Habitus

by Habitus · 12/05/12

The Weekly Standard’s Mark Falcoff considers the legacy and Joseph Roth and the resurgent interest in some of Roth’s German-language contemporaries. The essay is occasioned by the release of Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters. Falcoff sums it up:

What gives this book its special interest is the fact that Roth represents the final moments of an archetype: the cosmopolitan European, at home in several countries, and, before 1919, not even fully sensitive to national boundaries. (The Austro-Hungarian Empire was home to 17 different language and cultural groups.) Roth’s real home was the German language, and this explains why, after 1933, and particularly after 1938, he became homeless in both a physical and spiritual sense.

by Habitus · 11/08/12

As New York continues to face extreme weather and massive recovery challenges, we wanted to make one more way for our readers to help.

For any copies of our New York issue sold in November, we will donate 70% of the sale price to local organizations working on rebuilding and serving New Yorkers in need after Hurricane Sandy.

For a preview of what’s inside, read the 1923 essay by Konrad Bercovici on “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.” His caustic look at Jewish life in New York has a lot of relevance today:

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.

Also, take a look at our interview with World Trade Center designer Michael Arad, who has many timely reflections on trauma and recovery in our city.

Here’s the link to purchase. Please share with your friends!

by Habitus · 11/02/12

Our hearts are with our friends and neighbors who are suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Please consider a donation to help those in need.

This week, we are re-reading our interview with World Trade Center Memorial designer Michael Arad. It’s an interesting reminder of how New York has dealt with trauma and recovery in its recent past:

All of a sudden, by going through the crucible of this experience, I felt a tremendous sense of kinship to my fellow New Yorkers. All my neighbors, the people I saw on the subway, the people I saw on the street, and the people I saw gathering in public spaces like Union Square and Washington Square: we were one. That was very powerful and moving. In particular, I recall going to Washington Square a couple of days after the attacks—I was living in the East Village at the time—and our neighborhood, like everything south of Fourteenth Street, was shut off from the rest of the city. There were no cars, hardly any people outside. I went for a bike ride in the middle of the night—two, three in the morning—in an ever-widening circle, starting in my neighborhood, making my way over to Chinatown and TriBeCa and the West Village. I eventually ended up in Washington Square Park and I walked up to the fountain. There were candles surrounding the fountain and there were people standing there. I think people came there the same way that I did, alone or maybe with one other friend, but people stood there together. And when I walked up to that fountain, that circular fountain, I joined that circle of people and I didn’t feel alone anymore. I don’t think I understood the significance of that moment, but in many ways it was a very transformative moment for me: I felt that I became a New Yorker, realizing that this is my home.

Best wishes to our friends, colleagues, contributors, and readers in New York and the throughout the northeast.

by Habitus · 06/04/12

Habitus is very excited to share our latest production: Once@9:53 is a first-of-its-kind graphic eBook created by two close friends of the journal.The book is available for iPad only (so far) and can be downloaded from the iBookstore.

The Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky have collaborated to re-imagine the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book 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.

The project has been featured in The Forward and Tablet.

The National Yiddish Book Center is displaying images from the book in Amherst, MA until November 4th. Hear Stavans discuss the project on the center’s podcast.

Habitus produced a short video feature when the book was first published in Spanish.

Get your copy today!

by Habitus · 04/24/12

Habitus editor Joshua Ellison read an essay for NPR’s Berlin Stories, drawing heavily on his explorations of the city for our Berlin issue. His essay, titled “Germans in the Mirror,” recalls our conversation with Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenocak.

Get your copy of the issue here. You can also follow the excellent series on Facebook. The season-premiere episode is online in its entirety. Thanks to Anna Winger, Victoria Gosling, and the rest of the Berlin Stories team for including us.

Give a listen and tell us what you think!

by Justine Poustchi · 02/26/12

Religion (Re)Imagined

Alan Brit sheds light on the Frankists: Polish Jews who converted to Catholicism to gain rights and land in the 18th Century. Brit reveals a brand of Catholicism that deeply reflected Jewish roots in its acknowledgement of the importance of the Sabbath and a vague sense of kashrut.

In response to harsh criticism of the religiosity of the Israeli public, Dr. Samuel Lebens warns against “oversimplification of theism,” and advocates a deeper understanding of Jewish literature as an imaginative tool to promote change from within.

Relics of Totalitarianism

Recently, Poland has been turning its attention to its complicated past. The rising generation is ready to ask “inconvenient questions” through film, literature, and the establishment of the Institute of National Remembrance.

Architectural plans for Hitler’s imagined capital city, Germania, reveal not only a grand fantasy but also a pervading misanthropy. Robert Moorhouse looks at the fraction that was completed and the devastation that enabled its creation.

