Shabbat
Reading List
(editor’s note: this is Jacob Plitman’s last week as publisher of Jewish Currents, so this week’s reading list consists of a chronological roundup of Jacob’s past reading recs, in his inimitable style)
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I recently read the strangest book. A little boy misses his mom, but finally gets to kiss her and father doesn’t mind. He eats a cookie, and then (I think?) is turned into a charming and disturbed Jewish man who is obsessed with a woman who might be beautiful but who has boring friends, but once you like someone enough you start to like their bad friends anyway. He then mistakes a strain of music for the woman and falls in love with . . . well, not her, but something like her. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I recently read the strangest book. A woman who likes her monogrammed luggage smokes a cigarette out of her window, and then goes to the bathroom. There she shuts a cabinet door, and accidentally squishes a cockroach. She is very, very upset by this—and made even more so by the discovery of creepy paintings on her walls. But after seeing the paintings, she goes back to being so upset about squishing the bug (or perhaps the existence of “biology”?) that she ceases to like her luggage, even the monogrammed part. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I recently read the strangest book. A man once wandered around a strip mall (but fancy?) and saw a lot of signs, and these signs gave him some ideas I’m trying to understand but can’t. Actually I’m not sure he understood the signs himself, so instead he decided to make them into cards (??), but then he died :/ . Luckily this newer book is supposed to be the finishing of the old book, but is also a book itself, about the other book, and its non-completion, which the book completes, mostly. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): Buy the latest issue of this released-every-few-years magazine and name drop it as often as possible, and lo: every leftist you know will respect and fear you.
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I recently read the strangest book. A scared boy becomes a very robust man, who then has to help his friend get a divorce, which is making a lot of people upset. A lot of time in the book is spent in the robust gentleman’s mind, which, in addition to many schemes, contains a kind of Italian funhouse for memories? Also everyone’s always telling him he looks like a murderer, which I’m not sure I would take as a compliment, though I think he does. Can’t wait to read the sequel. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): Take a second and google “supreme court US constitution.” The sparely written and highly limited mandate that appears might surprise you, given the gargantuan status of the Supreme Court we know today. The Court’s core power as the final reader of the Constitution is not derived from the Constitution. Neither is a mandate to serve as the guardrails of the political process. If you’re a lawyer, or just a real freak for US history, you might know this. But more arcane, and arguably more interesting, is how and why this relatively marginal institution developed into the high temple of jurisprudence that it is today.
The answer is just part of a truly enormous tale, well-told in historian Charles Sellers’s magnum opus, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. I really can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s so thorough, so deep, and—believe it or not—very fun to read. And the Supreme Court saga is just one piece of it! After each chapter, I put the book down feeling like I’d been whispered something secret. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): At my summer camp, the dining hall sported a large plaque bearing Rabin’s image and the lyrics of the song “Shir L’Shalom,” which were found bloodied and crumped in his pocket after his assassination. One summer, underneath that plaque, we held a color war in which the team representing Lehi, the self-defined “totalitarian” Zionist organization, triumphed over the three other teams representing three other paramilitary groups. The irony of the looming plaque was lost on everyone, including (and perhaps especially) me. I am forced to wonder: What good has venerating Rabin done? What good can it do? Maybe we are better off confronting Rabin’s full life, the failures of Oslo and our own failures—which will likely require us to seek guidance from other corners of our experience.
Jacob Plitman (publisher): This is the only thing I’ve ever read that made me feel like I know anything at all about China. And it’s free! 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity defines the True Rate of Unemployment as “the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes.” As of October, that rate was 25.5%. Banishing unemployment through a federal jobs guarantee would transform life for almost everyone in this country, employed or not. Read The Case for a Job Guarantee by Pavlina R. Tcherneva. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I am reading this book again, and so I am recommending this book again. Since I last wrote, the woman is still in crisis. She is enduring “the hell of living matter.” She is experiencing “a wholly controlled rapacity.” She is discovering “a possible soul, a soul whose head does not devour its own tail.” She has found a “joy without the hope.” 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): I would like to recommend the entire backlog of Conner O’Malley’s YouTube channel. Thank you. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): The question has surely crossed your mind: What would happen if you approached the proud and celebrated perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66—self-proclaimed “gangsters” aided by the US government and inspired by US popular culture—and offered to help them create a whimsical and wacky commemorative film reenacting their crimes? Here is the answer. 18/10
Jacob Plitman (publisher): Some have claimed that video games are “the future of storytelling.” I have no idea what that means. Game plots are usually garbage that, at best, you endure because the particular game mechanics are fun. You are chopping someone with a sword. You are shooting up an airport. Why? Literally who cares. Also, I don’t know what it means for “storytelling” to have a past or future—but that’s not for the Shabbat Reading List. That is more of a “jewishcurrents.org” vibe.
