Shabbat
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Solomon Brager (contributing writer): It’s a rough time to be a trans person, okay? Every day, it seems like there are new attacks on our access to healthcare and our right to exist. When I need a break from the doom—a moment of trans joy (and messy trans drama) that doesn’t tiptoe around cis scrutiny or try to teach cis people to be better—I usually look for relief in the four-panel, lo-fi Instagram comic Vivian’s Ghost, authored and illustrated by YA novelist and librarian Hal Schrieve.

The comic follows three friends and former lovers, who were all gay trans boys when they met as teenagers: Collin, a classic Brooklyn freelancer with a delightfully messy polyamorous romantic situation; Cathy, a detrans activist on a fertility journey with a nice husband and a dark secret; and Vivian, an ambiguously evil ghost who clings to Collin’s soul and wreaks havoc in the lives of the other characters (I have a developing analysis about the particular dybbuk-like quality of the still-teenage Vivian and his ghostly malice). Antagonizing the group is Leon Donegal, an anti-trans journalist who is “just asking questions,” and just really wants to save the youth. Leon is writing a book, you see, and he wants Cathy and her dead friend Vivian right at the center of his thesis.

Vivian’s Ghost could be seen as a response to the horror show of the New York Times opinion page—if you wanted it to be one—but it’s principally concerned with the lives of trans people and the worlds we create with each other. It’s one of the most substantial and gratifying portraits I’ve ever seen of what it’s like to be a trans youth trying to become a living, breathing, thriving trans adult. The way the comic lays out the delights and horrors of growing up trans on the internet, including an instantly recognizable and deeply moving portrait of romantic teen friendship, is a highlight and a treat. We also end up receiving a real overview of the belief system and strategic machinations of the detrans movement via Leon and Cathy, but the comic goes to great lengths to give us a detrans narrative that is sympathetic without trying to detransition us all. And it depicts its actively transphobic characters with, like, a truly massive amount of nuance while also revealing the bad faith of their bad, very bad works. It’s also incredibly funny, sexy, well-paced, and does a ton with straight-to-page linework art––in short, it’s a delight to read. God, what a relief.

Hal started publishing Vivian’s Ghost online in the spring of 2022, and the new strips quickly became the highlight of my day, returning me to my own extremely-online teenage years, during which I eagerly awaited webcomic posts and LiveJournal updates from cute trans boys. I became deeply grateful for the camaraderie of the VG comments section, and the experience of all of us being there together, waiting for a good trans update in our trans days. Did I basically set upon Hal at our shared shul during the High Holidays to pepper hir with questions about what was next for Vivian? Yes, I did.

I imagine that one day soon Vivian’s Ghost will exist in the world as a collected volume, but for now, it is available via Hal’s Instagram and as four collected PDFs available via pay-what-you-can donation here. Do not skip the delightful side plot, “When Collin F*cked Ronnie’s Rabbi.”

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In the climactic monologue of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s two-part masterpiece from the early 90s, Prior Walter, who has been chosen by God’s abandoned angels to carry a prophecy of stasis, refuses the message. “We can’t just stop,” he says. Angels is something of a personal bible, and yet this very important line is one I’ve come to question over the years. In the age of climate catastrophe and rapid technological transformation, where it seems a lot of our problems might be solved by at least slowing down, Prior’s assertion feels, frankly, dated. These days, it hits my ears almost as apologetics. This is human nature; nothing can be done. But of course something must be done. And it might involve stopping.

In some ways, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, at Playwright’s Horizons until March 19th, is a perfect rejoinder to Prior. At the risk of “spoiling” something that happens five minutes in: Two casually estranged siblings, David and Sheila (Jess Barbagallo and Crystal A. Dickinson), wake up from a drunken evening sleeping en plein air to find themselves literally rooted in place—like trees. If I recall correctly, David utters a version of Prior’s line: we can’t just stop. But they have no choice.

The play unfolds as a kind of meditation on what it means to stop, what kinds of ecosystems can blossom in the presence of rootedness. In their immobility, the siblings are newly vulnerable and requiring of care, which in turn creates the conditions for a different kind of community to form around them. By the end, I was thoroughly moved by the depiction of this community, the way it responded to very real threats with a kind of slow and defiant being. It reminded me a little of the Palestinian value of “sumud,” steadfastness—a form of nonviolent resistance carried out largely by staying put, continuing on.

Another note to recommend The Trees: While it seems as though David and Sheila might be Jewish in some vague and attenuated way, there are two very explicitly Jewish characters in The Trees. (One, a rabbi, comes onstage holding a first generation Jewish Currents tote! Reader: I nearly died!) I’m always on guard when Jewish characters appear where I’m not expecting them—especially in work by Jewish artists—as these characters are so often kitschy comic relief, Jewishness as the joke. This is one of the best depictions of Jewishness on stage I’ve seen in a while; the characters feel Jewish without it having to be overperformed or telegraphed. They are not played for laughs or for pathos; they are not explicitly connected to grand narratives of Jewish suffering, but rather—like everyone else—to the intimate, little suffering of everyday life.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema began yesterday at Lincoln Center, and runs until March 12th. I would like to talk, too briefly, about some of the films that shouldn’t be missed.

Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister is the centerpiece of the festival, and the equal of any of the previous works by this stellar director. Featuring remarkable performances by Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard, it’s a film about sibling hatred gone mad. While it seems to be hinted at late in the film, we’re never explicitly told the source of the animosity, and that’s precisely the point: Sibling hatred needs no reason. The brother and sister must navigate death and illness, even as they can’t be in the same city, much less cooperate or sympathize with each other under such stressful circumstances. The depths of their hatred is, of course, the mirror of their former love, and Desplechin and his cast express all these complexities brilliantly.

Philippe Faucon’s Les Harkis follows a battalion of Harkis, Algerians who served in the French army during Algeria’s war for independence. The post-independence lot of the Harkis, tens of thousands of whom were killed in free Algeria, is a black mark on the French, who left them behind after promising never to abandon them. The film sets itself a very difficult dask—how do you make the fate of these men, collaborators in a war against their own people, sympathetic?—and succeeds. It’s an excellent but morally troubling history lesson.

On a radically different note, Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing—a wonderfully absurdist comedy about a team of superheroes who use the different carcinogenic elements of a cigarette to kill villains by giving them cancer—was the funniest film I’ve seen in months. The superheroes of the Tobacco Force are told to go on a team-building retreat, which is interrupted by members of the squad and random others, including a barracuda in the process of being fried, telling scary stories. Dupieux, who previously made a comic crime film in which the murderer was a loose rubber tire, is no stranger to comedies with a tenuous relationship to reality. Smoking Causes Coughing is utterly ridiculous and hysterically funny. If you miss it here, it’s due for commercial release on March 31st.

Before you go!

We’re seeking letters to the editor in response to our Rest issue! Send us your thoughts about our responsa, which explores anti-work politics and the meaning of Shabbat; the Fayer Collective’s manifesto from the threatened Atlanta forest; Bench Ansfield’s essay on “burnout,” which returns the term to its origins in landlord arson; or any other piece that struck you. We’re also interested in responses to the issue as a whole: Was there anything in its approach to rest you found unexpected or provocative, restorative or illuminating? Responses to the accompanying coloring book are also welcome. Please submit letters of about 250 words to editor@jewishcurrents.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): As we read through Exodus in shul, I have been following along at home in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, which I fortuitously discovered at an estate sale. Neither as exuberantly erotic or emotionally powerful as her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain retells the Exodus story but twists the details; though Hurston preserves the Bible’s sequence and much of its material, she announces in an introduction that she has incorporated folkloric traditions from the African diaspora—producing a Moses who is less God’s loyal servant than an independent magus.

Hurston imagines Moses as Egyptian, just as Freud does in Moses and Monotheism, which was published the same year as Moses, Man of the Mountain. In Exodus, Moses’ sister observes his retrieval form the river by Pharaoh’s daughter; in Hurston’s novel, Miriam is distracted from her brother by the glamorous princess’s arrival, and she invents the adoption narrative to excuse her lapse in watching the baby. Though the novel leaves Moses’ origins ambiguous, Miriam’s fiction–which plays on Hurston’s own renovation of the canon–influences Moses’ life, ultimately making him a Hebrew and setting in motion the Israelites’ liberation. Yet Hurston’s Miriam has a tragic end, as she is gradually excluded from public life.

