Habitus

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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by David Gutherz · 07/27/10

Chances are if I asked you to give me an example of radical Jewish culture, klezmer  and gefilte fish would not be the first things that comes to mind. For most people, these things are more or less total opposites. Indeed, John Zorn’s project Tzadik: Radical Jewish Culture project, featured in a recent exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Paris, explicitly advertises itself as “Jewish music beyond klezmer.”  Claude Berger, however, begs to differ. When he’s not pulling teeth or writing manifestos calling for an end to salaried labour, Berger runs a small Yiddish cabaret and restaurant called “The Train of Life.” Though not quite as out there as some of the “dub-Gypsy-tango-punk-thrash-neo-clash-post-post-klezmer outfits” we New Yorkers are familiar with, if you’re in Paris in search of some cholent, leftist fury, and mind-expanding jams Berger’s bistro is the place to be.

And if you’re in Brooklyn, well, there’s always another Gogol Bordello show.

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by David Gutherz · 07/12/10

“Soccer,” our friend Alexander Hemon recently observed, “is like literature. It provides access to a country. No one reads books just from their own country.” Certainly an “un-American” sentiment if I’ve ever heard one, but one that caught our attention. And so we thought: what better way to honor Spain’s long-awaited World Cup victory than with some classic Sephardi poetry, translated by the great Peter Cole?! Moshe Ibn Ezra’s  ”The World” seems particularly apropos:

The World

Men of the world have the world in their heart,
God set it in them when they were born—
it’s a flowing stream that won’t suffice
though the sea becomes its source,

as if its water turned to salt
when a parched heart called out to them—
they pour it from buckets into their mouths
but their thirst is never quenched.
Or, for the morning after, Ezra’s “Weak With Wine.”

Weak with Wine

We woke, weak with wine from the party,
barely able to get up and walk
to the meadow wafting its spices—
the scents of cassia and cloves:

and the sun had embroidered its surface with blossoms
and across it spread a deep blue robe.

And finally, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, here is contemporary Dutch poet Judith Herzberg (translated by Shirley Kaufman in conjunction with the author) reflecting on a sound that was repeated (no doubt too many times) throughout the yellow-card flooded game.

OW!

Could there be such a thing, a law
for the conservation of pain,
so that if we fight it here,
someone somewhere will be hurt
worse than the sound of ow?

Or does pain, like energy
(sorry, analogy), transform itself
not into heat, but somehow
into a kind of freeze
worse than the sound of ow?

Or could it be the pain we drive out
takes on a different form,
unlaughed, unsung, disavowed,
stiffens our pain-thirsty bodies
aching for the sound of ow?

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by Habitus · 03/03/10

Our friends at the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York produced a very ambitious and impressive year-long festival in 2009, Extremely Hungary, that brought an unprecedented array of Hungarian culture to New York and Washington, DC.

The year is over, but the excellent offerings have not stopped. On March 18th, the HCC will screen a film that promises an interesting perspective on Hungarian Jewish life: The Fidesz Jew, the Mother with No Sense of Nation and Mediation

Can differing political views break up a marriage? Eszter Hajdú’s 2008 film is a pioneering effort to disclose the underlying mechanisms of the political conflict that has divided Hungary since the hopeful political changes of 1989. It is the story of a broken friendship and a family that has fallen apart under the strain of differing political convictions. In one narrative, two Jewish friends are torn apart when one of them became a right-wing party (Fidesz) representative…The other story focuses on Zsuzsa, who separated from her husband in 2002 after they had stopped talking to each other, and politics pits even child against mother. “There isn’t a drop of patriotism in you,” Zsuzsa is told by her daughter, “you’re unfit to be a mother!”

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by Habitus · 03/02/10

If you are wondering what you are going to do in November, 2011, Harvard will be hosting a very interesting conference on the Russian-Jewish Diaspora. Not exactly timely information yet, but this statistic from the program description is quite remarkable:

Almost two million Russian-speaking people, most of them Jews, live outside the former Soviet Union (FSU). In January 1989, when the last Soviet census was taken, 1,449,000 people identified themselves as Jews.

Such a an amazing statistic doesn’t necessarily reflect the inherent challenges of defining a Jew. For example, the contention that all 1.1 million Russian speakers in Israel are in fact Jewish is, to say the least, subject to debate. Would also be interesting to know what defines a Russian speaker (i.e. second generation?). All the same, it helps to illustrate the remarkable imprint of Jews on the Russian-speaking world.

The organizers are accepting paper proposals through May, 2010.

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by Habitus · 02/26/10

The always-provocative Tony Judt has been wrestling aloud with his own past and self-definition in the NYRBlog. Today, he takes on the problems of identity and affiliation directly:

As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan.” But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.

He speaks of his affinity for “edge people” and “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.”

In our latest issue, our own Yuri Slezkine sketched out his own biography in somewhat similar terms, in an essay he titled “How I Became Multicultural.”

I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”

I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.

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