Anyway, I want to convince you to buy a game called Disco Elysium. The game will work on your computer, no matter how lousy it is. It was made by an art collective led by an Estonian middle school dropout.
As Disco Elysium begins, the screen is black. You are in a death-like sleep. Through dialogue choices in a small menu, you engage two characters: your screeching Limbic System, and your growling Ancient Reptilian Brain. You would like to stay dead. But, they explain, unfortunately you have to wake up. Upon waking, it becomes clear that you have managed to do enough drugs to forget everything you know—the year, your name, and anything about the murder case that, as you learn, you have been investigating for some time. You are a trope. You are an alcoholic amnesiac murder detective.
What follows is a China Miéville-esque noir set in the strike-ridden city of Revachol, which is something like Marseilles plus Tallinn, run by the Dutch East India Company, and still in ruins from a revolutionary uprising decades ago. A company-hired mercenary has been murdered, lynched on a nearby tree. You walk through lushly drawn urban decay, bouncing between conversations with beautifully-acted strangers and chats among the brilliantly-written voices in your own drug-addled head. It functions, basically, like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except the pages can talk to each other, you’re not allowed to go backwards, and the writing is superb. But the stakes aren’t a murder. They are communism, liberalism, fascism, or ... Disco.
It is the confluence of the player’s fear of missing the right choices and the city of Revachol’s own post-revolutionary decay that gives the game a special power. Revachol made all the wrong choices some time ago. You are hung over. The city is hung over. You grope the body of a murdered city in the search for a murderer. But in the end something else finds you.
18/10
Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Do you want to read about two expat American Jewish lesbians who were (likely) allowed to stay in their home in the French countryside during World War II because of their close friendship with an antisemitic Vichy official? If so, great—read Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, by Janet Malcolm. The above detail is only one of many that makes Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas so fascinating to read about.
Kathleen Peratis (co-chair, Board of Directors): I recommend Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn, which was recently found and translated from the Yiddish by Anita Norich. The collection of nine stories was first published in Vilna in 1939, a few weeks before the author’s death in her late 70s, of natural causes, just weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland. It’s a page turner—I read every story last week on a long flight, and they are riveting.
Blankshteyn adhered to the beliefs of the Folkspartey (Yiddish People’s Party), founded in the wake of the pogroms following the 1905 Russian Revolution, and then to Paoley Tsiyon, committed to socialist ideals and to building a national polity in Palestine. Most of the stories are set in Vilna and its Eastern European Jewish milieu, though others take us further west.
Political but not polemical, character-driven and with absorbing plots, Blankshteyn is a superb storyteller. Her Protagonists struggle to find their place in the world. “The Incident,” in which no one has a name, begins: “This morning, control of the city once again changed hands. One set of occupiers retreated, another took over, but it didn’t make much of an impression. People were used to such changes. In a few days, the steel helmets would surely return.” In “Director Vulman,” thuggish German occupiers hover over the action. The (rare) male protagonist, who regards neither his wife nor his mistress as his equal, is brilliantly sketched.
One of the longest stories, at 25 pages, is “The First Hand,” the tale of a “homeless deserted child” in Paris. Andree, at 15, is placed by the orphanage director in a luxury women’s clothing business as a messenger. Andree works “from morning ‘til night,” and rises through the ranks. She astutely observes that many of the rich clientele seem forlorn: “Things aren’t always happy even among the rich.” She is jealous of the rich American customers not for their money but for their “independence, their calm confidence, their relationship with men, their open almost comradely cool flirtation, so different from what she has known.” Her encounters with men—including one who might have married her if she had a dowry, and another who turns out to be married with a pregnant wife—convince her, at least for a while, that “love was not for her. She had other things to do.” The “other thing,” in this story as in most of the others, is Work, her “only sovereign.”
A feminist, socialist, and activist, Blankshteyn is an artist who deserves the praise this new translation should bring her, 80 years after her death.
