Jun

20

2025

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Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This year, some friends and I took on Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald’s meditation on memory, loss, and the haunted continent that is Europe. It concerns an unnamed narrator’s meetings with Jacques Austerlitz, a historian of architecture, who, over the decades, tries to come to terms with his life as an orphaned Czech Jew in the shadow of World War II. He grows up in Wales under the care of a Calvinist preacher, then travels to Prague and beyond to learn about his parentage. We follow Austerlitz and the narrator’s meanderings through the majestic, haunted train stations, old fortresses and castles, libraries, and concentration camps that dot the old continent, all built on the human remains and ravages of Europe’s colonial past.

Sebald interrogates questions of quiet profundity around the reliability of memory, the power or futility of art, symbols, and photos in wrestling with the traumas of the past. (On the latter subject, the narrator recalls an observation made by a close friend of Austerlitz’s parents: “One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair. Gemissements de desespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”)

The book’s formal innovations, of “going the full Proust”—long, unbroken, paragraphs, a fearlessly stream-of-consciousness style that produces sentence that coil and swoop back in on themselves, the unforgettable imagery, enigmatic symbols (those moths) and metaphors within metaphors, the sense of a man at the end of his rope, grasping for something to make his life of loneliness legible—make it one of more unnervingly moving reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Some of the questions around narrative reliability may chafe. Is Austerlitz a creation of the narrator, a means of coping through a breakdown? (Sebald—Fight Club fan?) Seeing Austerlitz through the eye of our narrator, we are, I think, meant to consider if the former is perhaps a vessel for the latter, if some authorial mischief is at play. It’s all in service of a grand yet still poignant idea: Reaching out across time for a sense of self-resolution, connection, comfort—peace, even—no matter how futile. As the late Richard Eder wrote in a sublime 2001 review: “Sebald’s past is a parabola. It arcs up to meet us, and when it arcs down it pulls us with it.”

Ari M. Brostoff (contributing editor): Last weekend I participated, along with a group of collaborators, in a sort of conclave for artists and other practitioners who work with groups—often either assembling them as organizers, unsettling them through performance, or both. The program was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the performing arts complex better known as BAM) and included a number of screenings; many of the films we watched were made by collectives from around the world and documented the usually unseen work of group formation that precedes an uprising.

The most astonishing film came at the end: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans), a 2013 experimental feature directed by the Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, which follows a ragtag group of Algiers tweens who raid the kitchen of a French colonial army barracks on a quest for foodstuffs beyond their usual paltry bean rations, and wind up capturing a soldier. In an interview with Film Comment, Mari explained that she recruited the film’s 20 young actors from the Algiers neighborhood where the film was shot; because “much of the film wasn’t scripted yet,” they “decided together who was best at which part.” The semi-improvised work of this acting troupe has an arrestingly unassuming quality even in the film’s early scenes of the kids making fart jokes on the beach; later, as the kids descend into a labyrinth of surreal colonial infrastructure and morph into an ad hoc guerilla organization, it becomes genuinely shocking. It also makes the film—the debut of which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence—historically unplaceable, or impossible, a self-conscious artifact of the scrambled timescape of postcolonial city life. The way the kids talk and dress and gesture in the presence of a digital camera’s harsh lens marks them vividly as children of the present era, even as their escapades place them in a dream-logic version of The Battle of Algiers and the loopy soundtrack (a contribution from the French prog rock duo Zombie Zombie) lends their adventure the darkly propulsive retro optimism of Stranger Things. Watching the film last weekend, it was impossible not to think of the children risking their lives for bread in Gaza—and of the devastating brilliance of the way these children have already begun to document the burning world around them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer approaches, Berlin is almost certain to be on the menu for some of our readers. I thought I’d share ways to see a Berlin that is neither a touristy Cold War/Nazi/Holocaust museum, nor the all-English-speaking sub-Brooklyn that so many cities are or aspire to be. My son and I went to the German capital recently in search of the remnants of socialism—of the communist Berlin that was crossed by a boulevard bearing the name Karl-Marx-Allee, originally Stalin-Allee.

The DDR Museum (DDR are the initials for the official name of East Germany—Deutsche Demokratische Republik) is the place to start. Though aimed at tourists, it gives a pretty fair overview of life in the former German Democratic Republic, covering daily life as well as the country’s politics and culture. Its gift shop includes objects like rubber duckies dressed in the uniform of the VoPo, the People’s Police who guarded the country. What’s not to like?

There are still statues and monuments dating from the vanished country, including the centrally located one at Marx-Engels-Platz. But if you walk along the avenues around Alexanderplatz, you’ll find tile murals on the outside of buildings, like that at 29 Alexanderstrasse, the Haus des Lehrers, commemorating the work of teachers. A bit further down at 29 Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, on the face of the Presscafé is another mural honoring communist journalists, which features Marx looking over the shoulders of the writers. The most moving monument can be found near Zoo Bahnhof: the monument to Rosa Luxemburg. The sculpture, consisting simply of her name, rises from the waters of the Landwehr Canal where her body was thrown after she was murdered.

