Shabbat
Reading List

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): Earlier this month, I watched the 1986 movie Heartburn for the first time. I didn’t realize until later that the novel from which the film is adapted—Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled account of her cataclysmic divorce from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein—turns 40 this year. The anniversary has inspired a spate of celebratory pieces, framed as correctives to the condescending and chauvinistic reception that greeted both book and film in the ’80s. A representative critic complained at the time that the novel was “a great misuse of talent . . . whose only point is to nail Carl Bernstein,” who cheated on Ephron when she was seven months pregnant with their second child. The movie, which bombed, was likewise called “one-sided” and castigated for its “tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.” (The film would have been stronger, a third critic suggested, if it had explored the motivations of the fictionalized, philandering husband; perhaps, for example, he was “disgusted by [his wife’s] pregnant body.”) According to the recent biography of Mike Nichols, who was Heartburn’s director, the hostile reaction took such a toll on him that he checked himself into psychiatric care.

The commentariat was right about one thing: The film is firmly situated in its protagonist’s point of view, faithful to the texture of her experience. This is the source of its defining feature, which is not spite but a fully realized precision. Every setting is rich with sociological detail (a New York apartment hung with sophisticated theatrical posters; a Washington, DC, townhouse dusty from a perpetually unfinished renovation). Many of the strongest scenes explore the pressure on the Ephron character, Rachel, to accept her husband’s affair, an expectation that warps her social milieu. After the adultery is revealed, Rachel’s best friend makes a habit of asking whether she is “being good”—in other words, whether she is resisting raising questions to which she will not like the answers. Rachel is played by a dauntless Meryl Streep, whose performance captures the embodied vulnerability of the character’s position. Heavily pregnant, she flees to New York City, balancing her toddler and her overnight bag on either side of her enormous belly, schlepping between a group therapy session and a magazine office where she goes in search of work. It’s the specificity of her reaction to what yet another critic dismissed as the “banal” fact of adultery that makes the betrayal land with such force. If Heartburn indulges in revenge in its final moments—in the form of a key lime pie that we watch Rachel bake, knowing and yet not quite believing its slapstick fate—then at least, as the saying goes, it is sweet.

Dahlia Krutkovich (fellow): When I entered college, I boasted a spotty attendance record at a Reform Sunday school as my only experience with religious education, and as a result, I had no real sense of Jewish tradition. I was lucky, then, that one of the most exciting professors at my liberal arts college taught a course on critical interpretations of the Book of Exodus, which I took my sophomore year mainly out of interest in the instructor and only vague curiosity for the subject material. I was even luckier that the primary accompanying text for that class, Avivah Gottleib Zornberg’s commentary The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on the Book of Exodus, became my formal introduction to Jewish textual interpretation.

Zornberg, who holds a PhD in English literature from Cambridge and whose father was the chief Rabbi of Scotland, approaches Exodus and its accompanying midrash—stories written by Torah scholars that explain the Bible’s apparent omissions or errors, which a classmate of mine earnestly referred to as “Bible fanfic”—as if they are, together, structured like a psychological self. Her interpretative method, she writes, hinges on the concept of the plain language of the text—the redemption of the Exodus story as it is written—being a conscious layer of meaning, while the midrashic stories and exegeses function as “unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning.” She writes in her introduction to the volume that, “The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative.” If the Exodus story is the constitutive narrative of Jewish religious peoplehood, placing it alongside the centuries’ long effort to retrieve and address the trauma of the flight from Egypt offers a compelling gestalt.

The readings and interpretations that follow are some of the most humanistic and deeply kind I’ve come to encounter in modern commentaries. In her essay on the first chapter of Exodus, where the narrative opens on the Israelites’ sense of selfhood impoverished by generations of enslavement, she hones in on the midrash’s preoccupation with mirrors. Placing Lionel Trilling and (perhaps obviously) Jacques Lacan alongside Rashi, Zornberg recasts this apparent preoccupation as an incipient celebration, one that implicitly represents the first moments in which the Israelites are able to reconstitute themselves as a people ready for divine covenant.

