Shabbat
Reading List
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Since editing Jewish Currents Contributing Editor Noah Kulwin’s interview with the journalist Vincent Bevins on his book The Jakarta Method two years ago, I’ve been meaning to read Bevins’s account of how US Cold-War-era intervention in Indonesia, Brazil, and elsewhere supported deathly and authoritarian political movements in the name of anticommunism. I finally got around to it this month, and I’m glad I did. Through interviews with coup survivors as well as long-term on-the-ground reporting and archival research, Bevins offers an intricate and heartbreaking account of Indonesian politics in the 40s and 50s. He chronicles how a moment of possibility after the country freed itself from Dutch rule—during which the country’s independent Communist Party built an impressive coalition and was seen as a leader among Third World socialist movements—gave way to a 1956 anticommunist coup, followed by the mass killings and imprisonment of up to a million Indonesians for suspected “communism.” This was supported by US military training, intelligence, and propaganda.
Bevins also chronicles how the events of Indonesia reverberated around the world, serving as a template for similar violence in Latin America, including in Chile, where, Bevins shows, right-wing groups began graffiti-ing ominous “Jakarta is coming” messages in public in the months before Pinochet deposed Allende in a 1974 coup. (That coup led to the killings and forced disappearances of tens of thousands of the new regime’s political opponents.) Bevins chronicles the excitement and energy of young leftists in Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere who took a flexible approach to communist ideology and put their faith in social democratic movements, only to learn that their countries’ fate would be influenced less by their successful democratic organizing than by the heavy hand of the CIA and its anticommunist allies.
After finishing The Jakarta Method, it’s tempting to want to insist every American be made to learn about this history of US foreign policy—and sobering to remember the major right-wing backlash that currently rages against any attempt to make educational progress in that direction.
Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): If, like me, you prefer your prose poignant but plain-spoken, you really shouldn’t read Meena Kandasamy’s writing. Don’t get me wrong: having interviewed her, I’m convinced of Meena’s literary genius. I also like complex novels as much as the next person and get why stories need to contain non-linear chronologies, unreliable narrators, or a roving point-of-view. But Meena’s madness goes much, much further. While her new book Exquisite Cadavers and her bestseller When I Hit You are better known examples of Meena’s stylistic defiance (and might well merit their own reviews), it is her first novel The Gypsy Goddess that really inaugurates the genre of mutilated novels.
The book is ostensibly “about” a horrific massacre that took place in 1968 in a South Indian village, where upper-caste landlords locked 44 low-caste peasants—including pregnant women, infants, grandmothers—in a thatch hut and then set the hut afire to punish their crime of demanding higher wages. However, the book doesn’t so much depict a massacre as commit one, hacking and tearing at every conventional way of telling the story. The first chapter is about the novel’s first sentence. Meena shares several versions of it, imagines readers’ reaction to each, then revises it. A few pages in, she asks, “Are you still hunting around for the one-line synopsis and the sixty-second sound bite? Do you want me to compress this tragedy to fit into Twitter? How does one even enter this heart of darkness?” The sheer magnitude of the tragedy that is a peasant’s life in Tanjore district, then, seems to defy every attempt at painless narration.
It can be hard to stay with this generous explanation for the book’s tortured form, especially when the author spends time reproducing scathing criticisms of her book, (“its English [is] a crime against the language”); spending another chapter on a dozen possible titles for the novel, explaining that the one she settled on has nothing to do with the book, only with the publishing industry push to sound catchy; yet another chapter on an imagined Q&A with a confused reader (Q: “Why can’t you follow a standard narrative format?” A: ‘if that’s what you want, go read the following academic articles’). Is any of this self-indulgence really necessary to do justice to the story? I’m not sure I know. What the broken novel does do, though, is equip you for what is to come. “Hate is haphazard,” Meena writes, “with a mind of its own, and a reckless impatience...Even if we stylistically try to recreate the texture of every other old-maid’s tale...hate is not always obedient to plot.”
So it is that after Meena finally writes “Fuck these postmodern novelists” and gets into the “actual” story of the war between landlords and Communist peasants (it is less “postmodern” than the first half of the book, but only just), the story itself is as haphazard as the hate driving it. By the time the beatings, rapes, murders, and massacres appear interspersed with lawsuits, formal letters of complaint, association meetings, and gatherings at tea shops, you’re listening not because of attachment to a specific character whose humanity Meena has convinced you of but because of the intense believability with which the fury of the powerful and torment of the downtrodden scream off the pages in a discordant cacophony: refusing to explain themselves to the unconvinced reader, refusing to do work to make you care about these burning bodies or despise these arsonists, just putting you in front of the violence and leaving you there to do what you please. The choice to engage, to read the list of 42 names and descriptions of the bodies recovered, to figure out who the “I” is in each chapter—the assassin? the murdered?—and whether to believe them, is left to you. The author is too busy undermining her own authority as a storyteller and prose’s power to help you understand. This is what happens when a poet writes a novel. Read at your own peril.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Faced with the corpus of a prolific major writer, there’s something thrilling about beginning with a minor work. Certainly there’s much to recommend starting with the most celebrated masterpieces—the books where the writer’s vision finds its fullest expression—and deferring the rest until one’s finished what’s most essential. But the imperfection and obscurity that often mark minor works can make them particularly potent sites of entry, allowing more direct access to a writer’s idiosyncrasies and obsessions than the achievements whose acclaim may unwittingly conceal the work itself.
