Habitus

by Justine Poustchi · 04/24/12

The recent shootings in Toulouse have brought the complexities of French Jewry to the forefront and inspired our own investigation into the modern literary history of the Jews in France. Since the advent of colonialism, the term “French literature” has inspired debates that argue vehemently for the rupture between French literature and Francophone literature. What then of French-Jewish literature? Since the emergence of the modern nation-state of France, both Sephardic and Ashkenazim Jews have been welcomed—so long as they wholly adapted their tongues to the language of les belles lettres. As a result, hybrid categories such as French-Jewish literature are seen to contradict the concept of a unified French identity.

Accordingly, contemporary French-Jewish literature betrays only traces of a Jewish sensibility. Such is the case of Yasmina Reza, a playwright of Hungarian Jewish and Russian-Iranian Jewish descent, who finds that the her parents’ world seeps into her plays, Art and God of Carnage. Though Reza writes directly to the influence of her parents in Hammerklavier, a series of autobiographical sketches, Reza argued in a recent interview with the Guardian for the importance of complete integration with French culture.

Though literature that speaks directly to Jewish themes is often marginal, literary critic Pierre Assouline turns his attention to the different representations of Job throughout the monotheistic tradition in his latest novel Les vie de Job. Drawing on his skills as a prolific biographer, Assouline dramatizes the biographer’s quest to piece together the different facets of the biblical character’s life, examining the intersection between the many lives of Job and the biographer’s own life.

Peering further back into French Jewish literary history, the memory of Vichy France occupies a distinct place. Patrick Modiano, an author of Jewish-Italian origins, constantly explores that terrain. Haunted by the memories of the Occupation, Modiano, in his first novel Place de l’Étoile, intertwines the specificity of his French locality with the wound of the war. Standing on the famous intersection that holds the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de l’Étoile (literally the Place of the Star), Raphaël Schlemilovitch hallucinates a parade of real and imagined Jewish characters, as Modiano probes the intersection between time, memory, and forgetting.

Similarly, Henri Racyzmow, a writer of Jewish Polish origins explores the “memory gap” which plagues European Jews. In Contes d’exil et d’oubli (Tales of Memory and Forgetting), a grandfather is unable to recover stories of shtetl life and instead chooses to invent tales about Yiddish culture.

France’s presence in Tunisia absorbed other Jewish populations into the nation’s literary history, creating a prismatic intersection between East and West. One can trace the junction between the two spheres through the works of Albert Memmi, best known for his non-fiction on the psychological effects of colonialism, but whose fiction deserves just as much attention. In The Pillar of Salt, Memmi richly evokes the atmosphere of the ghetto of Tunis, turning his attention to the relations between Arabs and Jews. Above all, Memmi investigates the difficulty of glancing back at the past, and the toils of memory that continue to fixate Jewish writers today.

 

 

by Ella Zamir · 09/14/11

In his Sh’ma Magazine article, “When illegal immigrants are Jews,” Douglas Hauer, an immigration lawyer, writes about the silence surrounding Jewish illegal immigrants in the United States. The conversation about illegal immigration focuses almost entirely on Mexican and Central American immigrants who come to the United States to find work.

The Jewish illegal immigrants in the United States come from different parts of the world–Russia, Canada, Israel, and Romania–and many of them came legally but lost their visa status for various reasons, such as a divorce or layoff.

Hauer says that there isn’t a lot of information and statistics about Jewish illegal immigrants, because:

Illegal immigration cuts across racial, national, religious, economic, and social lines, and that their Jewishness is erased when they are counted with other illegal immigrants.

Hauer tells about his client, a Holocaust survivor from Israel, who was interrogated for hours in the airport by the immigration officers about her wish to stay here even temporarily.

It is hard to justify interrogating an Israeli Holocaust survivor on the pretext of security or law enforcement. Even as a lawyer who practices in this field, I am intimidated by the behavior of our government officials. This feeling of intimidation must be so much more personal and frightening for Jews who have experienced persecution.

In the past few years, the severity and intimidation of interrogations by the U.S customs and border protection has only increased.

Hauer suggests that we need broad immigration reform that will not target specific communities, unlike Arizona’s AZ SB 1071 law.

by Joshua Ellison · 03/14/10

I’m excited to be back in Mexico City, making progress on the next issue of Habitus. Over the next week, I will post more photos and share some of my discoveries and conversations. Keep checking back.

This photo was taken in Chapultepec Park, one of the most beautiful urban green spaces I’ve ever visited. I like this frame because it has a certain tough teenage swagger but is actually kind of sweet. Look at the photos behind him: this is mainly a booth for face painting kids.

by Habitus · 02/15/10

At Habitus, we were very pleased to learn that this November, the Jewish Federations of North America will be bringing its General Assembly and International Lion of Judah Conference to New Orleans. JFNA president Jerry Silverman sees the city as the perfect choice for this organization of Jewish philanthropies to reflect, “as a Jewish community and family…on our collective responsibility and action together.”

