Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 12/15/11

Dan Miron’s From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking is a new look at how modern Jewish literature fits into the Jewish literary canon. Prior to Miron’s work, much criticism dealing with Jewish literature insisted on the necessity for viewing it a continuous, evolving literary mode. In his book, Miron argues that “discontinuity is a staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing,” that it is important to analyze Jewish literature with the understanding that various Jewish works don’t fit into the canon as easily as many argue. Thus, the works are not continuous but contiguous:

Vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse … characterized by dualities, parallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hybrids, similarities within dissimilarities, mobility, changeability, occasional emergence of patterns and their eventual disappearance, randomness, and, when approximating a semblance of significant order, by contiguities.

Sachar Pinsker, an Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the Near Eastern Studies Department and the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Michigan, reviewed the work for the New Republic. He writes: “The challenge of anyone who faces such a bewildering and contradictory subject is to resist the temptation to find false harmony and unity, and at the same time to avoid abandoning altogether the very category of ‘Jewish literature,’ which Miron still refuses to renounce.”

Click here to read the review. Dan Miron is Leonard Kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking is available for purchase.

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by Konrad Bercovici · 11/21/11

This essay by Romanian-born Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961) was published in in the September 12, 1923 issue of The Nation.

© John Rosenthal

There is an old European saying that every country deserves the kind of Jews it has.

If so, New York does not know what it deserves, for it has every kind—gangsters, social workers, philanthropists, corrupt politicians, patriotic capitalists, preaching socialists, anarchists, bigots, atheists, ignorant illiterates, highly educated men. Every kind of Jew, from the lowest strata of humanity to the peak of culture, is represented here—a complete nation. The only way to purify water is to sterilize it. The only way to purify a nation is to kill it. You can kill a Jew but you can’t kill the Jews. Spain has learned that. Russia has had her lesson. Poland has tried to solve her Jewish problem in a river. Hungary has imitated Poland. Rumania has tried to imitate them. Germany is doing it now. But it all comes down to one and the same thing. You can kill a Jew, ten, a hundred, a thousand, but you can’t kill the Jews. They cannot even be absorbed. No sooner has the inevitable process of absorption begun in a country, after two generations of tolerance has put the national or racial consciousness to sleep, than an anti-Semitic outbreak in that country or in another awakens the consciousness in the Jews and the reluctance to absorb them in the non-Jews. And the would-be alloy separates like non-mixable chemical matter, a little tarnished but not welded.

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by David Gutherz · 08/31/10

It uncommonly difficult, these days, to find a fresh perspective on Israel–but that is precisely what former Habitus editor Samuel Thrope offers in his new translation of, and commentary on, the Persian author Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s 1964 essay “Velayat-e Esrael.” Translating roughly  as “The Israeli Republic” Ahmad’s piece attempts to situate Israel in a “Republican” tradition that (as Thrope astutely observes) has more in common with Plato and the Ayatollah Khomeni” than Jefferson and Rousseau. As Ahmad puts it, “Ben Gurion lacks not from Enoch, and Moshe Dayan is no less than Job: these new guardians, each one a prophet or—at least—a clear-visioned seer, built a Republic in the land of Palestine and called to it all the Children of Israel, of whom two million live in New York and eight million others in the rest of the world.”

More than the curious musings of one renegade Iranian intellectual, these words are a poignant reminder of an Israel (and Iran) long gone, and a call to reflect on the ever-controversial relation between religion and politics in the Middle East. In Thrope’s words:

“The Israel Al-e Ahmad visited and to which it was possible to ascribe these semi-mystical qualities, even if he was naive in so doing, is long gone. Who today could confuse Israel’s political leaders—even those not on trial for corruption—with prophets and guardians? This is no place to speculate on precisely what changed or why. My point is only that Al-e Ahmad’s strange vision is a memorial not only to a lost relationship between Israel and Iran, but also a testament to the way that Israel once saw itself and was seen by the world, as a light unto the nations.

This essay is also a warning. As we debate Israel’s future, we would do well to consider the ultimate outcome of the left-religious coalition Al-e Ahmad advocated for Iran. As much as that dynamic and invigorating fusion of theology and politics propelled the 1979 revolution, it also led directly to the repressions and injustice of the Islamic Republic. For those on the right and on the left who argue that Israel’s policies should be grounded in Jewish texts and values, who claim that Judaism is us and not them, who advocate constant traffic, intellectual and physical, between the political demonstration and the beit midrash, Jalal Al-e Ahmad should give us pause. Fusion IS explosive not only in a nuclear bomb.”

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by David Lida · 08/26/10

Inside her room in a one-story brick compound in Tepepan, Carla puts the final touches on her makeup before leaving for work. Already dressed and made up, Alín, who lives in another room in the house and works with Carla, awaits her. Carla’s room is decorated with a collection of diminutive teddy bears, dolls, frogs (“They’re for good luck,” she says), fans, a wall hanging of the Last Supper, and an altar to a saint known in Tacoaleche, Zacatecas, as the Child of the Doves.

They wear long skirts and blouses. “We don’t like anything vulgar,” says Carla. They buy all their clothes in Xochimilco. “I used to like to shop in the Centro, but now I’m scared. There’s every kind of delinquent over there.” They work as waitresses and hostesses in a beer joint called La Vicenta.

On the wall there is a photo of Carla with a smiling client. —Is he your boyfriend? —Are you kidding? I only see him in the cantina. He’s married.