Meanwhile, the in-between Moses—never fully Egyptian, never fully Israelite—parallels the novel’s experiment with racial anachronism: all the characters, from Pharaoh down to the Israelite slaves, speak in Black English, and a viciously racist speech about miscegenation with Hebrews is ironically given to the novel’s only unambiguously Black character, an Ethiopian princess disgusted by Moses’ touch. Meanwhile, European fascism lurks on the horizon: the new ruler of Exodus becomes a nationalist demagogue, and an invented sequence about martial games before Pharaoh seems to inscribe into the biblical story the drama of Jesse Owens’s victory over white athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I am not sure what to make of all this—although famous as a Black folklorist and a brilliant writer, Hurston apparently had pretty bad politics (she was, for instance, opposed to the New Deal, for which Pharaoh’s public-building program seems to stand). But it’s a wonderfully confounding literary experiment, playing understated games with the Bible (the editor’s introduction to my edition contains the tellingly mistaken observation that Hurston changed nothing from scripture!), as when she has Jochebed longing that Pharaoh will revoke his harsh decree and they can “circumcise [Moses] and hold a christening,” so that it “would be just like old times.” The sly joke in that double-feature circumcision and christening (exactly which old times were those?) is characteristic of this novel’s vertiginous layering of contemporary politics, African folklore, and biblical narrative.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Early in The Jewish Son, an electrifying novella by the Argentine writer Daniel Guebel, arriving in English in April, the narrator makes a bold claim: “Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father is one of my favorite books; if I had to choose between rescuing this handbook of self-disparagement and reproach from a blazing fire, or Ulysses, I’d abandon Joyce’s pyrotechnic novel to the flames and burn my fingers to save the few pages written by the Czech Jew.” We soon learn that the autofictional narrator, also named Daniel, is so attached to this minor work because Kafka’s tempestuous relationship with his father parallels Daniel’s own. The Jewish Son, vividly translated by Jessica Sequeria, centers on this fraught bond, slipping seamlessly between recollections of a youth defined by a domineering father and a present consumed with care for this patriarch, now laid low by age and illness. While brief mentions of the Argentine military dictatorship hint at the contestations of power unfolding in the wider world—Daniel’s father, a follower of Lenin, belongs to an illegal political organization—Guebel remains focused on the intimate struggle between father and son. But following his literary idol, Daniel understands this conflict as nothing less than metaphysical. “For Kafka,” he explains enigmatically, “the Law is no longer God but the Father, and the struggle is no longer to understand Him (for the Father, like God, is at the mercy of His own whim, and to the violence of His formulations) but to be understood by Him, and to confront Him so that he may survive.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In all the furor over the recently issued Sight and Sound list of the best films of all time, one film’s scandalous omission went unnoticed. Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, showing for only a week at Film Forum in a newly restored version, is an essential film from a strictly cinematic point of view: a magnificent account of France during the Occupation, focusing on one city, Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne. But it’s even more significant for changing the way the French looked at themselves and their country’s past.

Though it was originally made for French TV in 1969, the television authorities—there were only two channels at the time, both run by the state—refused to broadcast it, so it was released commercially, running for 87 weeks in Paris. Its portrait of wartime France made it impossible for the French to view their occupied country as made up solely of brave Resistance fighters. Ophuls interviews farmers, French and English politicians, Germans who served in France, Communists, monarchists, French fascists, and Resistance members of various stripes, providing the full scope of the French reactions to their defeat at the hands of the Germans. To complete the picture, Ophuls makes great use of contemporary newsreel footage—both German and French—showing the love many of the French felt for General Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist government; the might of Germany; and the day-to-day concerns of the French, with footage of families encouraged to eat rabbit and women shown applying dye to their legs to replace unavailable silk stockings. The France of The Sorrow and the Pity was a country not only defeated by an external enemy, but also eaten away by internal rot, with a bourgeoisie that preferred Hitler to the socialist Léon Blum.

Another film, opening next weekend, also inspires sorrow and pity. Teodora Ana Mihai’s La Civil is a harrowing tale of a Mexico destroyed by drug cartels, who act with virtual impunity; a government unable and unwilling to stop them; and a people morally defeated by these internal enemies. When Doña Cielo’s daughter is kidnapped by a cartel, which demands an enormous ransom, she and her estranged husband pay. But the girl isn’t returned. The police are indifferent, and at first they can’t be told of the kidnapping in any case; they’re corrupt, and would just inform the cartel. And so Doña Cielo—in a brilliant performance by Arcelia Ramirez, who appears in virtually every shot of the film—sets out on her own to find her child. Everywhere she turns, she encounters treachery, brutality, callousness, and cowardice. In the face of her courage, she encounters omnipresent fear, which extinguishes all hope. Even Dona Cielo ultimately gets dragged into the mire, as the corruption of her society enters her soul as well. In the Mexico of La Civil, moral purity is impossible.

Abraham Josephine Reisman (member, board of directors): Thank HaShem for the death of the monoculture. Time was, there were certain TV shows you simply had to stay up on if you wanted to have a friendly chat at the water-cooler. Well, with water-coolers an artifact of civilizations past and American media consumption balkanized beyond recognition, there’s no longer an expectation that you’ll be watching the Show Everyone’s Watching, because no such show exists. I am therefore comfortable telling you all that I gave up on HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us—whose source material is the zombie apocalypse video game by the same name—halfway through episode two. The opening portion of that episode, which traces the origin of the fungal pandemic that essentially ends the world, was thrilling. But I just knew it would be a one-off and that we’d be following the generic archetypes who’d already been set up as the protagonists in the game, which I also abandoned out of boredom and frustration (and because I am bad at games).

In the case of both game and show, I have never even gotten to the part with the zombies. The characters and the world they inhabit are just so palpably xeroxes of xeroxes of xeroxes. Game creator and show co-creator Neil Druckmann has said that Alfonso Cuarón’s masterwork, Children of Men (itself loosely based on a novel by P.D. James), was a significant aesthetic and narrative influence on The Last of Us, and that’s fine. But the influence is so great that, if I were to write a basic description of either work, you might have a hard time figuring out which I was describing. (I’ll try my hand at it here: A man vs. nature tale where a cynical lone wolf escorts a young girl—who might hold the secret to saving humanity!—through an apocalyptic hellscape, fights off both fascists and violent rebels along the way, and learns to believe in the power of love in spite of it all.) By porting the basic plot structure and themes of Children of Men back to the screen without any significant aesthetic additions or innovations, all Druckmann and company seem to have produced is some warmed-over eschatological leftovers. And if you’re going to depict a zombie apocalypse—hell, any apocalypse—in 2023, you have to bring something more thematically robust than societal-collapse porn. In a world currently experiencing shades of its own particular disintegration, a boilerplate Armageddon seems a bit gauche. But I dunno, maybe it gets better later. I heard there was a gay couple.

