Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I am upstate, staying at the kind of house where people—mostly artists and poets and activists and performers—are always passing through, and where every few feet a new pile of books lies like a compost heap of their inner lives. I picked up a book from the top of one of these piles because it was old and slim and because I liked the title: And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman, a collection of very short stories from the mid-1960s by Peter Bichsel, a Swiss writer I had never heard of, translated from German by the poet Michael Hamburger. Indeed, I almost wonder whether it destroys the magic to recommend it like this, whether my enchantment with the book is also a function of my surprise, of entering a book the way one slips directly into a strange lake, without first checking its temperature or having read its TripAdvisor page.

Either way, I was taken by these stories, which rarely go more than two-and-a-half short pages. Nearly stripped of time and place and context, they reminded me of certain descriptions of hauntings, apparitions caught in repetitive, mundane actions. The haunted ask: Why this? What has given this ascent of a staircase such emotional weight that it has become pressed in the folds of time, that it must be repeated nightly? Bichsel’s vignettes are like this. A woman receives a letter from a man—an estranged brother? a lover? a difficult friend?—that says very little, but she reads it over, it changes her mood. An old man becomes old in his habits; he turns the radio on and off, is irritated with both sound and silence. An old woman brings flowers to another old woman. A man comes to a bar each week at the same time, watches others play a card game in silence, and leaves when the game is through; when he dies, the card players aren’t sure how to remember him. A woman wonders about her milkman who comes very early in the morning and who she has never met: What do they know of one another? These slight, spare scenes somehow manage to touch the strange patterns of being alive.

(Editor’s note: I couldn’t find a copy of this book on Bookshop or almost anywhere else, except for a rare and expensive used edition linked above, which to me suggests that Arielle stumbling across it really was improbable.)

Ari M. Brostoff (senior editor): As often as possible for the past few months, I have lifted weights at the Blink Fitness down the street from my building. I am small, weak, still fairly new to changing in the men’s locker room, and using a women’s weightlifting app “ironically.” Almost everyone else in the weightlifting section of Blink is big, strong, and seems mesmerizingly able to improvise lifts, like the most talented kids at the playground. Nonetheless, in a powerful show of homosocial democracy, I am allowed to take up as much space as I need among them. It’s great. I still have some significant barriers to entry, though, like the fact that I only vaguely understand how my movements are connected to my actual muscles. When I mentioned this to my friend Dayna earlier this year—she was, at the time, showing me the more or less literal ropes at her own Planet Fitness—she told me that this knowledge would start to become embodied as I got more practiced. She also told me to watch the 1977 bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron, the film that made Arnold Schwarzenneger into a household name (it’s available on YouTube). This week I finally did.

Pumping Iron, directed by the British filmmaker George Butler, is a campy introduction to the world of competitive bodybuilding—it focuses on the run-up to the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions of 1975—and it is overwhelmingly about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insane body and his incredible skill at self-objectification. Early on, Butler asks Schwarzenegger if he visualizes himself as a piece of sculpture. Arnold replies, in his singular Austrian-at-the-beach cadence, “yeah, definitely,” then goes on to suggest that his art form is in fact the higher one: While an artist who wants to embellish a figure’s musculature can just “slap on some clay,” he is doing it “the harder way.” He goes on to explain the feeling of “the pump,” in which the act of lifting increases bloodflow to your muscles and you get “a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode,” and then in case you didn’t get it, says, “It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as having sex with a woman and coming,” and then in case you still didn’t get it, asks, “So, can you believe how much I am in heaven? I’m, like, getting the feeling of coming in the gym, I’m getting the feeling of coming at home, I’m getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up . . . . So I’m coming day and night. I mean it’s terrific, right?”

