Habitus

by Habitus · 08/08/12

NPR’s Science Friday had a fascinating item about photographer Roman Vishniac,best known for his iconic photographs of shtetl life in Eastern Europe. The segment focuses on a far lesser-known part of his oeuvre:

Photographer Roman Vishniac, perhaps most famous for documenting Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, was also a pioneer of cinemicroscopy — filming through a microscope. Flora Lichtman looks back at Vishniac’s science cinema and talks to Dutch photographer Wim van Egmond about how he makes his award-winning images and videos of microorganisms.

You can see some examples of his scientific work here. Guest Flora Licthman recounts:

It’s almost like avant-garde film because, you know, you look at these oyster larvae pulsating, and you don’t know what they are.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 06/04/12

Habitus is very excited to share our latest production: Once@9:53 is a first-of-its-kind graphic eBook created by two close friends of the journal.The book is available for iPad only (so far) and can be downloaded from the iBookstore.

The Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky have collaborated to re-imagine the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary. Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building.

The project has been featured in The Forward and Tablet.

The National Yiddish Book Center is displaying images from the book in Amherst, MA until November 4th. Hear Stavans discuss the project on the center’s podcast.

Habitus produced a short video feature when the book was first published in Spanish.

Get your copy today!

Leave a Comment

by Justine Poustchi · 03/13/12

From the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

Hungarian Jewish writer Akos Kertesz’s recent condemnation of Hungary’s role in the Holocaust has led to a “political campaign”  against him, forcing the 80 year old writer to seek asylum in Canada.

Sam Jordison muses on the future of literary translation, noting the success of the works Hans Fallada, a German writer whose work explores his country’s dark political history, that leaves Jordison wondering what else he may have been missing out on.

Adam Gopnik takes a look at the dramatic and often hallucinatory ending of the Christian Bible: The Book of Revelation. Decoding the mystical vision, Gopnik reveals the text’s satirical caricature of the Roman Empire that, as Elaine Pagels argues in her latest book, is the result of a distinctly anti-Christian polemic that strived to maintain the early Jesus movement’s Jewish roots.

Fragments of Human Existence 

Drawing connections between Victorian pseudo-science and surrealist photography, Jacob Mikanowski’s article paints a complex portrait of the creation of writer Bruno Schulz’s cosmos and his obsession with matter.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief and rescue organization, is embarking on a project to digitize their extensive archives of the 20th Century Diaspora that includes over 500,000 names and 100,000 photographs. Take a look at some gems from their collection, which includes photos of painter Marc Chagall a young Leonard Bernstein, here.

New York contributor Arnon Grunberg “embeds” himself in different social groups that range from a Dutch family’s vacation to armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a part of a recent exhibition of his work in Amsterdam, Grunberg is seeking interesting ideas for new journalistic projects that you can be a part of. More information on the competition, which closes on March 18th, here.

Leave a Comment

by Justine Poustchi · 03/05/12

From http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/

Uncovering History

Albert Kahn, one of the earliest color photographers, traveled to over fifty countries to document the rich cultural diversity in the years before the First World War. Taking a look at his work, Maria Popova explores the way his photographs helped frame complex cultural narratives that had been reduced to “caricatures.”

For a group of Catholic Hispanos in Colorado, a breast-cancer gene reveals an ancient Jewish past, forcing the women to confront changes not only to their bodies but also their heritage. Elie Dolgin takes a look at Jeff Wheelwright’s exploration of the gene that plagues the women as religion, race, and DNA intersect.

Interpreting History

Home to the shrine of three faiths, Jerusalem has a history that is characterized by prophetic utterance—or more recently, pseudo-prophetic babbling. The phenomenon, labeled Jerusalem Syndrome, provokes a fascinating look at the psychosis engendered by the holy city on the people who believe God is speaking to them.

Ruminating on the future of Holocaust literature Stuart Kelly praises the work of Nathan Englander and Shalom Auslander, calling for more work that subverts the “monolithic narrative of victimhood.”

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 01/27/12

Courtesy of fotosencontradas.com.ar

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Reclaiming home, warts and all

“Pinch your nose and off we go,” advises novelist and Habitus contributor Aleksandar Hemon in this month’s issue of Guernica Magazine, as he leads us through the “deep shit pit of war, peace and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Hemon unflinchingly examines the foreboding trend of ethnicity-based education in the former Yugoslavia. (See our Sarajevo issue for more from the region.) “Do three or more passports make you alive several times over?” wonders Irin Carmon in a fascinating meditation on citizenship and family, as she explores her acquisition–and potential loss–of a German passport. “Where they fled, we globetrot, a historical asymmetry that parallels the other privileges earlier generations earned for us.” (See our Berlin issue for more on contemporary German Jewish identity.)