Now that I have also had the pleasure of reading some more of the more typically dry, chauvinistic debates and commentaries, I’m relieved and grateful for having had such a wise, introspective, and pluralistic introduction to Judaism as polyphonic textual tradition, one full of accumulated knowledge and accidental assertion.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Recently, while visiting my sister in Spain, I decided to delve into the work of one of the country’s most celebrated novelists and picked up Javier Marías’s 1992 novel A Heart so White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Marías, who sadly died last September, begins the narrative with a literal bang: A young woman, just back from her honeymoon, goes to the bathroom during a family lunch and abruptly shoots herself, leaving no clues as to why. We soon move forward in time and learn that that young woman was the second wife of the narrator’s father and the sister of the narrator’s mother, who married her dead sister’s widower after her death. Over the course of the novel, these details and their backstory are revealed to the narrator only slowly, changing how he sees the nature of his own relationship to his wife, Luisa, and to the concept of marriage itself.

Marías tells this story in a manner that can only be called Proustian: He frequently launches—mid-plot—into page-long searching meditations on the nature of human behavior. But if Proust tends to obsess over minute details—how one observes light hitting the water; how a memory flits into the brain; how people negotiate a conversation in polite society—Marías’s digressions are broader, concerned with life’s major philosophical questions, and therefore perhaps an eerier narrative insertion. “Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn’t yet been born or doesn’t know they’ll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death,” the narrator muses while thinking about how husbands and wives come into each other’s lives by chance. And unlike Proust’s leisurely (maybe even glacially) paced narratives, Marías’s plot is taut and quick, at times unfolding like a thriller.

As the narrator slowly learns about his father’s dark past, he is led to dwell on the inherent instability and insecurity of trusting in another person. One must enter a marriage, he concludes, with the knowledge that it is possible everything will change, a third-party could unexpectedly enter the frame, a partner could one day be provoked to infidelity, or even to violence. At times, he describes this fear as one that’s gender-neutral and reciprocal—he or his wife could each one day become villain or victim.

But the specter of violence and power that hangs over the novel is decidedly male: The hushed, overheard stories that populate the narrative are those of philandering men with the very lives of trusting women in their hands. The narrator and Luisa appear as paragons of a newer, more modern Spanish generation: They are both working professional translators, they communicate well, she seems to have relatively equal say in the relationship. But still, they are beset on all sides by darker stories. In a hotel room in Cuba, they hear a man speaking to his younger, dependent mistress, promising to kill his sick wife back home. On a job overseas in New York City, the narrator stays with a friend and witnesses her attempt to navigate a dating scene of shady men demanding sex tapes. Can the narrator’s loving heterosexual marriage evade these oppressive legacies? Marías leaves us with that question.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo can be counted on for at least two, if not three, new films a year. Hong is not only their director; he is also their producer, screenwriter, editor, and composer. His productivity is greatly aided by his consistent use of straightforward plots, the same actors, and a simple aesthetic that takes advantage of even simpler means. But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of complexity.

His new film, Walk Up, stars Kwon Hae-hyo, who usually plays very Hong-like characters. Here he appears as a film director who takes his daughter to meet an old female friend, an interior designer. Following Hong’s signature style, the camera, placed at a medium distance from the characters, simply runs, with no movement or cuts, as the conversation runs its leisurely course. While events in each scene continue to flow unedited before the camera, in another Hong-ian turn, once the director leaves to meet a potential financier for his next film, the flow of time becomes an uncertain thing. The “chapters” of the film occur at varying intervals, with the passing of time signaled by the presence or absence of a character from a previous scene. The arcs of relationships—parental, amorous, and amical—rise and fall both within the scenes and between them; it is for us to reconstruct what occurred in the gaps. But time is not exactly linear; variations of the same events seem to recur, and the film’s end circles back to the past.

Hong’s simple setups and minimal editing make him one of the cinema’s most literary directors: The characters’ words matter. Though lacking in flash, he is also extremely cinematic. He respects the integrity of time and space immensely, and it’s precisely through the long takes that his characters have the room to reveal themselves to each other—and to us. But what is most cinematic is his ability to make undercurrents clear without hammering us over the head with them. It’s the glances, the gestures, the space between the characters that make Hong’s films so extraordinary.

Before you go!

Together with the Foundation for Middle East Piece, Jewish Currents is co-sponsoring a virtual event this coming Tuesday about how the Kohelet Policy Forum—a right-wing, US-funded Israeli think tank—is shaping law in policy in the the US and in Israel/Palestine. Read more about it and sign up here!

We also wanted to announce there will be no Thursday or Friday newsletter next week. Chag Pesach Sameach!