I felt this way about Exteriors, a 1993 book by Annie Ernaux, which I’d never heard of before I saw it at my local bookstore last weekend. (It was the only Ernaux they had; perhaps the more famous ones flew off the shelves after last week’s announcement that the French novelist and memoist had won the Nobel Prize.) Exteriors, translated into English by Tanya Leslie, compiles a selection of diary entries from 1985 to 1992, each briefly detailing a scene Ernaux observed in her home city of Cergy-Pontoise, a planned community built outside Paris in the 1970s. The project is conceived as a departure for a writer whose central subject is her own life. Here she aims to look only outward—and no further than exactly what sits before her eyes. “I have sought,” she writes in the preface, “to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.”
But Ernaux understands that even if it were possible to strip away all interpretation, to write merely what one sees would remain a way of writing about oneself, a self that emerges in the shape of what attracts its attention or escapes its notice. The book ends by articulating this principle; Ernaux, seeing a stranger who reminds her of her mother, reflects, “So it is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the subway or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galeries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again.” An index of surfaces thus becomes an account of the self distributed over space and time, returning to itself in endlessly shifting iterations.
This is not to say that the self subsumes those it observes: Exteriors is also a glimmering archive of other lives, whose richness springs forth like a shadow from the glimpses of gestures, scrawls of graffiti, bursts of overheard laughter. In the manner of Elizabeth Hardwick’s autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights, Ernaux perceptively evokes the worlds through which she passes, leaving some scenes’ meanings open, working others into aphorisms of startling brilliance: In songs one remains locked in desire. All storytelling operates along the same lines as eroticism. The transmission from reality to symbol is a form of release. As the entries accrue, this partial record of seven years of waiting rooms, subway cars, and supermarkets seems to exceed its own bounds even as it remains fixed within them, affirming the infinity latent in the most mundane encounter.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Though I’ve had the novels of Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness in my library for years, I’ve assiduously avoided reading them for just as long. I’ve assumed these works describing lives lived in rural Icelandic would be noble and uplifting. If there’s anything I hate, it’s noble and uplifting.
But my wife and I recently traveled to Iceland where, unlike most tourists, I fell in love not just with the landscape, but with the Icelandic language, which I am now studying. So I decided the time had come to read Laxness, and to start with what is widely considered his greatest book, Independent People. Reading this novel has been described as “life-changing,” and if that’s an exaggeration, it’s only a slight one.
Over the length of this epic work, a Nordic Zola novel, Laxness tells the story of the archetypal “independent man,” Guðbjartur Jónsson, known as Bjartur, working his holding in the Icelandic wastes, refusing to accept assistance or any ties, either of family or friendship or class. Bjartur, who struggles mightily to maintain and sustain the land and sheep he purchased with such difficulty, represents not only the Icelander who has fought nature and isolation for the thousand years of settlement in the country, but also—in his insistence that only independence matters, that any compromise with others, any acceptance of help from others, destroys that independence and must be rejected—the egoism and individualism that for Laxness the Communist is the cause of the perpetuation of the real enemy, capitalism.
Bjartur is a profoundly unpleasant character, perhaps the most profoundly unpleasant hero of any great novel ever published. The deaths of those near to him matter less than the loss of a sheep; losing his children and wife to death merits little more than a shrug: Life is that way, has been that way, and will always be that way. Misfortune for the greater world, in the form of World War I, causes the price of Icelandic products to rise, and thus is a good thing. He and his fellow farmers’ only regret is that the war didn’t last longer. Bjartur is not only independent and disagreeable but also indomitable, and the one chink in his seemingly impregnable armor is his confused feelings for the girl he raised as his daughter, Sollilja. Laxness keeps the humanity this injects into Bjartur subterranean, saving the key moment in their troubling relationship for the final few pages of the novel.
Even a society as small Iceland’s is subject to the blandishments of wealth, and just as in 2008, when the crash crushed Iceland harder than almost any other country in the world, Bjartur is buried under debt taken on in the expectation that the good times will last forever. Laxness tells us that “the free man of the famine years has become the interest-slave of the boom years.” There’s one cause for the miserable life of the crofters: “The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty forever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man’s protector, but his worst enemy.” But it is Laxness’s genius that his own hero doesn’t seem to accept this lesson. There is no neat tying-up of the tale.
