Dec

13

2024

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I started reading (and then writing for) Jewish Currents after its 2018 revival, and like many converts, I am both curious about and frankly ignorant of my adoptive community’s long history. Consequently, I took a special interest in Annie Sommer Kaufman’s new translation of Ben Gold’s Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story. Gold’s Yiddish novel was originally published in 1944 by the Communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit, which after World War II launched the English magazine Jewish Life, which became Jewish Currents in 1956. Since I don’t read Yiddish, Avreml Broide felt like a recovered family archive—and even with Kaufman’s learned and generous introduction and William Gropper’s original illustrations, reading this slim volume will hardly take much longer than flipping through an unearthed photo album of a precious ancestor.

And Gold is indeed our political forebear. Born in Bessarabia, a province of the Russian Empire today split between Ukraine and Moldova, he immigrated as a child to New York in 1910. At the age of 14, he joined the Furriers Union, leading its heroic 1926 strike, which won, for the first time in the United States, a 40-hour workweek. Initially a Socialist, Gold became a staunch Communist, and fought both the conservative American Federation of Labor and organized crime outfits like Murder, Inc. for control of the needle-trades unions in New York. He served a prison sentence for organizing a hunger march during the Great Depression, and was prosecuted for his Communist affiliation in the second Red Scare.

Avreml Broide draws heavily from Gold’s life, barely fictionalizing events like the great 1926 strike and characters like the Communist schismatic Jay Lovestone or Socialist Congressman Meyer London. But the protagonist, Avreml, is not Gold. He is rather, as the title promises, “a worker,” his heroism general rather than particular. When Avreml errs in pitying an old Socialist mentor turned strikebreaker, he piously confesses his faults and accepts the Party’s chastisement; when he learns how deeply his wife Miriem is committed to Lovestone’s heretical critique of the Party, he separates from her. Though Gold’s writing is earthy and concrete, his fiction, like his Communist solidarity, aims to transcend the specificity of the self.

Communist universalism also offers a fresh, surprising version of that most familiar American Jewish genre, the ethnic bildungsroman. In novels like Abraham Cahan’s 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky, the protagonist grows in self-consciousness as he (it is usually he) assimilates culturally and ascends the class ladder. As Kaufman astutely notes, Avreml Broide bucks these American dreams. Avreml refuses his father-in-law’s offer to set him up in business, and thus the novel rejects the developmental path from worker to capitalist. Avreml does Americanize, after a fashion, overcoming his shtetl nostalgia through the mass comradery of the union, and learning English in a Communist workers’ school and then in a courtroom, on trial for his role in a bloody strike. He thus comes to illustrate one of the Party’s slogans in the ‘30s, “Communism is 20th-Century Americanism”—yet this Americanism is always understood as tentative, produced and sustained in ongoing class struggle.

And thus the novel devotes nearly half of its 117 pages to Avreml’s youth in a small Eastern European city, a lovely folk-impressionistic yarn reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s short stories or Marc Chagall’s paintings. But that yarn, I suspect, has a straightforward politics, evident in the clear parallels Gold draws between the Old and New Worlds. There, Avreml wrangles with small-time thieves; here, he faces the same venial gangsters. There, a rapacious moneylender extorts and then evicts an impoverished tailor; here, Avreml finds the same capitalist exploitation. You can cross the Atlantic Ocean and learn English, sure, but you cannot escape class struggle. Indeed, the novel ends with Avreml returning to Europe, fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for a free Spain. To be sure, writing in 1944, Gold sees Spain as the first battleground in the war against fascism, linking it to World War II; in his final letter to his comrades, Avreml writes that he is fighting for “our America and the Jewish people.” For a time, that is, Communist internationalism was compatible with a guarded patriotism and Jewish group loyalty. And yet, this patriotism comes with critique: As Avreml observes, the United States (like other liberal democracies) abandoned the Spanish Republicans, who were armed only by the Soviets. More profoundly, by reversing Avreml’s migration story, Gold completely rewires the immigrant genre in which he is writing, as if the robbers in a heist movie were to give all the money back. Gold thus pointedly defies the literary teleology of the nation. At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker.

Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Saddam Hussein wrote novels. That’s just one fascinating strand in the latest book from Steve Coll, The New Yorker staff writer and accomplished investigative journalist. Coll’s in-depth reading of the Iraqi autocrat’s little-known fiction, and their adaptation to Arabic television, make for some of the most compelling moments of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. The book is every bit as riveting as Ghost Wars, his monumental 2004 dive into Osama bin Laden’s path to the September 11th attacks.

Coll sets out to understand how the George W. Bush administration got the question of Hussein’s defunct weapons of mass-destruction program so wrong, and his reporting paints remarkably intimate portraits of Iraqi scientists and American spies. For material that broadly speaking is somewhat familiar—the American invasion was a slow-moving train wreck, and we’re still living in the world that Bush wrought—Coll’s book nevertheless feels fresh, even thrilling at times.

But it can be difficult to revisit the material and see so clearly all the potential offramps, so many moments that could have averted the war and altered the course of Iraqi, American, and world history. What if Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had made public his criticism and reservations about a preemptive invasion? I couldn’t help but find myself wondering whether he may have instigated a cascade of departures across the federal government that might have ultimately stopped the war. He publicly stayed loyal to Bush, just as many policymakers and appointees have stayed loyal to Biden during the ongoing Gaza war. There weren’t mass resignations then, or today, and Coll’s book offers a bleak account of the world that unfolds when militaristic frenzy is left unchecked.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long thought that one of the most delightful—but also most philosophical—songs ever written is They Might Be Giants’s “Older”: “You’re older than you’ve ever been / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older.” I’ve been thinking of these lyrics, at once incontrovertibly obvious and deeply profound, ever since I left a screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour masterpiece, The Clock, showing at MoMA through February. This was my third time viewing a chunk of the film, but while I’d previously only taken two-hour gulps, at this showing I sat through four full hours—and got the project in a way I never had before.