Alín, who is deaf-mute, produces some photo albums, principally from before she began to dress as a woman. She was a muscular youth with a masculine appearance. There are a couple of photos of her as a woman in the cantina, next to a man whose eyes are either very dreamy or dazed from beer. She makes a gesture in the form of a heart, indicating that the man is her boyfriend. She next mimes her hands as if she’s at the steering wheel of a car, and then waves a palm in the air.

Carla interprets: Alín’s boyfriend is a truck driver and he’s far away. Carla also had a photo album, with images of her as a man and as a woman. But a beau stole it. “One of a million bastards,” she says. “Why bother having a boyfriend? Soon enough they rob you.”

Carla says that Alín became deaf-mute many years ago, after her father gave her a brutal beating. Alín does not communicate with any traditional sign language. She has invented her own. Indicating a ring on a finger means married. Male or female gender is demonstrated with explicit gestures describing genitalia, and a finger ground into the cheek means gay. According to her photos, before dressing as a woman, she worked as a babysitter and in a hamburger stand.

Carla used to work in the family business, making metal sculptures from molds: Don Quijote, female nudes, bulls. She sold them on the street outside the Chilpancingo metro stop. After a while she grew bored.

Which never happens at La Vicenta, not even on the slow weekday afternoons when the few clients tend to be asleep with their heads atop the tables. At those moments, Carla says, “I gossip with my colleagues.”

They earn no salary, only tips. “We used to make a lot,” says Carla. “There were customers who would leave twenty pesos. Now they leave two or three.” Nonetheless, they tend to earn fifty or sixty pesos a day, and sometimes more on a busy Friday or Saturday. “There are also clients who give us perfume, shoes, or underwear,” she adds. Certain unscrupulous waitresses take advantage of the drunkest clients and divest them of their money. In fact, the waitress that introduced Alín to Carla is now in jail, doing three months for robbing a sailor.

Customers tend to behave, except for the drunks, who grab buttocks or other parts of Carla and Alín’s mysterious bodies. Alín has a feminine form thanks to hormones, while Carla’s is pure illusion. “The best lies are true,” she explains.

Theirs is not an easy life. Alín shows some scratches on her chest, the result of a tiff she had with another waitress, who bit her index finger, leaving a notable scar. She also has a majestic hickey on her neck, a gift from a guy who accosted her on the street a few nights earlier.

Alín is 23, Carla 38. Her dream is to open a beauty salon in Xochimilco. Truth, lie, or something intermediate. She says, “I’m not always going to live this way.”

To read more, order Habitus 06: Mexico City

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by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08

From the roof that I had before Katrina, I have only one slate left.

It’s a jagged grey oblong, about the size of my head, thin and sharp at the edges. It flakes easily; after a hundred years, this old slate has lost most of its integrity. It’s a slate that’s been written upon: a history of wind and sun and rain. It protected me and my family, and the families before us who lived here. It was a roof over our heads.

There was a time when I had piles and piles of these slates. I was a mad collector in the months after Katrina and stacked them around my porch and in the crawlspace underneath my house. Every time I heard the shovels scraping a roof in the neighborhood, I ran over to see if I could get the Mexican guys to save some slates for me. It was always Mexican guys working on roofs in New Orleans after Katrina, which is a sad fact that people make into politics: the old Creole craftsmen who built this city by hand and pride hardly exist any more, the men who passed on specific knowledge of the wood and stone and plaster. The Mexicans came in to do the roofs, and they worked quickly and just slid the slates off the roof with shovels. As the slates cascaded to the dumpster below in a cloud of gray dust and fracture, you could feel your heart breaking with it, and the sound when they hit was like disaster all over again. But when I explained I would pay fifty cents a slate, and once they got the idea from my rusty Spanish, they seemed to like it a lot. In Mexico people understand materials and recycling and the old ways.

I became a militant slate preservationist. I didn’t really understand why, since our obsessions only look like obsessions in retrospect. It just seemed like the only thing to do. We hadn’t had much water damage at my house, but the wind had torn through the neighborhood pretty badly—130 miles an hour, some said. An amputated branch of the sycamore in front of the house shot over the driveway like a white rocket and somehow landed high up in the ginger fronds. And the wind ripped off a bunch of the hundred-year-old slates on my roof, leaving the attic exposed to wind, rain, and ferocious winged termites. I lost a lot of sleep over those slates—for me there was something fundamentally wrong about a house with an open roof. Every minute that went by, I felt more damaged.

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by Aleksander Hemon · 03/21/07

The taxi driver who drove me from the airport and, when I observed that the leaves were already beginning to fall, replied: “Why, yes, first watermelons, then lessons,” which, on close analysis, I understood as representing a magic formula to describe the gradual approach of autumn.

The moment when, from Jekovac, after the Ramazan cannon fires to indicate sunset, you see the lights on all the minarets of Sarajevo simultaneously ignite.

The clatter of the first morning tram, echoing through the empty streets of the city.

The coldness of the buildings from the Austro-Hungarian era and the staircases inside them, with their treads worn by the soles that have climbed them for more than a century.

Somun—soft, white bread—(scattered with seeds) from the baker’s in Kovači.

Children’s balls, rolling in the shallow eddies of the Miljacka river.

The beauty of Sarajevo women, who always bear in them the imprint of their own past and their own future; the history of past and future changes: their faces reveal both skinny little girls and mature women, both minxes and careworn matrons.

The sfumato of a cold Sarajevo morning, before the sun steals up behind the mountains, and mist drifts up the slopes.

Škembići—tripe—at Hadžibajrić’s.

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