Anyway, I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise his predecessor. In the game of fungal zombie thrillers, there’s a clear winner when it comes to quality: the shamefully overlooked 2016 UK horror film The Girl With All the Gifts. Directed by TV-industry hand Colm McCarthy and written by Mike Carey (who adapted it from his own novel of the same name, and who comics fans may recognize as the guy who wrote Vertigo’s Lucifer series in its early glory days), the movie is one about which I will actually say . . . very little. I went in cold, knowing only that my spouse had recommended it after I tried to get her to watch the rest of The Last of Us episode two. She said I’d understand why; I did. Suffice it to say that it’s a story about fungal zombies, but one that has some profound things to say about what zombies actually mean in cultural consciousness—and what it will be like for all of us when nature inevitably wins. You can be the expert about this prescient film when everyone’s fighting over the planet’s last water-cooler.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Whenever I read a piece of criticism, I harbor a possibly unfair expectation: that it will not only help me think more interestingly about the work under consideration, but actually reconfigure my understanding of what art is. While that’s a lot to put on any particular piece of writing, I admire criticism that at least attempts it—if only partially, and almost always implicitly.

But critic Andrea Long Chu’s recent Vulture piece on HBO’s The Last of Us takes on this task directly. The review, which is ultimately less interested in the show than the video game from which it’s adapted, dismisses the still-common debate about whether games can be art at all, focusing instead on the question of “what kind of art they would be.” Chu delves into this inquiry through an exhilarating close reading of the zombie survival shooter—no less thrilling if, like me, you haven’t played it and don’t plan to. She argues convincingly that “in longform-narrative video games like The Last of Us, no predetermined relation exists between gameplay, as a real-time system of potential inputs and outputs, and traditional film elements like character, narration, or image,” and that The Last of Us exploits this gap (the technical term is “ludonarrative dissonance”) to produce “a compelling study in powerlessness.” She goes on to examine the game’s disturbing twist on the ubiquitous mechanic in which player characters endlessly die and regenerate, showing how it shapes the player’s relationship to the protagonists.

The review ultimately takes the idea that video games are distinguished from real art by their “interactivity”—a claim that makes a “breezy conflation of interactivity with control”—and turns it on its head, articulating a more precise and generative difference: “One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game.” By setting aside preconceptions about the essence of art and instead attending to the aesthetic effect of this game—and the specific formal features that generate it—Chu’s piece gave me just what I always hope to find.

Dahlia Krutkovich (fellow): While I was freelancing in London last summer and feeling a bit alienated from my own work, I picked up a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell’s chronicle of working poverty in those two cities in the mid-1930s. It would be ridiculous to compare my situation to Orwell’s—I had just finished graduate school and felt adrift; he was alternately starving and working backbreaking hours—but his reflections on boredom and “largely stupid and unnecessary work” felt like salves between tedious hours spent chasing down invoices.

Down and Out is split between the two cities and features everything you’d want from a piece of literary nonfiction. In Paris, Orwell documents his trifles with the petty politics that govern life in the high- and lowbrow establishments where he works as a dishwasher, populating his world with cartoonish-but-believable composite characters (the mutually abusive dynamic between him and the Russian cook at Auberge de Jehan Cottart takes pride of place here). In London, he follows the city’s itinerant men as they look for work and pass through the “spikes,” or government-run lodgings; this section feels relentless in its descriptions of the physical distress the English winter brings without a coat, food, or a dependable place to sleep.

At certain moments in the book, you can see the beginnings of the clichés that dominate food and travel writing today (the abusive cook, the “portraits” of hard-up men). But unlike contemporary takes on these genres, which often feel solipsistic or fall flat in their supposedly political engagements, Orwell refuses to commit to a single telling of this period of his life. Down and Out, though an account of the type of day-to-day stress and insecurity that will grind your teeth to powder, doesn’t shy away from the humor that comes from the absurdity and indignity of working life.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Friday, June 22nd, 1962, was the day I lived the moment I would like to dwell in for eternity. I was ten and nothing mattered as much to me as my favorite baseball team, the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros). That evening, they played a twi-night doubleheader against the Mets at the Polo Grounds, and my father took me and my brother to see the games. The moment we finished climbing the ramp and saw the field—and, more importantly, my beloved Colt .45s—is one I can conjure up at will. The color of the grass, the color of their uniform . . . never have I felt such pure joy. I’ve remained faithful to the team my entire life, and when they won the World Series in 2017, when I was 65, I sobbed—and when I finished sobbing, I wrote an emotional piece for Currents. Two years later we learned that the Astros had cheated throughout that season, stealing the signs the opposing catcher was giving by means of a camera in center field that transmitted the image to a screen behind the team’s dugout; the type of pitch was then relayed to the batter by banging on a garbage pail.

