Shabbat
Reading List
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.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I’ve been watching the fabulous second season of Reservation Dogs, about four Native American teenagers growing up on a reservation in eastern Oklahoma. Meanwhile, my husband has insisted we rewatch Transparent, a show that debuted in 2014 about a Jewish family in Los Angeles whose patriarch comes out as a trans woman late in life. It’s been an interesting experience watching these shows side by side; both are dramedies that portray their subjects’ milieus with striking, in-group specificity and verisimilitude. To be sure, these are very different milieus: If the architectural centerpiece of Transparent is the spacious, multimillion-dollar mid-century Pfefferman family home in Pacific Palisades (with a pool that is the centerpiece of some of its most memorable scenes), the centerpiece of Reservation Dogs might be the squat, boxy waiting room of the Indian Health Service (IHS) clinic, where slumped bodies wait endlessly under checkered ceiling squares of fluorescent light.
And yet, there is a common thread running through both shows, a shared anxiety about the erosion of tradition and cultural authenticity over time. Both the Pfefferman kids and the kids on the rez are culturally marked in dozens of different ways—in their speech and their foodways and their common referents, they are not entirely assimilated. And yet, they are not altogether comfortable with their own rituals and traditions either. In Reservation Dogs, lines from Star Wars end up in the before-meal grace. In Transparent, a Yom Kippur break-fast ritual begins with everyone holding a bagel over their heads (?) as they fumble toward the motzi. In a particularly resonant scene in Reservation Dogs, Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis, who continually steals the show) enlists two old-timers to reverse some “bad magic,” a curse she put on the head of a rival teen gang that is coming back to her threefold. The old-timers know the shape of the ritual, which unfolds alongside a river, but when it comes time to chant, they end up belting Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Across the river, the spirit of a fallen Native American warrior (the hilarious Dallas Goldtooth, actor and activist), who often appears as a spirit guide to the teens, chants along to the music in the traditional style. The wind in the reeds picks up. It’s working. The scene reminded me of Transparent’s portrayal of ancestors sharing physical space with the living—as when Ali Pfefferman, wandering around a “wimmin’s festival,” stumbles through time to 1933 Germany, to the looting and destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s visionary Institute of Sexology, where she watches her great-aunt Gittel’s arrest by Nazi-supporting youth. There are other ways to know things, these shows seem to be saying. We know even without knowing.
Dana Bassett (development director): Have you ever thought about what your dreams sound like? I had not, until I read Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives by Lavender Suarez, which bills itself as a manual for artists to learn about and get in touch with their ability to listen as an aide to the creative process, but which might as well be subtitled “How Listening Shapes Our Lives” for a general audience. I believe that listening—or perhaps more accurately, hearing—is an aide to anyone who wants to connect deeply with other people and the surrounding world. As someone who identifies as “not an artist,” connecting with people through conversation is the spice of my life. I loved how this book paired technical information about how the ear works with practical advice on how to be a better listener. I did not particularly love the New Age-y tone, but was able to suspend my skepticism in this case. I am also the type of person who buys wine bottles based on what the label looks like, and similarly I bought this book because the cover jumped out at me. It is a lovely object: The text is large and the pages feel satisfyingly thick, like construction paper. The cover is marbled blue, green, and purple, and the pages of each section of the book correspond to those colors, with darker, monochrome, also marbled “Sonic Inquiry” pages interspersed throughout, as well as delightful illustrations and quotes by the likes of Pauline Oliveros and Sun Ra.
I bought Transcendent Waves more than a year ago on my first trip back to my favorite Miami bookshop, Dale Zine, just after becoming fully vaccinated. It’s traveled with me on various trips, languishing in my backpack from Miami to Chicago to New York and back. Once I finally cracked it open and read the foreword, a charming story about the sound of conch shells by Beck’s mother, the artist Bibbe Hansen, I was hooked, and read the whole book in one sitting. The first (blue) section is titled “mind/ body” and outlines how listening works by detailing the complicated and beautiful mechanisms that enable us to hear. It also explains what sound waves are, as well as various phenomena of hearing and feeling sound and rhythm. I was particularly fascinated by the concept of brainwave entrainment, which is basically the idea that we naturally synchronize with our surroundings, like when you feel literally “moved” by the rhythm of a song.