Things for Arnold are terrific. He does push-ups with two blond girls astride his back. He falls asleep in the park in a cluster of bodybuilders, all barely clothed, like a pod of seals. (A running visual gag in the movie is how silly he looks every time he bothers to wear a shirt, like a Great Dane in a little sweater.) When asked about his weak points, he explains, “I have no weak points.” (He used to have some, but, he eliminated them.) His public appearances often involve little lifting but much flexing, which, if we take seriously his aspirations to being a sculpture, is actually the motion that shows him at the height of his craft: Even wearing a perfunctory Speedo, he is beyond naked, revealing parts of his body we didn’t know existed. It all gets a tad race-sciencey: The competitors who tremble before him include Mike Katz, who tells us he was called “Jewboy” growing up and became a huge jock in response; an Italian from New York with daddy issues; an Italian from Italy with mommy issues; and a Black Frenchman who doesn’t get any lines. Arnold himself is the son of an Austrian police chief (and, though the film doesn’t mention this, a former brownshirt) who spent his childhood “dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that,” and cheekily plays himself as an easygoing psychopath (to win, he explains, you just have to completely separate yourself from your feelings; hence, his decision to skip his father’s funeral because a championship was two months away). Perhaps the ultimate joke of the film is that, as “villain[ous]” as Arnold makes himself, it would feel almost perverse to root for a lesser man. It will perhaps not be too big of a spoiler to say that at the end of the movie, he wins.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): The Last Movie Stars is a six-part documentary series on Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and their relationship, made by Ethan Hawke and currently streaming on HBO Max. It includes clips of Newman and Woodward’s performances spanning the length of their careers, as well as from talk shows and other public appearances. But the series also includes new material in the form of interviews that Newman commissioned of everyone in his life in preparation to write a memoir. For reasons unknown, Newman ended up burning all the recordings but, thankfully for us, his partner in the project had already had them transcribed. Hawke assembles an array of actors to read the transcripts over the course of the series, with George Clooney reading for Newman and Laura Linney, who studied with Woodward, reading for her. The clips are woven in with readings from the transcripts and interviews Hawke conducts with the actors doing the readings, as well as with Newman and Woodward’s daughters.

I love movies about the movies, and I loved this series. I learned things I didn’t know about Newman and Woodward as individuals and about their relationship, and it’s fun to watch the clips of their movies over time. It’s not all joyful—the series covers Woodward’s career frustrations after having kids, Newman’s alcoholism, the loss of Newman’s son, and tests of the couple’s devotion to each other and the life they built—but it is all deeply moving. Hawke’s Zoom interviews are also an important part of the film—he is trying to understand both the project he was commissioned to make and his subjects, and his sheer love of the actors and the movies is palpable. And of course, the magnetism of Newman onscreen is inescapable.

This was also very fun to watch having recently read Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which I’ve previously recommended here (I also interviewed Butler about it), since Newman and Woodward cut their teeth in the Actor’s Studio alongside James Dean, Marlon Brando, and other stars of the era, all of which is covered in the book.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’d sooner have my fingernails removed with pincers and my nose cut off than be part of a reading group. And yet, Le temps perdu, Maria Alvarez’s documentary of a group of senior citizens in Buenos Aires that has been meeting for 17 years to read Proust, is a film of real charm.

The filming covers four years, from 2015 to 2019. The attendees—some regulars, some occasional, some just stopping in once—read a few pages aloud at each gathering in the Tribunales Café, right near the Teatro Colón and the city’s courthouses. The discussions are not orderly; the readers stop to comment on what they’ve read as it strikes them, agreeing or disagreeing with what Proust has written or with what someone has said or with the progress they’re making. Do people become better in old age, as it says in Le temps retrouvé, the final volume? Personal experience tells one reader that that’s simply false; another disagrees. And so it goes.

The Narrator’s lack of erotic feelings for Albertine are commented on, as well as the nature of Proust’s relationship with Albertine’s model, his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. Moving passages, particularly from the last volume, draw cries of awe at the author’s genius, while the way the madeleine has become a cliché is rightly bemoaned.

One of the group’s members comments on how every time he reads the full seven volumes it’s a different book, which is true of any great work of literature. But this is especially true given the scope of In Search of Lost Time. The nature of memory will matter more for some at one life stage than at another; jealousy is a burning issue when you’re young and a fading memory itself when you’re the age of the people in Le temps perdu.

Though some attendees are totally ignorant of the book (one, when told that it’s metaphorically a murder mystery, wants to know whodunnit), these elderly men and women, who have lived a long life in which they’ve seen coups, dictatorships, armed struggle, and state terror on the streets of their city, have retained their love of literature as a central element of their lives, and one they share with likeminded people.