I’ve always held up The Magic Mountain as exemplary of the kind of book whose continuation you’d kill to learn. I can think of no higher compliment for Independent People than to say that I regretted not being able to follow the characters of this magnificent novel across the wastes, hoping against hope that things will work out.
The French writer Annie Ernaux just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so we’re re-upping this recommendation of her novel, A Girl’s Story, from September 2021
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I just finished a strange little book of autofiction, Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. The author, now in her 70s, returns to the summer of 1958, when she was 18—her first summer spent away from her parents as a counselor at a camp in Normandy. Intoxicated by her newfound freedom, she fools around with the boys at the camp, one after another. The sex acts she describes are awful—she does not know yet how to experience pleasure or how to ask for it, and it’s just as well, because her “partners” are not the least bit interested. The others at the camp, men and women alike, treat her with derision and scorn. But she is unfazed. She is instead deliriously happy, “edified by the pride of experience, the possession of new knowledge.” Later, she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; with greater consciousness paradoxically comes a delayed feeling of shame at how she had been treated (“a girl’s shame”).
I connected to the subject matter (as I imagine many women, especially those who went to sleepaway camp, would). But it’s almost tangential to what’s at the heart of the book: the question of our relationship to our many selves through time. The author asks herself again and again why she is writing this book, this collection of scraps (sometimes there are only lists of evocative films or remembered song lyrics on the page, or a close reading of a single photograph). Sometimes “the girl of ’58,” as she calls her, is “she,” sometimes it is “I.” She is not grafting meaning onto events so much as undertaking an experiment of re-living, seeing if she can manage to exist in a past moment. It is a book that perhaps might not have been published by a less accomplished writer (Ernaux has published some 20 books of fiction and memoir); it is resolutely unsure of itself. I’m glad about that. The experiment, in this case, is more profound than a tidier work would have been.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Early next year, a new magazine of Black radical thought called Hammer and Hope will be making its debut. Excited for its arrival, a few of us decided to read the book that inspired the magazine’s name: Hammer and Hoe, historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s classic account of the Black workers in Alabama who organized with the American Communist Party during the Great Depression. The narratives of CP organizing that I’ve absorbed over the years, from Richard Wright’s Black Boy to Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism to Dorothy Healy’s California Red, have been centered in the big cities of the North and West. I knew in an abstract way that the party was, improbably, present in the South as well, and that its organizing there helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement—but had little idea of what this looked like. Reading Hammer and Hoe, I learned that the party itself was initially dubious about heading south, but ultimately chose to do so in the late 1920s—with alternately inspiring and terrifying results.
Just before the Depression, Communist Party leaders—who had initially seen the region too backward to organize in—began to take seriously the idea of organizing in the South after adopting the position that Black Southerners constituted an oppressed nation and a potentially revolutionary class. When organizers went to Birmingham, a city selected for its high level of industrialization, the party made few inroads with white workers, who with few exceptions hated and feared the prospect of interracial struggle. But Black factory workers and farmers alike eagerly got on board. Indeed, the party’s “outside agitator” status—its alien character as an internationalist organization rooted in the urban North and taking direction from the USSR—was not frightening to but welcomed by Black workers with little attachment to the state, and already practiced at clandestine organizing (union locals sometimes disguised their meetings as Bible study groups, for instance).
At the same time, the level of violence Black organizers encountered was staggering: The Klan, other militias, and state authorities tortured and murdered workers and their families for going anywhere near the union campaigns sponsored by the CP. Organizers were thwarted in a different way by Black middle-class organizations like the NAACP, which cherished their position as mediators between Black workers and white authorities. Kelley’s meticulously researched book makes clear that, given these circumstances, the improbability of organizing a Black workers’ movement in the South was in fact a near impossibility, and the fact that communist organizing took hold there at all—in the process, improving labor conditions for thousands of miners, steelworkers, and sharecroppers, and creating links between local Black radical traditions and an international workers’ movement—is the kind of 20th-century marvel we can only hope to see more of in the 21st.
Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): The weather has begun to get colder on the East Coast, and I find myself turning to “comfort” media: things that I’ve consumed and loved in the past. In my case, this means cartoons that I watch and rewatch, and comics that I read and reread. A few years ago, discovering that it was no longer online, I purchased the volume of Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell. I then lent it to a date (I should know better than to do that) and never got it back, but reordered it recently in anticipation of seeking coziness during the darker, shorter days ahead.