Abraham Riesman (member, Board of Directors): I’ve recently fallen in love. The object of my affection died just shy of two millennia ago. He was born Yosef ben Matityahu, but posterity recalls him as Flavius Josephus—or, more commonly, just Josephus. He was the first Jewish journalist.
“He wanted his whole body to be an eye, and nothing but an eye.” So speaks the narrator of the 1932 novel Josephus: A Historical Romance. Penned by German–Jewish novelist and antifascist pundit Lion Feuchtwanger, the book is among the finest pieces of historical fiction that I’ve ever read. I stumbled upon a reprint from the 1970s in the wonderful Judaica section of Chicago’s Ravenswood Used Books earlier this month. I knew a little about Josephus and was vaguely curious to know more, and the cover was gorgeous, so I snagged it. Then I devoured it. I feel like a changed man.
Josephus was born into a family of aristocratic priests in Jerusalem and became a priest himself, then a commander of anti-Roman forces, then a traitor to the Roman side, and finally a writer who chronicled the war for a mass audience in his landmark book, The Jewish War. The novel follows Joseph (as Feuchtwanger calls him) while he traverses Rome, Alexandria, and Judea during the run-up to and execution of the First Roman-Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. It’s so vividly imagined! And the prose is delicious! The issues at hand are, of course, deeply relevant. In a time of apocalypse, is it more ethical to be an activist or a chronicler? Can a Jew remain a Jew and also be a citizen of the world? What is justified in a struggle against imperial occupation? What does Jewish sovereignty (and its loss) mean for Jewish civilization? And so on.
That’s not even getting into Feuchtwanger himself—a fascinating gent, but I’m hoping to write a more substantial piece about him at some point, so I’ll stay mum for now. I’ll leave you with this passage, from the section on the sack of the Holy City: “It was as though a torturing impulse drove Joseph to the place where the horrors of the siege were to be seen at their worst. He had been sent here to be the eye that should witness all these horrors. It was easy to be shocked by them. To stand still and contemplate them because one must was far harder.”
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Every book has its time. Sometimes it takes weeks to get to, sometimes months, sometimes years, and sometimes decades. Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague is a book I’ve owned since I first saw Greed—the classic silent film Erich von Stroheim drew from it—in 1970 at the newly opened Anthology Film Archives. The final 15 minutes or so of Greed have remained etched in my memory, and a recent viewing confirmed my memory of it as one of the handful of great American films. This return to the film—which was famously faithful to its source material, to the point where it’s been said that Stroheim filmed every paragraph of the book (which explains why its original uncut length was over eight hours)—finally gave me the impetus to read its source.
Norris, who died at 32 of a ruptured appendix, was one of the purest American exponents of naturalism, the literary school of which Émile Zola was the absolute master. An unflinching and brutal gaze, focusing on human degradation and degeneration in their many forms, is at the heart of naturalism. For Zola, this often involved the intersection of lust and violence. McTeague is a naturalist in the American mode, which means that sex is at best hinted at. Physical lust is replaced in McTeague and in Norris’s other works by lust for the eternal American object of desire: money.
Greed, the title given the film by Stroheim’s co-scenarist, is a better title than McTeague, for though McTeague (he is never given a first name, called instead by the nicknames “Mac” or “Doc,” since he’s a dentist) is the central character, it is greed that is the motor of the book’s action. Every other emotion in the book—love, friendship, filial devotion—is twisted and perverted by the hunger for wealth and the mad desire to protect it as if it were a living thing under threat.
McTeague has risen from a carboy in a mine, the child of a drunken abusive father, to modest success as a dentist in San Francisco, the pre-earthquake life and physiognomy of which feature prominently in the book. Innocent of any sexual urge, he is smitten with the beautiful Trina Sieppe, whom he woos and wins and who wins $5,000 in a lottery. Her love for her money—which she loves physically, to the point of sleeping naked upon the coins that constitute the sum—feeds into an avarice that is more sexual than her relationship with her husband.