One attendee says that she has felt every human emotion expressed in the group, and that’s more than plausible; as I’ve written before, if humanity were to disappear tomorrow, its entire emotional scale could be reconstructed from Proust’s pages.

Daniel May (publisher): Earlier this year, my best friend, who works as a special education assistant, helped organize the first Minneapolis teacher strike in over half a century. I flew home to walk the picket line with him, and the energy on the sidewalk was infectious. It was hard not to get swept up in the sense of community and purpose and possibility, and I came back to New York buzzing from the feeling of vicarious solidarity.

The strike lasted three weeks, and a deal was struck that, while significant, was far from sufficient to address the fundamental problem: teachers in the Minneapolis district make on average $14,000 less annually than those in neighboring St. Paul; the discrepancy is even worse compared with suburban districts. As the school year came to its slow end (the district extended the year to compensate for time lost during the strike), many of the staff who had walked picket lines through those frigid winter weeks left for jobs in other districts. For my oldest and closest friend, the collapse of the community that he had worked so hard to build and which had struggled so hard together was devastating. In a long conversation the last week of the school year, he told me that he felt like a ghost.

What do we do with the awful pain of political struggle? With the disappointments that so often follow hopes of transformation? With the alienation from movement and organization that so much involvement in movement and organization provokes? Those questions have been lingering with me since that conversation, and as they’ve tumbled around in my head I found myself turning back to James Baldwin’s 1972 memoir No Name in The Street, which is, among other things, one of the most searing accounts of political grief that I’ve ever encountered.

Grief—for loves lost, families undone, and a country blind to its own brutality—is a constant theme through all of Baldwin’s writing, but in No Name it is the ever-present subject, and it is by no means clear through the work whether that grief will ultimately give way to hope or possibility or life. Through the essays, grief is braided together of various strands: Baldwin’s darkening despair at the country’s capacity to recognize the most basic facts about itself; his struggle to face the chasm that has opened up in his and his nation’s life with the murders of Dr. King and Malcolm X; and a growing sense of alienation from the community that made him, a community from which his fame leaves him estranged as he is more and more asked to speak on its behalf.

Early in the book, Baldwin writes that “hope – the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are – dies hard. Perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or the other, become wicked: because they are so wretched.” And yet, (as he puts it a few pages earlier), while “most people are not, in action, worth very much” every human being is an “unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.” Doing so, Baldwin concedes, is an act of faith. As is all politics.

Throughout No Name, Baldwin reminds his readers that to live a life of that faith, or, if you like the word better, hope, leads one at times necessarily into despair. In those times, we need guides to the darkness—not necessarily to lead us out of it (there are no easy outs, the book constantly insists) but to remind us that even and perhaps most especially in our darkest moments, we are with the great many who have weathered storms as or more devastating than our own, and we are with those that will follow. That is not always enough, but there is more than a small degree of comfort in such company.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): In a standard V.S. Naipaul book, a cloud of repugnance hangs over every character. Hailing from a newly independent country typically somewhere in the West Indies or Africa, Naipaul’s protagonists find themselves breaking under the strain of assimilation in some Western milieu. Usually, they are trying and failing, largely through no fault of their own. The experience renders them invisible and bitter. They internalize the cruelty of dislocation. They are ignorant to the fact that their every careless action, dashed-off remark, or sour joke reveals a hidden prejudice or outright hatred: for themselves, for their fellow displaced people, as well as for those who did the displacing.

