Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

In 1922, Sioma Lifshitz set off for China. He was a twenty-year-old Russian who became disillusioned with the political aspirations of the 1917 Revolution. He would spend the next thirty years in Shanghai, launching a career as a high-class photographer under the pseudonym Sam Sanzetti. Today, Lifshitz is heralded by many as one of the best photographers ever to have worked in Shanghai. When he left for Israel in 1957, he carried in his suitcase some 20,000 photographs that he had taken during his career.

Lifshitz–calling himself Sanzetti–opened his own photography studio in 1927 on Nanjing Road, a commercial street near the Bund, the tourist center and financial district in Shanghai. He photographed all manner of people: celebrities, film stars, young couples, children.

Lifshitz is famous for saying, “You could have found me in Honolulu, if that happened to be the destiny of the ship.” He was speaking of his decision to leave Russia when, quite impulsively, he boarded the next available ship to somewhere. In Shanghai, he apprenticed under an American photographer who taught him the craft, and soon thereafter Lipshitz began to work as Sam Sanzetti.

Lifshitz died in Israel in 1986. For years, his photography was unavailable for public viewing and his name had all but faded from memory. Now, the Israeli consulate in Shanghai has headed the effort to reinvigorate Sanzetti’s name and well-deserved fame in Shanghai.

The consulate hopes to find the stories behind the photographs. They’ve posted many of Lipshitz’s photographs on their Weibo—a Chinese version of Twitter—in hopes that someone will recognize who is in the photograph. Within days, the Weibo post has had thousands of hits and the consulate has received many calls with possible leads.

Oren Rozenblat, the deputy consul general of Israel in Shanghai said of the project: “It will be beautiful to see at the exhibition a very old lady standing in front of her picture as a young bride.”

Visit the Israeli consulate in Shanghai’s website on the digital exhibition here. Satellite Voices, an international photography forum, features some of Lipshitz’s work as well. Read the related article in the China Daily here.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Gertrude Stein’s reputation is that of a literary maverick and an American ex-pat in Paris. Yet she is hardly known for being a staunch Franco supporter, a disdainful detractor of Roosevelt, nor is she known for suggesting in 1934 that Hitler merited the Nobel Prize.

Eric Banks, a New York based writer who is the current president of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the relationship Gertrude Stein held with Bernard Faÿ, a Vichy bureaucrat directly responsibly for the death of at least 550 freemasons in France after 1940. The article is titled “Wars They Have Seen: How an Unlikely Friendship With a Vichy Collaborator Complicates Our Understanding of Gertrude Stein”.

She believed in the collaborationist policies of Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Marshall of the French State from 1940 to 1944—Stein even translated several of his speeches into English. Stein wrote in the introductory text to the speeches that the Méréchal was similar to figures like George Washington and other great leaders who, as a knight might, arrived in time to rescue his country and people. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1970 that Stein’s less reputable past was made available for public scrutiny with Richard Bridgman’s biography, Gertrude Stein in Pieces.

Stein’s politics did not wend their way into her writing. Instead, her political predispositions were visible only in her personal relationships she held with figures like Bernard Faÿ, who whisked her through the bureaucratic red tape necessary for translating Pétain’s speeches. John Whittier-Ferguson, an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, discusses this distinct lack of politics in Stein’s oeuvre:

“Most people don’t have enough reference points around her late writing from the war to engage with why it might matter to figure this out.” he says. “With Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, the story about their politics has been told and worked over more consistently and for longer,” says Whittier-Ferguson. “The narrative we have to tell ourselves about Stein’s politics is not really yet formed, which makes it harder to say what you’re going to do with this material on politics when she doesn’t seem to do much with it in her own texts. Glance at it, look off to the side, what do you do with that? But that’s what makes it very interesting, and challenging.”

Bernard Faÿ, Stein’s excellent friend who was deeply involved with the Vichy government, was an unlikely collaborator: an academic, an American history buff and Roosevelt fan, a homosexual. Faÿ pulled strings to keep Stein and Alice B. Toklas–Jews–safe together in the Northern French countryside once the Nazis began the Occupation; he arranged a lecture tour of the United States for Stein and worked extensively with her on her novel The Making of Americans. Faÿ earned his masters at Harvard and penned a dissertation at the Sorbonne titled L’Esprit Revolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la Fin du XVIIIème Siècle—a study of both the American and French revolutionary spirits between 1770 and 1800. He would have the won 1926 Pulitzer Prize were it written in English and not French, originally. Faÿ was a revered academic whose specialty was American Civilization. He taught at institutions like Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Iowa, and he wrote popular biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. He championed forward thinking and modernism in literature in music.

As more is discovered about Stein and Faÿ, new books and studies arise that help us understand who these two tremendous figures were, and how their politics and careers intermingled. Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Ulla E. Dydo’s and Edward M. Burns’ The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma, and Antoine Compagnon’s Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale are all relatively recent publications that seek answers to questions about Stein and Faÿ’s questionable political leanings.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Pamela Potter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reviews Erik Levi’s Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. Her essay was titled Crimes Against Culture or Business as Usual?  The Yale University Press published Levi’s book earlier this year. He discusses the Nazis’ use of Mozart as fodder for both antisemitism and Aryan pride.

Levi’s research, which unearthed newspaper articles, speeches and other archived materials, effectively transports readers back to the early 20^th century when, at the advent World War I, Mozart became a political tool to prove Aryan superiority.

Though Potter does find some faults with some of Levi’s contentions—that the steely appropriation of Mozart’s artistic identity was as ruthless and exacting as the Nazis’ elimination of Jews, for example–Potter considers Levi’s work to be an exemplary examination of the Nazi’s use of German cultural heritage. One significant aspect of the Nazis’ treatment of Mozart that Potter takes into consideration is the relation the German Jews to the composer:

Mozart’s significance particularly for Jewish performers and scholars provides perhaps the most compelling material for readers of this list, as the discussions yield some very poignant insights into this group’s stubborn adherence to German cultural identity. As is well known, the systematic exclusion of Jews from participation in German cultural life led first to a stop-gap measure concocted by the government and the Jewish community, known as the Jewish Culture League (Kulturbund deutscher Juden), to provide cultural and educational programs exclusively for Jews by Jews. When it came to excluding German content from the league’s programs, the deep connection German Jews held to German culture became all too evident. The ban on Mozart imposed upon the league in 1937 was a bitter pill to swallow, and Herbert Peyser, reporting for the New York Times, perceptively noted the German Jews’ undying claim to “that same artistic, scientific, and philosophic fare to which, through the centuries, they have felt a proprietary right to equal that of other Germans.

Erik Levi is a music and music history professor at the Royal Holloway University of London. He has extensively researched 20^th century German music, especially during the Nazi era. His other book Music in the Third Reich is available for purchase.

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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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