Imre Kertész’s reflections on Nazism and totalitarianism continue to be brought to English readers by the independent publisher Melville House. Sohrab Ahmari takes a look at Roberto Bolaño’s “The Third Reich,” as the author pushes the boundaries of literary interpretation of Nazism by constructing a character who fetishizes the Third Reich and then challenging his character to a board game.

Voices of the Literary Past

As a part of the New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast Series, Nicole Krauss reads Bruno Schulz’s story “Father’s Last Escape”: a surreal musing on “the genealogy of spirits.”

Another look at Joseph Roth’s letters probe deep into his complex political persuasions as both a socialist and a monarchist who dreamed perpetually of yesteryear.

This Friday, Annie Kantar will be reading from her translations of Israeli poet Leah Goldberg at NYU.

by Habitus · 01/31/12

Our contributor George Konrád has a scathing op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Hungary’s Junk Democracy.” He attacks his country’s rightward lurch, its assaults on constitutionalism and democracy, and foundering rule of law. Konrád writes:

I myself am a devotee of neither right nor left, but cast my lot with a democracy that allows all to speak, so we can see what kind of people are trying to lead us. Democracy’s main benefit is its protection, guaranteed by law, of the dignity of its citizens from humiliation at the hands of their leaders. It protects the weak from overweening power, and gives them the tools to protect themselves if need be.

by Habitus · 01/27/12

We are thrilled to share our latest issue, New York, in which we turn our attention homeward. Get yours today.

Click here to see the full Table of Contents.

Read our interviews with Michael Arad and André Aciman, and read a timeless essay from Konrad Bercovici—penned in 1923—about “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.”

More previews and additional New York material will be posted soon, so keep visiting our site.

by Daniel Bloch · 01/27/12

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Reclaiming home, warts and all

“Pinch your nose and off we go,” advises novelist and Habitus contributor Aleksandar Hemon in this month’s issue of Guernica Magazine, as he leads us through the “deep shit pit of war, peace and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Hemon unflinchingly examines the foreboding trend of ethnicity-based education in the former Yugoslavia. (See our Sarajevo issue for more from the region.) “Do three or more passports make you alive several times over?” wonders Irin Carmon in a fascinating meditation on citizenship and family, as she explores her acquisition–and potential loss–of a German passport. “Where they fled, we globetrot, a historical asymmetry that parallels the other privileges earlier generations earned for us.” (See our Berlin issue for more on contemporary German Jewish identity.)

Life in pictures, lost and found

Be sure to check out three captivating photo essays: Jessica Ingram’s “A Civil Rights Memorial” captures the often un-memorialized sites of hope, resistance and violence scattered throughout the South that, once re-discovered, provide vivid insight into the struggle to end segregation. Polish photographer Rafal Milach has followed the lives of seven young Russians as they find their way amidst ever-shifting landscapes. And Hiroyuki Ito, whose work has largely focused on New York, his home for the past 20 years, documents his return to Japan following the death of his father.

And don’t miss out on browsing through the hundreds of random photographs found on the streets of Buenos Aires–namely the Once neighborhood, the one-time center of Jewish life in the city–collected and loosely curated here. It’s at once an entertaining and unsettling experience.

Sketches of Idisshu

Now that our New York issue is about to come out, we have time to catch up on some recent books we missed. One of our favorites is Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, co-edited by the late, great Harvey Pekar. The book is a colorful consideration–through comics and essays–of secular Yiddish culture through the ages, focusing on the artists and writers who helped revive the language in the diaspora, especially in New York. And another new book that we just might actually get a hold of someday is the Yiddish-Japanese Dictionary/Yidish-Yapanish Verterbukh/Idisshu-go jiten, which runs over 1,300 pages and was compiled by one of Japan’s foremost Yiddishists. Who knew?!

by Daniel Bloch · 01/10/12

Here’s what on our mind this week:

From the scribes

Poet, translator and Habitus contributor Lisa Katz offers an intriguing who’s who of contemporary Israeli poetry, from more well-known writers like Agi Mishol (featured in our Budapest issue), Dan Pagis, Yitzhak Laor and Taha Muhammad Ali to relative newcomers (at least for those of us who are stateside) like Anat Zecharya, Almog Behar and Admiel Kosman.

In Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the main character, already besieged by a slew of problems in his daily upstate-New York existence, discovers Anne Frank herself living in his attic. Auslander discusses the connotations of this here.

And Etgar Keret’s story, “Creative Writing,” finds a husband and wife spinning fantastical tales.

Through the viewfinder

We said goodbye this week to Eve Arnold, who passed away at 99. The daughter of a rabbi, Arnold was the creator of iconic images of celebrities (perhaps most famously, Marilyn Monroe) and ordinary folk alike, and one of the first female photographers to be hired by Magnum.

In another, more gradual goodbye, the photographer William Gedney documented the demolition of the Myrtle Avenue elevated subway in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the reshaping of the landscape beneath it, all from his apartment window.