The second (purple) section is titled “creation/ expression” and is about the communication and absorption of sound. This section is the most specifically addressed to creative practice, though I think it is much more widely applicable. I particularly appreciated the discussion of sound’s relationship to “flow” and how we might change our relationship to the world around us based on our response to what we hear. I enjoyed thinking about listening as an active effort we make, rather than a passive activity we cannot control. One aspect of listening this section alludes to, but does not directly discuss, is patience. Recently, I watched a series of short videos produced by James Robinson called “Adapt-Ability” for The New York Times, and after I read Transcendent Waves I happened to watch the one on stuttering, which is a condition I am intimately familiar with through a very close friend who was also my college roommate. I highly recommend watching this and all of the “Adapt-Ability” videos (start with the whale eyes one), but the relationships between time, sound, and empathy were particularly interesting in light of Transcendent Waves. I realized communicating with my friend both through and about his stutter has taught me how to be a better listener and more sensitive to the diverse ways in which we communicate.
The last section of the book (green) is titled “internal/external” and discusses things like noise pollution and the impossibility of true silence. As for the inquiry pages, many of them present dichotomies, like “what do you think the first sound you hear when you’re born is?” or “… when you die?”, but the one I can’t stop thinking about reads “are there any recurring sounds in your dreams?” It had never before occurred to me to listen to my dreams, and I had no relationship to the sound of my subconscious. Do I listen to music in my dreams? Do people’s voices sound the same as in my waking life? Every morning since the book posed the question to me I’ve been waking up trying to recall the sounds in my dreams: What was the conversation like? Did those ocean waves make a sound? What does it sound like when I’m dreaming in some version of Spanish?
All and all, this book is a short and easy read that I would recommend to anyone who cares about self-improvement—or who is just looking for a fun and engaging book that looks good on your shelf and offers a pleasurable and practical reading experience.
Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Every once in a while, an excellent short story collection comes along to wake you up from the reading doldrums and to be read in a handful of days (or even in one sitting, depending on the luxury of your time). Hilma Wolitzer, now in her nineties, published such a collection last year: Yesterday a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. The majority of the stories were written in the 1960s and ’70s; some of them follow the same married couple over time, while others stand alone, but all are tales of domestic life, ranging from the deeply moving to the quite funny. The last story was written in 2020, and is some of the best writing about the early months of the pandemic in New York that I have read to date.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When we finished watching Mathieu Amalric’s dizzying, dazzling new film, Hold Me Tight, which opens today in New York and next week in Los Angeles, my wife asked: “Did you get it?” I did. What I didn’t say was that halfway through the film—which jumps back and forth in time and between geographical locales with no explanations or signposts—I was certain of what it all meant, and that certainty was, it turned out, totally groundless.
This is a film in which the ground is never solidly planted beneath the viewer’s feet. The motivations and actions of the main character, Clarisse (in a remarkable performance by the Luxembourgeoise actress Vicky Krieps), are either inexplicable or simply off. Perhaps Clarisse is even mad. As the film begins, we see her walking out on her family in the early morning hours, getting in her car, and telling a friend who works at a gas station and who asks if she is fleeing that she needs to see the sea. This, then, is a film about a woman in an unhappy marriage, and the subsequent scenes showing her husband to be obtuse and angry about her flight confirm this. Or do they merely seem to confirm this?
The film advances and Clarisse’s abandoned family goes on with its life, as the children grow up and Clarisse’s husband slowly comes to terms with his wife’s departure. But there are signs that something else is actually going on. Some of them seem significant as they occur, but of what? Is Clarisse remembering these events or is she imagining them as a way of justifying her abandonment of her family to herself? Or is it something else entirely?
Amalric, one of France’s most important actors, has directed his sixth film in so gripping a fashion that when the final reveal comes a few minutes before the end, all the clues suddenly explode into daylight. Hold Me Tight initially could have meant many things, but in the end it only could have meant one. I’ve watched the film twice, and the second time I was shocked by how subtly Amalric parcels out the solution throughout the film—a solution we refuse to accept because it’s too horrible.
*****
This week, Julie R. Enszer, the editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom, has a remembrance of Elana Dykewomon, who ran the journal from 1987 until 1994:
Novelist, poet, playwright, activist, lesbian, feminist, and proud Jewish dyke Elana Dykewomon died from cancer on August 7th, 2022. Elana lived a life that centered lesbians and valued their lives and perspectives.