Jess Bergman (contributing writer): At the end of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, the titular sex pest and erstwhile puppeteer, Mickey Sabbath, has lost virtually everything: two wives, a beloved mistress, his artistic practice, his job, his home. In exile from his life, Sabbath returns to the beach town where he grew up and pays an impromptu visit to his senile cousin Fish. Inside Fish’s untidy house, he finds “his own mother’s treasured sideboard,” and inside that sideboard, a carton of items that once belonged to his older brother Morty, a pilot who died in 1944 when his plane was shot down over the Pacific. To Sabbath, these material traces—an electric shaver studded with hairs, a red-white-and-blue yarmulke, a miniature ceramic fish—are shattering: “Just things. Just these few things, and for him they were the hurricane of the century.”

I thought of this melancholy encounter with a life’s detritus last weekend, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, where Roth’s personal library and other archival objects are on permanent display. The exhibit, located at the top of the palatial marble stairs that Roth immortalized in Goodbye, Columbus, consists, as you might expect, mostly of books. But alongside the inscribed galleys from admiring peers and a fat second edition of Webster’s unabridged Twentieth Century Dictionary you’ll find the sleek Eames Chair and ottoman where Roth sought relief from chronic back pain, a wastepaper basket and felt-tip pens from his study, a pennant from Weequahic High School. My favorite item was a worn-looking Mets cap with a dusty smudge on its brim.

I stopped by the exhibit while in Newark for Philip Roth Unbound, a three-day festival held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It was a celebration of what would have been Roth’s 90th birthday—and a kind of reclamation after the disastrous rollout of his authorized biography in 2021. On Saturday morning, I took a seat at the back of a packed auditorium for “Letting the Repellant In,” a panel featuring the novelists Susan Choi, Gary Shteyngart, and Ottessa Moshfegh, moderated by Ayad Akhtar. The conversation explored the provocations in Roth’s work, both the deliberate and the artless, from his defiance of Jewish respectability politics to his frequently (but not, in my view, uniformly) misogynistic characterizations of women. While each panelist had their own unique relationship to Roth, they were largely in agreement that disgust, discomfort, and the expression of subterranean desires are essential ingredients of quality literature. Choi movingly defended the occasionally grotesque sexuality in Roth’s oeuvre as part of a vulnerable dedication to depicting embodiment: not just the irrepressible libido of the young man, but also the infirmity of the old. (This insight prompted minor disagreement from Moshfegh, who self-identified as “a prude.”) After a quick lunch break at the wood-paneled deli Hobby’s—where every table is set with a complimentary ice bucket of pickles—I caught an afternoon reading of Roth’s 1959 story “Defender of the Faith” by Morgan Spector, star of HBO’s 2020 adaptation of The Plot Against America, whose actorly yet restrained performance was almost as impressive as the fact that he took a single sip of water while speaking for an unbroken hour and a half.

Attending only a small slice of events in the very middle of the festival, I was mostly spared from the kind of portentous remarks usually saved for opening and closing ceremonies. But there was a moment during the audience Q&A portion of “Letting the Repellant In” when a familiar flicker of anxiety emerged: Given the debates about representation, likeability, and “problematic” authors roiling liberal college campuses and MFA workshops, one attendee wondered, would Roth’s work continue to be taught? As someone who came to his novels outside of the classroom, and who has always understood his reputation as owing more to ordinary readers and literary critics than any scholarly edifice, I confess I found the question a little beside the point. Looking around at the rapt audience—which skewed older, but included a decent smattering of my generational peers—it was hard to muster too much fear about the durability of Roth’s legacy. At the very least, I thought, the proceedings would have flattered his insatiable ego.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I’m not sure what’s going on: Usually I walk around like Jay Sherman in the 90s animated cult classic The Critic (catch phrase: “It stinks!”). But lately I’ve seen so much good art—and even more surprising, a lot of it Jewish. Are these the fruits of mid-pandemic? Are we entering a more fertile phase in Jewish art? (If you think the answer to the latter question is “yes” and have theories about why this may be, reply to this email and let me know.) Either way, last Friday night, I attended one of the sold out performances of Alexandra Tatarsky’s solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Abrons Art Center, which I loved. From the first sequence, in which Tatarksy is a cartoonish lounge singer, wriggling behind the mic while performing a song about death by canned fish—a number she follows up by cracking a can of anchovies in oil and stuffing them into her mouth with her fingers—I was equal parts captivated, confused, and almost pleasurably repelled.