In a Free State, the Trinidadian author’s 1971 Booker Award-winning experimental novel, deals with these themes in four thematically interconnected stories. In a prologue, an unnamed passenger on a ferry from Greece to Egypt witnesses the bullying of an older, mentally unwell homeless man. In a short story, Naipaul traces the struggles of an Indian servant in Washington, DC who liberates himself from his employer only to find his latent prejudices toward Black people activated during his ensuing struggles to survive as a truly “free” man. Another short piece tells the dark tale of a West Indian man driven to violence as his fanciful illusions about climbing into the elite, educated life in Britain fall away. In a novella of sorts, two Brits—one a gay government official with a troubled past, the other the unhappy wife of another official—travel through a newly independent, unnamed African nation and former British colony (Uganda, we are meant to presume), amid what they gradually come to realize are the early days of a violent political upheaval; the travelers’ contrasting attitudes toward whether Britain had any business in this place at all, as well as their respective attempts at sexual dalliances, provides the tension that propels the strange, absorbing narrative. There’s much more to say about each of these stories. But in case it’s in any way unclear, they offer no comfort, no affirming lesson about the subaltern class bootstrapping its way into social visibility or happiness.

Naipaul’s characters seem incapable of articulating their sense of fracture, of finding the emotional lexicon to convey the sense of tragedy and loss that come from being born into empire. These traumas are where Naipaul always seems most comfortable. He appears to revel in the unpleasantness, often drawing on his own experiences and those of his family to force upon his characters—and his readers—violent emotional and psychological confrontations. Tidy resolutions are nowhere to be found.

Naipaul thrusts his characters, including the Brits, into contexts that expose the brittleness of their supposed freedom. By the 1970s, the chains of colonialism are, in theory, broken. But those touched by it, servants and masters alike, still find their possibilities, hopes, and dreams curtailed. The brutal, dehumanizing hierarchies of the past are technically gone, only to be replaced by the realities of economic exploitation in a rapidly globalizing world. The human capacity to simply not see those deemed inferior, either along ethnic or class lines—or some combination of the two—endures, and powerfully so. (As novelist Neel Mukherjee put it in a 2018 piece about the book for The Paris Review: “What if nations are broken in such profound ways by the experience of colonialism that freedom can only launch them into a state of replicating the selfsame power structures, similar instruments of oppression of its own peoples?”) In its wake, it turns people cruel and resentful—impulses not unfamiliar to Naipaul, a man who had an acknowledged penchant for acts of violence in his sexual relationships.

What will always bring me back to Naipaul is the maddening, debasing, darkly hilarious vision of a post-colonial creature. Does he yearn for the colonial days, as some have suggested? This question feels reductive to me: Colonialism happened, and whatever it broke—civilizationally and personally—doesn’t just go back together. This is a gnawing discomfort Naipaul is content to sit with. He’ll allow his mostly male characters to feel a sense of wonder as they step off the gangplank and venture into the big city, and show us through their eyes the marvels and visceral pleasures of Western excess. Then, without warning, the dream gives way to nightmare: characters buckling under the strain of endless shifts busing tables and cleaning kitchens; absorbing slurs and taunts from passersby; struggling with being understood, despite speaking English—proper, accented, Anglophile English; and reeling from sexual humiliations and insults to their fragile masculinity. The little indignities and everyday struggles metastasize, making the newly arrived hard and cold, consumed by self-interest and the prerogatives of survival in a world that will not recognize their basic humanity.

The possibility that I might in any way identify with these characters and their frustrations unsettles me. More specifically, the notion of accepting a world that does not recognize you, respect you, or dignify you as an individual, only as a signifier of a history broken long before you entered it, sends me reeling. This is the unsparing, often enraging stuff of Naipaul. I can’t seem to get enough of it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): After a short, brutal illness, the recent loss of my friend Michael Lardner—the heart and soul of the Marxist Education Project, where I often gave talks—has led me to reflect on death. This week, I will recommend some of my favorite short stories in which death features prominently and movingly.

First is James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the final story in his first book, Dubliners. I’ve often regretted, and I’m probably not alone, that Joyce did not continue to write the way he wrote in this book, in which every story is written in a stirring, perfectly formed language. “The Dead” is Joyce’s farewell to classical fictional forms, and he bids adieu with as perfect, as musical a piece of writing as has ever been produced in English.