Her creative output was substantial. Her 1974 debut novel Riverfinger Women is a classic among lesbian readers. Her double award-winning novel Beyond the Pale (1998) tells the transnational story of Gutke and Chava, highlighting lesbians in Jewish history. She also wrote a short story collection, Moon Creek Road (2003), and numerous poetry collections.
Wide-ranging coverage of her death—from her local East Bay Times to The New York Times to The Times of Israel—would have surprised Elana. These obituaries provide a narrative of her life, but they do not highlight the politics of her adulthood: solidarity with Palestinian people and a critique of the Israeli government.
Elana grew up in a Zionist family, as many news outlets reported, and identified as a Jew throughout her life. As an adult, Elana separated her Jewish identity from her family’s Zionism and remained committed to Jewish culture, history, and identity. In Evelyn Torton Beck’s iconic collection Nice Jewish Girls, Elana wrote, “it is crucial to say, yes, I am a lesbian and I am a jew whenever it is necessary to be counted.” Elana was present and counted in many places, including The Tribe of Dina, edited by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, and numerous issues of Bridges, a vital Jewish feminist periodical. Most recently with Judith Katz, she edited Sinister Wisdom 119: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century (2021). Elana also made significant contributions to fat studies in her work.
In the 2002 poem “My Mother and the Wars,” Elana gives her mother an article by Letty Cottin Pogrebin “critical of Israel government policy.” Her mother responds: “Anything Israel does / to defend itself is necessary,” while she searches “through her clippings file for columns on the other side.” The familial dance continues, and Elana muses:
Am I still in adolescent rebellion, could I be among
the self-hating? Don’t I remember how she and my father fought for Israel,
and why? “They want to drive us into the sea.”
Mom, you can swim.
Elana’s wry humor brings levity to the serious and difficult conversations.
In Milk and Honey, the 2011 collection I edited, Elana’s poem “An Eastern/Western Country Song,” carries the epigraph, “for my mother with whom I can discuss almost anything.” It begins:
We don’t talk about Zionism any more
because I say
we’re on the wrong side of a brutal war
and you say
the Arabs would push us from the shore
The poem continues in that dialogic fashion, ending where it began: “let’s not talk about Zionism any more.”
Other Jewish lesbian-feminists joined Elana in her critiques of war, nationalism, and Zionism, including Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Irena Klepfisz, and Clare Kinberg. Together with Elana, they provide a rich legacy for resistance today.
Elana was always fierce in her politics, which, over the years, were wide-ranging. She articulated a vision of lesbian separatism that was as equal in its power to mobilize and inspire as it was to alienate other lesbians. For all her political ferocity, she was generous and kind and caring.
The only balm I find in imagining a world without her is knowing that we continue her work.
*****
Before you go, one last thing: this coming Monday, September 12th, Jewish Currents Executive Editor Nora Caplan-Bricker and Contributing Writer Linda Kinstler will be discussing Linda’s new book, Come to This Court and Cry, at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Linda also recently discussed the book with Contributing Writer Helen Betya Rubinstein for this newsletter.) You can sign up for the Harvard event here.
Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): Earlier this summer, I picked the novel First Love, by Gwendoline Riley, out of my mail pile nearly at random. I had never heard of Riley—an English writer in her early forties who has been steadily accruing literary acclaim since she published her first book 20 years ago—or of the novel, her fifth, which came out in the UK in 2017, and will be released in the US next month by New York Review Books, alongside the newer My Phantoms. If I’d had expectations, First Love would have upended them. It’s an unusual novel, full of the negative space that exists between people—its 166 pages contain many stretches of dialogue in which most things go unsaid—and of the competing interpretations that swim in that void.
