Shabbat
Reading List
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!
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I got Covid two and a half weeks ago; it was more substantial than the first bout and I’m still sort of recovering. The worst of it now is a lingering brain fog, once described by my colleague Jacob as the feeling of having drunk one PBR at all times, which seems right to me in its implication of mild dissociation. It’s lifting day to day but nonetheless, I’ll keep this short! The only upside of Covid was the permission to stay in all day watching movies. Perhaps the best thing I watched was a delightful Japanese classic called Tampopo (1985) about a widow haplessly running a crappy roadside ramen joint who is inspired to improve by a truck driver with a discerning palate. Juzo Itami’s camera has a roving eye—or perhaps a roving nose: He is not afraid to move away from his central characters and their pursuit of the perfect bowl of noodles to other rooms and other dishes (a particularly wonderful tangent—and an indelible image involving an egg that would be criminal to spoil—arrives as hotel room service to a gangster and his paramour). But the heart of this film is the ramen itself, and the relationship between the widow Tampopo and the rambling truck driver Goro. It’s not quite a romance; one senses the complications of real love might have spoiled the broth, so to speak. And yet it’s not not one; the movie spins out like a top on the energy of a person who has been inspired by another. “Everybody has their own ladder,” Tampopo says to Goro on their only night out alone together. “Some climb the rungs to the top. But some don’t even know they have one. You helped me find my ladder, Goro.”
I feel compelled to add that as soon as I started testing negative, I went and saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in the theater. It’s an instant classic, a totally original crowd pleaser. Go see it!
David Klion (newsletter editor): I recently started Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government, an acclaimed 1,000-page historical tome with a very cool cover that’s been taunting me on my bookshelf since its publication five years ago. It’s a multigenerational saga about an enormous Soviet-era housing complex on an island in the middle of the Moskva River opposite the Kremlin that was home to some of the most elite Communist Party members and their families, including quite a lot of ethnic Jews and many of the eventual victims of Stalin’s purges. I’m not very far in, partly because I spent much of the past week in the DC suburbs and it seemed like too much trouble to bring this one down from New York (instead I brought Serhii Plokhy’s brisk, readable The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, which is great if you’re looking for an introductory survey of the country dominating international headlines this year), but what I’ve read so far of The House of Government is vividly written and captures the almost apocalyptic cult-like atmosphere of the generation of Russian left-wing intellectuals that would eventually overthrow the Provisional Government. As a longtime fan of Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, I’m excited to spend some more time in his singular reimagining of the Soviet world.
Ari M. Brostoff (senior editor): I can’t remember anymore whether I’ve always thought Sam Cohen, whose first book, Sarahland, came out last year, was named Sarah. I’ve met Sam a few times through mutual friends (she’s great) and am pretty sure I make this mistake every time. Has that really happened, or did Sam’s name simply get overwritten in my mind when I learned she was coming out with a short story collection about a whole world of Sarahs? In any case, the die has been cast; Sarah it is. This is not a book for people with strong boundaries.
Every story in Sarahland features a Sarah of some kind, from a girl growing up in a midwestern suburb “who feels basically and secretly interchangeable with all teenaged Sarahs” to the biblical Sarah (whose story centers on a pulpy romance with Abraham’s concubine Hagar) to the Sarahs produced by a mall arcade game where you can map your features onto a digital Sarah of your choosing (the narrator and her friend become Sarah Schulman and Sarah Silverman and speak in their voices for several pages). The Sarah universe reminds me of the slippery worlds in the stories of Aimee Bender (who is thanked in the acknowledgments): Sarahs are always becoming other things—cats and eels, girls they’re in love with, other Sarahs. Bodies turn into each other or fall apart. In one story, the especially surreal “Dream Palace,” the narrator (a second-person Sarah, this time) runs into a long-haired butch who used to bully her in elementary school, but this time seduces her. “When she drops her pants you’re confused by her cock because you feel sure she didn’t have one as a kid when she peed on you at recess,” Cohen writes. “‘Where’d you get it?’ you whisper. ‘That kid in our class who died left it to me in his will,’ she explains. ‘He was a feminist, it turned out.’”
