by Habitus · 01/27/12
We are thrilled to share our latest issue, New York, in which we turn our attention homeward. Get yours today.
Click here to see the full Table of Contents.
Read our interviews with Michael Arad and André Aciman, and read a timeless essay from Konrad Bercovici—penned in 1923—about “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.”
More previews and additional New York material will be posted soon, so keep visiting our site.
Leave a Comment 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.
by Habitus · 09/12/11
At the age of thirty-four, the Israeli-born architect Michael Arad won the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition with his submission, “Reflecting Absence.” He spoke with Habitus editor Joshua Ellison as the site was readied for its unveiling on September 11th, 2011.
You are an immigrant to New York but you have now made an imprint on the city that few people could equal. How has this process changed your relationship to the city?
I think what really changed my relationship to the city came before this project—the 9/11 attacks and the response of New Yorkers on that day. I’d been living in New York for close to three years. I’d lived here before at a much earlier age, in sixth grade. I had come and gone from New York throughout college and graduate school, but I felt very much like an outsider here. It was a city that always intrigued me; I knew I wanted to come work here and live here. But even after being here for a number of years, I still felt like an outsider—I think New York is a city that’s full of outsiders.
Arad, the architect/designer of the World Trade Center Memorial
Having an Israeli background, New York was far removed from the difficulties of living in Israel. Back home, I knew that prevalent sense of vulnerability—violence could be waiting on the next bus ride or around on the next corner. When the 9/11 attacks happened, that misplaced sense of security evaporated in an instant.
But I also gained something: All of a sudden, by going through the crucible of this experience, I felt a tremendous sense of kinship to my fellow New Yorkers. All my neighbors, the people I saw on the subway, the people I saw on the street, and the people I saw gathering in public spaces like Union Square and Washington Square: we were one. That was very powerful and moving. In particular, I recall going to Washington Square a couple of days after the attacks—I was living in the East Village at the time—and our neighborhood, like everything south of Fourteenth Street, was shut off from the rest of the city. There were no cars, hardly any people outside. I went for a bike ride in the middle of the night—two, three in the morning—in an ever-widening circle, starting in my neighborhood, making my way over to Chinatown and TriBeCa and the West Village. I eventually ended up in Washington Square Park and I walked up to the fountain. There were candles surrounding the fountain and there were people standing there. I think people came there the same way that I did, alone or maybe with one other friend, but people stood there together. And when I walked up to that fountain, that circular fountain, I joined that circle of people and I didn’t feel alone anymore. I don’t think I understood the significance of that moment, but in many ways it was a very transformative moment for me: I felt that I became a New Yorker, realizing that this is my home.
One of the interesting tensions around this memorial project has been the question: Is this a national memorial or a New York City memorial?
It’s a national memorial. I think that’s how everybody involved in it right now sees it. At some points over the last few years, there were questions about whether or not we should include the names of people who died in Pennsylvania, or in Washington, or Virginia. For me, it was never a question.
I also think it goes beyond being a national memorial; I think it’s part of our shared human heritage, wherever we are coming from. There are people from over sixty countries among the victims. And New York is an incredibly cosmopolitan city that brings people in from everywhere and gives everybody a shot—I’m not going to say an equal and fair shot, but it gives everybody opportunities which they might not have elsewhere.
You have written that you started thinking about memorial ideas very shortly after the event.
We were living next door to a pastry shop called De Robertis on First Avenue, between 10th and 11th, and shortly after the attack, they put up a cake in the window that had an image of the Twin Towers. It said, “We will never forget,” in frosting. When I first saw it, I thought it was in terrible taste. But as I walked by it, day after day, I grew to really appreciate the gesture. These people used their best means of self-expression. They wanted to find a way to express themselves and they used the tools that were available. It was easy to be very dismissive of that when you first saw it. But I came to realize it was not that dissimilar to what I did when I started to sketch ideas on a piece of yellow tracing paper. I was trying to find a way to make sense, to acknowledge what we had seen, what we had suffered. I spent close to a year on what was a very personal and very cathartic exercise of exploring these ideas. There was no memorial competition, there was no client driving the design project. This was a very personal effort, something I spent days obsessing over and building and sketching and designing.
