Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 12/05/11

As we begin December, here’s what’s crisp and new this week:

Back in the USSR (and out of it)

One of the more interesting obituaries in recent memory noted the the death of Lana Peters, AKA Svetlana Alliluyeva, AKA Svetlana Stalina, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. The Guardian examines her legacy as a “cold war plaything.” Meanwhile, Tablet Magazine reconsiders Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman‘s magnum opus about Jews who survived the Holocaust only to find themselves under Stalin’s rule. Tonia Ben-Barak, grandmother of acclaimed Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, lived through both tragedies.She is the subject of Shalev’s recently-translated memoir, My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner. Take a look at a review and an excerpt.

Contributors’ Corner

The latest New Yorker features an essay by Aleksandar Hemon, whose work graces our Sarajevo issue. In other news, Ana María Shua‘s Death as a Side Effect was published in her native Argentina nearly twenty years ago, and has finally appeared in English. Read a recent review featured on Three Percent, the blog wing of Open Letter Books. For more of Shua’s work in English, check out our Buenos Aires issue.

Through the Lens

The Aperture Foundation has released a volume on contemporary Latin American photography aptly titled, The Latin American Photo Book. Our friend Marcelo Brodsky is one of many contributors to this fascinating anthology, which includes Boris Kossoy, the Brazilian photographer who has taken evocative pictures of New York (see example above). And speaking of evocative pictures of New York, be sure to look  “Out Harvey Wang’s Window,” now on view at the Tenement Museum‘s new exhibition space at 103 Orchard Street. Click here for a preview of Wang‘s striking portraits of the Lower East Side in flux.

by Michael Sterling · 12/05/11

This December marks the twentieth anniversary of Pedro Meyer‘s legendary multi-media photography exposition I Photograph to Remember. Meyer’s intimate collection of photographs documents his parents’ struggle with cancer.

The first of its kind, I Photograph to Remember originally could only be viewed on a computer screen. The exposition was housed, so to speak, on a CD-ROM; the photographs of Meyer’s family are accompanied by music and narration. “The narration, and the use of my voice,” says Meyer, “made a huge difference in how this work was perceived. It is precisely because of the inherent limitation of the photographic medium, that the presence of the voice picks up where the photograph couldn’t tread. I made sure that the narration would always be a complement to that which was self evident in the picture, thus adding to the story being told while not competing with the image.”

I Photograph to Remember is featured in the Mexico City issue of this magazine.

View the original project as it was intended to be seen in 1991 here. See an essay Meyer wrote in 2001 about I Photograph to Remember here. Visit Meyer’s website here to see his most recent work.

 

by Habitus · 11/27/11

Here is a round-up of what we’re excited about this week and think you will be, too:

On Our Shelf

Read an excerpt from Umberto Eco‘s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which deals with the legendary anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Take a look at what the New York Times and the Washington Post think about it. And make sure to read (and watch) what Eco himself has to say.

Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative is a collection of essays–on everything from digital animation to writer’s block–by Lawrence Weschler, director of NYU’s Institute for the Humanities and Habitus board member. Check out an interview with Weschler, read a review of the book and tune into a talk he gave at the Open Society Institute.

André Aciman, a fellow Habitus board member, contributor, and friend, has written a new memoir, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. Read the New York Times review, as well as the feature on Tablet Magazine, which includes an excerpt.

The work of Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec has finally appeared in English, thanks to Open Letter Books, which published his My Two Worlds this summer and plans to release his The Planets next year. Take a look at the Words without Borders review of My Two Worlds and the recent interview with Chejfec in Guernica Magazine. Look for more from Chejfec in our upcoming New York issue.

 Jews with Cameras

Photographer Joshua Cogan has traveled the world in search of far-flung Jewish communities, from Gondar in Ethiopia to Kochi in southern India. Check out his evocative photos as featured in the Forward.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 is now on view through March at the Jewish Museum and profiles the dynamic Jewish photographers who combined their art with social commentary and found a new way of looking at New York. For more, take a look at our recent conversation with Daniel Morris, author of After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers.

From Nowy Targ to Zuccotti Park

Translationista, the blog of author and translator Susan Bernofsky, features a fascinating personal essay linking a visit to her grandmother’s hometown in Poland to Bernofsky’s experiences in Zuccotti Park with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Be sure to check out the recent interview with Bernofsky in Book Forum, and our Berlin issue, which features her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck.

-Compiled by Daniel Bloch and Michael Sterling

by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

Jenna Weissman Joselit, a Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, reviewed Jonathan Boyarin‘s Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side. The book is a history of the district told through the story of a humble synagogue, Boyarin’s own shul which he’s attended since he was a youth in New York. Joselit’s review, titled Praying with Ghosts, is published in The New Republic.

The Lower East Side, situated in the very heart of the city in south Manhattan, is in many ways its own space apart from New York. “Everything about the place–its architecture, its rhythms, its residents–seemed at odds with the rest of the city. It still does,” writes Joselit.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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:
Read more »

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

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.