My favorite story is the first one, which gives the book’s title and conceit a different, unsettlingly realistic resonance: Here, “Sarahland” is the impenetrable bubble inhabited by Jewish girls passing through sorority life on their way from summer camp to an MRS degree. “We lived in a privately owned off-campus dormitory where 90 percent of the girls were named Sarah,” explains a narrator known as Dr. Sarah (she’s pre-med) to differentiate her from her best friends, Sarah A. and Sarah B. Dr. Sarah continues:
The whole dorm was Jewish. I never understood how these things happened. Nowhere on any of the dorm’s advertising materials, which had succeeded in making me so excited to live with no parents in a building of studious 18-year-olds with a frozen yogurt machine, did it say the word Jewish, but it seemed wherever I went in my life, everyone was Jews. While I might think I was making independent choices and moving around freely in the world, it was as though a secret groove had been carved, and some invisible bumpers were going to push me gently back into that groove, the Jew groove, Sarahland, and Sarahland would trick me into thinking it was the entire world.
Someone really needed to give this extremely familiar phenomenon a name and I’m so pleased Sarah Sam Cohen did it: Sarahland it is.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): April is the month of cinematic biblical epics, and along with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s non-epic The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I’d like to advocate for The Robe. This grandiose account of early Christian suffering stars Richard Burton as Marcellus, an imperial Roman officer who pays the ultimate price for adopting the new faith. My reason for recommending it has little to do with its cinematic or historical qualities, though. It is worth watching for one of the film’s villains, a slimy character who betrays the Romans to the Christians and the Christinas to the Romans. His name is Abidor.
Abidor is indeed a Hebrew name, meaning “father of the generation,” but it’s not of biblical origin: it was devised in the modern era. Moreover, the name does not appear in Lloyd C. Douglas’ bestselling novel, which inspired the film. How, then, did my family of Russian Jews get dragged into ancient Rome and become a player in the rise of Christianity?
Since the name Abidor only appears in the film, I researched the screenplay. It was written by Albert Maltz, the Communist screenwriter and member of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to rat before HUAC. Informing was a major concern of Maltz’s, and Abidor had a much larger part in the original screenplay than in the finished product. The drafts expand his awfulness greatly, an awfulness which in the film finally leads Richard Burton to tell him “Go back to Damascus, Abidor.” Abidor was a symbol of evil for Maltz. Why “Abidor,” though?
Maltz was a Jew from Brooklyn, and his family had connections to Brownsville, once the second-largest Jewish community in America. Brownsville was the home of the Abidors, my grandfather Louis and his two brothers, who along with their families were then the only Abidors in America. Maltz’s family were builders or, as some reports have it, house painters. So were the Abidor brothers. That they would have competed or had dealings with each other is almost certain, and that they would have bumped heads is also easy to imagine. The Abidors were not all easy men to get along with. One of my great-uncles left his family, took up a drifting existence, and was murdered at a boarding house in Queens, his head smashed in by his roommate when he and his girlfriend were making too much noise during activities we can easily imagine. My grandfather was a landlord with a roving eye, a fact I only learned when I was 50, decades after his death. When my grandmother got wind of this, she wanted to throw him out, but her sisters told her: “He’s got money, he’s got property. Stay with him and make his life a living hell.” And she did.
These difficult immigrant Jews would not have been nice people to know, and the archivist in charge of Maltz’s papers told me that my hypothesis was probably correct: Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Maltz waited for the right moment to take revenge on his family’s former foes. And so it is that if you watch The Robe, you’ll find the ancestor of a contributing writer to Jewish Currents influencing world history.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): While I expected that fatherhood would dramatically alter my reading life, I didn’t anticipate becoming a father in exactly the way I did—spending the first months visiting my sons, who were born 14 weeks premature, at the hospital. The current structure of my life means that aside from the time I spend reading to my kids, I’m not reading as much or as well as I’d like. This disruption has made me all the more grateful for the Between the Covers podcast, hosted by writer David Naimon. The premise of the show is simple and familiar: Naimon talks to the author of a recently published book. But the resulting discussions are truly singular. Naimon’s questions, often multifaceted and thick with allusions to other interviews and texts, reveal the depth of his forethought and preparation. His own subtle and attentive close readings draw listeners into the writer’s work while leaving space for his interlocutor’s answers to carry the conversation forward. Like the best criticism, the exchanges are grounded in the particularities of literary technique and in touch with art’s most fundamental questions. Listening to them has helped me keep my reading mind alive. (The recent episodes with Sheila Heti, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Solmaz Sharif are all fabulous places to start.)