You originally envisioned a memorial on the Hudson River.
It was the image of the river being torn open, and I imagined walking up to the edge of the river and looking beyond, and feeling this sense that the fabric of space had somehow been torn open and water was falling into these voids—and that these voids would never be filled. It was a completely enigmatic and inexplicable image, and I spent a lot of time trying to realize it. I wasn’t sure if it could be realized.
I built a little fountain in a miniature scale—twelve inches by twelve inches. A year later, there was a competition for the design of the memorial. I wanted to see if I could take those ideas that I had for the voids on the Hudson and in some way reinterpret them. I also wanted to bring that sense of creating a specific place—a place of assembly within the city, like Union Square, like Washington Square—that helped me confront that day, not alone but as part of a project.
In both the Hudson design and the competition version, you started with the idea of submerged forms or negative spaces.
It was about creating a space that would remain inaccessible and empty, an emptiness that I think is filled with meaning. I was making the absence visible—something that is not erased with the passage of time.
The void doesn’t really open up under you until you’re right there, right at its edge. It’s a very visceral reaction: you really feel it in your chest, in your gut, as you walk up to them.
This idea of “reflecting absence” seems to repeat a question that has been central to memorial design since the Second World War, which is: How do you capture in physical space the enormity of a tragedy that is beyond measure? Did you look to other memorial projects for guidance?
As an architect, I’ve seen many memorials and many buildings and many monuments, so all of those feed into the design unconscious. You don’t know where everything that you draw upon and think of comes from. It comes from a mixture that is deep within.
On the question of memorializing, one of the difficulties here was that the number of deaths—close to 3,000—could easily become an abstraction, a number that’s impossible to grapple with and understand and break down. We arranged the names of the victims around two pools according to meaningful adjacencies. The idea was that there would be a reason why one name is close to another name, that these adjacencies and the placements of the names would reflect the relationships that existed between the victims. A lot of the victims knew each other very well: they’d worked together, some of them were families that died together, some of them commuted together every morning, or went to school together. Some of them only got to know each other that day. In their effort to help each other, some of them died together. I wanted to reach out to family members and ask them if there were names of other victims that they would like to see next to the name of the person they lost. This was a big “ask,” so to speak, for the memorial foundation. This was something I’m still surprised we were given the opportunity to do, because it was a tremendous risk, and institutions and the people who run institutions are usually risk averse.
Mayor Bloomberg deserves tremendous credit for giving us the opportunity to pursue this. It wasn’t until 2006, when he became chairman of the foundation, that we were given a green light to go ahead and try this. And then it wasn’t until 2009 that letters finally went out to family members asking for this input. We got over 1,200 requests from family members, and we spent a year arranging the names very carefully to meet each and every request. It was a very emotionally challenging task—it was the kind of task where you had to hold onto that depth of feeling without letting it overwhelm you, and without becoming callous to it either. There are incredibly sad stories that are now embedded in the very fabric of this memorial design. These relationships, to the naked eye, are invisible: it looks like a random array of names, but in fact there are constellations of adjacencies.
There’s one particular story of a meaningful adjacency that I’ve shared a number of times. Abigail Ross Goodman lost her father that day. He was on Flight 11. She lost her best friend, Stacey Leigh Sanders, too, who was working in the North Tower. Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, and so she lost her father and her best friend in an instant. We got a request to put those two names side by side, and initially we didn’t know why. You find out one story after another. I don’t know all the stories that are part of these arrangements—I don’t think anybody will ever know all the stories.
However you come to know them, I think there are ways to transmit these incredibly sad and moving stories and to build up a sense of understanding, one person at a time, adjacency by adjacency. This way, we might better understand what happened that day, rather than become confounded by the close to 3,000 deaths. I think these individual stories will always have resonance. There will be new ways to share these stories that I can’t imagine yet, but someone else will become involved in doing this. The meaningful adjacencies are a way for us to address that question that you are asking about: how do you memorialize, especially when it seems like such an overwhelming task, something that is beyond comprehension?
It also strikes me, as an architectural matter, that the use of the names is an interesting response to one of the major challenges of the site, which is the enormity of the scale of the space. It is a way of allowing for a more intimate, quiet register within this really vast expanse.