Tatarsky is a clown—that’s how she defines her otherwise difficult to describe practice of being weird onstage with props. For almost a decade she has been working on an interconnected series of absurd existentialist performances about nothing that she calls Seinfeld (get it?), and which takes as a loose text Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 18th century artist bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. (She mocks the sound and pretensions of this word, bildungsroman; she often makes words physical in this performance, processing them through the body like a ball traveling a Rube Goldberg machine.)

The headline for Talya Zax’s piece about the show in The Forward (which I would be surprised if she chose) proclaims that the show is “about” the Holocaust. I don’t think that’s right, but it does seem that Tatarsky has found the object she needs for her ongoing performance of painful, meaningless (hilarious) nothing by leaning into the contours of a kind of mid-century Jewish trope. I’m reminded here of the Jews that surround Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer: grotesque, lecherous, dramatic, with an almost primordial relish—a talent, perhaps—for suffering. (“Gentiles have a different way of suffering,” Miller writes. “They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.”) It is a very old Jewishness, a nod to the history of Jew-as-onstage-metaphor for all of suffering humanity—made new and strange by the sheer extent of its strangeness. The show has finished its run, unfortunately, but since it seems that Tatarsky is committed to keeping up the bit indefinitely, there will undoubtedly be another chance to catch her.

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): Before I read historian and museum curator Richard Rabinowitz’s new book, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was the example that came to mind of a narrative that uses inherited objects to tell a family’s story through the generations. But I suspect very few Jewish Currents readers are walking around with netsuke—the tiny wood and ivory sculptures centered in de Waal’s narrative—in their pockets. And de Waal’s family, the cosmopolitan Ephrussi clan whose wealth was rivaled only by their co-religionist friends, the Rothschilds, may feel a tiny bit out of reach for most of us.

From more familiar objects, Rabinowitz weaves together what, for many Currents subscribers, is probably a more familiar story. Using the skills he cultivated in his curatorial work for New York City’s Tenement Museum, Rabinowitz brings alive the non-religious but strongly Jewish world of early 20th-century immigrant Brooklyn. Each chapter of Objects of Love and Regret is structured around an ordinary item once found in the Rabinowitz family home in East New York. Each object’s history explores a different dimension of his family’s early struggle to hold on to tradition and community while becoming “American.” In examining a simple bottle opener, for instance, Rabinowitz recounts the story of his then-teenage mother teaching his grandmother how to use the tool as part of an American kitchen. In another chapter, Rabinowitz honors a wooden cigar case that housed rarely useful but never-to-be-discarded odds and ends. Beach chairs, first used for homemade picnic lunches in local parks, became used for stoop sitting as the family left the tenements and moved to a neighborhood of attached houses. The history of the chairs says all that needs to be said about the loss of community. As stuff, the objects might seem like nothing special, but over the course of Rabinowitz’s storytelling and research, they come to feel very special.

The book is a lot more than a walk down memory lane. Rabinowitz sensitively tracks the upward mobility of his parents alongside the social fragmentation and physical decay that reshaped Brooklyn between the 1930s and 50s. As he investigates these changes, he presents both what happened in his family’s neighborhood as well as a vision of what could have been, a parallel that is simultaneously heartbreaking and thought-provoking as Brooklyn continues to evolve. Long-time readers of the magazine will recognize and appreciate being immersed in a neighborhood that has long since disappeared; newer Currents subscribers will be introduced and welcomed into that era.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): While watching the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s latest film, Rimini, I wracked my brain trying to come up with another filmmaker with as grim a vision of humanity. Lars von Trier—whose shamelessness in degrading his actors, particularly women, puts him and Seidl in the same class—comes close. But in Seidl there is less aestheticizing of humanity’s sorry state. He is not only a filmmaker who sees us as morally and emotionally fallen beings, but one for whom our physical ruin is omnipresent. His cruelty to his characters isn’t physical; rather, it consists in casting an unflattering gaze on human bodies and their desires. His films are so many portraits of Dorian Gray—he puts the hidden image of Wilde’s classic repeatedly on display.