Nora Caplan-Bricker (web editor): This spring, I’ve been slowly making my way (delayed by a recent bout of Covid) through Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel The Unpossessed, published by New York Review Books, which follows a group of self-sabotaging leftist intellectuals as they attempt to fulfill a longtime dream of starting their own little magazine. I was inspired to read it by Vivian Gornick’s appreciative essay in The New York Review of Books about Slesinger’s collection of short stories, Time: The Present, which will be reissued next month by Boiler House Press. As Gornick explains, Slesinger, the daughter of an affluent and assimilated Jewish family, gathered the material for The Unpossessed during her marriage to Herbert Solow, “an intellectually rigorous man on the left” and an editor of Menorah Journal, a Jewish intellectual and literary magazine of the 1920s and ’30s “among whose editors and contributors could be counted Elliot Cohen, who, years later, became the first editor of Commentary, and Lionel Trilling, who, years later, became, well, Lionel Trilling.” (After the end of their marriage, Slesinger moved to Los Angeles and pursued a successful career as a screenwriter before dying of cancer at only 39.) How could an editor at a Jewish intellectual and literary magazine of the 2020s not be tempted to dip into a novel inspired by such obvious forebears—especially one that Gornick describes as both satiric and tragic, and “often brilliantly original”?
The Unpossessed, which is full equally of razor-sharp bons mots and tediously repetitive passages, both does and does not live up to that recommendation. An endless scene set at a fundraiser had me wondering where Slesinger’s many editor friends were when she needed them. Gornick acknowledges that “many on the left have deplored The Unpossessed for what was said to be Slesinger’s unknowing presentation of the politics undergirding its story,” and though she considers this beside the point in a book that is really about the tortured marriage of the central couple, I would argue that the characters’ propensity for lines like “it’s all, as you say, e-co-nom-ic” is not exactly irrelevant to the integrity of the novel’s world-building. (Though this is a commentary on Slesinger’s era rather than her abilities, the book is also littered with asides like the following, from the mind of the magazine’s blue-blooded potential funder: “Funny thing about Jews: you met them downtown and wanted to cut their throats; you met them at home in the evening and found yourself telling them your troubles.” The novel seeks to skewer prejudices that it has evidently also internalized, which can be queasy-making as well as sociologically interesting.) All in all, The Unpossessed lacks the ruthless, bullseye accuracy of a novel like Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, to which it is often compared, but which pins its subjects with a far more elegant shrewdness. (“Scratch a socialist and you find a snob,” McCarthy writes archly.)
That said, I’ve enjoyed my hours with Slesinger’s circle of downhearted socialists. The book’s strongest portrait is of Miles and Margeret Flinders—the former the true-believer of the “triumvirate” of old friends behind the new magazine, the latter his sensitive and adoring wife. Miles fears that finding happiness with Margaret could sap his passionate commitment to politics; Margaret seeks, with an excruciating carefulness that Slesinger renders with pitch-perfect poignancy, to coax him into permitting himself a personal life. The depiction of Miles’s friendships with the rest of his triumvirate—Bruno Leonard, a professor who commands a following of collegiate communists, and a handsome and flaky novelist named Jeffrey Blake—has its own subtle pathos, as each confronts the danger of staking his identity on the cohesion of their group as a “heroic whole.” The reader has to laugh at the way the three friends talk about their magazine—as if it might save them, or save the world. “The magazine to end all magazines—or no magazine at all,” they insist. Maybe it’s obvious which of those two ends up happening, but Slesinger captures the thrill of the lofty hopes that can spring from the smallest literary enterprise.
Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): I haven’t been reading too much recently, but I have been enjoying the new HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, based on the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman. For me, it’s the prologue to the NBA of my youth: the Pat Reilly I think of as the slicked-back-haired, Armani suit-wearing coach of the New York Knicks and then the Miami Heat is presented here as scrappy and unkempt, trying to reboot his stalled career by forcing his way back into the Lakers organization. The Magic Johnson I know of mostly since his 1991 HIV diagnosis is shown as young and cocky and ready to win games, hearts, and women. The cast is just a pleasure to watch—including Quincy Isaiah as Magic, John C. Reilly as the sleazy but charismatic and successful team owner Jerry Buss, Adrien Brody as Pat Reilly, and Gaby Hoffman as Claire Rothman, general manager of the Forum arena, among others. There’s not so much to laugh about these days, so I’ve appreciated the pure entertainment of this series so far.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It was 1981, and my then-wife and I were meeting friends at the restaurant in the Ukrainian National Home on 2nd Avenue in the East Village. We were waiting inside the front door when I saw a notice on a bulletin board announcing a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine. Though a product of the New York City public school system, I can subtract 40 from 1981: 1941! They were celebrating the invasion of the USSR by the Nazis. Even so, we liked the restaurant, whose entrance featured a bas-relief of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Ukrainian national hero and Jew-killer.
I bring this up not to justify Vladimir Putin’s insane claim that he is seeking to “denazify” Ukraine, but in the context of the brilliant, horrifying and essential new film, Babi Yar. Context, by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, which opened last week at Film Forum. Babi Yar. Context is a film that fits in with the director’s most recent works, films I have recommended highly here: State Funeral, a documentary about the crowds at the funeral of Stalin, and The Trial, the account of a show trial at the beginning of the Stalinist purges. As he did in those and other films, Loznitsa has assembled archival footage with no omniscient voiceover and little explanatory text. The images are the story.
Presented here is life in Ukraine as the Nazis invaded it on June 22nd, 1941 and conquered and occupied it shortly thereafter. Loznitsa’s aim is to present life under Nazi occupation and the reaction to it as it was, not as a gilded legend would like it. The insane brutality of the Germans is on display, as they fire flamethrowers into peasant homes and bombard cities. The enemy has made himself known.
But on the Ukrainian side, the reaction is disturbing. Loznitsa shows us the enthusiastic greeting given Governor-General Hans Frank when part of Ukraine is joined to his Polish Nazi fiefdom. German troops entering Ukraine are greeted with flowers, and as they march through Lviv they are greeted with arms raised in the Hitler salute. Crowds gather to attach portraits of Hitler to the front of trams, with Nazi flags added to the display. And everywhere there are posters hailing Hitler as the “liberator”—a view still shared by some when I went to that East Village restaurant 40 years later.
To my knowledge, Loznitsa has never before engaged in any form of visual trickery. But in Babi Yar. Context he wants his Ukrainian audience to be forced to look long and hard at their predecessors’ actions, which he does by slowing down or magnifying shots of a series of brutal attacks on Jews in Lviv, of Jews being made to walk naked down the streets, and of a Jewish woman dragged by her hair across the cobblestones. There is no footage of the killings at Babi Yar, though Loznitsa includes footage he discovered of the explosions in the center of Kyiv that served as the pretext for the murder of over 33,000 Jews in a ravine outside the capital. Photos in both black and white and in color tell us all we need to know. But Loznitsa also includes footage from the trials of the perpetrators of the massacre, with survivors recounting the events in Babi Yar and elsewhere in occupied Ukraine.
By the end, only the most hardened anti-death penalty advocate could avoid feeling sympathy with the 200,000 spectators of the hanging of 12 Nazi war criminals in Kyiv. And no viewer, not a one, can feel anything but disgust at the final scenes of the film: sewage pipes emptying industrial waste into the ravine of Babi Yar, burying the murdered Jews a second time, this time under a sea of sludge.
(ed. note: for more context on Babi Yar, read Linda Kinstler’s feature in the Soviet Issue of Jewish Currents, now arriving in subscribers’ mailboxes)
Before you go: The artist Jenny Yurshansky, whose work is featured in the Jewish Currents Soviet Issue, has an exhibition, A Legacy of Loss: There Were No Roses There at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles on display through May 12th. Curated by fellow Soviet Issue contributor Rotem Rozental and including the work “Hide and Seek” featured in the issue, the exhibit has been written up in the Los Angeles Times,
and you can join Jenny for walk-throughs on any of the following Sundays: April 10th, 1–3 pm; May 1st, 10 am–12 pm; and May 8th, 4–6 pm.
Also, fun fact: This is the 100th Shabbat Reading List! We introduced this format at the start of the pandemic as part of an expanded email newsletter, and it’s been published virtually every Friday since. Here’s to the next 100...