In some ways, these design decisions were very straightforward. We knew we wanted to place these pools where the towers once were. We knew we wanted their scale to be commensurate with the size of the towers’ footprint and we knew that we wanted every name listed. After that, it was about letting the history of the site come forward through these design elements. When you have very clear objectives, it becomes easier to make decisions that are going to be consistent.
You are also very conscious, programmatically, of how a viewer moves through the space. Can you talk a little bit how you envision that?
Well, I think the experience of the memorial actually begins when you consider the scale of this neighborhood. If you think of Lower Manhattan, of these tall and narrow urban canyons where you can barely see a sliver of sky in some instances, and you walk out of these canyons onto this vast, open plain—this eight-acre memorial site—where a clear dome of the sky is so present all of a sudden: You are at once within the city and also looking at it as if you were outside it. You have this distance that separates you from Lower Manhattan even though you are firmly within it.
For me, it was always about rooting the site back into the life of the neighborhood, and also giving you the opportunity to separate yourself from everyday New York life. It’s a very dynamic relationship, I think, between the site and the surrounding city. The site is very much defined by the buildings that will rise around it. I think it’s powerful, once you cross the street and step onto the memorial plaza. You discover this unexpected forest of nearly 400 trees. You walk under their canopy and the view of the city becomes even more mediated through that permeable ceiling of branches and leaves. Then you walk deeper into the site, to the edge of one of two enormous voids.
We designed these voids with an eight-foot wide and two-foot tall water table that surrounds them and serves as the spring point for the waterfall. Above that, there are the bronze panels where the names are inscribed. What happens is that you can start to see the scale of the void—you start to see the waterfall from 200 feet away—but the void doesn’t really open up under you until you’re right there, right at its edge. It’s a very visceral reaction: you really feel it in your chest, in your gut, as you walk up to them. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t really capture in a photograph because a photograph isolates the sentiment into something that is just a visual image. But when you’re there, your sense of balance is upended by what is around you. And then, as you stand there at the edge of void, and as you take in this enormous space, you see this multitude of names that surrounds each pool—close to 1,500 names over each void.
You start walking slowly and gradually around these pools, taking in one name after another. Each name has a geographic component to it that I think is very important, and it’s reinforced by these meaningful adjacencies, though you might not know about them. When you walk up to the void, what you see is one name and then another and another and, together, they coalesce to form a river of names that surrounds each pool. But each name is an island unto itself. What is on this memorial is the name of the person—that most essential marker of the unique identity of the individual—and, at the same time, there’s also this assembly of names, all together. I think it was important to me to draw on the individual loss, but also this collective loss that we suffered—that sense of the individual and the universal.
There have been commemorations of 9/11 at every scale, from the very personal to the civic and political. You talked about your neighbor’s bakery. So why is it important to have an official response, a single space that focuses all this memory and mourning?
I don’t think it’s a single response, I think it’s one of many responses. This is the “national” 9/11 memorial and it has a standing that is separate from those others, as an institution of the state. I think that’s appropriate, but I also think that it does not thereby give it more meaning or a better meaning than other memorials that reflect the diversity of responses that we had to that day. There should be multiple ways of understanding that event, and I think there will be multiple ways of understanding this memorial. I think many people will walk away from it with very different understandings and resolve to respond to what they have seen in very different ways.
You mentioned before that Israel was your family home. I wonder if you feel like you have internalized anything about that country’s approach to memory or memorialization in the way that you approached this design.
I don’t necessarily think so. I was born in London, I grew up in London and New York and Washington and Jerusalem and Mexico City, and that was all by the time I graduated high school. So I think that all of these influences are part of it, so maybe no is the wrong answer—the answer is yes and…
Was I influenced by the military cemetery in Jerusalem? Yes, but I was also influenced by seeing Chichen Itza and the pyramids in Mexico. One of the benefits of having a childhood that was spread across so many continents is that you start to see the universal in this world and understand that there is much more that unifies us than divides us. When it comes to something as difficult as dealing with death, you will find that to be more the case than anything else.
Memorials necessarily have to address themselves to posterity. I wonder if you have given much thought to what someone in the future will learn about what happened on 9/11 from visiting your memorial—is it meant to be educational in that sense?