DCIGTH takes place in a version of New York City in which humans and mythical creatures live all together, navigating their joys, mistakes, crushes, losses, and aspirations. Darwin’s pet is a talkative manticore, his landlord is a minotaur, and a trio of stoner angels crash rent-free on his couch. Through a series of events in their younger lives that were largely outside of their control, Darwin’s best friend Ella has terrific karma—which, in this world, is acutely measurable—while his is abysmal. The characters’ choices and friendships are the heart of the story, and the art is gorgeous. The book has adult themes (drinking, sex, career blues) so it’s not for kids, but I feel a special kind of nostalgia when I curl up on the couch with a compelling comic book.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This has been a big year for the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese officer in World War II who, having been given an order to hold his position on an island in the Philippines until relief arrived, did so until 1974, 29 years after the war’s end. Earlier this year, Werner Herzog’s short, spare novel about Onoda, The Twilight World, was published in the US, and I recommended it highly here. We now have Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Forest, by the French actor-turned-filmmaker Arthur Harari, opening today. It is anything but short or spare, clocking in at nearly three hours. Some of the details in the film don’t appear in the novel, and vice versa. Onoda, we learn in the film, was not an ordinary soldier, but part of an elite unit: His dedication to the order to never surrender was that of someone specially trained for this purpose—which does little to change the maniacal nature of his commitment.
Onoda was not alone in his holdout. While Herzog’s book speaks of the comrades who stayed with him for varying periods before they were killed, the focus is on Onoda’s own mind and activities. But in Harari’s film the pointlessness of this last stand is multiplied by the filmmaker’s more thorough treatment of the small cadre of first three, then two, then one, then zero fellow soldiers. When, just a few years after the war’s end, a Japanese delegation (including Onoda’s father) goes to the island to track him down and convince him that the war is over, Onoda and his sole remaining followers become a perfect example, in miniature, of mass delusion, interpreting the straightforward message to give up as a coded command to continue their resistance.
Nature, Herzog’s great bugaboo in his films and in his Onoda novel, is in Harari’s film less an enemy than a supplier, its lushness not a disguise for hell, but a provider of shelter and tools. There is likewise no madness in Harari’s Onoda. With the exception of his demented breaking of the coded message that isn’t one, he remains a well-trained officer throughout the film. Even when a tourist brings him his superior officer, long-since retired from the military, who finally convinces him that the war is over, his reaction is an emotionless one: stoic acceptance.
The film, along with its grim realism, contains moments of deadpan comedy. Years into their wanderings around the island, Onoda’s last remaining comrade tells him he couldn’t have had a better commander—to which Onoda responds that he couldn’t have had a better second-in-command. All is well in their army of two.
Before you go:
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our upcoming event, “Reporting from Occupied Territory: A Conversation with Palestinian Freelance Journalists.”
On Tuesday, October 18th, at 12 pm Eastern, join journalists Lara Aburamadan and Dalia Hatuqa for a discussion about autonomy, precarity, storytelling, and politics,
moderated by New York Times Magazine contributing writer Rozina Ali. This event is co-sponsored by Jewish Currents and the Freelance Solidarity Project.
Strangely, as a young teen, when I was just beginning to think about politics, I thought abortion was wrong—if the war in Iraq was wrong because it would kill thousands of Iraqis, shouldn’t terminating a pregnancy be wrong too? That was how I thought about the issue. I no longer believe that, but my feelings on life, abortion, and babies have only grown more complicated upon witnessing my wife Emily go through labor, and then raising our Shayna together. Rabbi Miriam’s brazen defense of the right of a person to terminate a fetus was most provocative because Miriam, like me, also has a baby (also named Shayna!). Miriam said of her pregnancy: “Slowly slowly my future child became more and more real. And I was elated to meet my baby. I felt I loved her and in some intimate and ineffable way I felt I had a relationship with her. But in a beautiful Jewish contradiction, I also did not believe she was alive in me. She was not a person, not yet.” To be honest, I’m still struggling with how I feel about that—is it really the case that the fetus who became my beautiful daughter was not living, not a person, until her head came out into the world?
To be clear, even if I was sure a fetus was a living being of some sort, I would still be pro-abortion rights, a position in line with Sophie Lewis’s own provocative argument that “if the labor of pregnancy is productive of life, then interrupting that labor is—logically speaking—productive of death.” I am convinced intellectually by Miriam—and she marshals a powerful argument—though emotionally I’m unsure. I think it’s because I’m uncomfortable with the thought that my daughter Shayna, as a fetus, was not a living being. I doubt I’ll be able to come to a sure footing on the question. My continued wrestling with the issue is a testament to the power of Miriam’s sermon.
Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): I woke up to
an email in my inbox with the subject line “Welcome to Post-Fascism.” It
was a magazine newsletter referring to the fascist Giorgia Meloni’s
victory in Italy’s recent elections, an outcome that seems to have
shocked observers around the world. I know precious little about Italy,
but because some of that comes from the fiction of Elena Ferrante, this
outcome did not shock me. Ferrante’s magisterial Neapolitan Quartet probably does not
need me to recommend it because almost every major figure in the
literary and critical establishment has been recommending it for years.