Norris’ portrait of the degeneration of everyone in McTeague through their avidity for gain ends in Death Valley in a stunning tour de force of fiction writing: McTeague, having murdered his wife for her money, has been captured by his former rival for her affections. Both of them pay for their greed in a locale whose name can be applied to our entire country.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): A few weeks ago, I saw an amateur production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), hosted by Brooklyn Eviction Defense in the outdoor theater in Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn. It hasn’t been far from my mind since. One of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “learning-plays,” it is a straightforward piece of agitprop, its morals imparted through the mistakes of the “young comrade” who is escorting Communist agitators from Moscow as they attempt to foment revolution among workers in China. The play takes the form of a hearing: The young comrade, who will otherwise be captured and tortured by the enemy, has been killed by his fellow comrades and thrown into a lime pit, and they are now recounting the circumstances of his death to the Party, awaiting judgment.
It is plain that Brecht wishes to impart the importance of acting together—of party discipline—which requires the negation of the individuated self. This turn is not subtle: In order to blend in among the Chinese workers, the agitators from Moscow hide their faces under identical masks. (“Then be yourselves no longer . . . You are nameless and without a past, empty pages on which the revolution may write its instructions.” “And so the young comrade demonstrated his agreement by effacing his personal features.”) When the comrades speak, they speak only in chorus; in this production, directed by Lucas Kane, these lines were spoken in perfect unison but in discordant registers; there was real unpleasantness in the sound of them. Every so often, a singular voice would stop the action and provide the moral, often in the form of a quote from Lenin.
Though I knew I was supposed to be identifying with the comrades, I felt a visceral fear and revulsion at the portrayal of this “togetherness.” I heard later that Kane was concerned about the capacity for the masks and the delivery to scare people, which was not his intention. And yet, it seems that it was Brecht’s—that he wanted to make this element impossible to disguise. Revolution is not pretty, and there is reason for discomfort with the discipline it demands. In the wake of the show—and perhaps in the wake of our Soviet issue—I struggled a lot with my feelings about “joining.” For readers of this magazine in its early years, when it was a project of the Communist Party USA, party discipline meant minimizing and excusing the crimes of the Soviet Union. It also, I must say, produced a lot of bad, dogmatic thinking and writing.
And yet, as I’ve continued to chew on the play for the last few weeks, reading it over twice more, I cannot deny its lessons, which speak to arguments forever playing out on the left about purity politics (“With whom would the just man not sit to help justice? / What medicine is too bitter for the man who’s dying?”) and party discipline (“Show us the way which we are to go, and we / Will go that way with you, but / Do not go the right way without us / Without us it is / The wrong way . . . We may be wrong and you may be right; therefore / You must stay with us!”), and the role of the ego in bad political decision-making—even when motivated by righteous urgency (“I can’t submit because I know I’m right. I can see with my two eyes that misery cannot wait.”). In other words, I have learned something from the learning play, and despite its sledgehammer moralism, it still left me wrestling.
David Klion (newsletter editor): Yesterday I got a galley of Emily Tamkin’s forthcoming second book, Bad Jews. I’m obligated to disclose that Emily is my friend and a contributor to the Jewish Currents Soviet Issue, and this is a book that thanks my Diplomacy Slack in the acknowledgments and quotes numerous people I know (including outgoing JC Publisher Jacob Plitman and Contributing Writer Eli Valley), so I’m hopelessly biased. That said, it’s also a book that seems practically custom-made for the JC audience. Based on extensive interviews, Emily has written a reconsideration of American Jews over the century that has passed since the US closed its doors to most Jewish immigration in the 1920s, and has attempted to complicate any static and reductive idea of what American Jewish identity is. I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing in depth, especially for Emily’s insights on neoconservatism and on the contemporary Jewish left, two particular fixations of mine. But I have no doubt anyone reading this newsletter will find something of interest here.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Last year, I was struck by a driver in a hit-and-run while on a run near my home in Brooklyn. (Don’t worry—I’m completely recovered now.) I had already been interested both in public safety alternatives to policing and in combating the deleterious effects of car culture, and as I navigated the aftermath of the crash, these questions took on a new urgency: how might we think about preventing traffic violence and holding drivers accountable without relying on the carceral system? Policing the Open Road, by the legal historian Sarah Seo, makes a convincing case that the history of American policing and the history of the automobile are intertwined. It’s easy to forget how completely the adoption of the car transformed American geography and the contours of everyday life, and Seo’s clean prose brings that era of major change to life. As new cars dangerously overwhelmed existing infrastructure not designed to accommodate their speed, states and municipalities passed a flurry of new laws and regulations, and then confronted the fact that few drivers obeyed them. The professionalization and expansion of municipal police forces—bringing with it the increased capacity of the state to enact racialized violence—occurred in part in order to enforce traffic safety regulations. Evidently, the sprawling criminal and legal response has succeeded in establishing a body of law that often protects police overreach, but not in meaningfully protecting Americans from the continual toll of traffic violence. I’m still early in the book, but Seo’s recounting of early debates over the moral and ethical duties of drivers and her analysis of how the “individualism” of the car affected drivers’ sense of responsibility to a community are genuinely fascinating.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some time ago, I wrote of my love for the Library of America (LOA), the wonderful collection of the greatest American books, beautifully bound and printed on paper that won’t yellow for a thousand years. They have just published a volume of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald that belongs in everyone’s personal library, not least the young among you. This new volume includes, along with previously collected and some uncollected short stories, one of the great works of American literature, The Great Gatsby.