There’s little story here: the events take place at a Christmas gathering, and though there are disagreements about Irish politics around the table, it’s all of no consequence. Then, a tenor attending the dinner sings a song, and a happily married woman in attendance suddenly remembers Michael Furey, a young man from her youth who once sang it for her, and who later died for love of her. Her husband realizes that his wife has been transported to the time and place of that love. The power of music, of love, and of memory are the subjects of “The Dead,” and its final sentences are almost impossible to read, so painful, so true are they: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Next is J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from Nine Stories. I’ve never gone more than a couple of years without reading this book since first doing so when I was 17, 53 years ago. The brilliance of its writing, the perfection of its tone, its quiet buildup to its abrupt ending still shocks me. The best of Salinger—well, actually, that’s The Catcher in the Rye—but some of the best of American short story writing is in this volume, and the wonder and mystery of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” remains an extraordinary feat.

Finally, from Jorge Luis Borges’s collection Labyrinths, there’s “The Witness.” I recommended this to Michael when he got his fatal diagnosis, telling him that when I thought I was going to die last year it was this three-paragraph story—if it can be called that—about what it is that dies with us when we go, that played an important role in giving me the strength not to let my heart kill me.

I’ll leave the final word to Borges, from the closing paragraph of that story: “[O]ne thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man’s or woman’s death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”

Before you go, a few more things:

-Jewish Currents Culture Editor Claire Schwartz’s first book of poems, Civil Service, is out this week! To quote the publisher: Claire “stages the impossibility of articulating freedom in a nation of prisons. Civil Service probes the razor-thin borders between ally and accomplice, surveillance and witness, carcerality and care--the lines we draw to believe ourselves good.” Fans of our culture coverage, and especially our poetry, won’t want to miss this.

-Next Thursday, August 11th, at 7 pm Eastern, our friends at Alte are hosting a screening of Peter Odabashian’s documentary My 2020, about a mixed-race family gathering to navigate a pandemic, political upheaval, and isolation together. The event, which is part of the Celebrating Aging Series, will be in Rosendale, New York, and will include a post-screening discussion with the director. Sign up here!

-Lastly, we would be remiss to not recommend a print subscription to our forthcoming summer issue! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, we are sure you’ll love the in-depth reporting, essays, reviews and more that Jewish Currents magazine has to offer. Subscribers receive three gorgeous issues a year plus a special winter gift delivered directly to your home. Every subscription dollar we receive goes to supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.

Subscribe to Jewish Currents TODAY to make sure you’re amongst the first to receive the summer issue!

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Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I expected to like Teju Cole’s 2011 debut novel Open City because it belongs to a literary tradition I love—the flâneur novel, in which a narrator idly wanders city streets, his (and it’s usually his) thoughts digressing in step with his motion. But I ended up appreciating Open City most for the way it subverts that very form. It’s beyond cliché to compare Cole’s book to the works of W.G. Sebald, whose four brilliant novels of itinerant melancholy trace the lineages of 20th-century violence. Still, Cole’s prose and the project really are Sebaldian, much more so than most of the work that gets haphazardly compared to the German depressive. In Open City, as in Sebald’s books, a reticent man drifts about having long, even essayistic exchanges with others (often strangers) and noticing things about his milieu, especially the ways it’s built over and conceals brutal histories. But while Sebald figures his narrators’ post-Holocaust alienation as an almost metaphysical principle, transforming them into spectral vessels, Cole grounds us firmly in the life of his central character, Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatrist completing a fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. We quickly get a sense of Julius’s aloofness, which borders on misanthropy: Early in his self-imposed walking regimen he experiences the human bustle of New York streets “as an incessant loudness,” and when he encounters a disabled man on the subway, he refuses him money because he finds the man’s performance of suffering distasteful. These displays undercut the romance of his detached tone; if his rich, melancholic riffs on philosophy, history, and music remain intoxicating, they also come to seem arrogant, even menacing.

When we arrive at Open City’s striking climactic turn, in which Julius is accused of an act of brutal violence and says nothing in response, the pretense of the novel’s form elegantly collapses. Cole prepares us for this by having Julius reflect on the difficulty of the psychiatric task of diagnosis, since “the mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are.” He compares it to the ophthalmological phenomenon of “an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons associated with vision are clustered, that vision goes dead.” This evokes an earlier discussion of literary theorist Paul de Man’s notion of insight, which “can actually obscure other things” and become “a blindness.” In the same way, it is Julius’s obsessive observation and analysis that obfuscates his own participation in the violence of the world. The final pages offer what I read as a subtle revision of Dante—perhaps a proto-flâneur, even if his course was divinely set—in which Julius, hearing an ambulance “heading toward Times Square’s neon inferno,” looks up at the stars, and sees in them not glimpses of heaven, but instead all that he cannot see. His descent into hell has taken him nowhere.