Like much of Seidl’s oeuvre, Rimini—which continues its run in New York at the Quad this week and will open in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal on March 31st—seems to be a documentary, and if you go into it accepting that premise, you’ll wonder at every moment how the participants agreed to take part. But it is, in fact, a carefully constructed fiction film, tracing the extremely plausible downward trajectory of Richie Bravo, an Austrian easy listening singer, played with chilling realism by Michael Thomas. Once a big star, he has now landed in Rimini, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, where he performs in hotel dining rooms before crowds of middle-aged, German-speaking tourists, all reliving their lost youths through this rather absurd-looking schlockmeister in his sub-Elvis costumes. Earning almost nothing from his shows, Bravo supplements his income by sleeping with female admirers, who pay for the very dubious pleasure of doing so. Rimini itself is as broke as Bravo: The film, which takes place in winter, shows a desolate resort city in its off-season, the streets and beaches covered in snow, the empty hotels looking as rundown as the people, many of whom are refugees from Africa sleeping outdoors or killing time waiting for nothing.

Bravo’s life is shaken out of its pathetic rut by the appearance of an attractive young woman who he attempts to pick up. But he soon learns that she is his long-lost daughter, who has come to claim years of unpaid child support. In a typical Seidl touch, Bravo accepts that he owes the money and promises to turn it over—but in order to do so, he must commit the basest act of a very base life.

I fear I might have made Rimini sound like an unattractive experience, and it’s certainly not a date movie. But it is an exhilaratingly clear-eyed portrayal of human sadness and delusion.

David Klion (contributing editor): Just over a year ago, my colleague Nathan Goldman wrote in the Shabbat Reading List that he was reading Moby-Dick to his infant twins, who were born premature and were still in the NICU at the time. “Now that the boys are in separate rooms, I read each chapter to one and then the other, so we can all share in the same surges of language seeking the unspeakable,” Nathan wrote. “I hope by the time we reach the final page, we’ll all be home together.”

It was a lovely sentiment, and it stuck with me, though I had no idea that in less than a year I would become a NICU dad myself. I didn’t end up reading Moby-Dick out loud to my daughter until after we took her home, 11 weeks after her premature birth, and with many medical challenges still ahead of us. The wonderful thing about newborns is that you can read anything to them; they aren’t listening for the story or the characters or the themes, but for the cadences of their caretaker’s voice. We read her children’s books too, of course, but personally I find that I come alive as a reader when I try to channel Melville’s 19th century prose, even if that means stumbling over the occasional antiquated word. At five and a half months, our daughter doesn’t need to know anything about the New Bedford whaling industry or veiled homoerotic themes or biblical allusions to register her father’s intensity when recounting all of the above. For my part, this strange, lyrical novel (which I started years ago but never finished) is best appreciated out loud, with a captive listener—ideally one whose mind is still taking form. I don’t expect she’ll remember any of this when she’s older, but I have faith some of it will linger deep in her subconscious, and that someday she’ll be able to revisit it on her own terms.

This week, I’m exiting the role of newsletter editor, though I will remain with Jewish Currents as a contributing editor and will continue to write for the magazine. When I launched the Shabbat Reading List three years ago, it was my hope that readers would get to know the people who make up the Jewish Currents family as human beings, beyond our most considered editorial output. That goal has been fulfilled many times over, and I’ll always be proud to have built this newsletter and its ever-expanding audience. This isn’t goodbye, because I’m not going anywhere, but I do want to thank you all for returning to the newsletter week after week. It’s been an honor; let’s keep in touch.

Jessica de Koninck (member, JC Council): One of the things I love about reading poetry is that it encourages me to view different aspects of my own life in new ways––a secret pleasure that sometimes feels deliciously indulgent. As a gift to myself, I first read Hila Ratzabi’s new poetry collection, There Are Still Woods, for Tu B’Shevat, and I have since read it several times more. Her poems pay close attention to all that lives, and I have felt my own perspective enriched by that close attention. In the poem “End of the Anthropocene,” Ratzabi writes, “There is a way to be an animal on earth”; that phrase appears to be at the heart of her project, as she proceeds to study that way of being. The poem continues:

I’m surviving, I’m branching

The leaves are t-t-t-t-tapping

The poet becomes the tree. For Ratzabi, everything living––including leaves––is capable of speech. Even in Ratzabi’s most dystopian moments, she is able (to borrow a phrase from the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski) to “praise the mutilated world.” In “Goodnight Earth,” she writes:

How the new species

crawl out of broken cells,

hatched chicks, new eyes

all over their fur

glowing in a thousand directions.