It feels odd recommending a classic like The Great Gatsby. Any serious reader, one would hope, will have read it, but it’s hard to know how classics like this are holding on, so signaling it is not entirely out of line. But even if you have read it, The Great Gatsby is a book that should not be read just once. You can find something new rereading any classic, but Gatsby in particular should be read in the various stages of a reader’s life. The many faces and facets of love in it—Gatsby’s profound and doomed love for Daisy Buchanan; the frivolous affair of the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the star golfer Jordan Baker; Daisy’s husband Tom’s infidelity with the equally unfaithful and doomed Helen Wilson—resonate differently with every reading.
The book’s profound understanding of the human heart, of our failings, of longing, and of moral cowardice all require multiple readings at different periods of our lives to be fully understood and felt. Love and hope and desire are radically different when you’re young than they are when you’re in middle age and then again from the way they’re experienced in old age. It’s Fitzgerald’s genius that while still young—he was 29 when Gatsby was published—he produced a work of fiction that resonates so strongly and so differently across its readers’ lives.
Along with its account of a doomed love, Gatsby is the great novel about self-invention and reinvention, about the emptiness of success, about social climbing and racism and antisemitism—the latter of which rears its head quite disturbingly in the portrait of Meyer Wolfsheim, based on the gambler Arnold Rothstein.
All this is why I particularly recommend this LOA volume to the young among you. The Scribner paperback you probably already have will likely not survive the many readings of The Great Gatsby you owe yourself. It’s a book to be saved, returned to, and passed on to your yet-unborn grandchildren.
Arielle Isack (JC fellow): It feels trite to recommend feminist reading (as opposed to feminist raging) this week, but Shulamith Firestone’s iconic 1970 text The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution provides a compelling case for burning shit down and glimpsing a better future through the smoke. This is not to say that it isn’t a rigorous text. Firestone essentially tries to redefine historical materialism away from class conflict toward what she theorizes as an even more fundamental schism: the conflict between the sexes. From this idea, which is only superficially based in Marx, springs forth Firestone’s fascinating and terrifying concept of a true utopia: one of mechanized uteruses and socially sanctioned incest, as all divisions of labor and gender and family unit have been necessarily destroyed in the pyre of patriarchies past.
There are some glaring deficiencies in Firestone’s utopia, the most pressing of which are its disregard for non-white women’s liberation and its elision of gay or trans possibilities. However, reading the then-25-year-old author’s brilliant and batshit manifesto is valuable and inspiring if only for the sheer brazen disregard it shows for every single building block that led us from prehistory to our current capitalist patriarchy. Many of its sincerely felt yet ultimately insufficient recommendations hinge on a very real and legible program of seizing reproductive technologies away from patriarchal oppressors; it is only because Firestone has such little regard for preexisting thought and social structures (including feminist ones) that this crucial point is articulated in full.
I feel fortunate to live in New York, a city where access to abortion will almost certainly remain guaranteed by law. But I have this lingering feeling that the reason the feminist response to Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has felt so tepid here is a desire to accommodate and protect the liberal legislations and sensibilities that have thus far made it so. The response has been sheepish, because acknowledging the objectively worse realities for women in other states amounts to protecting and being grateful for our local status quo. To read The Dialectic is to immerse oneself in what can sometimes read like an otherworldly fantasy laden with the prejudices of Firestone’s generation, but the book is singular in its commitment to the unavoidable truth that “feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the basic structures of society.”