Reading reviews of the novel, I was struck that most critics, even those who admired the novel, read it quite differently. James Wood, in a representative rave for The New Yorker, sees Julius’s “ordinary solipsism” as “an obstacle to understanding other people,” but ultimately “enabl[ing] liberal journeys of comprehension.” For Wood, Julius’s solipsism places limits on his knowledge but does not truly undermine it. Indeed, Wood writes that Julius’s “political inactivity has to do with his ability to see things so well.” But Wood passes over everything in the novel that suggests we might mistrust the quality of Julius’s vision. Perhaps aiming not to reveal too much, most of the writing on Open City I read made no mention of the consequential climax; the one major review that did, in The New York Times, presented it as a shoehorned twist rather than a culmination of subterranean currents. A fascinating article by scholar Pieter Vermeulen resonated much more with my own reading. Vermeulen argues that critics have missed that the novel “interrogrates rather than celebrates” the idea of “literary cosmopolitanism,” in which “productive alienation” (Wood’s term) generates understanding. He suggests that Julius is not a flâneur at all, but rather a “fugueur”—an amnesiac figure for whom, in the words of philosopher Ian Hacking, wandering is “less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate self.”

Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): It used to be once a year, then every six months, and now every few weeks I find myself doomsday planning with my loved ones. When “it” happens—and the “it” could be anything, really: a typhoon, an armed mob, a nuclear missile—where will we run to? What will we take with us? What skills will we need to survive whatever it is we are running from? As we flee, how will we make sure that we both support others and protect ourselves from others?

Lately, these apocalypse-prep sessions have come to seem more and more like a reading group discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. All our imaginary doomsday scenarios seem to echo the book’s protagonist Lauren Olamina’s flight from the ruins of her life in 2024 California. At the beginning of the book, Lauren is a disabled Black teenager living in a lower-middle class gated community. The walls protect Lauren and her family from the turmoil churning outside - armies of the homeless, the addicted (their drug is called “pyro” and causes pyromania), the poor, the armed, and others left to die amidst a total ecological and economic breakdown. But Lauren, precocious as she is, knows that the walls are only delaying the inevitable, and one day they will fall under the weight of the desperation of the masses outside. She keeps her bags packed, learns to fire a gun, invents a new religion that helps her get through the end of days, and tries against all odds to get her family to take her seriously.

One night, Lauren’s predictions come true in the worst, grisliest possible way as her neighborhood is attacked by gangs of pyromaniacs. Her family dies before her eyes. But even through her horror, Lauren’s survival training kicks in and she flees, joining the thousands who walk down I-101 in search of food, safety, hope: a life. Lauren navigates burning forests, escapes debt slavery, survives shootouts on the road, robs provisions from ruined neighborhoods, struggles to afford water priced like diamonds, runs into orphaned children lost in the woods, and faces again and again the vexed question of whether other people are enemies or allies, dead-weights or assets in her frenzied quest for survival. Her journey feels like one that is inevitably coming for all of us. If we are to reap what we have sown, Octavia Butler has at least offered us the comfort of knowing exactly how devastating a reaping is coming for us all.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Recently, I consumed two pieces of media which had completely different content but a common thread: by the end of each, I sat back and thought, “WOW, I see what you did there. Magnificent.” A slow build-up; subtle until it wasn’t.

