Habitus

by David Gutherz · 07/14/10

Wondering what to do with your Wednesday? Looking for a change of pace? A little intellectual stimulation, for a change? Well, then, you simply should not miss joining Habitus editor Joshua Ellison for a conversation with celebrated author André Aciman tonight–Wednesday, July 14th–at the Museum of Jewish Heritage as they discuss the provocative question: Is New York the Diaspora?

With its enormous Jewish population, its creativity and culture, and its unparalleled array of options for Jewish living, should we really think of New York City as part of the Jewish Diaspora; or is it just another kind of homeland?

André Aciman has chronicled a life’s journey across continents and has also emerged as one of contemporary New York’s most astute literary observers. He writes: “New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere…a shadow city.” We will talk to André about being a stranger at home in New York, about the place of the city in his recent work, and what it means to be a Jew here.

Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and, more recently, Call Me By Your Name and Eight White Nights. He is a Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of New York.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

by David Gutherz · 06/23/10

Congratulations to Habitus contributor Katie Orlinsky for getting a number of her stunning photos featured in the New York Times! The upcoming issue of Habitus will be carrying a photo essay of hers on migrant workers in Mexico.

Leave a Comment

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!

Leave a Comment

by Ekaterina Krasavina · 06/14/10

Rodger Kamenetz, the Louisiana-based author who described post-Katrina New Orleans in Habitus 04, continues to trace the city’s misfortunes. Five years ago when New Orleans was struck by the hurricane, it was the human factor that accounted for the graveness of the consequences. This time the disaster is man-made from the start, and the management of its consequences is no more effective than before. In his article for Tablet, Kamenetz compares the bureaucratic and political upheaval that followed the BP oil spill with the absurdist world of Franz Kafka.

He lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom—which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”

Kamenetz offers neither solution, nor salvation. Instead, he turns to a traditionally Jewish response in times of trouble:

It hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 04/28/10

Last year, Habitus editor Joshua Ellison introduced Mexican American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans to Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. Soon afterward, the two began a collaboration, re-imagining the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book that was 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. As the story unfolds, photojournalist Roli Gerchunoff stumbles across the bomb plot—and realizes that he may have a chance to change its outcome.

Stavans and Brodsky have shared an early draft of the book with Habitus, and in the video below speak about their work on on the project, their reasons for reexamining the AMIA bombing, and their enduring affection for the fotonovela.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/25/10

Our friend Osvaldo Golijov will bring his music to Toronto next week at the TSO’s sixth-annual New Creations Festival. Golijov was also the subject of a nice profile in The Star.

Each of Golijov’s compositions is different. The influences include South America, the synagogue and the shtetl, wrapped in a life-filled tonal shimmer.

Read more »

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/25/10

Our contributing editor Ilan Stavans has a piece in the Forward about the Jewish-Argentine poet Juan Gelman. Stavans writes:

He makes me think of the Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement who came to Argentina seeking a Promised Land but rapidly found disillusionment. Gelman isn’t an immigrant, but his parents and siblings were born in Ukraine of martial stock. His father fought in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Growing disappointment with the promise of a new life in the New World is Gelman’s theme. It culminated in 1976, at the peak of the Dirty War, when police kidnapped his 20-year-old son, along with the son’s pregnant wife; they were never to be seen again. Theirs became two more names added to the long list of desaparecidos.

For more from Buenos Aires and Ilan Stavans, take a look at Habitus no.3.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/23/10

Habitus contributor Rodrigo Fresán has published an autobiographical essay in Granta, in which he tells the story of the time he thought he had killed Borges.

Upon turning a corner (my girlfriend ran fast, she was already a long way ahead; she belonged to a gym, did aerobics, was in much better shape than me) I barreled into a lightweight old man. The man flew through the air, clutching his stick and uttering choked little cries. He fell face up and then I discovered that the man was Borges and that I, maybe, had killed Borges.

Thankfully, the great man survived, and Fresán went on to his own distinguished life of letters, including a long-standing friendship with posthumous literary superstar Roberto Bolaño.

For more from Borges, read our own never-before-translated interview.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/23/10

Our friend and adviser André Aciman has a new novel out, a follow up to his “hot” Call Me By Your Name. The first chapter is excerpted in the New York Times, so read it here.

Aciman is best known for his memoir Out of Egypt, recounting the story of his Alexandrian-Jewish family’s exile. He revisited some of its themes last year, after Obama’s speech in Cairo, in a fascinating op-ed called “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.”

He will be speaking about his new book tonight at the New York Public Library.

Leave a Comment