Evan Drellich, the journalist for The Athletic who broke the story, has now written a complete account of the scandal, Winning Fixes Everything. Though nothing can shake my love for the team—a love that is, like all true fandom, irrational—I found it to be a difficult and disturbing book. It is also essential reading for all baseball fans. Drellich’s portrayal of the Astros, which digs deep into the background of the scandal, and especially of their brilliant general manager, Jeff Luhnow, is a damning picture of the fruits, at all levels, of the willingness to do anything to win. Destroying the team’s reputation and tainting the championship are far from the only sins of Luhnow’s obsession with being a step ahead of everyone else. Human beings, both players and staff, were treated as things, tools to advance his project of building a great team. The widespread use of analytics, described in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, is shown here to be a dehumanizing force, obviating the need for human judgment: The numbers, which cover everything from plays on the field to the rate at which a ball spins, are all you need. Those who once scouted ballplayers can be replaced by a series of numbers. So fire ’em! Managerial decisions can be made through use of a spreadsheet. The manager doesn’t agree? Can him! Luhnow and the Astros took what everyone else did in adopting the Moneyball way and pushed it further.

The same went for cheating: The Yankees and the Red Sox cheated by stealing signs. The Dodgers cheated. The Mariners and Indians likely cheated, too—but their cheating still required someone on second base to relay the sign to the batter. By 2017 it was baked into the Astros’ DNA to be open to anything. Luhnow didn’t participate in the cheating himself, but he established the setting for it. We should look at Winning Fixes Everything as a kind of anti-Moneyball, revealing the seedy underbelly of what was once a shiny new and thrilling tool.

Before you go!

We also wanted to let you know that the Tamizdat project is hosting a rare and signed book auction in support of undergraduate students who left Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia under duress. We donated a copy of the Soviet issue to the auction, and if you’re looking to donate to a good cause, you should check it out.

Also, Abraham Josephine Reisman, whose recommendation features above, has a new book out next month. It’s a biography of public relations and hype machine innovator, WWE commissioner Vince McMahon. You can pre-order it here!

Dana Bassett (development director): If there’s one thing I know about being Lebanese-American, it is that Lebanese-Americans love one thing–and that thing is Lebanese-American Khalil Gibran. With this knowledge firmly in hand, I was of course intrigued to see the words “Illustrated by Khalil Gibran” printed on the dark orange cover of The Book of Khalid, which stuck out to me while I was looking over second-hand titles at the Bed-Stuy bookstore and cafe Better Read Than Dead.

The back cover mentions that the novel, written in 1911 by Ameen Rihani, is considered to be the first by an Arab-American writer in English and that Rihani was besties with the great Gibran, who apparently based The Prophet (Leb 101 required reading) off of Rihani’s characters. As a devoted Arab-American, what could I do but give the man at the bookstore counter his eight dollars? It was my long-winded, disjointed and overly descriptive destiny.

I later learned from my friend Zain, who is an aficionado of forgotten authors, that, though The Book of Khaled was originally published a century ago, it was republished in 2012 by Neversink Press. According to Zain, Neversink “digs up forgotten authors for contemporary audiences.” Despite the book’s impressive historical pedigree, I have to admit that I do kind of understand why it was forgotten.

The text is presented as a “found manuscript” partially authored by the wandering dreamer, prophet, and fool Khalid and buttressed by the omniscient narrator’s interviews with various individuals, including Khalid’s best friend and travel companion, Shakib. But the narrative is very convoluted, and there are only three small illustrations by Gibran. The style makes it hard to tell what is “real” and what is not. The parafictional interplay between the narrator’s intervention and Khalid’s own almost makes the text interesting but mostly makes it confusing. Despite my communal loyalty to Gibran and best efforts to appreciate Rihani’s novel, I cannot earnestly say I recommend that you read it.

After a winding introduction, the book mostly follows the lives of an opposite but codependent pair of friends, Khalid and Shakib, and their selected misadventures as immigrants from Baalbek to the Little Syrian section of downtown Manhattan and back. While certain aspects of the novel feel significant, like Khalid’s propensity for burning books once he finishes reading them and a moving chapter on the metaphysical quality of ruffles, the chapters don’t necessarily relate to or build upon one another. In fact, the novel feels disjointed, as Khalid jumps from one failed scheme to the next. In one instance, the narrator abruptly ends a chapter on a painful event in Khalid’s life and then quickly pivots to Khalid’s meditation on the beauty of the natural world. Funnily enough, my edition is a “readers copy” with a menacing warning across the bottom: UNCORRECTED ADVANCE READER COPY — DO NOT QUOTE. Another apparent layer of separation between me and being Lebanese.

