Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 01/04/12

Happy new year! Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Start 2012 off with a few fascinating reads: The Shifting Boundaries of Jewish Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Multiple Identity Narratives and Histories explores both new and familiar nuances of what it means to be Jewish. BOMBlog considers the rollicking and largely fabricated legacy of Octobriana, a Soviet-era cartoon bombshell. And philosopher John Gray offers a thoughtful antidote to doom-and-gloom scenarios created by recent socio-political change.

And the latest in city-speak: Economist Edward Glaeser celebrates cities as catalysts for “collaborative brilliance.” SoBro vs. ProCro? The Atlantic Cities finds out what’s behind the art (or lack thereof) of (re)naming a neighborhood. The Manhattan grid system design just turned 200, and the Museum of the City of New York is honoring it through April. And finally, what’s lovelier than a frigid New York night lit up by neon?

by Daniel Bloch · 09/21/11

Élisabeth Gille was five years old when her parents were picked up by the Gestapo. She and her sister managed to survive the war in hiding, but her father and mother, the writer Irène Némirovsky, perished in Auschwitz. Gille grew up to become a writer herself, and her quasi-biographical The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, has just been published by New York Review Books. Gille–who died in 1996, a few years before her mother’s Suite Française was published, garnering Némirovsky posthumous celebrity–imagines her mother’s life as a privileged young woman in Russia and later as an émigré in France, working on what would become her magnum opus.

“I have never before come upon a book at once as loving and as devastating as The Mirador,” Ruth Franklin writes in The New Republic. Franklin admires Gille’s refusal to “sanitize” the anti-Semitic attitudes that pervade much of Némirovsky’s early work, arguing that, by doing so, Gille has “lovingly and subtly” performed a “piercing act of maternal vivisection.”

by Michael Sterling · 09/19/11

Russian author Vasily Grossman’s 1959 novel Life and Fate found fame twenty years after it was written, and sixteen years after the author died. The book was seized by the KGB and proclaimed to be fuel for western anti-Communist sentiments. It was not until a microfilm copy of an early manuscript was smuggled from Russia and printed in Switzerland in 1980 that Grossman’s chef d’oeuvre was allowed to gain recognition. Grossman died in 1964 and never saw the 900-page Life and Fate in print.

The BBC’s Radio 4 has produced an audio dramatization that airs this week. The production features an all-star cast that includes Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant. The show began Sunday, September 18^th and will conclude on the 25^th. The BBC also offers this dramatization for free download.

Life and Fate was kept from print by Mikhail Suslov, the Communist Party’s chief ideologue, who defended the KGB’s decision to seize the manuscript. Though Grossman pleaded in defense of his work, Suslov deemed the novel to be incendiary and likely to contribute to rumors of Soviet totalitarianism and abuses of human rights in the West. The novel focuses on family life in WWII Russia and the rule of the Soviets, who Grossman likens to the Nazis.

Grossman has been called a modern Tolstoy. Just last week, Life and Fate was number one Amazon UK’s bestseller list, and the novel’s audience in the West constantly grows as its importance and immensity is further recognized.

Grossman’s Everything Flows, his other major literary work, is featured in the Moscow issue of Habitus. Life and Fate is available for purchase on Amazon. More information on the the novel and the BBC dramatization is available at the Telegraph and Radiotimes.

by Ella Zamir · 09/14/11

A monument to Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was installed on September 4, 2011 in his hometown Odessa. The sculpture appears on the corner of Zhukovs’koho and Rishel’jeska’ streets, across from the apartment building where he lived, according to the Forward.

The world of Oddesit, a club dedicated to promoting cultural interests, collected funds from all over the world–England, Germany, Israel, France, Canada, Italy, and more, to fund this sculpture over the last five years.

The sculpture shows Babel sitting on stairs and writing, beside a giant wheel with his name inscribed on it.

by Daniel Bloch · 09/14/11

On the eve of the Second World War, Lithuania boasted one of the most vibrant Jewish communities on the continent. Its largest city, Vilna (also known as Vilnius, Wilno and Vilne), earned the moniker “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and was a beacon of religious and secular learning for Yiddish-speaking Jews across Eastern Europe. Since their initial settlement during the fifteenth century, the Jews of Lithuania (commonly called Litvaks) had for centuries seen the borders change beneath their feet, and the nationality of the ruling class pitch from Lithuanian to Polish, to Russian, to Polish, to Soviet, to Lithuanian, to Nazi German, on June 24, 1941.

Much of what we know today about this once-vibrant outpost of the diaspora is thanks to the efforts of YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, which was founded in Vilna in 1925 as the Yiddish Scientific Institute. YIVO, which since 1940 has called New York City home and is currently housed in the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street, is the premier resource for information on Ashkenazi history, and its archives are an overwhelming trove of over 23,000,000 items.