But where most reviewers want you to read Ferrante for the books’
breathless prose, their candid depictions of womanhood, and their
haunting portraits of friendship, I urge you to read her books for their
portrait of a society structured from bottom up by reactionary forces.
The books follow the lives of two girls growing up in the slums of 1950s
Naples amidst the country’s postwar recovery, coming of age during a
burgeoning communist movement and growing old at its decline. Reading
the book jackets, you’d learn that the story is one of these women’s
complicated friendship, but it is equally a story of violence both
intimate and impersonal, inflicted variously by parents, siblings,
lovers, neighborhood strongmen, factory overseers, husbands, children,
the police, and most of all friends. Spectacular instances of organized
violence sometimes appear in the foreground (eg. a prominent fascist
moneylender is stabbed in his home; the local communist is arrested for
the murder) but more mundane forms of repression are constant (a father
throwing his disobedient daughter out of the window, boys hurling rocks
at girls who shamed them at school, brothers fighting for their sisters’
‘honor’).
And ultimately, the daily repressions are what determine the characters’ life trajectories. Perhaps the pivotal moment in the first book, My Brilliant Friend, is when a father refuses his daughter, the protagonist Lila, an education, setting her up for a lifetime of subjugation at home, at work, and beyond. The villains, it seems, are always those who love us, and our basest social instincts are always the ones we exercise at home. In the second book, The Story of a New Name, Lila observes as much on her wedding night as her husband, son of the dead neighborhood fascist, forces himself on her. “He was never Stefano, she seemed to discover suddenly, he was always the oldest son of Don Achille [who] was rising from the muck of the neighborhood, feeding on the living matter of his son. The father was cracking his skin, changing his gaze, exploding out of his body.”
Even if you kill the fascist, the fascism remains in the children, in the small gestures and big, in their love as much as in their hate. Even amidst a revolution without, relations and habits of domination remain protected and nurtured within—even amongst the revolutionaries themselves—ready to flower again when the time is right, as it now seems to be. Giorgia Meloni promises to protect “god, family, country,” and while Ferrante’s book says little about the country and less about god, it bares the fascist entrails of the family for all to see.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): God Save the Animals,
an addicting new record by the singer/songwriter/producer Alex G (stage
name of Alex Giannascoli), has a sonic template that I like to call—as a
compliment, to be clear!—“summer camp gone wrong.” The album assembles a
collage of beautiful and catchy guitar-backed melodies that are
frequently hijacked by pitched-up or pitched-down vocals, eerie layered
choirs, and distortion. It’s a fitting mood for the lyrics, which
wrestle in ways both touching and unnerving with the grand business of
life and its meaning, as Giannascoli fumbles with the promise and peril
of religion as a guiding light.
At times, religiosity is
considered in a dark, even mocking light: “God is my designer/Jesus is
my lawyer,” an autotuned voice croons on “S.D.O.S”; the song “Blessing”
offers a creepy whispered mantra that sounds more like a curse: “Every
day is a blessing / as I walk through the mud / if I live like the
fishes / I will rise from the mud.” (In a testament to Giannascoli’s
daring, he released this very weird song as the album’s first single.)
At other times, like on gorgeous love song “Miracles,” the reach for the
divine seems sincere, resulting in an expansive humanistic vision: “I
pray for the children and the sinners and the animals too/and I pray for
you.” The song, incidentally, also includes one of the more romantic
lines an indie softboi can come up with: “You and me/we got better pills
than ecstasy.” (If I’ve put you off by suggesting “God Save the
Animals” is a Christian record, don’t be alarmed—the album also includes
such lyrics as “I have to put the cocaine in the vaccine/walk out of
the doctor with immunity.”)
Overall, it’s a rare feat when an artist can lean into strangeness and surprise without sacrificing the simple pleasure of an easygoing hook—so it’s my pleasure to spread the Alex G gospel.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer):The
time is long since past when baseball was the great American pastime.
Though attendance is still high, it’s football and basketball that rule
the roost these days. But if sports have long been a way out of poverty,
especially for immigrants and their children, baseball remains a way
out of despair. While Dominicans and Venezuelans are prominent on the
field, those most desperately clinging to baseball as an escape route
are the much smaller group of Cuban peloteros for whom the sport is a
way to save both themselves and their families.
The Last Out, showing on October 1st on PBS’s show POV and
streaming all of October at PBS.org, follows a group of Cubans who,
enticed by an American agent to defect, temporarily settle in Costa Rica
in the hopes of attracting bids from American teams. Despite the
complexities of their situation (Cubans cannot be signed by American
teams unless they have legal residency in a third country, a process
that, as we see in the film, can take a long, long time), the three
players we follow are full of optimism—nay, certainty—that living the
American dream is just around the corner.