When I mentioned I was personally struggling with how much I wasn’t enjoying the book, Zain sympathized. “I find that books that deal with cultural identity—between two worlds and all!—tend to be all over the place all of the time!” he texted back.

I’m still going to finish The Book of Khalid (this weekend, in fact), but my waning interest in Khalid and Shakib’s activities feels like a personal failure of my Lebanese-ness.

“Inshallah it will come together in the end,” Zain wrote.

Inshallah Zain is right.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): This piece by Vivian Gornick in Lux gave me publishing envy, so I thought I would share it with you. It’s a portrait of Gornick’s relationship with her analyst, Dr. F, “a small, neat woman in late middle age, a German-Jewish Freudian analyst who wore an air of gravity that was both reassuring and off-putting.” Having internalized the patriarchal orientation of psychoanalysis at the time, Dr. F struggles to help Gornick with her issues: The analyst thinks they are trying to resolve Gornick’s trouble with men; Gornick thinks they are trying to resolve her trouble with work. (“Whether the therapists knew it or not, they were keepers of a culture that people like me were now rebelling against.“) The moments of epiphany in the piece—whether Gornick’s or Dr. F’s, relayed by Gornick—reminded me what I love about Gornick’s writing, the way she rings a line of dialogue like a bell, the way meaning resounds in small episodes. It made me want to go back and read Fierce Attachments. But also, how exciting to read something new! Viv has still got it.

Aparna Gopalan (contributing editor): If you are queer, Asian, or part of a complicated parent-child relationship, Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter is not a book you should pick up without careful planning. Not simply because it will leave you bawling for minutes or hours (although it is likely to do that) but because it might leave you haunted for days and weeks to come.

The book is told from the perspective of an unnamed 70-something-year-old woman who works in a nursing home in an unnamed country and watches her also-unnamed 30-something-year-old daughter with constant pain and disapproval. With the usual accoutrement of a novel (proper nouns, a plot) stripped away, all that’s left on the page is the raw, first-person experience of a woman laboring her way to the grave while watching her beloved child grow up to be gay.

The book opens with the daughter in financial distress. After asking her mother for money that is nowhere to be found, the daughter ends up temporarily moving in with her mother and bringing her partner Lane along with her. This sets up scene after scene of the mother’s suffering as she is forced to look directly at the things she had otherwise “only imagined and assumed,” and, one might add, things she had denied. In one early scene, the mother watches her daughter and Lane through a bedroom door left ajar. She recounts: “my daughter, dressed in a sleeveless shirt and shorts, has one arm wrapped gently around the girl who’s facing away from her. Sisters who get along well. Close friends. But what draws them to each other isn’t something so common and ordinary. Whatever it is, it’s clearly beyond my assumptions or expectations.”

The mother does not take this irrefutable proof of her daughter’s sexuality well. Over the course of the novel, she becomes more venomous than any first-person protagonist has any right to be, at one point saying to herself, “Why won’t she try to live a normal life? Why won’t she even try? Why did I bring a child like that into the world? And to think how happy I was when I first had her! She was a wonder to look at and gazing down at the sleeping child filled me with feelings I can only describe as love...Why does my daughter, of all people, have to like women?...How could she be so cruel? Why am I ashamed of this child that came out of me? I don’t like the fact that I am ashamed to be her mother. Why is she making me deny her, and by extension myself and this entire life I’ve lived?”

Reading these internal asides, snipes, and diatribes, one seems to get a front row seat to the thoughts of every parent with a child who refuses to conform. It’s like finding the private diaries of Evelyn from Everything Everywhere All At Once and witnessing the guilt, sadness, disgust, and stubborn denial that simmers underneath the surface of a seemingly-benign disapproval. Reading this book feels like a faux-ethnographic exercise in trying to answer the questions any child facing a parent’s rejection asks themselves, such as, Why are they like this? Where is their horror coming from? And what makes it so very enduring? The mother’s narration offers tantalizing clues.

At times, it seems her disapproval of her daughter is animated by nothing more than petty shame as she imagines her family becoming fodder for gossip: “What if someone sees? What if strange accounts travel from household to household, embellished and altered at every stop, sweeping through the neighborhood? What if the words reach my ears like a storm?” But there are deeper fears at play, too: “You think you’re going to be young forever?” the mother asks her daughter. “You are alone. What do you have? A husband? Children? Friends and colleagues will leave you eventually.” As the novel progresses, the mother’s narration repeatedly returns to the anxiety that her child will live out old age just as she is: toiling endlessly in an often demeaning job, coming home everyday to an empty house, living only with memories of people who are gone.

Ultimately, the mother’s refusal to accept her daughter seems to stem from an unshakeable belief that her child will not be able to defy the laws of society and normalcy to find peace, love, and a graceful old age with Lane.“What kind of world do they think they live in?” she thinks when her daughter and Lane speak up against a neighbor beating his wife rather than simply turning their eyes away. “A magical, brilliant place they read about in books? The kind of thing a few people can pick up and overturn?”