That moment that I described to you earlier of walking up to the edge of the void and seeing the scale of this space, which echoes the scale of the towers’ footprints, and seeing the multitude of names that surrounds each void—that is an incredibly powerful moment. It is the moment of walking up to a threshold, to this line that separates the living from the dead. I think this will always be a powerful moment. Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, even when people might not know every detail of that day, they will still comprehend in an instant that this happened.
I think that’s important. But I also think this story is going to be told in many other venues. When you built a memorial a thousand years ago, it was in the absence of the printing press, the Internet and movies and every other medium that we now have at our disposal to share information, to disseminate information, and to connect to people. So this idea that the memorial is somehow singlehandedly going to convey the story of 9/11 to future generations—that’s not going to be the case. I am not trying to get myself off the hook. It does need to do something very profound. But it’s part of a much larger combination of forces, and if you looked in the paper on almost any day in the last ten years, there would have been some reference to some aspect of 9/11. Whether it was a story about security at airports or immigration or the wars or anything else, it is all part of that story. I think we’ll be discussing 9/11 for a long time to come.
That must be liberating as a designer, in some sense.
It allowed me to focus on what I thought was most essential. I don’t think I could ever have become of the sole arbiter of the meaning of 9/11. Anybody who thinks they can has a very narrow agenda.
Visit the National 9/11 Memorial Website here. This interview will be featured in forthcoming the New York issue of Habitus. Subscribe now to pre-order your copy.
by Esther Dischereit · 03/13/11
I crept beneath Berlin
and lived like a rat
from the drains of people
who sat around the table.
When the bells tolled
we cowered and winced
and held our Jewish ears
by Habitus · 03/03/11
Our first digital publication—a collection of some of the best writing from our first six print issues—is now available for download. Use the link below to purchase a copy as a DRM-free ePub, readable on the device of your choice supporting that format, or visit Amazon to get a copy formatted for your Kindle. An iPad edition should be available soon in the iBookstore.
Over the coming year and in the future we plan to bring you a variety of publications in electronic formats, substantially expanding the range of our offerings. We’re currently working on a number of exciting projects, including graphic and photographic work, a series of “reprints” of lost works in translation, and a series of short standalone titles. Digital-only publication, we hope, will allow us to expand Habitus‘ horizons in ways we simply could not afford otherwise.
As we explore further, we’d love to share the results with you, our readers. We sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the texts collected in this anthology, and those we publish in the days to come.
by Habitus · 01/13/11
During the contentious debate over what form Berlin’s planned Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe would take, Horst Hoheisel became infamous as the man who proposed blowing up the Brandenburg Gate. He first came to prominence as a designer of monuments with the construction of his “negative fountain” in his hometown of Kassel. The project was conceived as a mirror image of a fountain that was destroyed during World War II; a phantom monument, surrounding the empty space left behind with a reflecting pool. “For Hoheisel,” James E. Young explains, “even the fragment was a decorative lie, suggesting itself as a remnant of a destruction no one knew much about.”
In Germany and throughout the world, Hoheisel has proposed memory works designed to provoke anger and stimulate debate by upending the conventions of the memorial form. The artist writes, “I don’t need the memorial as an object itself, the idea of thinking creatively is a monument and memorial on its own because particular monuments tell much more about our time, about ourselves and less about those victims.”
Habitus: Your personal history overlaps so closely with the history of Germany after the war. When you were young, what did you know about the war?
Hoheisel: I was born in December 1944, in the last month of the war. My parents were from Latvia, from Riga. Now I live in Kassel, Germany.
When I was working on the Aschrottbrunnen memorial fountain in Kassel, I found out from my research that the Jewish people of Kassel had been deported to Riga. So the story suddenly became very personal, very near to my own family biography.
by Joshua Ellison · 01/06/11
Memory is everywhere in Berlin, but history is curiously absent. There isn’t much to see that’s especially old. A few churches, a few grand buildings and statues, a few ominous relics, but otherwise the post-war and post-wall city is gray and mute. There are lots of places where significant things used to be: a cheerless park where Hitler’s bunker used to be; tidy streets that used to be bisected by the wall; endless holes in the ground and scaffolding and cranes.