First Love is a Cinderella story of sorts, though an unflinchingly unromantic one: When it opens, its protagonist, Neve, has recently married Edwyn, an older man she moved in with 18 months ago, trading her solitary life “on the dole, in the North”—as he throws at her during one of their many horrendous fights—for coupledom in a roomy flat in a quiet part of London. No one seems more surprised by this than Neve herself, except possibly Edwyn: They are, she says, “two people who’d always expected, planned, to live their lives alone.” Marriage sometimes seems to have made them no less so. Neve believes that it’s Edwyn’s “dream world, his symbol world, that we were dragged into” during arguments, his cruelty addressed less to her than to what she is made to signify, “outfitted in colours, slogans, that I could not see.” As Neve reflects on her own history—her childish and domineering father; her passive and self-pitying mother—the reader wonders whether she, too, is rehearsing old patterns, giving some truth to Edwyn’s furious claim that he is fundamentally unseen. On the outside, it’s all new terrain, but internally each of them wanders the same old pocked and dangerous territory. But perhaps, by accommodating herself to Edwyn, Neve is in fact overcoming her habits: Maybe, she thinks, it was actually her old life of “snap-twist getaways” that echoed her mother’s itinerant loneliness, her father’s carelessness with people and money. In Riley’s subtle novel, the question of which interpretation holds more truth is irresolvable. Still, the close world of Neve’s marriage is leavened by hope that people can change at least slightly—can be transformed by the practice of giving and receiving care and affection, even if only some of the time.
The narrator of Riley’s most recent novel, My Phantoms, which was published in the UK last year, also struggles to throw off a suffocating emotional inheritance. There are other commonalities between the two books: While Neve is a writer, My Phantoms’s Bridget is an academic; both grew up bouncing between a self-absorbed mother and a petty-tyrannical father, and the scenes of their childhoods are sometimes interchangeable. But whereas First Love is the story of an uneasy marriage, My Phantoms studies a strained mother-daughter relationship. And while the structure of First Love is more conventional, gaining dimension from varied settings—Neve goes to meet friends for coffee, to a writer’s residency, to a therapist’s office—My Phantoms keeps its frame claustrophobically, almost experimentally narrow. The reader exclusively sees Bridget with her parents, or thinking about her parents, or—very occasionally—discussing her parents with other people. The rest of her life is sketched only cursorily: She lives with her psychoanalyst boyfriend and their cat. We understand the distance Bridget has traveled from her mother largely through her disdain for the older woman’s disavowal of agency. At one point, she accuses her mother of getting stuck in a “note of disappointed expectation.” “I think you feel like a bargain has been broken,” she says. “You understand that a deal was never struck, don’t you?” But a cold, sometimes cruel superiority peeks out from behind Bridget’s composed acuity, suggesting that she, too, holds tightly to her disappointments. The novel dramatizes what many of us can’t help but know: However consciously we reschool ourselves in adulthood, we retain fluency in our family of origin’s emotional idiom, a language we never unlearn.
When recommending a novel, there’s an urge to say something superlative. But First Love and My Phantoms, despite the pleasures of their unusually precise psychological portraiture, feel in many ways of a piece with a familiar strain in contemporary fiction—it’s not hard to think of other first-person novels of self-determination narrated by 30-something writers or 40-something academics. (Though Riley’s characters, contra the flatness of affect often associated with the subgenre, are bright with vitality even when they’re insufferable; Bridget’s mother, for example, has a flinty charisma—what her daughter calls her “announcing-ness”—that wins her admirers even as it shields her emotional incapacity.) It’s a genre of novel that I find myself less drawn to lately—a tendency I’ve been more conscious of since reading Jewish Currents Contributing Writer Raffi Magarik’s wonderful piece in our Summer issue, which discusses the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s attempt to turn away, as she has put it, from “the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who . . . just writes about herself and through herself,” toward a 19th-century-style narrator who “sees more and has a wider view.” In a recent roundtable on fiction in The Drift, the novelist Alexandra Kleeman wrote about feeling an even more extreme “hunger for the world” when reading: “I’d like to see a novel with no people in it, no anthropomorphic anythings, no characters at all.”
But even in the grips of this particular literary appetite, there was something especially appealing about My Phantoms, which defamiliarizes the first-person form by doubling down on its narrowness. The title itself speaks to this quality: Bridget refers in the novel to her parents’ “spectral associates”—the appreciative audiences that always factor into her father’s far-fetched stories, and the persecuting choruses that drive her mother’s hyperbolic complaints, neither of which seem to exist as advertised. What are the parents Bridget presents to the reader but her own spectral associates—not people, but dramatis personae? She, too, is traversing an inner landscape, which implies through its very airlessness the existence of an exterior that she is forever trying to reach.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In the past year, we’ve gone from having no JC staff babies to having five, with several more on the way. Suddenly, on our morning Zoom meetings, there are babies gurgling and crying out of frame, sucking down bottles or giggling at the screen. Curiously, the only people “having” babies on staff right now are men—to a person, every single man on the payroll has either just become a father, is about to become one, or is growing their brood. As a woman of childbearing age, this presents a circumstance my therapist might call “provocative,” an opportunity—whether I like it or not—to reflect on my own choices and desires. I struggle to explain exactly when and how I knew I did not want to be a mother; there is at least some evidence that this knowledge was present even in childhood. And yet as long as I’m technically capable of producing a child—and I still have a few years yet—it seems there is never absolute comfort in this decision. Even as I know I will not do it—even as I affirm and love my life without it—there is the tiniest place in my psyche that keeps waiting for something to change, for something or someone to “save” me from my decision. I almost said “sad” decision, though I myself don’t think of it as sad, and certainly don’t think I need saving. But such are the ambivalences of being a non-mother, even now.
