Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

“I’m so tired of being told my writing is ‘moving.’ I want to be told it is convincing.”

This is only one of the myriad confessions and frustrations from the literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin now available to the reading public. An estimated 7,000 pages of entries spanning more than fifty years has been pruned to a comparatively-slim, 598-page volume–Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook and published last spring by Yale University Press.

Kazin (1915-1998) grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and is best known for his memoirs, A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew, as well as for his works of literary criticism, namely On Native Grounds. Kazin’s Journals offer an insight into his “neurotic postures” and “private unhappiness,” which often went unexplored in his better-known works, Vivian Gornick argues in a recent article in Boston Review. Case-in-point, according to Gornick, is this entry from 1986:

“I shiver when I read day after day of my journal and come across the same anger, the same unappeasability, the same heart, the same, the same unrest and anxiety…a hungry soul, often a bitter soul.”

The “richly unmediated expressiveness” of Alfred Kazin’s Journals, Gornick writes, reveals the “appalling nature of raw material untransformed by art.” For a second take on Journals, check out the New York Times review by Dwight Garner, who calls the book “easily one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century.”

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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

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by Yuri Slezkine · 01/21/10

I became Soviet in 1963 when the USSR beat Czechoslovakia in the World Hockey Championship on an empty-net goal by Leonid Volkov. I became Russian around the same time and for the same reason. I became exuberantly Soviet in 1964 when I joined the Octobrist (Lenin’s Grandchildren’s) League, and then again briefly in 1966 when I was admitted to the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

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.

I was officially classified as Russian in 1972 when I received my internal passport (on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday). I was temporarily reclassified as Soviet in 1978 when I received my external passport (on the day I was hired by the Ministry of the Merchant Marine).

I became Swedish for a day and a half in 1978 when I borrowed the identification papers of one Gunnar Gunnarsson (place of birth Göteborg, permanent residence Boda) for the purpose of surviving a visit to the rebel-held part of Sofala Province in the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

I became a published author in 1981 when Progress Publishers printed my Portuguese translation of L.M. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle at the Present Stage. My attempt to translate a manual on mechanical engineering for Peace Publishers was aborted due to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I became Iouri Slezkine in 1981 when the Department of Visas and Permission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received special permission to transliterate my name into French. I was dismissed from the All-Union Union of Communist-Leninist Youth and from the Soviet Army reserve.

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by George Szirtes · 11/01/06

My Jewish Budapest did not exist. If it did exist it failed to inform me, if, indeed, it informed anyone. It might have existed in whispers, in tones of voice, in the sharing of certain unspoken, or little spoken, or not-spoken before the children, anxieties, but then I was a child and I had never heard of it. Furthermore I was not a Jewish child and neither was my brother, because, as you could have checked for yourself by a cursory physical examination, we were not circumcised. That we did not speak Hebrew, had never knowingly entered a synagogue, and had participated in no Jewish festivals or ceremonies, was further proof of the same fact.

True enough, our father was Jewish, he never denied that. He looked Jewish, that is if looks themselves can be Jewish. He had deep soft dark eyes and a considerable nose; indeed he still has the nose, and will, I expect, hold on to it now for the rest of his life; or maybe one should say, it has held and will hold on to him, it being a relatively small organ among many larger organs on the greater body to which it clings. My father was Jewish by accident, it seemed to me: the accident of his nose. Whether that was a minor or a serious accident, I couldn’t tell. But then the entire, as-yet-untried, ground of our being (to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich) was necessarily unclear.

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