Habitus

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.

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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.

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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.

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

“I’m so tired of being told my writing is ‘moving.’ I want to be told it is convincing.”

This is only one of the myriad confessions and frustrations from the literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin now available to the reading public. An estimated 7,000 pages of entries spanning more than fifty years has been pruned to a comparatively-slim, 598-page volume–Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook and published last spring by Yale University Press.

Kazin (1915-1998) grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and is best known for his memoirs, A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew, as well as for his works of literary criticism, namely On Native Grounds. Kazin’s Journals offer an insight into his “neurotic postures” and “private unhappiness,” which often went unexplored in his better-known works, Vivian Gornick argues in a recent article in Boston Review. Case-in-point, according to Gornick, is this entry from 1986:

“I shiver when I read day after day of my journal and come across the same anger, the same unappeasability, the same heart, the same, the same unrest and anxiety…a hungry soul, often a bitter soul.”

The “richly unmediated expressiveness” of Alfred Kazin’s Journals, Gornick writes, reveals the “appalling nature of raw material untransformed by art.” For a second take on Journals, check out the New York Times review by Dwight Garner, who calls the book “easily one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century.”

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by Michael Sterling · 10/11/11

James Polchin, a professor at NYU, recently wrote an article for The Smart Set titled World Views: From New York to Germany and Back Again. He begins the article with an excerpt from André Aciman’s essay “Shadow Cities,” a contemplation of exile. Aciman finds that New York acts as a stand in for memories of elsewhere—an exile’s quintessential condition and experience. As Aciman likens New York to a canvas on which memories of another time are projected, Polchin finds that the American-born German artist Lyonel Feininger did something similar in his own art.

Feininger was born in New York in 1871. At sixteen, he was sent to Germany to study music. He would not return to the United States for forty-nine years; in 1937, he and his Jewish wife left Germany. Feininger had good reason to feel unsafe in his homeland: soon after he fled back to his birth-city, some of his canvases were shown in the Nazi’s infamous show, “Degenerate Art.”

Polchin attended “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World,” a show of the artist’s works at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. The title of the show reflects Feininger’s condition as an outsider in both his birth-country, the United States, and his chosen homeland, Germany. Polchin finds that the title “evokes the sense of exile, that powerful marginal space that granted Feininger (like most expats) freedom from the cultural demands of the adopted country and a broader space for creativity.” Read more »

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by Ella Zamir · 10/11/11

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science will screen Stanley Kramer’s film “Judgment at Nuremberg,” fifty years after its world premier, on Tuesday, October 11 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

In Suzan King’s article for the Los Angeles Times, Ellen Harrington, programmer at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, says:

“it had been only 16 years since the end of World War II and 14 years since the trials had taken place when Kramer decided to premiere the film in Germany in the face of people who had been complicit and lived through the war. He was not just making a movie for the rest of the world, he was making this movie to show to Germans. This is a film that really for its time was incredibly daring. It was not something that other filmmakers were interesting in tackling in terms of looking at the citizens of Germany and the nonmilitary component of Germany and the judicial structure and how they were complicit in enforcing all of these policies.”

Karen Kramer, widow of Stanley Kramer, recalls:

“The German people quietly filed out of the theater after the film. It didn’t play [in Germany] for two years after that premiere. They took it hard. The German people didn’t like what they saw. It was a very right thing and a very brave thing for Stanley to do. Nobody wanted to make it. People asked him, ‘Nobody wants to see this movie. Did you have family in the Holocaust?’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t, but I’m Jewish so I guess that makes it personal enough for me.’”

The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won for Abby Mann’s screenplay and lead actor Maximilian Schell. The cast of the film included several stars, as Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich,Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and others.

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

Before Buenos Aires there was Basavilbaso. Most of the seeds of contemporary Jewish life in Argentina were literally sown in the grassland of the pampas, especially in the northeast provinces of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, where thousands of Jews settled around the turn of the twentieth century. Allotted farmland by the Jewish Colonization Association, the newcomers brought little actual knowledge of farming–most came fleeing the urban pogroms and poverty of Eastern Europe–but saw Argentina as their Zion. In less than a generation, colonias like Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez and Moisesville were dotted with Jewish schools, hospitals, cemeteries, social clubs and synagogues. In two generations, however, the colonias were emptied of their youth, most of whom left for Buenos Aires in search of their future selves.

What became of the colonias? A recent article on Fox News Latino offers a glance at contemporary Jewish life on the pampas; an accompanying slideshow digs a bit deeper. Several of the images profile the Museum of the Jewish Colonies, housed in an old pharmacy in Villa Domínguez and brimming with archival gems.

For a literary look at the Jewish colonias, check out Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, with a forward by Habitus contributing editor Ilan Stavans. For more on Argentina, take a look at our Buenos Aires issue.

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by Michael Sterling · 10/05/11

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by Michael Sterling · 10/05/11

William Deresiewicz, a former professor of English at Yale University and a widely published literary critic who has contested popular theories put forward by powerful figures such as Terry Eagleton, recently wrote a humorous but potent reflection on Jewish culture and its propensity for creating genius. He titled it Parade’s End, referring to the well-recycled list of famous Jews whose names are invoked often to affirm the greatness the Jewish people: Marx, Einstein, Freud and Bob Dylan, not to mention Jesus. Deresiewicz calls this tendency to name famous Jews “the Jew parade,” a “roll call of Semitic Pride.”

Deresiewicz finds that many Jews who’ve achieved great fame were and are non-practicing. Rather than devoting themselves to the study of the Torah, many of the most invaluable Jewish minds derive their genius from other sources, namely a Jewish upbringing in which children are constantly reminded “Whenever Jews enter the larger world, they do great things. Deresiewicz writes:

“To do great things—to express their abilities in a form that’s valuable to the world as a whole—Jews not only have to be Jews, they have to stop being Jews: at least, in any active way, any way that’s recognizable to traditional Judaism. It only makes sense. In traditional Judaism, you’re not supposed to write songs or novels, or think about economics or physics. You’re supposed to sit in a yeshiva and study the Talmud. You aren’t supposed to enter the larger world at all; you’re supposed to shun it. Whenever I drive through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, I think: what a senseless waste of comedic talent.”

The cultures that are acutely aware of the influence of a traditional marginalization and sustained persecution of its people–Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews, according to Deresiewicz–work to balance tradition with modernity and assimilation. This desire for balance, says Deresiwicz, causes that Jewish genius to be stifled since fewer people might work to differentiate themselves and fulfill other roles.

Click here to read Parade’s End on The American Scholar. 

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/05/11

Before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald was a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize. His most emblematic works, like Austerlitz and The Emigrants, are steeped in themes of memory and trauma, drawing from his own struggles as a post-war German writer. “It was Sebald’s desire to protect his waywardness and individual freedom from those who aimed to curtail it,” writes Uwe Schütte, the director of German studies at Aston University in Britain, in an appreciation of his former mentor that appears in Times Higher Education. 

Schütte charts Sebald’s migrations–both the literal one he made from Germany to England, and the “inner” ones he would make from academia to writing, and from criticism to literature. Claiming that memory itself was the “moral backbone of literature,” Sebald spent most his life railing against what he perceived as the culture of silence and denial that pervaded German life after the Holocaust.

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