Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Each year, The Institute of Psychoanalysis in London hosts the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival. This year’s will be the Institute’s sixth run. Bernardo Bertolucci, the Academy Award winning Italian filmmaker who has been involved in projects such as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Last Emperor, is the festival’s Honorary President. This year’s festival will take place from November 3^rd through the 6^th.

Andrea Sabbadini, the Director of the festival, discussed this year’s theme of border crossing, migration and the immigrant’s experience. The immigrant, Sabbadini says, traverses mental borders as well as physical ones. The films this year will attend to this multi-faceted theme in various ways. In particular, they will demonstrate two kinds of spaces that immigrants occupy once they’ve been uprooted: the transitional space and the bridge space.

Sabbadini references the 20^th century psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space–otherwise known as a comfort object, like a child’s security blanket. This is a developmental phase between the psychic and external reality which facilitates the interaction of these two realities. In relation to an immigrant, for instance, a transitional space might be clutching to the memory of home in order to find comfort in a vastly different location and situation.

The bridge space, says Sabbadini, “is the passage going from one condition to another—whether a psychological condition, or moving physically. It is what happens to individuals when they do [migrate]. It seems to me one thing that always happens is that there is a loss. Sometimes a very major loss, sometimes a very traumatic loss. It could be a loss of language, a loss of identity, a loss of status, a loss of family, and a loss of one’s country of course.” Sabbadini elaborates on the immigrant’s experience of loss, in particular the transition from possession to dispossession. He claims that loss needs to be mourned. “If that mourning process is not possible,” says Sabbadini, “or interfered with or denied, then problems often ensue.”

Festival themes in the past have included children and Eastern European films. Hollywood films are excluded not because they are not worthy of the festival, but rather because they have far greater access to international distribution than do European films. Many European films do not find their way out of their countries of origin.

The Institute of Psychoanalysis, home of the British Psychoanalytic Society, is a center for training psychoanalysts, exploring psychoanalytic theory and treatment techniques. It is also the source for new publications in the field, further research, and the dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas through public lectures and events.

Click here for more details and as well a video of a press conference given by Director Andrea Sabbadini.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Lee Siegel wrote a funny article he titled An Unexpected Alliance for More Intelligent Life. The alliance he references was that of T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. An alliance is an odd word for friendship, but odd might be the best word to describe a friendship between two idiosyncratic icons.

Marx and Eliot are not the likeliest friends. One was a comedic actor, a man who adored being outrageous and provocative, while the other was a banker, an anti-Semite and a generally stoic man. One starred in thirteen feature films, had a career in vaudeville, and was a successful radio and game-show host. The other had a limited oeuvre since he never quit his day job to focus on writing. However, the two began to correspond in letters—somewhat randomly—in 1961 when Eliot wrote Marx, wondering if he could have a autographed portrait of the man. Eliot promised the actor that the photograph would be placed in proximity to portraits of other famous contemporaries and friends, including W.B. Yeats and Paul Valéry. The portrait Marx sent along was, ironically, not to Eliot’s liking, so the poet asked for another—one that displayed the iconic Marx with a cigar and thick mustache–and at the same time invited the actor to dine one night.

Groucho’s comic humor was, says Siegel, “uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic.” Siegel continues, “Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilized taste, the crux of Groucho’s humor was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste.” For instance, Marx once said to a host, “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” Marx even mocked Eliot, who believed in the necessity of art and knowledge: “Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.”

After sending along a second portrait, Marx asked one of Eliot in return. The photograph that Eliot sent came with a somewhat humorous note, which was odd for the poet since he was renowned for his serious demeanor. “I like cigars too but there isn’t any cigar in my portrait either,” he wrote. Marx thought this was hilarious.

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by Ella Zamir · 09/14/11

In his Sh’ma Magazine article, “When illegal immigrants are Jews,” Douglas Hauer, an immigration lawyer, writes about the silence surrounding Jewish illegal immigrants in the United States. The conversation about illegal immigration focuses almost entirely on Mexican and Central American immigrants who come to the United States to find work.

The Jewish illegal immigrants in the United States come from different parts of the world–Russia, Canada, Israel, and Romania–and many of them came legally but lost their visa status for various reasons, such as a divorce or layoff.

Hauer says that there isn’t a lot of information and statistics about Jewish illegal immigrants, because:

Illegal immigration cuts across racial, national, religious, economic, and social lines, and that their Jewishness is erased when they are counted with other illegal immigrants.

Hauer tells about his client, a Holocaust survivor from Israel, who was interrogated for hours in the airport by the immigration officers about her wish to stay here even temporarily.

It is hard to justify interrogating an Israeli Holocaust survivor on the pretext of security or law enforcement. Even as a lawyer who practices in this field, I am intimidated by the behavior of our government officials. This feeling of intimidation must be so much more personal and frightening for Jews who have experienced persecution.

In the past few years, the severity and intimidation of interrogations by the U.S customs and border protection has only increased.

Hauer suggests that we need broad immigration reform that will not target specific communities, unlike Arizona’s AZ SB 1071 law.

