Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 12/15/11

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Inherited borders / Paper cities / The everywhere-ness of a song

"Jerusalem," Matthew Picton

The Borderlines column of the New York Times ran a fascinating piece on the shape of East and West Germany and how the roots of their formerly notorious border might go back all the way to 900 A.D. The artist Matthew Picton creates cityscapes out of paper, but not just any paper. His model of Jerusalem (see detail), for example, is crafted from slips of paper quoting The New Testament, The Torah, the Koran and the Armenian Bible. Check out his other visions (including Lower Manhattan) in person. Meanwhile, André Aciman guides us through the cross-border, multilingual history of a single evocative song.

A Tunisian return / A Bolaño motif / A critic’s legacy

The writer Colette Fellous admits to a “permanent feeling of at the same time being present wherever [I] live but also slightly out of context,” and her novels have explored this condition, largely through her own migrations–both literal and literary–between Tunisia and France. If you’re a fan of Roberto Bolaño’s work, maybe at some point you’ve wondered, “What’s with all the Nazis?” Well, here’s a thoughtful consideration of that question. And speaking of thoughtful considerations, the Daily Beast examines Why Trilling Matters, Adam Kirsch’s appreciation of literary critic Lionel Trilling.

A glimpse of an artists’ den / World poetry in motion

Little Star features an intriguing piece by Rosanna Warren that vividly imagines Le Bateau Lavoir, the Montmartre building that served as a haven and inspiration for Picasso and Max Jacob, among many others, for much of the first half of the twentieth century. And, finally, don’t miss out on the World’s 10 Best Transit Poems! (Note: the feature neglects to include the poem featured in the lead photo. It’s “Tango de Montréal,” by Québécois poet Gérald Godin.)

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by Daniel Bloch · 12/05/11

Boris Kossoy, "Protest against the Vietnam War, New York, 1971"

As we begin December, here’s what’s crisp and new this week:

Back in the USSR (and out of it)

One of the more interesting obituaries in recent memory noted the the death of Lana Peters, AKA Svetlana Alliluyeva, AKA Svetlana Stalina, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. The Guardian examines her legacy as a “cold war plaything.” Meanwhile, Tablet Magazine reconsiders Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman‘s magnum opus about Jews who survived the Holocaust only to find themselves under Stalin’s rule. Tonia Ben-Barak, grandmother of acclaimed Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, lived through both tragedies.She is the subject of Shalev’s recently-translated memoir, My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner. Take a look at a review and an excerpt.

Contributors’ Corner

The latest New Yorker features an essay by Aleksandar Hemon, whose work graces our Sarajevo issue. In other news, Ana María Shua‘s Death as a Side Effect was published in her native Argentina nearly twenty years ago, and has finally appeared in English. Read a recent review featured on Three Percent, the blog wing of Open Letter Books. For more of Shua’s work in English, check out our Buenos Aires issue.

Through the Lens

The Aperture Foundation has released a volume on contemporary Latin American photography aptly titled, The Latin American Photo Book. Our friend Marcelo Brodsky is one of many contributors to this fascinating anthology, which includes Boris Kossoy, the Brazilian photographer who has taken evocative pictures of New York (see example above). And speaking of evocative pictures of New York, be sure to look  “Out Harvey Wang’s Window,” now on view at the Tenement Museum‘s new exhibition space at 103 Orchard Street. Click here for a preview of Wang‘s striking portraits of the Lower East Side in flux.

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by Habitus · 11/27/11

Arthur Leipzig, Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn

Here is a round-up of what we’re excited about this week and think you will be, too:

On Our Shelf

Read an excerpt from Umberto Eco‘s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which deals with the legendary anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Take a look at what the New York Times and the Washington Post think about it. And make sure to read (and watch) what Eco himself has to say.

Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative is a collection of essays–on everything from digital animation to writer’s block–by Lawrence Weschler, director of NYU’s Institute for the Humanities and Habitus board member. Check out an interview with Weschler, read a review of the book and tune into a talk he gave at the Open Society Institute.

André Aciman, a fellow Habitus board member, contributor, and friend, has written a new memoir, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. Read the New York Times review, as well as the feature on Tablet Magazine, which includes an excerpt.

The work of Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec has finally appeared in English, thanks to Open Letter Books, which published his My Two Worlds this summer and plans to release his The Planets next year. Take a look at the Words without Borders review of My Two Worlds and the recent interview with Chejfec in Guernica Magazine. Look for more from Chejfec in our upcoming New York issue.

 Jews with Cameras

Photographer Joshua Cogan has traveled the world in search of far-flung Jewish communities, from Gondar in Ethiopia to Kochi in southern India. Check out his evocative photos as featured in the Forward.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 is now on view through March at the Jewish Museum and profiles the dynamic Jewish photographers who combined their art with social commentary and found a new way of looking at New York. For more, take a look at our recent conversation with Daniel Morris, author of After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers.

From Nowy Targ to Zuccotti Park

Translationista, the blog of author and translator Susan Bernofsky, features a fascinating personal essay linking a visit to her grandmother’s hometown in Poland to Bernofsky’s experiences in Zuccotti Park with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Be sure to check out the recent interview with Bernofsky in Book Forum, and our Berlin issue, which features her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck.