Providing inexpensive housing for all was a prime goal of the government of the DDR, and you can travel to outer neighborhoods like Marzahn and walk around Helen-Weigel-Platz or the Allee-der-Kosmonauten to examine the beautifully brutalist (not oxymoronic) apartment blocks that in no way resemble or feel like American projects. Or just walk down Karl-Marx-Allee from Alexanderplatz and look around you. At Strausberger Platz you’ll find a wedding-cake apartment building on the order of a majestic Soviet palace, covering two blocks on both sides of the boulevard, containing 5,000 apartments. The variety of exteriors within the sameness of the prefab buildings, with their slashes and dashes of color, is a real lesson in urbanism and architecture.

Soviet-style socialism being dead, two cemeteries are essential visits. In Friedrichsfelde Cemetery there is a large and moving section dedicated to the socialist and communist dead. You’ll find the resting places of figures from both the Social Democratic and Communist parties in a beautifully designed walled area. On the other side of the wall is a section housing the panjandrums of communism, including the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, the family of the martyred Karl Liebknecht, the head of East German espionage Markus Wolf, his brother the filmmaker Konrad Wolf, and the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin. Interestingly, all the Jews buried there have pebbles placed on their graves. The cemetery tells another, uglier story: the plaques have been brutally removed from some graves, and the death masks from another, as they were vandalized by fascists in March.

On Chauseenstrasse in downtown Mitte is what’s known as the French Cemetery, the final residence of the cultural elite of the DDR, including the composer Hanns Eisler, the writer Anna Seghers, and the turbulently married couple Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Not coincidentally, next to the cemetery is the Brecht-Weigel Museum (reservations required), located in their house. The visit is only to Becht’s part of the house (they lived separately in the same building), so his interests, particularly in Chinese culture, are obvious everywhere you turn.

Outside of socialism, a visit to the house in Wannsee where the Final Solution was negotiated is well worth the long ride on the S-Bahn. The magnificent manor provides a beautiful view of the lake, and also has a café serving babka and bagels, which a sign advertises—correctly—as Jewlicious. Before heading out from Wannsee, those who love literature should pay tribute to Heinrich von Kleist, whose grave is on a low hilltop overlooking the lake, on the precise spot he committed suicide after shooting his companion, a willing accomplice in the venture.

A final note: Berlin is enormous and the public transport is as bad as New York’s. Be prepared to travel an hour to get anywhere.

This week’s parshah, Shelach, introduces a foundational legal principle that repeats, with slight variations, several times throughout the Torah: “There shall be one law [Torah] and one rule [mishpat] for you and for the stranger who resides among you.” In our case, the verse concludes a set of divine instructions about the sacrifices to be offered upon entering the Land of Israel, and establishes that all people in the community, Israelite and foreigner alike, should perform the sacrifice in the same way, abiding by the same rules and regulations. The Talmudic sages expand this seemingly simple sacrificial instruction, with its mere hint of equity, into a broad judicial doctrine mandating consistency and equality in legal cases—a principle they invoke almost a dozen times throughout the Talmud in support of egalitarian legal procedures.

In one instance, for example, the Rabbis use the verse to argue that monetary cases (concerning crimes punishable by a fine) must follow the more stringent regulations of capital cases (concerning those punishable by death), so that all trials have identical protocols. In another case, they invoke it to prevent exceptions to normative legal processes, even in exceptional circumstances. These citations include an additional note, explaining that the verse means “that the law is equal for all of you.” The Torah’s laws become equal for everyone, the Rabbis imply, when its processes center uniformity and consistency.

A powerful example of the application of this principle is found in the famous rabbinic transformation of the Torah’s imagined retributive justice enacted through “an eye for an eye.” According to the plain meaning of the text, the verse says that someone whose eye is gouged out can gouge out the perpetrator’s eye, but the Talmud interprets it instead as a monetary exchange, in which the perpetrator is required to pay the victim an amount of money that is determined to be the value of the eye. In discussing this law, the Rabbis imagine exaggerated cases in which the violent exchange of body parts is far less equal than the exchange of money, proving their point by asking characteristically absurd questions: What if the two parties have different sized eyes? What if the perpetrator had only one eye to begin with? The Talmud then cites our verse as textual proof that the rabbinic alternative of monetary compensation is not only more ethical but also more equitable than its biblical counterpart because money allows for a regularity that is otherwise unattainable.

The rabbinic reading of this verse provides a framework not only for valuing stable judicial constancy but also, perhaps counterintuitively, for thinking about the value of innovation. Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known by the acronym the Netziv (1816-1893), notices the redundancy of “law” (“Torah”) and “rule” (“misphat”) in the verse in our parshah and interprets the words as referring to two different dimensions of Jewish law and practice: the innovated practice created in every generation (“Torah”) and the timeless ordinances definitively outlined in our texts (“mishpat”). The verse, according to the Netziv, thus comes to teach us that both are “equal, without distinction”—the instruction we inherit and the teachings we innovate have equal standing. The rabbinic re-interpretation of “an eye for an eye” demonstrates the legal weight of this transformation: In recasting the biblical text’s plain meaning of violent retribution, the Talmudic sages created a new interpretive path—a teaching added by their generation, which is understood as “Torah,” equal in weight to the Bible’s own text. Taking seriously that “there should be one ordinance” demands not only that we analyze and apply our norms with a rigorously egalitarian ethos, but also that we create new norms that reify these political commitments—and that we understand our own innovations as themselves a form of Torah no less than the ordinances we have inherited.

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