As the title suggests, the film is built around clocks: Over the course of the absurd runtime, we see timepieces displaying each of the 1440 minutes of the day in scenes excerpted from I don’t know how many thousands of films (and sometimes TV shows). Sometimes, particularly on the hour, we see several clocks showing a given moment. (Three o’clock is a big one, for obvious reasons—that’s often when kids are released from school.) The clocks in Marclay’s film appear in all manner of locations and designs: They are in train stations and anonymous offices; on wrists, bedside tables, and famous buildings like Big Ben; they’re digital and analog, in Roman and Arabic numerals. Often we see people glancing at their watches without actually learning the time, or we know it only because it’s spoken aloud. On very rare occasions, people in the film explicitly philosophize about time. But mostly, temporality simply unfolds. It’s something that’s always there, and which we’re constantly conscious of even when we’re not conscious of being conscious of it.

The film is usually seen as a curiosity and a tour de force of cinematic editing. But Marclay is doing something far subtler than merely assembling random shots with clocks in them. Sometimes the connecting images are related to each other in one way or another: For instance, in one clip people draw guns and fire, and the shots land in a scene from an entirely different film. One may be in color, the other in black and white, unmooring the historic time of the genre from the chronological time of the film in front of us while also flattening the different scales into a unified flow: Time is one. And even as the minutes tick forward, time in the film is not unidirectional, as certain actors who appear and reappear (Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, Dirk Bogarde, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close) grow older and younger at random. By drawing clips from works both highbrow and lowbrow, and from all across the globe, Marclay emphasizes how all of cinema—and indeed, the entire world—is caught in the same stream of time, which defies the borders of genres and nations.

The Clock is shown such that the time on the screen matches the time in the world. But even so, a few minutes into my viewing, someone took out his cell phone to check the time. There are things I simply cannot accept, and phone use in movie theaters is at the top of the list. So I leaned forward and informed him—though my inner Brooklynite prevented me from expressing myself quite this politely—that we are living the same moment as the people on the screen.

This week’s parshah, Vayishlach, tells the story of Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s daughter, who, after moving to a Canaanite city with her family, attempts to explore the local community on her own. While Dinah is “out visiting the daughters of the land,” a Hivite prince, Shechem, notices her, and proceeds to “take her, lay with her, and humble her [vayaaneha].” Just after their encounter, Shechem speaks kindly to Dinah, professes his profound love for her, and seeks permission for the two to marry.

Later commentators by and large read the verb “vayaaneha,” which can also be translated as “afflicted” or “oppressed,” as indicating assault. This characterization is supported by the reaction of Dinah’s brothers, who are horrified to learn of her encounter with Shechem: “The men were distressed and very angry, because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter—a thing not to be done.” In their emotional state, they carry out a murderous rampage against Shechem and his entire city, after which they seize Dinah and remove her from Shechem’s home. With the exception of one brief mention in a long list of genealogies at the end of Breishit, Dinah is never again named in the Torah.

Dinah’s saga—as well as her silence—has spoken to generations of feminist interpreters who have expanded upon a minority view within the tradition that reads “vayaaneha” as simply describing a sexual encounter, including one that is consensual. These scholars also point to the text’s assertion that Shechem did indeed love Dinah, and to the tenderness and kindness with which the text notes he addresses her in the verse following their encounter. Inspired by the text’s glaring omission in describing how Dinah felt, several feminist commentators have similarly suggested that Shechem and Dinah had a true, loving, and consensual sexual relationship—one that she actively chose and pursued of her own accord.

This reading is perhaps most famously expressed in Anita Diamant’s 1997 feminist novel, The Red Tent, in which Diamant imagines these events from Dinah’s perspective. The Red Tent gives voice to Dinah’s love for Shechem, along with her despair at his murder and her anger toward her brothers’ violent rampage, which robbed them of a life together. Other more recent texts have also taken up this interpretation: In Dirshuni, a collection of contemporary feminist midrashim, the scholar Dini Deutsch Frankel rereads and rewrites Dinah’s story, even changing her name from Dinah (literally meaning “her rules”) to Dini (“my rules,” and intriguingly also the author’s own name). Frankel also shifts the language of the verse in question by playing with the Torah’s lack of vocalization: The text notes that Shechem “vayishkav otah,” literally meaning “he lay her,” in which the word “otah” figures Dinah as a direct object of Shechem’s behavior. However, because the Torah has no vowels, the same letters could be read as “itah,” which would mean that Shechem lay “with her,” a description of an action undertaken together rather than done by one party to another.

Frankel’s retelling emphasizes that the only moment of force in this story happens when Dinah’s brothers take her, unwillingly, from Shechem. Their violent retaliation and hostile kidnapping of their own sister is seemingly justified, for in their minds Dinah’s choice simply could not have been her own. In patriarchal systems, when subjugated individuals act of their own agency, they are often seen as being “taken” or “seized” by a nefarious external source. Consider, for example, how contemporary anti-trans rhetoric imagines that trans men and boys are just young “girls” who have been seized and “seduced” by strategically planted, dangerous ideologies that convince them to transition. Indeed, knowledge and relationships do take something from patriarchy, but it is not the subjugated people themselves—it is control and domination. With this in mind, we must be open to a reading in which Shechem did not “take” Dinah, but rather, Dinah herself took back her own agency and autonomy from her brothers. They responded in the way dominating powers tend to respond when power is taken from them—with unrelenting violence under the guise of protection.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.