extensively with her on her novel The Making of Americans. Faÿ earned his masters at Harvard and penned a dissertation at the Sorbonne titled L’Esprit Revolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la Fin du XVIIIème Siècle—a study of both the American and French revolutionary spirits between 1770 and 1800. He would have the won 1926 Pulitzer Prize were it written in English and not French, originally. Faÿ was a revered academic whose specialty was American Civilization. He taught at institutions like Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Iowa, and he wrote popular biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. He championed forward thinking and modernism in literature in music.

As more is discovered about Stein and Faÿ, new books and studies arise that help us understand who these two tremendous figures were, and how their politics and careers intermingled. Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Ulla E. Dydo’s and Edward M. Burns’ The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma, and Antoine Compagnon’s Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale are all relatively recent publications that seek answers to questions about Stein and Faÿ’s questionable political leanings.

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Pamela Potter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reviews Erik Levi’s Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. Her essay was titled Crimes Against Culture or Business as Usual?  The Yale University Press published Levi’s book earlier this year. He discusses the Nazis’ use of Mozart as fodder for both antisemitism and Aryan pride.

Levi’s research, which unearthed newspaper articles, speeches and other archived materials, effectively transports readers back to the early 20^th century when, at the advent World War I, Mozart became a political tool to prove Aryan superiority.

Though Potter does find some faults with some of Levi’s contentions—that the steely appropriation of Mozart’s artistic identity was as ruthless and exacting as the Nazis’ elimination of Jews, for example–Potter considers Levi’s work to be an exemplary examination of the Nazi’s use of German cultural heritage. One significant aspect of the Nazis’ treatment of Mozart that Potter takes into consideration is the relation the German Jews to the composer:

Mozart’s significance particularly for Jewish performers and scholars provides perhaps the most compelling material for readers of this list, as the discussions yield some very poignant insights into this group’s stubborn adherence to German cultural identity. As is well known, the systematic exclusion of Jews from participation in German cultural life led first to a stop-gap measure concocted by the government and the Jewish community, known as the Jewish Culture League (Kulturbund deutscher Juden), to provide cultural and educational programs exclusively for Jews by Jews. When it came to excluding German content from the league’s programs, the deep connection German Jews held to German culture became all too evident. The ban on Mozart imposed upon the league in 1937 was a bitter pill to swallow, and Herbert Peyser, reporting for the New York Times, perceptively noted the German Jews’ undying claim to “that same artistic, scientific, and philosophic fare to which, through the centuries, they have felt a proprietary right to equal that of other Germans.

Erik Levi is a music and music history professor at the Royal Holloway University of London. He has extensively researched 20^th century German music, especially during the Nazi era. His other book Music in the Third Reich is available for purchase.

 

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.’”

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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.