Whatever terrible things we humans may do to the planet, these poems seem to say, life will still somehow win out. She finds even in plant life the qualities she both admires and would like to see in people. For example, in “Forest Arrangement” she writes:

The trees are so good at waiting

I forget they are alive.

They watch me. I insist on it.

How could they not, being everywhere?

The clear sense of unity among and all living things animates her writing. To read Ratzabi is to remember that life around us can be a source of abundant inspiration; and to connect with that sense of awe and wonder reminds us to do a better job of stewarding our planet. Filled with poems of love and grief for the earth, There Are Still Woods makes urgent the truth that the planet is ours for the saving and may yet be saved.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I spent a few hours this past weekend reading Your Hearts, Your Scars, a slim, potent collection of essays by the writer Adina Talve-Goodman (z”l) about the fullness and the complexities of a life lived with “two hearts in my possession: one inside, and one out.” The first is the donated heart she received at age 19; the second, the single-ventricle one she was born with, which led her to experience heart failure at age 12. “Is your suffering dear to you?” she asks herself three times in the opening essay, quoting a story from Talmud. There and elsewhere, Adina treads through questions of ableism, strength, and shame with lightness and humor. In another essay, she entertains a suitor’s suggestion that there might be something zombie-like about living in a body containing a dead stranger’s heart, admitting there were days when she “did walk about the world feeling a lot like death in drag”—but ultimately she finds the greater horror lies in being cherished for her scars.

The collection itself is unfinished—Adina died of a rare and swift cancer caused by post-transplant immunosuppressants in January of 2018, 11 years after she received the donor heart. It’s easy to lose sight of the specific gifts of this book within the many layers of her living legacy: In a postscript, Hannah Tinti, the One Story magazine editor who helped edit this collection, characterizes Adina as “a hero in colorful scarves and overalls” with “a weakness for glitter and Cher.” Adina was the managing editor of One Story, a performer and trained clown, and the daughter of two rabbis. (Her mother, Rabbi Susan Talve, is known for opening her St. Louis synagogue to BLM protesters in 2014 and 2017.) Even after the transplant, Adina held on to the heart she was born with—not, she tells a nosy doctor, because it’s “a Jewish thing to take your organs home with you,” but because she wanted to keep what was rightfully hers and maybe to find out what a “dying heart” contains. The heart was released to her “in an urn through a funeral parlor,” she recounts drily, “as my own ‘remains.’”

The essays here deal in a troubled economy of gratitude and gifts, where one person’s death becomes another person’s life. But they are populated with the seemingly lightweight details of young adulthood: makeout sessions in basements and in cars, awkward breakups, too-long conversations with strangers, encounters on late-night subway platforms. On a walk to an Iowa cemetery on the ten-year anniversary of her transplant, where she means to pray but realizes she cannot recall the words, Adina remembers that the second-century miracle worker Shimon bar Yochai is said to have lived with “one eye laughing and one eye crying.” These essays devote themselves to living in this space, refusing the ostensible weight of their subject with a bright, insistent humor.

Adina was a new friend the year we both lived in Iowa (her first and my last), warm and sharp and generous and funny. Reading these essays lent new valences to my memories of hiking with her in the woods near my house, of sharing cocktails one night at a dance party that turned out not to be dance-y enough, of burning intentions in her backyard under a new moon. I was moved by the way a voice really can stay alive in print, how encountering Adina in these pages made her briefly, vividly present. There’s a moment in one essay when she bristles at being called “pretty” by a nurse, and concludes that what the nurse must mean is that she looks “a lot like life.” It’s a phrase I want to use to describe this book, which is too brief, and incomplete, but full of life regardless.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Mark Mazower’s history of Greece during World War II was, for me, a great revelation. The story of the killing fields of Eastern Europe is well known, told over and over again from every conceivable angle. Mazower’s account of the less familiar horrors of the Nazi war in Greece can only leave the reader with unbounded respect for the Greek people, who fought first against the Italians and then against the Germans. Mazower has since written an excellent history of Salonika and, most recently, of the Greek Revolution of 1821, which led to the Greeks’ liberation from Ottoman rule.