Isaac Scher (contributing writer): I recently finished White Noise, Don DeLillo’s most well-known novel of post-industrial Americana. In it, the nuclear family is no longer an organizing principle of social life, and neither is much else. The primary sites of meaning are the grocery store and mass media, industrial-ecological crisis and preoccupation with death. The story’s middle-aged protagonist and narrator, Jack Gladney, is an ambitious professor heralded for his creation of “Hitler Studies,” DeLillo’s darkly satirical jab at the scholarly impulse to create new concepts for purposes of self-aggrandizement. (Jack’s precocious children often seem more intelligent than he is.) His hilarious colleague Murray, who hopes to establish the field of “Elvis Studies,” has submerged himself in American arcana to grasp deeper cultural meanings. He tells Jack: “I read the TV listings, I read the ads in Ufologist Today. I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.” In this America, there is the magic of the marketplace, and the dread of death. Inside the home, there is a sad distance between Jack, his fourth wife Babette, and their children, each of them uniquely paranoid and obsessive. Their spoken exchanges tend to break down. (“All plots tend to move deathward,” Jack occasionally intones.) Literal scripts of TV advertisements mark the last anticlimactic words of their dialogues. “MasterCard, Visa, American Express.” The reader’s sensation is that a moment has been sullied by an ad blurted from a device. But lines of marketing copy could just as well come from the characters themselves.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): I’ll admit, my exact memory of Elif Batuman’s celebrated novel The Idiot, which I tore through too quickly some years ago after receiving it as a 23rd birthday present, is a bit hazy. But I recall feeling a bit perturbed by the story of precocious-but-naive Harvard freshman Selin: I was troubled by some beside-the-point (and, I now realize, paradoxically Selin-esque) questions: How did Selin have time to read so many extra books in college, and had I failed by not doing the same? Had she considered just talking to her confusing romantic interest Ivan? Why couldn’t the Harvard students just live in normal dorms?
Still, despite my ambivalence about the novel, Batuman has become one of my favorite essayists on the relationship between life and literature; her collection The Possessed is excellent, and her 2020 New Yorker article on Zoom performances of Greek tragedy during the pandemic is one of the finest essays the magazine has published in recent years (it’s impossible to succinctly describe, but it combines discussions of Sophocles, Freud, childhood, climate change, war, and pandemic into a coherent and affecting whole). So after enjoying an excerpt of Either/Or, the sequel to The Idiot, I got hold of a galley, and I’m thrilled to announce that I get it now. Armed with a useful five years’ distance from the campus and a little less insecurity about my own reading resume, I can fully appreciate the hilarity and tragedy of Selin’s incredible naivete and enduring perceptiveness. In this installment, sophomore Selin navigates parties and her first sexual relationships and reflects on family relationships in childhood and the thorny moral quandaries of the tourism industry. She uses Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and a series of other texts, from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, to contemplate the central question that animates her coming-of-age: should one aim to live an aesthetic life or an ethical one? And just how ethical is it to reproduce the aesthetics of life on the page?
Few writers are as funny as Batuman, but the novel isn’t perfect. The Selin voice can have diminishing returns over time: one starts to wish for a bit less incessant questioning and a bit more of an attempt at an answer, even a fumbling attempt. Batuman typically excels at making meaning of the daily incidents of college life, but sometimes aims too high and falls flat, as with a cringey passage comparing the struggle to find space for a mat in Pilates class to Israel/Palestine. But on the whole—especially as Selin gains a bit more confidence and a bit more impulse for action rather than just contemplation—Either/Or is a pleasurable read about what literature offers and asks of us as we try to make sense of the world.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): What if what defines us is not what we say, think, and do, but what other people think we think, say, and do? This is the premise of David Shields’s latest book, The Very Last Interview. Shields went through every interview he has ever given over 40 years, removed his responses from the conversations—seeking the common issues and concerns of the interviewers—and assembled them into this slim volume. The result is a portrait with its subject omnipresent yet totally absent.
Even without Shields saying a word, we learn that he’s a Jewish writer in late middle age who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His parents were writers, and his father suffered from depression and was subjected to electroshock treatment. Shields loves sports, is divorced, has one child, and questions the novel as a form. He teaches, and some of his students don’t think highly of him. There’s a dark side to him, attested to by the titles he gives some of the chapters: “Brokenness,” “Failure,” “Suicide,” “Envy.” He’s also well-regarded enough to be considered a writer with answers to questions about Knowledge and Truth.