A hundred years ago, the journalist Karl Scheffler famously wrote that Berlin was a “city condemned to becoming and never to being.” Even now, nothing looks quite finished. Berlin is always becoming something else, but it’s condemned precisely by what it had been before.
Even where the past has been all but erased, Berliners are constantly recording and remembering. Monuments, large and small, are everywhere. Berlin is perpetually retelling its own story. It’s how the city brands itself, in both senses of the word.
by Joshua Ellison · 08/26/10
If you need a taxi in Mexico City, you must follow the rules. First, never hail a cab on the street, even though hundreds could rocket past you in a given hour. Locals will tell you this with the certainty of death itself. They might do it from time to time— to save a few pesos or just for convenience—but they are horrified that you, a visitor, would even consider something so reckless. Everyone has a story to tell about a terrifying crime, usually a kidnapping but sometimes worse, that happened to someone who got into the wrong taxi.
Call your cab from a reputable dispatch. Some safety-minded people, and every tourist guidebook, will tell you that this isn’t enough: you need a few extra precautions. When you call the dispatch, ask for the taxi’s official registration number and the name of your driver. When the car arrives and you confirm the driver’s identity, take a look at the registration and, finally, make sure that number matches the license plate. If everything checks out, then you can be serenely on your way.
by Habitus · 08/26/10
In the late 1990s, a group of young artists transformed the Mexico City art scene and drew international attention to a city that had previously been considered an obscure outpost of contemporary visual culture. Yoshua Okón, one of the defining personalities of that moment, embodied its spirit with video and installations that were impolite, funny, and inflammatory. His seminal works aimed squarely at his society’s hypocrisies, excesses, and human spectacles. Now an internationally known artist who creates and exhibits work all over the world, Okón lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City. He spoke to Habitus from his home in the Condesa neighborhood, where he has spent most of his life.
Habitus: Growing up in Mexico City can mean so many different things and represent so many different worlds that don’t often intersect. Can you tell me a bit about the version of Mexico City that you knew growing up?
Okón: It’s a good way to describe the city and Mexico, as a whole. I’m very grateful to have grown up here; it’s a very complex place that doesn’t allow you to ignore the multiple realities and experiences. It’s a very in-your-face place that doesn’t allow you to live under many illusions.
I grew up in Colonia Condesa, where I still live today. It’s a neighborhood that was historically full of immigrants, so the cosmopolitan dimension of Mexico City is very strong here. It’s also a neighborhood with a very active street life. The old urban planning has survived here; it has a very human scale with lots of parks and green space and small businesses. You interact a lot with other people. This kind of neighborhood puts you in touch with the city’s many realities. As a child I would hang out in the parks and I got to meet an amazing variety of people: recent immigrants, working class, middle class, various races.
My work is very much socially oriented and that definitely comes from my experience growing up in the city and, specifically, in Condesa.
Was there a particular time in your life that you became aware of the city’s violence and corruption and social divisions—all the things that would become central to your art?
That was something I saw almost from the beginning. I don’t think it is particular to Mexico. I lived the in the U.S. for eight years and I would dare say that, in many ways, it’s a much more corrupt society. The difference is that there you have very sophisticated mechanisms that make people feel they are living in a fair society. To me it is, in many ways, much more ruthless. Here, the corruption is far more naked.
You might be best known for a piece in which you paid local policemen to act out in front of your camera. They dance, sing, gesture obscenely, shout. Can you say a little about how the material was gathered?
My experience with the police in Mexico City is very much love-hate. They are so cynical and corrupt but they are also amazing actors. At the end, you know they just want your money and they know it, too. But there is a theatricality to it that I have always hated and always loved. I thought: these guys are so creative and such skillful performers, why not use them as actors? These guys will make you laugh but you will feel highly uncomfortable at the same time.
There is something obviously cynical in the act but, at the same time, there is something that’s also very tender about they way they perform for you.
Exactly. There is something very human and down-to-earth about the way they behave but of course it is also cynical.
I’m interested in the relationship between orchestration and improvisation in this kind of work. How do you find the right level of intervention for a given situation?
Well, I guess that is part of my art. For me making artwork has a lot to do with my curiosity about the world. It is a great way to rethink the way I understand the world and to challenge the viewer. I think we often live mostly by stereotypes. This work is a way of bringing a little distance from everyday life.