My knowledge of the Greek Revolution was severely limited—mainly to the story of Lord Byron and the philhellenes (foreign admirers of Greece who joined the fight)—and given Mazower’s particular affection for the Greeks, I was expecting a tale of heroism against all odds. But The Greek Revolution is a story with few real heroes, and certainly not one of unblemished freedom fighters standing up to oppression. The reality is far more interesting and far more human.

Initially launched by a group of idealists, the revolution soon became a swirl of many wars, all of them marked by brutality. As part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece had a sizable Turkish community, and the revolution was an ethnic and religious war as well as a war for independence. There was no Greek nation, Mazower makes clear, and regional ties to local notables—local bandits, even—were stronger than bonds with any of the men who posed as political leaders of the struggle. Civil war within the Greek camp was constant, as were assassinations. Plunder was a strong if not principal motivation for many of those who fought the Turks, and accounts of looting fill the pages of Mazower’s book. Murder of civilians was carried out by both sides. This situation was a shock for the hundreds of philhellenes. Many, Mazower tells us, wondered who were the oppressed and who the oppressors; on the ground, things were not as clear as they had seemed from a safe distance. Mazower makes this tale of crossed loyalties and constant back-stabbing vivid and exciting.

On another note: There’s a film opening this weekend at Film Forum—and running for one week—that I wasn’t all that happy with, but which I’m certain will interest many readers of Jewish Currents. Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ‘45 documents the amazing accomplishments of the Labour government that trounced Churchill in the election of 1945 and proceeded to carry out a program unimaginable in today’s UK, or anywhere else. In just a couple of years, under the leadership of Clement Attlee, and the truly great Nye Bevan, Labour created the National Health Service; built decent public housing; and nationalized the mines, as well as the rails, the airlines, and transport of all kinds—upending the world as it was. It’s a marvelous story, told by men and women who lived through it. But Loach, ever the Labour leftist, is unable to explain how it all came crashing down, except by resorting to the simplistic explanation that it was all top-down and the workers didn’t control industry. Loach’s picture of a socialist Britain will inspire hope in many, if not in me.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): To call Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention extremely detailed would be an understatement. The 2011 biography of the Black Muslim leader by the late Manning Marable, one of the most esteemed historians of his generation, reaches into every nook and cranny of Malcolm’s life and pulls out something interesting. Somehow, Marable does it without the book ever feeling like a slog. As with any work about Malcolm, the subject’s far more famous autobiography, which Alex Haley wrote with Malcolm’s cooperation, looms large over this book. Marable, making a case for another authoritative biography in the shadow of this totemic work, deals with his position by frequently referencing the autobiography, using archival and government sources as evidence to highlight its convenient omissions and debunk some of its more hallowed myths. With little pathos, Marable spends a good chunk of his biography examining how Malcolm exaggerated his pre-conversion life of crime to increase the drama of his prison time and support the narrative of the Nation of Islam delivering him from sin; more salaciously, Marable also posits that Malcolm may have cheated on his wife Betty and had a sexual relationship with a man for money, two assertions that upset his family greatly. (Ta-Nehisi Coates delves into the controversial notion that Malcolm engaged in gay activity here.) While I can’t help but enjoy the gossipy intrigue the book sometimes trades in, Marable’s reassessment of Malcolm’s much-debated political and spiritual transformation from Nation of Islam devotee to Black Power movement pioneer is far more important.

If you’ve read the autobiography or watched Spike Lee’s movie that adapted it, you’re familiar with how Malcolm turned his back on the Nation of Islam’s bizarre and sectarian take on Islam and race. According to Marable’s account, those works capture the broad strokes of Malcolm’s transformation, but the details in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention complicate their otherwise straightforward narrative. Marable shows how Malcolm flirted with rejecting the Nation’s ideology before he formally left the fold, and how he bounced between praising mainstream civil rights leaders and calling them “Uncle Toms”—sometimes in the same week!—while he was still in the Nation. In other words, his transformation into a more orthodox Muslim and a proponent of involvement in mainstream politics happened in fits and starts, not all at once. Marable also spends a great deal of time on Malcolm’s overseas travels, which included stops in the Middle East and Africa, where he met with the likes of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and Palestine Liberation Organization officials. It was there that his fascination with Pan-Africanism and his flirtation with socialism crystallized.