The spirit of David Markson and the great French writer Edouard Levé hover over The Very Last Interview, as do the person, writing, and fate of David Foster Wallace. As a portrait of the artist from without, The Very Last Interview is a fascinating piece of work. But it’s also a portrait—a largely ugly one—of the world of the critic.
The critics Shields interviews come across as needy and shamelessly opportunistic, requesting letters of recommendation from the author for admission to the Iowa program. Their questions reek of self-congratulation (“So you can’t read a book that isn’t shattered into caesurae of shattered space – Why should that matter to me?”), pretentiousness (“I would argue that all scopophilia is by definition meaningless. Watching other people play a game, though, strikes me as being at the extreme far end of meaninglessness. How do you justify it?”), and just plain meanness (“For instance, has any book of yours sold even fifty thousand copies in hardcover? That would be every person in Pascagoula, Mississippi and absolutely no one else”.) And of course, Shields as a professor and everyone on the teaching end of the workshop world “benefits from a model that is not only deeply authoritarian and patriarchal but also inherently racist, misogynistic and anti-democratic.”
The question of “why write?” comes up repeatedly. Seeing it over and over again, it becomes abundantly clear that these critics are so enamored of their own voices that they can’t even imagine that the question is meaningless. Writers write because they must and can. Shields is a saint for not having punched any of them in the snout.
Before you go: On Thursday, May 19th, Alice Radosh, co-chair of the Jewish Currents Council, will give a talk at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum on the hidden history of slavery in her hometown of Pelham, New York. Research has revealed the names and descriptions of enslaved people who were essential to the town’s economy but who were never acknowledged or honored. Tickets and directions can be found here.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): There’s an unsettling symmetry to Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s second book, which works less as a novel than as a series of interlinked stories about a gay American teaching English and roving the hookup apps in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first chapter finds the unnamed narrator sympathetically struggling to advise a closeted student; the last one finds him on an ill-advised night out with some new graduates, his gaze hungry, his hands lingering too long on one of the boys’ flexed bicep, or falling “errantly” on his crotch. In the second chapter, he plays the submissive in an assignation with a stranger—and only narrowly escapes when it gets out of hand; in the penultimate one, he dominates another new lover, testing his own capacity for sexual cruelty. It makes for a compelling investigation of desire: where it cleaves to and from who we “are,” how we account for its peculiar polarities, the ways it can take us both closer to and further from what we want. Many of the blurbs on the back of the book speak to Greenwell’s talent for writing about sex (Sheila Heti: “I can think of few contemporary authors who bring as much reality and honesty to the description of sex. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison.”) And it’s true. I can’t remember the last thing I read where the sex scenes themselves were not just an irreducible plot point in themselves (or worse, seasoning), but rather, wholly explored as a site of narrative: The aforementioned penultimate chapter is particularly remarkable for how it tells the story of the relationship to come from within an extended, play-by-play of their first sexual encounter. Still, I think in some ways, Greenwell’s writing about love is the book’s anchor. The middle chapters of the book, grouped in a section titled “Loving R.,” vividly conjures the relief of love. The before and after of love—what happens when the narrator is once again without it, once again an agent primarily of his desire—constitutes the primary movement of this somewhat quiet book. The emotional clarity and elegance of the writing, which sometimes called to mind Rachel Cusk, carries the book through its more subtle movements.
Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Last weekend was a chores weekend for me, and to stay entertained while cleaning I began listening to “Power Trip,” the first season of Cover Story, an investigative podcast from New York Magazine. Told in nine episodes, the series looks at the underground world of psychedelic therapy. The podcast hosts—Lily Kay Ross with iO Tillet Wright in Part I and David Nickles in Part II—are terrific, and their involvement in this investigative work is personal: they each have sought healing for trauma through psychedelics. At first motivated by the possibilities such powerful drugs offer for individual and societal transformation, the hosts and the interviewees have all experienced harm within unregulated therapeutic spaces and dismissals of that harm at all levels of leadership and community. The discussions are nuanced and honest; participants are open about the internal and external pressure they have felt to avoid jeopardizing public perception and the success of clinical trials, and they are driven by care for each other and for those considering becoming involved. As the concept of psychedelics-as-medicine becomes increasingly accepted and mainstream, this is an important addition to the conversation.
Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Power, fortune, family, mythmaking—if you like reading books about a combination of these things and it would sweeten the pot if the book was described as a “literary puzzle,” check out Trust by Hernan Diaz, out next week.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Wobblies, Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s brilliant documentary on the Industrial Workers of the World—the greatest of all our native-born radical movements—has been restored and is being re-released today, in time for May Day. It’s showing in New York at Metrograph and the New Plaza Cinema and will soon be available nationwide. If you see only one radical film this year—or, I’ll go further, only one documentary—this should be it.
The Wobblies was honored last year by the Library of Congress for its lasting artistic and historical value, and if ever a film on an episode in radical history deserved this honor it’s this one. Not only is it a masterpiece of left-wing cinema, it is also a model of oral history. The directors chose to limit the voiceover narration to a minimum, preferring instead to have now-elderly former Wobs tell their personal experiences of the union’s heyday from its founding in 1905 until it was crushed in 1917-18. As a result, we hear firsthand accounts, filmed in 1976 and 1977, of men and women who took part in the great Lawrence strike of 1912 and in the IWW’s free speech campaigns, who rode the rails and worked the fields. Because the filmmakers chose to tell the story in this way, some moments in the union’s history are missing, but they are more than made up for by the insights, the enthusiasm, the joy, and the songs for which the IWW were so famous, all in the voices and varied accents of former Wobblies for whom the IWW was once a living thing that held out hope for the destruction of capitalism.
The IWW’s ideology was vague: it called for all workers to join the One Big Union, which would one day call a general strike that would bring capital to its knees. What would follow was unclear, but it was enough to lead to a repression of the Wobs that would only be equaled in the 60s and 70s in the government’s campaign against the Black Panthers. For the men and women in The Wobblies, however difficult the strikes and struggles were, they were all worth it, and their memory was a lasting source of pride.
Those interested in reading about the Wobblies should pick up two books: Melvyn Dubofsky’s classic We Shall Be All is far and away the best and most judicious account of the IWW’s rise and fall. My own I’ll Forget it When I Die! is a detailed and accessible account of one of the darkest moments in American labor history, the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, when 1,200 striking Arizona copper miners and their supporters were rounded up, loaded in boxcars and dumped in the New Mexico desert. The Wobs led the strike that served as the pretext for the deportation, and writing the book reinforced a love for the IWW I first felt over 50 years ago when I read Mel Dubofsky’s book.
As a bonus recommendation: What’s lovely about A.B. Zax’s Hello, Bookstore—a documentary opening today at Film Forum on The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts—is that for most of its length it avoids what we’ve come to expect in films about booksellers. However justified, hearing the constant lamentations on the end of reading or the end of buying print books or the horrors of Amazon has become a bore. Hello, Bookstore is about something else, something actually wonderful. It’s about the eponymous bookstore’s owner, Matt Tannenbaum, a man who loves books, who loves sharing his love of books, and who loves to read and quote from what he’s reading and what he’s read.
Tannenbaum bought the bookstore as a 30-year-old in 1976, but not once does he complain about the awful effects of the passage of time in his trade. He’s someone who does what he loves: he talks to people, he reads, and occasionally he makes some money selling his wares. He knows his customers, and even those he doesn’t know are made to feel he does.
The film is a reminder of just how awful the early days of Covid were, when Tannenbaum wouldn’t allow people in to browse or even pay for books they’d ordered or requested. The financial impact is devastating, but this transplanted New York Jew (he tells of his first sighting of a moose after moving to the Berkshires and wondering if Moose eat Jews) becomes the town’s George Bailey. His cashbox all but empty, he puts out an appeal to save The Bookstore and his GoFund Me drive saves him and his store.
As in the Capra film, the relief and happiness he feels is so sincere, so real, that we can’t help but share in it.
Before you go: Jewish Currents Contributing Editor Maia Ipp and filmmaker Katz Tepper (who participated in a recent JC event) are the guests on a brand new episode of the podcast Disloyal, discussing Tepper’s film Roasted Cockroach for Sale. Listen to the podcast here!
Also, on May 18th, JC Senior Editor Ari Brostoff is participating in the Triply Canopy live event “Executive Fiction” along with Richard Beck and Sean McCann; they will be discussing the novels Bill and Hillary Clinton have co-authored with, respectively, James Patterson and Louise Penny. The event is free to attend in Lower Manhattan or to livestream. Sign up here!