As the book goes on, the mother’s anguish intensifies: at one point she confesses she wants to kill Lane. But then, when a patient at her nursing home is mistreated and the mother resists it rather than watching from the sidelines, she herself begins acting as if she can transform the world from a cruel place to a kind one. She refuses to believe her colleagues when they say old people’s suffering is just “the way of the world,” or just “normal.” She begins to make a scene, to do things that set people talking, defy the rules she so insidiously inflicts upon her child.

The mother’s growing hypocrisy—preaching conformity to others while refusing it for herself, telling her daughter to stop protesting at work even as she herself loses her job for her “sentimentality”—makes the second part of the book even more infuriating than the first. It takes a homophobic mob attacking her daughter for the mother to see that like her, her daughter and Lane “stand with their feet planted on firm ground, not in fantasies or daydreams...They exist in the thick of life, terrifying, relentless.”

This is not to say the mother “comes around” to having a gay daughter—this story, after all, is not bound by the plot requirements of an Oscar-nominated movie. Even as she spends her days caring for a patient that she (not to spoil anything) literally steals out of her nursing home, the mother hopes that the sight of her changing diapers and cleaning bedpans will make her daughter and Lane ‘realistic’ about their old age. She hopes they will “go find themselves a real partner now – someone who will share the responsibility and trust,” because her daughter’s seven-year-long relationship still cannot appear “real” in her eyes. But no other ending could have really done this book justice or made it feel like it is ventriloquizing all the world’s unaccepting parents, laying bare their deepest fears for their children to read with pain and horror, but also, maybe only for a minute, with understanding.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Nineteenth-century Danish art is certainly not something museumgoers get to see much of, which makes “Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 16th, all the more welcome. The show is a generous one, with about 100 works in various mediums organized by theme. Sketches and paintings of arresting nature scenes abound, as do portraits. Danish monuments are covered, too, and striking works depicting eerie dolmens feature prominently. Most impressive are paintings of Copenhagen and its harbor, particularly Johan Christian Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight (1846). The painting is a massive work, more than three feet by five feet, of a looming nighttime sky, the moonlight glimmering on the water captured with the perfect degree of sadness and gloom.

One interesting series of paintings and drawings of rooms—some inhabited, some not—makes brilliant use of space and geometric shape. Among this latter group are two pieces that make the entire exhibition worthwhile: Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 (1912) and Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900–1906). These are the only paintings in the show by the greatest of all Danish artists—indeed, one of the greatest artists of his time—Vilhelm Hammershøi. (Two drawings are also included, as well as a suitably scruffy-looking portrait.) I mentioned Hammershøi when I recommended the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney, for light and private interiors were these artists’ great subjects. Both of the Hammershøi paintings are of uninhabited rooms, but it’s his genius that an empty room becomes the perfect pretext for filling a space with shadow and light, laid onto the canvas with a stunning variety of tone. Shadows of objects replace the objects themselves. In Moonlight, light seems to originate from an impossible place below the surface on which light is cast. But Hammershøi has seen something we don’t: that light can come from below, reflected off a well-polished floor. Different qualities of light are handled with equal mastery; hazy light and harsh light are given their individual personalities. There is no need for a figure in the room, for light is given being.

I can only assume there was some curatorial problem that prevented the museum from having more works by Hammershoi, who stands head and shoulders above his compatriots. Even so, two unforgettable works on a show is a number not to be sneered at.

A personal note: When we travel, my wife Joan and I like to have a theme for our trips that will take us beyond the tourist route. So we visited the Lisbon of Fernando Pessoa, the Paris of Proust, and Oslo through the films of Joachim Trier, visiting every location in his works shot in the Norwegian capital. We already have our package of lists and maps of the locations containing paintings by Hammershøi, as well as the places he painted them. “Beyond the Light” has whetted our already voracious appetite for more of this largely unsung genius.

Before you go!

We hosted a conversation between artist Katz Tepper and Greg Bordowitz back in March of last year, where Tepper discussed how kinship, disability, and diasporism informed the creation of their film Roasted Cockroach for Scale. We wanted to share that Roasted Cockroach is on view at Lauren Gitlin and has been extended until February 19. You should go see it if you’re in New York!

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Within a Budding Grove, the second of seven volumes in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is often described as the installment in which the narrator—seen in the previous book mostly preoccupied with missing his mother at bedtime—grows up a bit and becomes obsessed, instead, with his love for a series of youthful and feisty girls. But what kind of love is this? The book, which I read last month in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation revised by Terrence Kilmartin and then D.J. Enright, is less interested in love’s capacity to bring us closer to another person than in the way that love obscures, or interferes, with understanding another: “The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow…all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry a very clear impression of her.” Since the narrator’s approach to his objects of desire is less about them than about his impression of them, the real thing is likely to disappoint, just as his attendance at a performance by the actress La Berma and his later visit to a church in the seaside resort town Balbec are feeble letdowns compared to the images he has constructed over a period of years.