If all this sounds familiar, perhaps you have already read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood—which I approached over a period of months with a similar ambivalence, “accidentally” leaving the book on a plane and then variously avoiding and embracing it, like a charismatic but emotionally taxing friend. It is difficult to say whether I liked the book, a diaristic autofiction of a woman wrestling with the question of whether or not to have a child in her waning childbearing years. Sometimes it seemed so direct, like she was just transcribing my thoughts. In quantifying and verifying her lifelong aversion to motherhood, she writes: “if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendships, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.” Of the difficulty of resolving against motherhood: “She doesn’t want a baby—but her body doesn’t believe her. On some level, no one believes her. On some level, she doesn’t even believe herself.” Of the social pressure to have a child: “To have a child is like being a city with a mountain in the middle. Everyone sees the mountain. Everyone in the city is proud of the mountain . . . A mountain, like a child, displays something real about the value of that town. In a life where there is no child, no one knows anything about your life’s meaning.” There are many of us walking around feeling this way. So why is this the first time I’ve ever read it on the page? We’re deep into a trend of writing about being a mother—and indeed, those stories are important and undertold! But it appears that those women who wrote and didn’t have children perhaps thought it better not to draw too much attention to that fact, lest it present a challenge to their authority on the big ideas and experiences of life.
Like me, Heti is the granddaughter of Auschwitz survivors and the daughter of a mother who worked long hours, did not relish motherhood, and shirked some of its basic expectations. This only adds to my uncanny experience of reading this book, burrowing into my own fairly specific life experience in another’s text. Heti interrogates the relationship of not wanting children to both her grandmother’s pain and her mother’s clarity about the meaning of her life not coming primarily from the act of mothering. Accordingly, the last third of the book takes a somewhat psychoanalytic turn. Dreams play a more substantial role; epiphanies like therapeutic breakthroughs—immediately assimilable by force of their truth and simplicity—appear on nearly every page.
Did I learn something about myself? I don’t know. It seems these were things I knew. But I did feel represented in perhaps a different way than I’ve ever experienced with literature, in a way that bordered on a sense of intrusion. And Heti is such a worthy ambassador for us, the women who will not be mothers, and who are certain, and who struggle nonetheless.
As an aside, when Motherhood came out in 2018, we published a great review by contributing writer Helen Betya Rubinstein, narrowly taking up the question of the ways Heti decenters the Holocaust in her book. It’s one of those reviews I think about a lot, despite not having read the book until now.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): In Bliss Montage, the new short story collection by Ling Ma—the author of Severance, the 2018 global pandemic apocalypse novel that began to look unnervingly prescient in 2020—a series of first-person protagonists face the strange, the sci-fi, the surreal. One lives in a house alongside 100 ex-boyfriends; another takes a trendy club drug that causes invisibility. But Ma’s prose remains understated, clear, and affecting as these characters—usually Chinese American women—grapple with relationships, abuse, racism, and diaspora. The stories are haunting, and usually unexpected. In “Peking Duck,” Ma gets meta, interrogating common critiques of immigrant fiction (the protagonist’s short story is “a tired Asian American subject, these stories about immigrant hardships and, like, intergenerational woes,” a fellow writing workshop participant complains) and the question of who, really, is authorized to tell someone else’s story. In my favorite story, “Returning,” a novelist having marital problems with her husband goes with him to his fictional native country, where he secretly plans to take part in a traditional healing ceremony that involves being buried alive overnight. Meanwhile, the novelist has written a book about a couple that plans to be cryogenically frozen together for 100 years so that they can wake up again when their assets have matured enough to make them rich. (It’s a premise that itself wouldn’t be out of place as a standalone Bliss Montage story.) I was so entranced that I had to be reminded to get off my New Jersey Transit train from Newark airport at the end of the line.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Now that the full season of Nathan Fielder’s brilliant HBO series The Rehearsal can be binge-watched, I feel it to be my duty to recommend it. It is, to say the least, an odd show, and sometimes a painful one to watch. But it is also a profoundly moving, thought-provoking, exasperating, and exhilarating television masterpiece. It is a show that will leave no one indifferent, some considering it, as did The New Yorker’s reliably wrong-headed Richard Brody, “cruel.” Others will view it as a profound intellectual and emotional experience. I am very much in the latter camp.