Life in pictures, lost and found

Be sure to check out three captivating photo essays: Jessica Ingram’s “A Civil Rights Memorial” captures the often un-memorialized sites of hope, resistance and violence scattered throughout the South that, once re-discovered, provide vivid insight into the struggle to end segregation. Polish photographer Rafal Milach has followed the lives of seven young Russians as they find their way amidst ever-shifting landscapes. And Hiroyuki Ito, whose work has largely focused on New York, his home for the past 20 years, documents his return to Japan following the death of his father.

And don’t miss out on browsing through the hundreds of random photographs found on the streets of Buenos Aires–namely the Once neighborhood, the one-time center of Jewish life in the city–collected and loosely curated here. It’s at once an entertaining and unsettling experience.

From Yiddishkeit

Sketches of Idisshu

Now that our New York issue is about to come out, we have time to catch up on some recent books we missed. One of our favorites is Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, co-edited by the late, great Harvey Pekar. The book is a colorful consideration–through comics and essays–of secular Yiddish culture through the ages, focusing on the artists and writers who helped revive the language in the diaspora, especially in New York. And another new book that we just might actually get a hold of someday is the Yiddish-Japanese Dictionary/Yidish-Yapanish Verterbukh/Idisshu-go jiten, which runs over 1,300 pages and was compiled by one of Japan’s foremost Yiddishists. Who knew?!

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 01/10/12

Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn / William Gedney

Here’s what on our mind this week:

From the scribes

Poet, translator and Habitus contributor Lisa Katz offers an intriguing who’s who of contemporary Israeli poetry, from more well-known writers like Agi Mishol (featured in our Budapest issue), Dan Pagis, Yitzhak Laor and Taha Muhammad Ali to relative newcomers (at least for those of us who are stateside) like Anat Zecharya, Almog Behar and Admiel Kosman.

In Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the main character, already besieged by a slew of problems in his daily upstate-New York existence, discovers Anne Frank herself living in his attic. Auslander discusses the connotations of this here.

And Etgar Keret’s story, “Creative Writing,” finds a husband and wife spinning fantastical tales.

Through the viewfinder

We said goodbye this week to Eve Arnold, who passed away at 99. The daughter of a rabbi, Arnold was the creator of iconic images of celebrities (perhaps most famously, Marilyn Monroe) and ordinary folk alike, and one of the first female photographers to be hired by Magnum.

In another, more gradual goodbye, the photographer William Gedney documented the demolition of the Myrtle Avenue elevated subway in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the reshaping of the landscape beneath it, all from his apartment window.

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 01/04/12

Courtesy of Project Neon

Happy new year! Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Start 2012 off with a few fascinating reads: The Shifting Boundaries of Jewish Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Multiple Identity Narratives and Histories explores both new and familiar nuances of what it means to be Jewish. BOMBlog considers the rollicking and largely fabricated legacy of Octobriana, a Soviet-era cartoon bombshell. And philosopher John Gray offers a thoughtful antidote to doom-and-gloom scenarios created by recent socio-political change.

And the latest in city-speak: Economist Edward Glaeser celebrates cities as catalysts for “collaborative brilliance.” SoBro vs. ProCro? The Atlantic Cities finds out what’s behind the art (or lack thereof) of (re)naming a neighborhood. The Manhattan grid system design just turned 200, and the Museum of the City of New York is honoring it through April. And finally, what’s lovelier than a frigid New York night lit up by neon?

Leave a Comment

by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

From "The Block," by Romare Bearden

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

by Michael Sterling · 12/05/11

This December marks the twentieth anniversary of Pedro Meyer‘s legendary multi-media photography exposition I Photograph to Remember. Meyer’s intimate collection of photographs documents his parents’ struggle with cancer.

The first of its kind, I Photograph to Remember originally could only be viewed on a computer screen. The exposition was housed, so to speak, on a CD-ROM; the photographs of Meyer’s family are accompanied by music and narration. “The narration, and the use of my voice,” says Meyer, “made a huge difference in how this work was perceived. It is precisely because of the inherent limitation of the photographic medium, that the presence of the voice picks up where the photograph couldn’t tread. I made sure that the narration would always be a complement to that which was self evident in the picture, thus adding to the story being told while not competing with the image.”

I Photograph to Remember is featured in the Mexico City issue of this magazine.

View the original project as it was intended to be seen in 1991 here. See an essay Meyer wrote in 2001 about I Photograph to Remember here. Visit Meyer’s website here to see his most recent work.

Leave a Comment