Marable ends the book in the only place you really can: the assassination of Malcolm X by Nation of Islam members. Marable demonstrates that the NYPD and FBI had no interest in solving the case, and that they arrested the wrong Nation members who were ultimately convicted. Evidence he uncovers in the book points to a Newark Nation of Islam member as one of the culprits. In 2021, the two men pinned for the murder had their convictions thrown out—a testament to Marable’s careful work.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Now that my 13-month-old twin sons have mastered the art of seizing and paging through books, we’ve ended up spending most of our reading time on board books designed to withstand the tugging of tiny, shockingly strong hands. But for last night’s bedtime story, I reached for a long-neglected paper favorite: Du Iz Tak?, written and illustrated by Carson Ellis. This imaginative tale—which follows a cast of whimsically rendered bugs who discover a sprout that soon develops into a leafy plant, which, in turn, becomes a vibrant social space—is composed entirely in a made-up bug language. It’s hard to say what difference this makes to my kids, still early in their journey into speech, but as a parent I love the way it brings me closer to their view of the world. Usually, reading to them means speaking words I understand and they don’t. But as I read the strange syllables of Du Iz Tak? aloud, we all share the experience of struggling to comprehend, delighting together in the interplay of confusion and sense.

Though Ellis’s book is decipherable—or at least I think I’ve begun to parse it!—the experience reminds me of a remark the Italian designer Luigi Serafini once made about his beautiful Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of imaginary phenomena featuring surreal illustrations and a nonsensical language produced by automatic writing. “The book creates a feeling of illiteracy,” Serafini said, “which, in turn, encourages imagination, like children seeing a book: they cannot read it, but they realize that it must make sense (and that it does in fact make sense to grown-ups) and imagine what its meaning might be.” By throwing adults out of the stable certainty of meaning, Du Iz Tak? similarly facilitates that pleasure in bewilderment—and the struggle to understand.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When I was informed of the existence of a volume of the fables of Vasily Eroshenko, I knew it was a book I had to read. Eroshenko has been described as a “blind left-wing Esperantist”—i.e., a speaker of the constructed international language Esperanto—a combination that is obviously quite rare. His appeal to me is obvious, since I’m legally blind and an Esperantist as well, though a lapsed one. (I’ve translated works from the communist Esperanto movement of the early 20th century; part of my marriage ceremony was performed in Esperanto; and the ketubah my artist wife created is written in English, Hebrew, and Esperanto.)

Born in a Ukrainian village in 1890, Eroshenko lost his sight at age four, but this did nothing to prevent him from living a life of activism and frenetic movement. He spent years in Japan, where he was deeply involved in both the Esperanto and revolutionary movements, associating with men who would form the core of the Japanese Communist Party. He later moved to China, where he was less happy but still ran in remarkable circles with some of China’s most important intellectuals. His travels allowed him to survive the extermination of the Soviet Esperanto movement, and he finally returned to his birthplace in 1952, where he died that same year. He was apparently a somewhat difficult man, but his political and linguistic activism bespeak a commitment to human brotherhood and solidarity.

And yet, however optimistic Eroshenko’s beliefs might have been, his newly published collection of Aesopian tales, The Narrow Cage—featuring anthropomorphized insects, fish, and a variety of quadrupeds—presents a tragic vision of life and humanity. These tales, bleak beyond compare, are clearly expressions of Eroshenko’s lived experience as an outsider. While they frequently invoke notions of “selfless love” and “self-sacrifice” as the ultimate good, the reward for self-abnegation is almost always betrayal and death. Creatures of all kinds are called on to free themselves from slavery, but it is the potential liberator who is turned on and slaughtered by the enslaved. The Narrow Cage reveals the darkness latent in Eroshenko’s anarchism, in which death is the ultimate anarchist. As one of its incarnations says in the story “Two Deaths,” echoing Bakunin: “All must die. It makes no difference to me. For I am an anarchist. I am an equalizer! I kill flowers and birds and men and women and children. Ah, what fun it is to reap destruction on living things.”

Before you go!

We leave you with one final recommendation from Jewish Currents Press: The second printing of the Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah is finally here! We think this beautiful hardbound edition featuring footnotes rich with anecdotes, notes on the authors’ intentions, and crucial context about the movement, will make a meaningful contribution to your Passover seder for years to come. Domestic orders placed by March 16th will arrive before the first night of Passover (April 5th). Order yours today!

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!