We agree that it’s an inspired choice of locale.

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by Joshua Ellison · 08/11/09

When we arrived at the apartment of the writer Angelina Huberman-Muniz, the power was out in the whole neighborhood. We had to walk up seven flights of stairs in total darkness. As the city has expanded so explosively, she told us, these outages have become common.

The apartment was, first and foremost, a library. Walls and walls of books were arranged according to careful categories: Spanish, Mexican, Jewish, American and English. She was particularly fond of her first editions of J.R.R. Tolkien. The apartment has a large balcony. From there I had my first view across the city, which was endless. She had an old telescope that was pointed at a clock tower. The hands didn’t move.

Huberman-Muniz is one of Mexco’s most prolific and respected writers. Born in France to parents who fled the Spanish Civil War, she arrived in Mexico in 1942 after three years in Cuba. She is from a Sephardic family and her writing delves almost obsessively into the mythology and history of old Spain. She told us about her newest book-in-progress, the story of Spain’s first female doctor, whose mother was an African slave, and who narrowly escaped a death sentence (for homosexuality) from the Inquisition. Her exculpatory defense, amazingly enough, was that she was a hermaphrodite. Somehow, the Church was never able to definitively prove or disprove her claim, so she lived. The book will be called The Seductress of Toledo.

When Angelina was young, her mother had told her about her Jewish heritage, as if she was sharing a secret. She taught her to make the sign of the kohanim with her fingers, as a private signal to other members of her clandestine tribe. It was clear that her family carried the memories of Spanish crypt-Judaism long after they were able to identify openly. Their religion was always something beneath the surface, though Angelina assumed it as an important part of her own identity. It seems that through her writing, she has been filling is some of the missing pieces for herself. She creates what she calls “false memories.” She takes parts of her own story and expands them, connects them, gives them roots.

The diversity of her experience and interests is somewhat at odds with Mexican culture, she feels. Mexicans are mistrustful of mixture. It’s a defensive response of the internal struggles they live with, the contradictions of “being both European and Indian.”

The power came on just as we walked out of her door. We decided not to take the elevator.

•••

Later, we arrived at the home of the photographer Pedro Meyer and it was six hours before we left. He lives in the Coyoacán neighborhood, a beautiful and placid enclave with a distinctly Spanish look. It was also the neighborhood of Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.

His home is magnificent. I’m not sure what officially classifies a house as a “compound,” but this was definitely it. We sat in his high-walled garden and talked. Later, he gave us a tour of his art collection, which included signed prints from Picasso and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and a canvas from Diego Rivera and works of many other leading Mexican artists.

Meyer has photographed and exhibited all over the world; his last major show, a retrospective, was shown in sixty museums around the world–simultaneously. He is also the founder and editor of ZoneZero, a major international photography website, and he has also created the Pedro Meyer Foundation in a building not far from his home.

We talked about Mexico’s history with photography. Nearly every major photographer has made images in Mexico, he said. It was a rite of passage to travel and work here. It was only later that Mexicans started to participate in their own representation through photographs. Even though he is a committed champion of Mexican photography, he is also dubious of the label. Today, such a category seems far too simple. He told us about an exhibition of “Mexican photographers” in which he exhibit pictures he had made in the United States. An important critic, somehow unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance, commented how surprising it was that Mexico, through Pedro’s lens, looked so much like America! There were signs in fucking English, Pedro complained.

These days, Meyer is much more excited to talk about photography’s future. He is the rare artist who has transitioned gracefully from being an accomplished photographer to a digital artist, embracing all the possibilities the new tools provide. To him, the distinction is meaningless.

Much of his work today, and much of our conversation, was devoted to the notion of realism and verisimilitude in the digital age. His latest book, called Heresies, is filled with images that expertly manipulate and challenge the viewer’s perceptions of reality.

The results, it seems to me, are also consummately Mexican: they employ satire and the fantastical in a way that resonates with so much Mexican art, both folk and fine. In the way they freely extrapolate on the visual texts and playfully mix exposition and interpretation, the pictures also strike me as profoundly Jewish.

As the night wore on, and we drank beer in the living room with Pedro and his wife Nadia, he told us a harrowing story–everyone we met seemed to have a few–of an absurd and dangerous encounter with the notoriously corrupt and inept local police. The story is too complicated to repeat here, but you should read his version.

