Shabbat
Reading List

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!

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!