Fielder’s previous show, Nathan For You, originally on Comedy Central and now streaming on Hulu, was a bizarre version of a business advice show. In it, Felder cooked up Rube Goldberg schemes to save failing businesses, like having people with communicable warts work as massage therapists so that customers at a spa would pay higher rates for wart-free massages. It also ended with perhaps the most moving single episode of any TV series, “Finding Frances,” in which Nathan assists an elderly Bill Gates impersonator in tracking down and winning back the lost love of his youth. The underlying theme of Nathan For You was the star’s loneliness and inability to connect with others.
The Rehearsal takes Fielder’s drive to help others in an unexpected direction. What if, in life, before doing anything drastic, we could rehearse beforehand all the possible scenarios and outcomes of a given crisis? The theory, mentioned in the first episode, is that life would be better off if we knew how our actions would turn out.
But what we learn is that no preparatory work can get us ready for the twists life will throw at us. The bulk of the season was spent rehearsing for parenthood, with child actors filling in while a bible-thumping, conspiracy minded nut readies herself for motherhood, and with Nathan filling the role of father.
Nothing goes well between the ersatz parents, which is the first curveball reality throws. Nathan will always be awkward and uncomfortable around others. He attempts to escape his fundamentally submissive nature when, at his parents’ suggestion, he tries to add Judaism to the born-again household. The difficulties inherent in this situation immediately manifest themselves, and Nathan ends up losing his non-wife.
But the participants in Nathan’s experiments are real people with real human feelings, which Fielder seems not to have taken into account in devising the rehearsals. There are at least three truly cruel moments in the series, all the more cruel because despite the pretext of play-acting, they affect real people in a real way.
It is impossible to squeeze all the complexities of The Rehearsal into a brief recommendation. Every week, after each episode, my son Pascal and I had lengthy discussions of the ramifications of each episode, of what it said about parenting, Jewishness, relationships, reality itself, and our inability to truly know others. It’s a very rare show that offers all of this in 30-minute gulps.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): New parenthood leaves you suddenly full of strong opinions on subjects about which you recently knew nothing: for instance, children’s books. Now I read a few to my twin six-month-old sons every day, as they lie rapt, fixed to the sound of my voice and the arrangements of text and image on the page. Since they’re not old enough yet to have their own preferences—or at least to express them—I’m left to decide for myself which ones are any good and why.
I’ve been developing a theory that children’s books are either excruciatingly bad or transcendently good. One defining characteristic of the genre is that stories need not follow the familiar rules of adult causality. (In that sense, kid lit is inherently avant-garde.) The worst books often tend to simply replace narrative arcs with dull litanies of discrete statements or events; apparently, when the audience is totally new to the world, any old sequence of words will do. But the best ones instead explore the playful possibilities opened up by the departure from logic and linearity. This makes for adorable premises and thrillingly strange bursts of language.
Paolo, Emperor of Rome—written by Marc Barnett and illustrated by Claire Keane—follows a little dog’s escape from a hair salon into the streets of Rome, where he wanders free. He catches an opera, meets the pope, and, subverting my expectations, never returns home. (I love when, standing in awe of the Colosseum, he remarks dolefully, “How beautiful to build such a towering marvel, and how cruel to fill it with barbarism.”) In Esmé Shapiro’s Ooko, the eponymous lonely fox tries to act like a dog to earn human affection, but ultimately befriends a more like-minded raccoon named Oomi. My favorite moment comes right after Ooko and Oomi meet. “This is my stick,” the raccoon declares. “This is my other stick. And this is my other other stick. Wanna play?” The weird effervescence of the phrase “other other stick” gets me every time.