If in general the life
of an aspiring ballplayer is tough—an infinitesimal fraction of those
who are signed ever make it to the majors—our protagonists’ are
infinitely more miserable. Their agent, Gus Dominguez, who invests in
their futures by supporting them minimally until they are signed (when
he will receive 20% of their bonus), at first seems fine enough, but we
eventually learn he has spent five years in jail for smuggling Cuban
ballplayers and is in bad odor with the bigwigs in the sport. Tryouts
held to spotlight the players are poorly attended and fruitless, and
they begin to slack off in their training, which makes the prospect of
being signed grow even more remote.
Like so many immigrant tales, The Last Out
is a story of disillusionment. One player, appropriately named “Happy,”
is expelled from the agent’s program and eventually takes the long,
dangerous trip from Costa Rica to the United States. (He gets closer to
the majors than anyone else when he meets the Cuban-born Houston Astros
first baseman Yuli Gurriel. Gurriel—who is the son of one of Cuba’s
all-time great players, and who won the American League batting title in
2021—is the fulfillment of the players’ dream.) Another, a promising
pitcher, simply disappears, though the filmmakers later track him down.
The third player, a pitcher casually considered lazy and unserious, is
the only one still playing ball at the film’s end—though in the
Dominican Republic, not the US, where he plays “alongside major
leaguers.”
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): A few weeks ago, I sat next to an older woman on a platform upstate waiting for a train back to New York. The chunky jewelry she was wearing basically screamed Jewish psychoanalyst, and we struck up a conversation about the recent Jewish Currents issue, which deals with psychoanalytic themes (reminder to subscribe!). She recommended a YouTube series called Group, which explores a “process group,” a form of group therapy where individuals react moment-to-moment to one another and to the dynamics of the group itself. Only a minute or two into the first episode (they generally run between 15 and 20 minutes), we learn that process groups differ very starkly from, say, dinner party discussion. People are saying things that they would never, ever say in polite company: They are expressing sexual attraction and even arousal toward one another; noting anger and annoyance with even slight or casual comments or behaviors; straightforwardly asking for and receiving love and validation. I consider myself a conflict-forward person without a lot of social anxiety, but some of these interactions had me cowering under my pillow. But I kept watching, because I was surprised by the extent to which I felt myself to be a part of the group, noticing my own emotional reactions to the events in the room (the group members are played by actors but led by the real psychoanalyst Elliot Zeisel).
This became acute at the end of the season, when the group had to address a harmful situation that played out between a man and a woman without rushing to judgment or dismissal, and also without resorting to overarching political ideas or frameworks that might not be shared between the members. This sidelining of politics and recommitment to digging in to raw feelings and relations challenged me enormously, and yet it was helpful to remember that there are other ways to skin a cat, as it were; that there might be other tools in our toolbox. I sometimes found myself frustrated by the lack of resolution—with all the new therapy shows out there, it’s easy to forget that therapy isn’t quite teleological—but I ultimately respected the fidelity to the form. And some of the discomfort and frustration I felt at the end of the first season was instructive in a way that I don’t often experience in relation to television. The second season takes place during the pandemic and tries to bring the reality of Zoom life into the group. I couldn’t stomach that, frankly, but I do crave more. I hope they start meeting again in person soon.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is a slim novel about an obsession so immense it dominates, and eventually destroys, the lives at its center. Haber charts the relationship between two art critics—the unnamed narrator and his friend from his Oxford days, whom we know simply as “Schmidt”—whose camaraderie has soured into enmity. From his deathbed in Berlin, Schmidt has sent the narrator a long-winded email reiterating his disdain, initially inspired by the narrator’s stray remark on the nature of criticism and cultivated over the following 13 years. The narrator catches a flight to Germany for one final confrontation. Most of the novel takes place on this pilgrimage, feverishly zigzagging with the narrator’s thoughts across time and space while tracing the critics’ intertwined careers, and the life of Count Hugo Beckenbauer, the (fictional) syphilitic 16th-century Dutch artist who produced the painting that has consumed Schmidt and the narrator for decades. The pair is convinced that this piece, also titled Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, is an unsurpassed masterpiece. In paragraph-long chapters of one to four pages, the novel details their hyperbolic adulation—as well as their corresponding disgust for most art, including Beckenbauer’s two other surviving works—and compulsive attempts to express the painting’s singular, apocalyptic genius. In sinuous, recursive sentences infused with equal parts reverence and venom, Haber constructs a darkly parodic portrait of aesthetic devotion and intellectual friendship, in which the redemptive practice of collaborative interpretation becomes a cage that two egos relentlessly rattle.