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by Nicholas Myerberg · 08/08/11

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author, essayist, and academic, has recently been selected to lead the exhibition development team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Conceived in 2005, the museum is currently being built on the former site of the Warsaw Ghetto; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett expects that the museum will be open to the public in April 2013. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s task will be difficult: alongside the legacy of the Holocaust, the museum must examine the 800-year history of Jews in Poland in a coherent and compelling way.

Ruth Ellen Gruber, of The Jewish Daily Forward, recently posted an interview that she conducted with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, wherein the two discuss Gimblett’s Yiddish roots, her literary/academic collaboration with her father, and the current status of the museum.

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in its current state. (via The Museum of the History of Polish Jews)

One point in particular stood out, speaking to the difficulty Kirshenblatt-Gimblett may face in trying to make proportional the emphasis put on the Holocaust and the emphasis put on the other seven-hundred-some-odd years of history that constitutes Polish-Jewish identity.

Over her academic life, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has been heavily involved with the production of a large body of work dealing with pre-Holocaust Judaisms and Judaic cultural histories. See, for example, her collaboration with Lucjan Dobroszycki on “Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust” or her most recent book, co-authored (and comprising of interviews) with her father, “They Called Me Mayer July.” Long associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett seems uniquely qualified to offer a holistic look at the history of Polish Jews.

Gruber’s interview is available here.

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by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/11

A unique voice in Jewish literature passed away this weekend. The Brazilian writer Moaycr Scliar was a writer and physician. His novel The Centaur in the Garden was widely praised and included among the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by The National Yiddish Book Center. According to a New York Times review:

This novel by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar is reminiscent of the Chagall paintings in which the scenes of everyday Jewish life are tenderly and oddly transmuted into fantasy.

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by Habitus · 01/27/11

Our friends at Open Letter Books have announced their longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards.

The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this morning at Three Percent—a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester. According to award co-founder Chad W. Post, this year’s longlist is a “testament to the number of high-quality works in translation that are making their way to American readers, thanks to a number of talented translators and exciting publishing houses.”

Berlin-issue contributor Jenny Erpenbeck’s made the list for her novel, Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky (who translated Erpenbeck for Habitus, too). Susan made the list twice, nominated also for her translation of Microscripts by Robert Walser.

Anthea Bell, whose translation of Maxim Biller’s “The Second-Hand Jew” appears in our Berlin issue, also received a nod, for her translation of Julia Franck’s The Blindness of the Heart

Congratulations to all the finalists.

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by Habitus · 01/25/11

Our friends at the World Policy Journal have posted an adapted version of our editor’s note from Berlin as part of their ongoing series on “The Future of the City.” They write:

The theme of the Winter 2010-2011 issue of World Policy Journal is “Megalopolis: The City of the 21st Century.” We asked experts, policymakers, and writers from around the world to answer this question: “In the future, what will our cities look like?” There are some cities, though, where it’s impossible to talk about the future without talking about the past — or ideas about the past. Berlin is one of those places. Joshua Ellison reflects on the city’s past, present, and future in the essay that follows, which is adapted from the introduction to the latest issue of Habitus, a journal of global Jewish culture.

Read the post here.

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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.

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by David Gutherz · 09/28/10

Nathalie Handal’s new Words Without Borders series “The City and the Writer” is one blog that Habitus readers will not want to miss.  Handal is traveling around the world to talk to writers about the cities that have housed, inspired, and–sometimes–infuriated them. “Since I was a young girl,” she writes,  ”authors and their books have made me long to visit the places and cultures they described. Not just to experience the stories and people they introduced me to, but to discover the parts, certainly more vast, they couldn’t.” This month: Antwerp through the eyes of the Netherlands’ poet laureate, Ramsey Nasr.

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by David Gutherz · 08/24/10

One of our founding principles here at Habitus is that the Diaspora is not only–as Ahad Ha-Am conceived of it–a web of roots strengthening the tree of some (material or spiritual) Jerusalem. It is also rhizome: a constantly shifting multiplicity of connections across and between several centers, several worlds. And so it is always with great pleasure that we hear of things like the current Bi-Centennial Celebration of Jewish Life in Argentina at the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Tracing the evolution of the Argentine Jewish community from the first recorded Jewish wedding in 1860 through to the present day, the exhibition employs a number of multimedia elements including a mesmerizing presentation of contemporary Argentine Jewish film. The guiding theme, however, is that most paradigmatic Jewish medium: The Book. At the “heart” of the exhibit lies “Book Store of Memories,” a collection of several hundred biographies that showcases the singular diversity and richness of Argentine-Jewish culture. Mirroring this celebratory monument, however, there is also the “Underground Library II,” a re-imagining of Israeli artist Micha Ullman’s memorial to Nazi book burnings.  All in all, the exhibit goes far beyond its stated aim of “illustrating the integration of the Jewish community into Argentine society.” It is powerful homage to the continued vibrancy of Diaspora existence in general, and in Argentina and Germany specifically.

The exhibition runs through October 10th.

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