Of course, part of the purpose of children’s books has always been educational. I do bristle at the notion of didactic literature—and indeed, many of the books that are narrowly focused on imparting a lesson ring false and seem hollow. But I’ve quickly found beautiful books that unspool their lessons subtly and without forgoing a sense of play. What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking, written in Polish by Tina Oziewicz, illustrated by Aleksandra Zając, and translated by fellow twin parent Jennifer Croft, provides a tour of anthropomorphic emotions carrying out fitting tasks: “Freedom sails”; “Nostalgia sniffs a scarf”; “Calm pets a dog.” It’s a tender introduction to the varieties of human affect that leaves its implicit moral—that all of these emotions are normal and worth talking about—unspoken.
More explicit but no less lovely is Sheila Heti’s new book, A Garden of Creatures (gorgeously illustrated by Shapiro, the author of Ooko). A companion text to Heti’s most recent novel, Pure Colour, A Garden of Creatures is likewise a book about grief. It opens with two animals, a cat and a bunny, confronting the sudden illness and death of their friend, and follows their conversations about how to process this unassimilable absence. “Where do we go when we die?” the bunny asks, to which the cat responds, “No one knows. But we are all the same as each other, because we all ask this question and wonder.” Later, unable to hold back tears, the bunny says, “When someone dies, we miss them.” The cat replies, “I think missing someone is a way of keeping them close.” The book is bracing in its unsentimental directness. I’ll be grateful to have it when my kids can understand the words and begin to ask questions of their own.
Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): As an undergrad at the University of Texas, I knew next to nothing about organized labor, and even less about socialist and worker movements across the Southern Hemisphere. In my junior year, a course on labor movements in Latin America changed all that. It also served as a backdoor survey into America’s Cold War-era imperial interventions in the region, fueled by corporate and capitalist interests with little tolerance for pro-worker governments and movements in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The readings and lively lectures gave me a vocabulary for describing empire and American power that still inform how I think about these topics as a journalist and human being.
I recalled all of this upon finally watching Walker, a 1987 film by the British director Alex Cox. The movie is deeply unhinged, often offensive, and spectacularly violent—so I recommend it both emphatically and with some reservation. It presents a fictionalized account of the bloody misadventures of sometimes-lawyer, sometimes-mercenary, always-deranged William Walker—a fervent believer in American empire, a personification of Manifest Destiny, and a leader of multiple bloody campaigns to extend a slave-holding empire from the American South into Central America. His greatest, albeit short-lived, success came in the 1850s, when he and his group of ragtag soldiers of fortune intervened in Nicaragua’s civil war, sparking a coup that wound up installing Walker as dictator.
The great Ed Harris portrays Walker with just the right mix of sociopathic detachment, world-conquering hunger, and hilarious (perhaps idiotic?) poise, even as his bloody dreams of tyranny begin to collapse. He’s thoroughly invested in Walker’s lunacy. In truth, the entire cast, from René Auberjonois (playing Charles Frederick Henningsen, a commander in Walker’s forces) to Peter Boyle (playing Gilded Age robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt as a repulsive demigod), seems to get the assignment: skewering Reagan-era jingoism and directly implicating the Cold War project in Central America as a successor to the tyranny of the antebellum South.
Cox shot much of the film in Nicaragua with the full support of the Sandinistas, and he takes the heaviest of hands, drawing on-the-nose parallels between the Walker saga and the Reagan administration’s misadventures in the country in the 1980s. The bombastic screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer, self-conscious narration by Harris, and chaotic aesthetic play like a homage to Sam Peckinpah (whose name appears onscreen at one point), the director of classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. As such, Walker is not so much an homage to Westerns as it is a sendup of the genre, its excesses, and its unsettling nods to the Lost Cause.
Since this is a scripted narrative, not a documentary, Cox takes numerous liberties, depicting Vanderbilt as Walker’s prime benefactor and condensing timelines. Cox also indulges in increasingly obvious anachronistic flourishes, ranging from self-consciously ahistorical dialogue, magazine covers hailing Walker’s campaign, and, uh, a helicopter. Cox films Walker’s carnage in hypnotic slow-motion, set to an unnerving synth-heavy score by the great Joe Strummer. Imagine if Cormac McCarthy wrote a book, Werner Herzog adapted it, and Paul Verhoeven re-shot and edited—that is Walker. Alas, that was too much for most respectable critics of the time, who largely despised the movie. It also seems to have largely ended Cox’s career as a rising director of subversive movies like Sid and Nancy and Repo Man.