David Klion (newsletter editor): We all know social media is bad for us; as a recovering Twitter addict, I know it better than most. But as with any other addiction, our behavior on social media platforms is easily trivialized, and our minds instinctively recoil at the idea that our silly time-wasting posts have any kind of real-world impact. What Max Fisher effectively conveys in his new book, The Chaos Machine, is that these platforms really are distorting our material reality in tangible and horrifying ways, and that the harms they cause are intrinsic to their design and consciously enabled by the for-profit entities that built and manage them. Fisher, a reporter for The New York Times who helped co-found Vox (which, as he acknowledges early on, is one of a whole cohort of news sites engineered to take advantage of social media algorithms), is exceptionally gifted at explaining complex topics in plain English, and he brings that talent to bear in this account of how Facebook and its peers broke the world, which includes on the ground reporting not only in Silicon Valley but in countries like Myanmar—where, Fisher convincingly argues, Facebook is directly complicit in genocide.
A good antidote to social media is private, closed online communities where a few dozen like-minded people can share articles, ideas, and common idiosyncratic interests without performing for a larger crowd. I hope Fisher won’t mind my acknowledging that he and I are in one such community together—and while that community certainly doesn’t agree on everything, we agree that Fisher has managed to scare us into reconsidering the many hours a day we spend poisoning our brains online.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): There is no political historical documentary that equals Patricio Guzman’s classic multi-part film The Battle of Chile, which follows the birth, tribulations, and death of the Popular Unity government of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Allende led Latin America’s noblest attempt at the democratic construction of true socialism—an attempt bloodily crushed on September 11th, 1973. Guzman, at the time an ardent young leftist and a supporter of Allende, was arrested in the wake of the US-backed right-wing coup and held in the prison camp that was the National Stadium, where the great communist folksinger Victor Jara was murdered. In the decades since, Guzman, living outside Chile, has rarely wandered from the theme of the crushing of the hopes given birth to by the Popular Unity government. His film about the sea to Chile’s west (The Pearl Button) is meant to remind us of the disappeared leftists thrown into it by the Pinochet government; his film about the Atacama Desert (Nostalgia for the Light), is likewise intended to show the families of the disappeared searching for their loved ones’ bones buried there.
Guzman is now an old man, and the newly released My Imaginary Country is his account of the year and a half between the outbreak of demonstrations in Chile in October 2019 over a 30-peso increase in subway fares, through the campaign to authorize the writing of a new constitution, and on to the election of the 36-year-old leftist Gabriel Boric. Guzman’s wonder at this unexpected return of what he thought forever lost is felt in every shot and interview.
Popular Unity was a movement of left-wing political parties; by contrast, the social movements that arose in 2019 were anti-political, and though one might expect an old-line leftist like Guzman to be skeptical of violent protests involving thousands of young people throwing stones at cops, that is not the case. Though he never mentions it, in The Battle of Chile the cops fired at fleeing crowds, while in My Imaginary Country the young men and women, in their masks and helmets, give as good as they get. Another striking difference is that every interview subject in the new film is a woman. Women occasionally appear in The Battle of Chile, but they’re presented here as the major force of change in Chile. Young women barely out of high school are part of the constituent assembly drafting the proposed new constitution. The message of My Imaginary Country is that Chile has changed, and that the changes have just begun.
Sadly, we now know that Guzman’s unbridled optimism crashed against reality, and the proposed constitution, which consecrated a hundred rights and was the most progressive ever proposed anywhere, was soundly defeated in a referendum earlier this month. It’s impossible to fault Guzman, now 81, for believing that the country he imagined in his twenties and thirties was about to become a reality. Hope dies last.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): A few weeks ago, staying at someone’s house in the Catskills, my friends and I found a closet full of board games including one distressingly called Monopoly: Brooklyn Edition. Since it’s unhealthy to breathe in too much country air without thinking about the face of the real estate state back home, we played. Released last year, Monopoly: Brooklyn Edition is much like the Atlantic City-based original, except the properties run the gamut from Coney Island and Prospect Park to the Hot Corner, a sporting-goods store in Midwood that I can only hope made it onto the list through an inspiring act of grift. An hour into the game, I had monopolies across the cheapest corridor of the board, which included properties in my own real-life neighborhood of Crown Heights: the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Jewish Children’s Museum, and the Weeksville Heritage Center, which commemorates one of the first free Black communities in the 19th-century US. I built hotels on all of them, which I could do cheaply because the property values were so low, sending rents skyrocketing and immersating my friends. At some point in the process of discovering slumlordism I was like—”you guys I think this game is doing it on purpose?”
As it turns out, it was! The internet revealed that Monopoly started out as a dystopian satire called The Landlord’s Game, patented by a progressive reformer named Elizabeth Magie in 1904 to demonstrate “the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” Don’t get too excited, it doesn’t include an account of primitive accumulation or a vision of class war (a corrective I assume is supplied by the cult classic Marxist board game Class War); everyone starts out with the same amount of money and has an equal chance of going to jail. But once property starts to get concentrated in the hands of one or two players, it is basically impossible for anyone else to rebound—even if an impoverished player has a couple of decent holdings, they will inevitably get mortgaged in order to pay for the unasked-for privilege of living in a city with someone else’s hotels. It is manifestly unfair and unpleasant; you build nothing, the board is ugly, and you simply go around in circles until enough people give up. And yet you want to win, maybe just in order to stop!
