Habitus

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.

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 01/27/12

Courtesy of fotosencontradas.com.ar

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.

From Yiddishkeit

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?!

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 01/10/12

Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn / William Gedney

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.

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

From "The Block," by Romare Bearden

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 12/15/11

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Inherited borders / Paper cities / The everywhere-ness of a song

"Jerusalem," Matthew Picton

The Borderlines column of the New York Times ran a fascinating piece on the shape of East and West Germany and how the roots of their formerly notorious border might go back all the way to 900 A.D. The artist Matthew Picton creates cityscapes out of paper, but not just any paper. His model of Jerusalem (see detail), for example, is crafted from slips of paper quoting The New Testament, The Torah, the Koran and the Armenian Bible. Check out his other visions (including Lower Manhattan) in person. Meanwhile, André Aciman guides us through the cross-border, multilingual history of a single evocative song.

A Tunisian return / A Bolaño motif / A critic’s legacy

The writer Colette Fellous admits to a “permanent feeling of at the same time being present wherever [I] live but also slightly out of context,” and her novels have explored this condition, largely through her own migrations–both literal and literary–between Tunisia and France. If you’re a fan of Roberto Bolaño’s work, maybe at some point you’ve wondered, “What’s with all the Nazis?” Well, here’s a thoughtful consideration of that question. And speaking of thoughtful considerations, the Daily Beast examines Why Trilling Matters, Adam Kirsch’s appreciation of literary critic Lionel Trilling.

A glimpse of an artists’ den / World poetry in motion

Little Star features an intriguing piece by Rosanna Warren that vividly imagines Le Bateau Lavoir, the Montmartre building that served as a haven and inspiration for Picasso and Max Jacob, among many others, for much of the first half of the twentieth century. And, finally, don’t miss out on the World’s 10 Best Transit Poems! (Note: the feature neglects to include the poem featured in the lead photo. It’s “Tango de Montréal,” by Québécois poet Gérald Godin.)

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 12/05/11

Boris Kossoy, "Protest against the Vietnam War, New York, 1971"

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 11/27/11

Arthur Leipzig, Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn

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

Leave a Comment

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.”

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 06/07/11

German comic artist Elke Steiner–whose stirring portrayal of Rabbi Regina Jonas appeared in our Berlin issue–now tells the incredible story of Catharina Margaretha Linck, a woman who lived most her life in 18th-century Germany as a man. After serving in several armies and marrying another woman, Linck was eventually discovered and executed for sodomy in 1721. She was, according to Steiner, possibly the “last woman in Europe to be sentenced to death for having sex with another woman.” Read the whole story here. Steiner’s pieces on Rabbi Jonas and Catharina Linck were translated by Edna McCown. For more of Steiner’s work, check out her website.

Leave a Comment