-Compiled by Daniel Bloch and Michael Sterling

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/21/11

Maghen Abraham synagogue before renovations (courtesy Wikipedia)

To speak of synagogues in Lebanon sounds obscure today, given the country’s history of conflict with Israel, but at one time over 20,000 Jews worshipped in dozens of synagogues throughout the country. The community’s core has always been Beirut, which is fitting given the city’s legacy of religious diversity, but the sectarian bloodshed of the ’70s and ’80s drove the majority of Lebanon’s Jews overseas, mainly to Europe and the United States. (Ironically, the deadly Green Line dividing Beirut’s Christian and Muslim neighborhoods during the civil war ran through the Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jamil.) The community now hovers around 200, but a comprehensive plan to rebuild the Maghen Abraham synagogue in Beirut is nearing completion.

The project, as covered recently by Deutsche Welle Online, began in 2009 and has progressed under tight security and with financial support from both the Lebanese Jewish diaspora and local construction companies involved in urban renewal projects in downtown Beirut. One of the companies, Solidere, was founded by Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister whose assassination in 2005 touched off massive socio-political change in Lebanon. For an in-depth look at the rebuilding of Maghen Abraham, check out the website of the Lebanese Jewish Community Council, which includes extensive photo coverage of the reconstruction, as well as notes on the community’s history.

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/09/11

Photo by Marcelo Brodsky

The work of Marcelo Brodsky merges the historical with the personal. In his career as a photographer, Brodsky has created an enormous archive of powerful images engaging with the nuances of his identity as an artist, a Jew, an Argentine and the brother of a desaparecido–a disappeared. Marcelo’s brother Fernando is one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 Dirty War, victims of an exceptionally cruel apparatus of state-sponsored terrorism which targeted  suspected “subversives.” Many, like Fernando, were barely out of their teens and allegedly linked, however tenuously, to anti-dictatorship political and social movements. Once detained, the majority were never heard from again, their bodies never recovered, thus literally disappearing by the thousands from their families–a horrific technique replicated during the same era by dictatorships across Latin America, especially in Chile and Uruguay.

In a conversation that appeared in the Buenos Aires issue of Habitus, Marcelo Brodsky recognized the importance of his family’s experience not only to his art but to a larger conversation about collective healing and memory in Argentina. Brodsky said:
Read more »

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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 Daniel Bloch · 10/28/11

While Samuel Beckett’s characters are not necessarily known for their action and decisiveness, several newly published books reveal that Beckett himself was quite the activist, especially against the Nazi machine. Benjamin Ivry, writing in The Forward, considers the illuminating details of Beckett’s personal crusade against anti-Semitism and his involvement with the French Résistance, as depicted in Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, published by Cotinuum this past June, and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956, recently released by Cambridge University Press. Did Beckett identify with Jews because of his friendships with Jewish artists from across Europe, along with his experiences as an Irish writer in exile? Was his anti-Nazi fervor a reaction to the Third Reich’s hatred of otherness? Together, Ivry writes, these two books give a “fuller understanding of Beckett’s motivation for his pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi activism,” and also “underline how profound Beckett’s ties were with the Jewish people.”

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/28/11

Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” may be the most famous text affixed to an American monument, and certainly one of the most evocative poems about immigration, yet Lazarus herself has always remained a bit elusive. In 2006, a comprehensive biography by Esther Schor, professor of English at Princeton, brought the brief but vibrant life of Emma Lazarus–a native New Yorker whose Sephardic ancestors helped settle the thirteen colonies–into focus. Now, just in time for the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty’s official dedication, Schor has teamed up with Nextbook Press to create an interactive online version of Lazarus’ poem.

Besides being an entertaining feat of multimedia craftsmanship, Schor’s annotations provide fascinating bits of relevant miscellanea; for example, did you know that the face of Lady Liberty was modeled after the mother of Frédéric Bartholdi, the statue’s designer? Also, Schor reveals, Emma Lazarus not only wrote about the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she helped teach Russian Jewish immigrants English and wrote exposés about their inhumane living conditions.

For more on the legacy of Emma Lazarus, take a look at a recent New York Times article, which includes a copy of Lazarus’ seminal work written in her own hand.

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/18/11

“There are no words in my mouth,” realizes Blanca Hammer, the heroine of Until the Dawn’s Light, the latest work by acclaimed Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. A life full of tragedy has taken its toll on Blanca, and the novel finds her criss-crossing Europe by train in the 1910s with Otto, her four-year-old son. What exactly is Blanca escaping from and where is she headed? Appelfeld answers such questions only partially, but two recent reviews of the book offer some fascinating insight.

Hailing the book as “masterful,” Julie Orringer—author of The Invisible Bridge—writes in the New York Times that Appelfeld “captures a larger sense of longing for a Jewish homeland,” and that, through Blanca and Otto’s wanderings, the reader feels “the losses of an entire nation, and the terrible cost of its triumphs.”

Shoshana Olidort, in her review for the Forward, considers the weight of Appelfeld’s own life on his characters. “One senses that Appelfeld is not mining his imagination to concoct tragic stories,” she writes. “Rather, he is simply telling and retelling the story of his life as a child survivor of the Holocaust.”

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