It would be very boring for me to come up with a script, or answers, before I create the piece. That’s where performance comes in. I basically set up very simple parameters—the rules of the game that speak for themselves. Reality is always surprising me; most things that happen could have never come from a script.
You encourage people to see themselves and their place in society with humor. There is something kind of democratic in the use of humor in your work, which creates a kind of relationship of equality between the subjects and the audience, who may not be on equal footing in society at large.
I think humor is an incredible useful tool for gaining distance from ourselves. When we laugh, we are more able to see ourselves from the outside. My works are as much about the viewer as the subjects being portrayed. Humor allows viewers to become implicated in the work. Once you are laughing, you are already implicated. A mixture of humor and discomfort can be very powerful.
by Sabina Berman · 08/26/10
My father didn’t talk much. But when he did, he talked to the air. He would gaze at the ceiling and speak in a grave monotone, disconnected from me and anyone else who might be within earshot. It was like listening to the rain. The few bits of his life that he told me about, he told just like that, and then he fell silent, without searching for a moral. And that silence was like listening to the rain in some corner of my memory, distant, remote.
Eleven moments have shaped my destiny, he once told me. Just eleven, that’s all. But if you were to take even one of them away, I’d be a different person altogether. I’d have a different name, I’d think in another language, and I’d live on the other side of the world, or else I would have stopped living long ago.
The first of those moments happened at the turn of the century, in Radzin, Poland. That spring night the Jews of the shtetl left their houses and walked along the dirt path to the cheder, the school, where they shuffled around, standing, whispering, quietly wondering if what had brought them together there was really a miracle about to happen. The rabbi was in the middle, seated at a wooden table, and on the table a glass bubble waited enigmatically, empty except for a simple filament that rose about four centimeters from its base. The rabbi beckoned the children over to the table.
Let the children be the first to see the Future, he said.
Reb Meyer, according to my father, was famous in Poland for his oratory.
Among the children who stepped forward and surrounded the table was, of course, my father, Herschl Berman, dark-skinned, with black eyes and payes.
All right, said Reb Meyer, let’s see.
Then, soundlessly, the miracle occurred: the bubble lit up like a tiny sun on top of the table. The people gasped, their eyes opening wide.
Then they applauded.
And the applause grew louder as the rabbi waved his hands, palms down, over the shining light bulb, blessing it in Hebrew. Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who allows us to light electric bulbs.
The next day at cheder, Reb Meyer spoke animatedly about the miracle of a literally brilliant Future. Myriads of light bulbs would arrive to erase the darkness of evil and suffering from the earth. Hadn’t God revealed Himself to Moses as the radiant light of a burning bramble bush? Hadn’t He appeared to Daniel as a bolt of lightning suspended in the sky? Light is the appearance of God, and if God had found it necessary to set fire to a bramble bush in the desert in order to talk to Moses, in the twentieth century he would talk to everyone, ecumenically, through light bulbs.
And now not even fools will be capable of sin, the rabbi concluded.
Over the years, Reb Meyer’s optimism grew bitter in my father’s memory, but the joy of seeing that burning light bulb was something from which he never recovered.
I’ll tell you exactly what I felt when I saw the bulb, my father said to me.
He closed his eyes and spoke to me of the long, cruel winters in Radzin. Winters that lasted half the year and forced people to lock themselves inside their houses or in the temple, because to step outside into the air meant being stabbed by a piercing blade of cold.
During that half of the year the sun was always a hypothesis: maybe it was hiding behind the perpetually clouded sky. And when the wind rearranged the clouds and the sun gradually peeked out between them, Reb Meyer knew it, because the window next to his chair lit up, and beneath his gaze the sheet covered with the characters of the great book of the Talmud grew whiter and finally, radiant. Then he would dismiss his class and order the children to leave the schoolroom to take advantage of the interstice of sunshine.
Out in the snow, the children unbuttoned their black jackets and white shirts, they slipped their tzitzit over their heads, and flung their arms open to feel the sun on their chests. That was the happiness I felt from the light bulb, my father concluded, opening his eyes.
To read more, order Habitus 06: Mexico City
