Habitus

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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by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, the author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, as well as the 2010 novel Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is a National Jewish Book Award winner and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee. Recently, the Harvard research associate and Westchester native sat down with Rationally Speaking, the blog wing of New York City Skeptics, a non-profit promoting “critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education among the general public.” Goldstein spoke at length with co-bloggers Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci about engaging with “Spinoza’s God” and the danger of ideologies, among other fascinating topics.

To learn more about Goldstein, check out her website.

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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 Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

Before Buenos Aires there was Basavilbaso. Most of the seeds of contemporary Jewish life in Argentina were literally sown in the grassland of the pampas, especially in the northeast provinces of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, where thousands of Jews settled around the turn of the twentieth century. Allotted farmland by the Jewish Colonization Association, the newcomers brought little actual knowledge of farming–most came fleeing the urban pogroms and poverty of Eastern Europe–but saw Argentina as their Zion. In less than a generation, colonias like Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez and Moisesville were dotted with Jewish schools, hospitals, cemeteries, social clubs and synagogues. In two generations, however, the colonias were emptied of their youth, most of whom left for Buenos Aires in search of their future selves.

What became of the colonias? A recent article on Fox News Latino offers a glance at contemporary Jewish life on the pampas; an accompanying slideshow digs a bit deeper. Several of the images profile the Museum of the Jewish Colonies, housed in an old pharmacy in Villa Domínguez and brimming with archival gems.

For a literary look at the Jewish colonias, check out Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, with a forward by Habitus contributing editor Ilan Stavans. For more on Argentina, take a look at our Buenos Aires issue.

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/05/11

Before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald was a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize. His most emblematic works, like Austerlitz and The Emigrants, are steeped in themes of memory and trauma, drawing from his own struggles as a post-war German writer. “It was Sebald’s desire to protect his waywardness and individual freedom from those who aimed to curtail it,” writes Uwe Schütte, the director of German studies at Aston University in Britain, in an appreciation of his former mentor that appears in Times Higher Education. 

Schütte charts Sebald’s migrations–both the literal one he made from Germany to England, and the “inner” ones he would make from academia to writing, and from criticism to literature. Claiming that memory itself was the “moral backbone of literature,” Sebald spent most his life railing against what he perceived as the culture of silence and denial that pervaded German life after the Holocaust.

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by Daniel Bloch · 10/05/11

Gerbi outside the Dar Bishi Synagogue

After forty-four years in exile, David Gerbi returned to Tripoli with a clear goal–to save Libya’s last remaining synagogue. What he found was a decaying shell full of the detritus of decades of neglect. While Gerbi has met with hostility from some, he also found locals sympathetic to his cause, helping him clear away some of the rubble and trash. Gerbi, a psychologist who has lived in Italy since 1967, saw his return not only as a personal milestone but also as a national one. ”You now have a test for the NTC [National Transitional Council],” he said, “to see if they will discriminate or if the new Libya will be a real democracy. My intention is to restore it and make it a normal functioning synagogue.”

As reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post, Gerbi’s mere presence in the country has touched off a debate in Libya and abroad, especially among the community leaders of the estimated 200,000 Libyan Jews who live primarily in Israel and Italy. “This is an issue that needs to be addressed,” an NTC spokesman stated, “but only when there is a stable and legitimate elected government in place.”

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by Daniel Bloch · 09/21/11

Chad Post of Three Percent, the online extension of Open Letter Books, has not-so-scientifically confirmed what we at Habitus have assumed all along: reading translated works of literature makes you a smarter person. Post points to selections from Eli Pariser‘s The Filter Bubble to support his assertion.

Pariser describes a study at the University of California at Santa Barbara which presented two groups with different versions of “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The first version was a literal translation of the original–meaning that it was confusing and highly bizarre–while the second version was streamlined, conventional and with cartoons. After reading the story, each group performed a task involving numerical patterns, and the group that read the more literal translation did twice as well as the group that read the watered-down version. In other words, Post concludes, “things outside of your mental comfort zone spark creativity and other cognitive abilities.” Heartening news indeed for those of us who woke up as cockroaches this morning.

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by Daniel Bloch · 09/21/11

Élisabeth Gille was five years old when her parents were picked up by the Gestapo. She and her sister managed to survive the war in hiding, but her father and mother, the writer Irène Némirovsky, perished in Auschwitz. Gille grew up to become a writer herself, and her quasi-biographical The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, has just been published by New York Review Books. Gille–who died in 1996, a few years before her mother’s Suite Française was published, garnering Némirovsky posthumous celebrity–imagines her mother’s life as a privileged young woman in Russia and later as an émigré in France, working on what would become her magnum opus.

“I have never before come upon a book at once as loving and as devastating as The Mirador,” Ruth Franklin writes in The New Republic. Franklin admires Gille’s refusal to “sanitize” the anti-Semitic attitudes that pervade much of Némirovsky’s early work, arguing that, by doing so, Gille has “lovingly and subtly” performed a “piercing act of maternal vivisection.”

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