That all of this was lost on me as a kid, when I played a zillion games of Monopoly with my friend Adam, and simply that the game became as successful as it did, suggests something striking about the power of gamification, the way a simple cycle of punishment and reward infuses aggressive delight into a world where the best possible thing that can happen to you is that you land on a space called “Free Parking.” I’m 50 pages into Malcolm Harris’s forthcoming book Palo Alto, and am learning a ton of fascinating stuff about the proletarianization of California, but if you’re looking for a take on expropriation that can be absorbed while getting slowly, depressively drunk, I highly recommend the thought experiment called Monopoly.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Writing and reporting on mental health treatment is frequently dogmatic, posing two ideologies as diametrically opposed and arguing passionately for one of them: psychiatry or anti-psychiatry, psychoanalysis or more solutions-oriented approaches, etc. It’s a rare feat, then, that Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves, a deep dive into the complex mental health experiences of several individuals that considers how patients’ narratives of their own mental illness can help or hinder treatment, avoids such easy dogmatism. Aviv’s deep reporting and close attention to the actual experiences of her subjects—including Naomi, a Black woman in Minneapolis incarcerated after throwing her twin sons into a river during a mental health episode; Bapu, a woman in Chennai who may be experiencing schizophrenia but believes she is having mystical connections with gods; Roy, a depressed American Jewish doctor responsible for a famous lawsuit targeting a psychoanalytic treatment center for not providing medication; Laura, a high-achieving young woman from a debutante WASP background prescribed mountains of drugs to treat her depression; and Aviv herself, hospitalized at age six for a seemingly precocious form of anorexia—assures that she is attuned to the nuances of their individual experiences, rather than itching to slot them into a predetermined thesis. Still, Aviv is clear on the types of systems and approaches that consistently fail to serve patients, from carceral settings in the US to colonial models of mental health treatment in India. Those who enjoyed hannah baer’s piece in our Summer 2022 Issue on the discarded religious roots of mental healthcare might also be interested in Aviv’s exploration of the possibilities for therapeutic treatment that better takes into account the full communal contexts of patients’ lives.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For fans of Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten, may I introduce...my sister, Rachel Angel. I know, I know—but I’ve been listening to the album, Midnite Heart Attack, a country-inflected record about getting entangled in a relationship and then slowly getting free, on repeat since it came out last week. The singles—“I Can’t Win” (boozy honky-tonk vibes) and “Closer to Myself” (breakup anthem banger)—come early on the record, but this week, I’ve been really into the “Baby Can I Come Home to You” / “Many Nights” / “Daddy” trio. Check it out!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Julia Mintz’s Four Winters tells in a simple and direct way the story of the 25,000 Eastern European Jews who fought as partisans during World War II. Mintz tells her story strictly through the words of a group of now-elderly Jews, both men and women, who lived through the four winters of the partisan war. Historians have no say in this; Mintz wants us to hear firsthand the daily experience of the relative handful who fought.
Unlike Jewish partisans in countries like France, many of whom were affiliated with the Communist Party, the fight of these partisans was not an ideological one. Simple survival was all that mattered. One woman’s mother told her that if the Germans came for the family, “just run; maybe one of us will survive.” Some joined strictly Jewish units, while others served with Red Army units. And, as one of the men admits, “we were scared.”
We hear the incidents that led these men and women to take to the forests and join the armed groups. Joining was not a straightforward matter. The partisan bases “were not a hotel”; you had to know someone who would tell you where to go and then hope that you’d find the guerrillas and be accepted among them.
Once there, the shock was immense. These peaceful, largely urban Jews had to live in tents in the open and to learn how to use weapons they’d never touched in their lives. Learning quickly was essential to survival. We are told they learned they had to shoot “a foot below the target.” And they learned quickly, “because when your life depends on it you learn quickly.” Sabotage methods had to be learned, like the proper method for derailing trains.
It was not only bravery that was required; chutzpah was just as necessary. How else could these people, most of them teenagers at the time, be capable of threatening Polish villagers that failure to follow their orders, to provide them with weapons, or to take care of an orphan Jewish child would result in their homes and villages being set on fire?
Four Winters is constructed largely of the talking heads of the partisans, with stock footage inserted occasionally. But there are also photos taken of individual Jewish fighters as well as units—some by Faye Schulman, who is interviewed in the film. She was a photographer before the war and continued taking and even developing photos in the forests, putting a blanket over her head to make an ad hoc dark room. In many of her images, there is a beautiful young woman, often wearing her chapka at a jaunty angle. This is Schulman herself. Her proud poses and her concern for her appearance speak eloquently of the hope that animated these men and women.