The first was the film “Official Competition,” whose Rotten Tomatoes profile reads: “Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas star as two egomaniacs commissioned by a millionaire to make a movie together in this sharp comedy skewering wealth, art, and pride.” I’d argue that nearly everyone in the film is an egomaniac: the pharmaceutical tycoon (who appears only in choice moments to further the plot, and in one scene of great comedy) looking for a project to sanitize his public legacy; Cruz, eccentric and brilliant as Lola, the director of the film-inside-a-film; Banderas as Félix, a global celebrity who drives to the first day of rehearsals in a neon convertible, making out with a younger woman; and Oscar Martínez as Iván, an acting professor who takes his vocation, and himself, very seriously. Lola hand-picks Félix and Iván—renowned stars in their own circuits who have never acted opposite each other before—to play the roles of two feuding brothers. In a series of rehearsals, she uses the tension in the actors’ relationship to fuel their artistry; over the course of the film, the levity darkens. I promise you’ll want to see the rest for yourself.

The second piece of art I found with that same element of methodical genius in weaving a story together was Peking Duck, a fiction piece by Ling Ma recently published in The New Yorker. The narrator of the story is a creative writer whose parents immigrated to the US from China when she was young, and the piece goes back and forth between her memories, her current day in a writer’s workshop, and then (seemingly) to a version of the story that she presented in that workshop. The final section is written from the perspective of her mother, the main antagonist throughout; the work as a whole ambles along patiently, until it pierces.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A confession: my attachment to James Joyce has an intensely personal reason. For Joyce, dates were sacred, two of them in particular. First, June 16th, now known as Bloomsday, which was the day in 1904 when Joyce first went out with his companion and later wife Nora Barnacle, and the day the events in Ulysses take place. Joyce’s other holy date was February 2nd, his birthday. February 2nd is also my birthday (I turned seventy the day the book turned a hundred), as well as that of my son. I have nothing in common with Joyce but a birthday and virtual blindness, but the connection remains. And so I’ve read the book three times though I’ll likely never do so again.

Ulysses was published a hundred years ago, on February 2nd, 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. The novel was the subject of a truly astounding exhibition at the Morgan Library, One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The Morgan has mounted, in a single room, a comprehensive collection of documents, manuscripts, books, magazines, paintings, photos, paintings, and even a store sign from the original Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Taken together, the items tell the story of Joyce’s writing life, dedication, and sacrifice, as well as the sacrifices he imposed on his family in his dedication to his art.

Joyce knew early on that he was fated to live away from his natal Dublin and that his fate was to never be understood. At twenty-two he wrote a lengthy poem printed as a broadside (which he was unable to pay for and so went undistributed) called “The Holy Office,” in which he said in the final stanza: “I stand the self-doomed, unafraid/unfollowed, friendless, and alone.” But he was not alone in his travels, accompanied by his faithful Nora (the exhibition includes one of the many salacious letters he wrote when they were apart), as well as their two children.

The exhibition follows Joyce on peregrinations to Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. The brilliantly conceived and executed catalog of the show tracks Joyce’s itinerary, featuring his passport, a letter from the ever-generous Ezra Pound offering advice on getting his poetry published, and another from Sylvia Beach who saw to the publication of Ulysses when no one else, including Virginia Woolf and her Hogarth press, would.

Anyone interested in Joyce, Ulysses, or just literature, can only be grateful to the Morgan for bringing together manuscript pages, corrected galleys, and addenda to the galleys, providing us with a near-perfect imager of the incredible work involved in the creation of the most difficult book in world literature.

More people love Ulysses than have ever read it. One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is so gripping that its success at bringing people to the actual work is all but certain. Reading Ulysses is not a test. You will miss many things in it, and that’s fine. Most people get things wrong about the book. For example, despite evidence to the contrary, the main character Leopold Bloom is assumed to be Jewish. But read it anyway: feel the thrill of the language, and experience the joy and affirmation of Molly’s soliloquy that ends the book.

Lastly, we would be remiss to not recommend a print subscription to our forthcoming summer issue! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, we are sure you’ll love the in-depth reporting, essays, reviews and more that Jewish Currents magazine has to offer. Subscribers receive three gorgeous issues a year plus a special winter gift delivered directly to your home. Every subscription dollar we receive goes to supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.

Subscribe to Jewish Currents by August 5th to make sure you’re amongst the first to receive the summer issue!

If you already subscribe to the magazine, please make sure your address is up-to-date here (and perhaps consider sending a gift subscription to a friend or relative!). If you need to renew your subscription, you can do that here.