Read more dispatches from Mexico City here.

by Joshua Ellison · 08/10/09

The first thing to adapt to when you arrive in Mexico City is the scale. This is where every account of the city begins, because it’s where you must begin. Even for an experienced urbanite, this is another kind of place, a whole different realm of numbers: over twenty-million people; seven-million miles of streets; 250 colonias, or neighborhoods; 12,500 tons of garbage produced every day. The numbers alone can have a numbing effect, but in person that reality can stretch your perception, even your sense of self, as you try to situate yourself in relation to a human enterprise of this magnitude. Feeling this small takes some getting used to.

We are staying in the Condesa neighborhood, a relatively calm and historic colonia near the city center. It’s been called Mexico City’s Greenwich Village, which is probably generous–or slanderous, depending on your politics–but it does have a pleasing array on food, bars, galleries, park space, and other gentrified amenities. Condesa is also a point of gravitation for artists and intellectuals in the city. Once upon a time, this was an immigrant enclave for Jewish and Spanish Republican exiles. The neighborhood, with its signature Art Deco buildings, was hit hard by the earthquake here in 1985. Today, glass-fronted condos have mostly filled in the holes.

It’s not so large by local standards, but I’m finding it almost impossible to navigate. One night, after walking in circles for hours, our disorientation was so total that we walked up a spiral staircase into a solid wall (this was inside a restaurant, believe it or not; we were promptly sat in a dark corner).

•••

Our first encounter of the trip was with two warm and interesting characters. Jose “Pepe” Gordon is a writer and the host of a wonderful television program, called Imaginantes, which features short animated interludes derived from literature (everyone from Borges to George Steiner to Etgar Keret). We also met with Alberto “Beto” Buzali, a writer and literary impresario. They both seemed very excited about the project and were very generous with their time, connections, and expertise.

They had fascinating stories to tell. Pepe told us about a conversation with a well-known indigenous Mexican painter, Francisco Toledo, who had become a deep reader of Kafka and kabbalah. Toledo, Gordon said, found a profound connection between those texts and his desire to connect, through art, to his own ancient culture. Toledo was trying to preserve a native language that has lost its alphabet. Kabbalah had lead him to reflect on the power of letters, their physical life that also gives solidity and presence to the people who use them. Gordon suggested that maybe Toledo’s painted images could be the forgotten signs of his language, too–the characters that were lost when his people started using the colonial alphabet.

(Spanish speakers will enjoy the clip from Gordon’s show based on the encounter).

•••

We ended the day at the rooftop bar of the Condesa df hotel, drinking mezcal, looking out over the neighborhood as a summer storm pounded the city.

Read more dispatches from Mexico City here.

by Joshua Ellison · 08/10/09

We’ve been in Mexico City this week, meeting with local authors and laying the groundwork for Habitus 06. So far, it has been a fascinating experience and we feel very grateful for the warm welcome we have received.

Over the next week, we’ll be using our new blog to share some discoveries and conversations as we begin to explore this complex, frenetic, and unfathomably large city. Our hope is to bring our readers along with us as this new issue takes shape. We’ll also be very glad to hear from people with experience of the city who might be able to point us in new and promising directions.

Read the entries so far:
Mexico City I
Mexico City II

PS: Of course, we are also excited to share Habitus 05: Moscow, which is making its way to press and will be available very soon. Keep checking habitusmag.com for updates.

by Claude Cahn · 11/01/06

Roma are often subjected to a special kind of justice-the justice of the mob. On an early autumn night in 1995, one such mob descended on the Romani quarter in the remote village of Velyka Dobron in Transcarpathian Ukraine.

On the night of 10 September 1995, fires destroyed three houses in the Romani settlement in Velyka Dobron, a Hungarian village in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. As the houses were set ablaze, the 400 to 500 Romani men, women, and children who live in the settlement ran to the surrounding woods. The next evening, the crowds returned and destroyed another nine houses, looting and plundering as they went. According to eyewitnesses, local police as well as police from the regional capital were present on both nights, but they failed to stop the mayhem.

The Roma of Velyka Dobron stayed in the woods for two or three months, afraid to come out, living off berries and roots and the occasional meal brought to them by sympathetic villagers, who themselves risked ostracism for their charity. During that time, three young Romani men turned themselves in for the crime that had set the Hungarian villagers against their community: the killing of a Hungarian man, Alexander Dokus, in a brawl. From the news of his death to the news of the perpetrators’ conviction, the local papers reported the event as another Gypsy crime story. The retribution against the Romani community that occurred in between, if mentioned at all, was muted and downplayed. Our organization, the European Roma Rights Center, heard the story the following May from Aladar Adam, chairman of the organization Romani Yag in Uzhorod, the Transcarpathian regional capital. We decided to make a visit to Velyka Dobron and piece the story together.

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