Walker remains a caricature and an enigma by the end of the film, more an individual curiosity than a clear symbol of a bigger machine or system at work. Still, there is a swagger and a meanness to Cox’s strange film that resonates. Even when it doesn’t entirely work, this sort of visceral, spectacular satire must endure.
David Klion (newsletter editor): Yesterday, I received a galley of Malcolm Harris’s forthcoming Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. I can’t claim to have read more than the gorgeously written introduction so far, but based on that as well as the high esteem in which I hold Harris’s work in general, I feel comfortable recommending it here. It’s the sort of book I fantasize about writing and am always eager to read: a comprehensive, multifaceted history of a particular urban area (in this case, Silicon Valley) that helps explain the dominant tendencies of our dystopian present and likely future. In that, it reminds me of City of Quartz, the classic survey of Los Angeles by Mike Davis, who has profoundly influenced Harris along with probably every living leftist writer (and who recently announced he has terminal cancer, prompting an outpouring of tributes). But while L.A. may have dominated American and global culture in 1990, when Davis’s book was published, today we are all trapped in the collective headspace of a smaller and decidedly more bubbled California city, where Harris grew up and which in recent years has seen an epidemic of teen suicides that Harris situates in a much deeper context. “What haunts,” writes Harris in his introduction, “are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.” That should be enough to hook me for the next 600 pages.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sometime around 1988, when Paul Auster was a highly esteemed but not yet world-conquering author, I interviewed him at a diner in Park Slope for a short-lived but excellent magazine called BQE. We hit it off immediately, and bonded over, of all things, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. The book, he told me, was about being a single father. Paul had raised his son Daniel when he and his first wife split up, and I was raising my then-four-year-old son. I found his idea intriguing, and ever since I’ve wanted to read the book to test out Auster’s theory (Much later, he wrote about Pinocchio in The Invention of Solitude, focusing on Pinocchio’s role in saving his father). I’ve waited decades, but we finally have an adult edition, brilliantly translated and annotated by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna and published by Penguin Classics.
It is unquestionably a moralizing book, filled with finger-wagging about children who aren’t obedient, stressing the need to go to school and obey teachers and avoid bad company. But in order to tell that moral tale, Collodi portrays Pinocchio as very much like actual children: selfish, greedy, heedless, lazy, and all too ready to take the easy way out, to disregard parental advice. Disney’s Pinocchio is a scamp, but a lovable one; the original is a marionette hellbent on doing everything wrong under the sun. Presented with a choice, he will always, up until the last moment, make the wrong one. This is a cautionary tale for children, but also for parents.
The most familiar things about Pinocchio play a much smaller role in the book than in the Disney version. Pinocchio’s nose only grows in a few chapters, and Jiminy Cricket doesn’t follow the little puppet around trying to keep him on the straight and narrow; he makes an appearance early in the book as The Talking Cricket, and Pinocchio, annoyed with his hectoring, throws a mallet handle at him and kills him, though he somehow reappears later in the book.
Pinocchio is also a social realist novel. The poverty of 19th century Italy is omnipresent. The fire in Gepetto’s hearth and the pot with cooked food in it are drawings: he can’t afford the real things. When a wicked puppeteer asks Pinocchio what his father’s job is, he answers: “being poor.” Bread with butter on both halves is a rare treat, sufficient to attract a large crowd of children to a party. But Collodi’s sympathy for the poor only goes so far: to him, those who don’t work are only getting what they deserve.
Parenting plays a very small part in Pinocchio, as the puppet runs away from Gepetto near the beginning of the book. They only find each other again in the final chapter, when Pinocchio saves Gepetto from the belly of a shark. Pinocchio is not the story of a single father, but of a boy left without guidance.
Auster was writing about his then-adolescent son Daniel when he wrote about Pinocchio: “For the little boy to see Pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be ‘good’ and could not help being ‘bad,’ for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of revelation.”
While reading Pinocchio, I was unable to shake off thoughts of the fate of Daniel Auster, dead from an overdose this past April after a short, tragic life. Daniel was a Pinocchio who, like the original character, fled Gepetto. Unlike the original, he never found him again.