When he finally has a chance to meet the girl he’s long admired from afar at Balbec, real life’s intrusion on carefully nurtured fantasy briefly dampens his excitement: “The certainty of being introduced to these girls had had the effect of making me not only feign indifference to them, but actually feel it.” Instead of an experience shared by two people, love, in Budding Grove, is mostly an extended negotiation with the self, about what the narrator can make himself believe about a girl, and whether he can successfully stave off despair by convincing himself she must feel the same way. Indeed, what Proust calls love here might better be understood as lust or a crush; in any case, it’s a relatively pessimistic account of how stubbornly the self intrudes in our attempts to know others. But to read it, and to chew on Proust’s exhaustive and penetrating analysis of every passing emotion our narrator has as he fumbles his way into adulthood, is nothing but a delight.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Since New Year’s Eve, my wife and I have been slowly making our way through the oeuvre of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This week, after celebrating our twin sons’ first birthday, we watched his 1988 masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro. It turned out to be perfect for the occasion. This quiet, whimsical film follows two young sisters as they settle into an old house in the countryside, where they’ve moved to be closer to the hospital where their mother is convalescing from an unspecified illness. As their professor father attends to the house and his work, the girls spend most of their time exploring their new home and the surrounding forest, where they discover a number of friendly, magical spirits, from tiny soot-like beings that swarm mischievously through the house to the large, cuddly, titular beast who reigns over the woods. Though the specter of the mother’s sickness tinges the film with melancholy, My Neighbor Totoro is largely free of narrative conflict. Instead, it’s structured around the sisters’ mundane little missions—planting acorns in the yard and urging them to sprout, meeting their dad at a bus stop to deliver an umbrella—which are suffused with the dreamy unreality of youth. Like Maurice Sendak’s picture books or Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book, My Neighbor Totoro is the rare work that approaches the actual, unadulterated experience of childhood, in which the world is an infinite reservoir of wonder.

David Klion (newsletter editor): The guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine, best known as the frontman of the band Television, died last weekend at 73. Though never quite as commercially successful as its peers in the 1970s downtown Manhattan punk scene—a scene that also included Blondie, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Patti Smith—Television was enormously influential on the way alternative rock would sound over subsequent decades. Perhaps inspired by this classic Onion article, which mentions Television, I’ve been playing 1977’s Marquee Moon for my enthusiastic four-month-old daughter this week. I have a particular fondness for one of the gentler tracks, “Guiding Light,” which seems to anticipate the entire oeuvre of U2, one of the many bands to acknowledge Verlaine’s impact.

I’ve also been revisiting Will Hermes’s wonderful 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, which is a panoramic account of the diverse music scenes that exploded across New York City in the mid-1970s (amid the punitive fiscal crisis historians increasingly recognize as the beginning of the neoliberal era). In addition to Television and all the other aforementioned bands, Hermes covers everything from hip-hop to jazz to salsa to classical, all of which thrived as cheap rents attracted misfits from the outer boroughs and the suburbs and facilitated creative cross-pollination. It situates Verlaine in a wider context; while his talent was singular, it was realized through contact and collaboration and experimentation, as everything worthwhile is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pierre Le-Tan, who died in 2019, was a French artist and illustrator who collaborated with the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, among others. He was also, as he tells us in his marvelous volume A Few Collectors, a tireless collector of thousands of objects, for whom “collecting [was] both essential and completely useless.”

A Few Collectors is itself a collection, a series of illustrated vignettes about the collectors whose path he crossed over the course of a lifetime. There’s the collector who owned the dildo once in the possession of the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach; the former beauty who never married because objects were more important than men; and the people who own things that were once Le-Tan’s, which he had to sell when financial hard times hit.

Though art and artistic objects dominate, there is also the man who collects the wax models of the heads of criminals and, most fascinating of all, the man who collected crumpled pieces of paper: restaurant checks, letters, tissues. Sadly, upon his death his heirs flattened all these apparently worthless pieces of paper he had so carefully saved, destroying a lifetime’s worth of collecting. The tags attached to the crumpled objects, lovingly drawn by Le-Tan, go untranslated from the original French, so only the bilingual will know the sorrow attached to the crumpled letter paper, related to “Nicole, a bad memory,” or that the saved post-it note is described as “a minor, but charming” item.

My thousands of books will find a home with my son after I die. But how long, I wondered after reading A Few Collectors, will my collection of hundreds of bookmarks, picked up at bookstores from around the world, survive me?

Before you go!

There’s a new magazine from Jewish Currents contributors Madeleine Schwartz and Linda Kinstler that should be on your radar: The Dial, which calls itself “the world’s little magazine” and aims to cover stories from around the globe. The magazine’s first issue is devoted to the international fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy and includes stories from Poland, Ghana, Turkey, France, and more. Enjoy!