Now, in a macabre twist of historical irony, YIVO is currently at the center of a controversy over the place of Holocaust memory and anti-Semitism in modern-day Lithuania. On September 22, YIVO will host “The Vilna Ghetto Experience,” a concert dedicated to music composed in the Vilna ghetto, which will feature opening remarks by the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Audronius Ažubalis. In a letter of protest addressed to the Center for Jewish History’s Academic Council, the invitation of Mr. Ažubalis is referred to as a “harmful mistake” by Didier Bertin,President of the French-based Society for the Promotion of the European Human Rights Model. The letter equates the planned presence of the foreign minister at the YIVO event with “‘de facto’ support to the current anti-Semitic policy of the Lithuanian government by a major Jewish organization.”

A second letter of protest was sent to the CJH Academic Council in which Mr. Bertin echoes the call of a recent opinion piece in Haaretz calling for the expulsion of Lithuania’s ambassador to Israel. While the Haaretz article makes no mention of Mr. Ažubalis or the YIVO event, it aims to expose a so-called “escalation in Lithuanian chutzpah,” as illustrated by recent efforts by Lithuania’s government to investigate several Litvak survivors residing in Israel who, for example, were active in the partisan movement that fought Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators, some of whom were later executed by the Soviets for helping the Nazis and, in turn, redefined as heroes of Lithuanian resistance against the Soviets. 

Why the outcry over Mr. Ažubalis’ presence in New York? According to reports compiled by the website defendinghistory.com, a watchdog site that seeks to counter the efforts of the “Holocaust Obfuscation movement,” in October 2010 Ažubalis accused Jews of Litvak origin as being behind a bill in Lithuanian parliament that would grant dual citizenship to people with Lithuanian descent living in the diaspora.

The Forward offers a more comprehensive and objectively-reported take on the controversy. In his article, Paul Berger spoke to Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director and contributor to the Moscow edition of Habitus, who said he would look into Ažubalis’ comments, but in the meantime saw the Lithuanian consulate’s co-sponsoring of “The Vilna Ghetto Experience” concert as a way of “honoring us by acknowledging the suffering of Jewish people.”

 

 

 

 

by Daniel Bloch · 05/24/11

A letter from Vladimir Lenin’s sister to Joseph Stalin currently on display at the Moscow State History Museum seems to confirm the communist icon’s Jewish roots. The letter, written in 1932–eight years after Lenin’s demise–claims that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape poverty. Interestingly, Lenin’s sister meant for the revelation to be made public to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism in Russia. Read the full story here.

by Habitus · 01/17/11

Aspiring photojournalists and photography students: Here is a rare opportunity to learn with Jason Eskenazi, celebrated artist and Habitus contributor. Jason writes:

The fall of the Berlin Wall led me out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections I traveled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the USSR, and have returned many times since culminating in a photography book project called Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, exhibited at Visa Pour L’ Image in Perpignan, France, at the Leica Gallery in New York and winner of Best Photography Book 2008 by Pictures of the Year International.

Jason’s work was featured in our Moscow issue, and in this Habitus-produced video:

Of course, Buenos Aires is also a place near and dear to Habitus, so this is an experience we can wholeheartedly recommend. The workshop is scheduled for mid July. More info here.

by David Gutherz · 07/09/10

For those of you who are (or may soon be) joining us from Moscow, be sure not to miss the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War’s newest exhibit: “Writings and Reflections of Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army.” Part of a larger documentary project that has already collected records from approximately 900 veterans, the project seeks to combat stereotypical visions of Jews as perpetual victims. “I wanted to somehow document the role of Jews in the history of war,” said project director Leonard Blavatnik, ”not only as victims, but also as heroes.”

Read more: The Jewish Chronicle – Moscow exhibit gives a voice to Jewish Red Army soldiers

by David Gutherz · 07/09/10

It has been more than half a century now since the death of Josef Stalin, but Vasily Grossman–the great Russian-Jewish novelist whose work we published in issue five–is still suffering on his account. As The Guardian‘s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding details, Grossman’s work–although increasingly popular in the West–still rubs many Muscovites the wrong way. In the midst of the Kremlin’s quiet but persistent campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, Grossman’s work is seen by many as a pesky reminder of just how bleak, savage, and sad life could be under his Iron Fist. And no doubt Grossman would never want us to forget it. But, then again, to judge his novels as bits of war journalism is like reducing Anna Kareninina to a piece of anarchist pamphleteering. For, as his daughter Ekaterina points out, although never one to blunt the reality of suffering, Grossman also had an uncanny skill for finding warmth amidst the agony and goodness in even the darkest of men. His is a message that deserves to be heard, and one can only hope that in the coming years more readers in his home country learn to unplug their ears.

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!