Shabbat
Reading List

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...

Every Friday, Jewish Currents staff, board members, and other supporters send out a selection of books and articles from other publications we’ve been reading (and maybe the occasional movie or TV show or album). We spend a lot of time developing and promoting our own work, but we want to offer you a look at what else is on our minds.

If you’re interested in buying any of our recommended books, whenever possible our links below go to Bookshop, an alternative to the monopolistic corporate behemoth that is Amazon. Purchases made on Bookshop directly support independent bookstores. Jewish Currents maintains our own homepage with Bookshop, and if you buy through there or through the links below we get a 10% commission, so you’ll be supporting our operations too. Doesn’t that feel much better than making Jeff Bezos a tiny bit richer?

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s space programs, made headlines by declaring that humans had in fact made contact with extraterrestrials. Among other eyebrow-raising claims, he insisted that the aliens and the Americans had formed an “intergalactic federation” and that representatives from both species were operating an underground base on Mars. You may remember that I poked fun at Eshed in this newsletter at the time—the rare alien story in mainstream news too out there even for me. I never read Eshed’s last book, The Universe Beyond the Horizon, as it was never translated into English. Luckily, members of the UFO network MUFON have cobbled together a crowdsourced translation of his latest tell-all memoir Operation Supernova, which details the near-breakdown of the Intergalactic Federation after Donald Trump’s departure from the White House under what Eshed describes as Joe Biden’s “weak leadership,” and the aliens’ subsequent turn to the Israelis as superior human partners. Reader, I have to admit, it’s pretty convincing stuff.

Eshed’s aliens more or less conform to the canon description of the grays: short, humanoid, big eyes, gray skin. They communicate telepathically in the language spoken by their interlocutors. But in Eshed’s telling, by necessity, they have also learned to communicate from a distance—not via satellite, as in the past, but via text message, straight to the iPhone in the Oval Office. It was due to some well-placed Pegasus Spyware—Eshed stops short of saying that the Israelis bugged the US president, but that is indeed the implication—that the Bennett administration first learned there was trouble in paradise: The aliens, tired of sneaking around and keen for easier exchange with Earthlings, have long wanted to reveal themselves, and saw in Trump a leader with a talent for controlling the message who could pave the way for a grand revelation without inducing mass hysteria. But Trump misjudged in planning for an other-worldly second act to the Abraham Accords at the start of an all-but-assured second term. Now the aliens were stuck with Biden, in whose powers of persuasion they had “zero confidence,” as the characteristically blunt alien negotiators put it directly to the leader of the free world himself, via text. They cite Sens. Manchin and Sinema, but also viral tweets, substack posts, and hot takes from niche publications in the American mediasphere (bizarrely, the aliens quote from both Jacobin and Commentary with some regularity) about everything from the hasty pullout from Afghanistan to Jen Psaki’s rapid Covid test gaffe.

Enter the Israelis, who intercept the transmissions and make direct contact, bonding immediately with the ETs over their no-nonsense style and realpolitik worldview. Eshed recounts how lead Israeli negotiator Idan Roll, the gay former model and father of two from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gains the aliens’ trust by introducing them to the Israeli hasbara operation, a well-oiled machine adept at “explanation” on a global scale. If anyone can competently carry the message of extraterrestrial life, it’s them. (In this regard, the book also unexpectedly doubles as a deep dive into hasbara networks, from top secret meetings with AIPAC executives to virtual tours of gamified troll farms and Instagram influencers.) According to Eshed, the Israelis have now replaced the Americans in the Martian underground base. But if all this is true, where’s the big announcement? Eshed says any day now...

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): For decades, the mysterious German Jewish philosopher Hans Perel was known to us only from passing references in the writings of his more famous friends and acquaintances. Many of these allusions concern not the work but the man himself—and portray him as a bit of a nuisance. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin complains that Perel ditched him at an expensive lunch, leaving him to foot the bill. A diary entry by Martin Buber describes a release party for an issue of Buber’s storied magazine Der Jude at which Perel overindulged and defaced the walls with pornographic graffiti. But if the accounts of Perel’s behavior are less than flattering, every mention of his gnomic writings—all of which have long been thought lost—is ecstatic. Theodor Adorno once wrote to Max Horkheimer that Perel “did in each lightning phrase what would take most of us a lifetime of labor.” Ernst Bloch called him “not the last true metaphysician, but the very last.” For Hannah Arendt, his thought “promised to renew the possibility of religion, of politics, of human being.”

Finally, we can experience Perel’s work for ourselves. His magnum opus, The Ruin of What Is, has just appeared in English from NYRB Classics, in a luminescent translation by Damion Searls. Those preoccupied with the chaos of the last few years might have missed the big news of the text’s discovery in late 2020, when it was found in a wrecked submarine off the coast of Denmark. (Though we know Perel died fleeing the Nazis, the exact circumstances remain obscure, so it’s unclear whether the copy belonged to him or was being ferried out of Europe by some associate.) Miraculously legible despite water damage and decay, the manuscript was promptly published in Germany to considerable acclaim; I’ve been eagerly awaiting its arrival in English ever since.

So how is it? Baffling and brilliant. Shifting seamlessly between aphorism, discursus, and fable, Perel interweaves a quasi-mystical exegesis of “ehyeh asher ehyeh”—the Hebrew phrase God gives when Moses asks for God’s name in the Book of Exodus, variously translated as “I am that I am” and “I will be what I will be,” among other variations—with a meticulous and biting rebuttal of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, developing what scholar Susan Buck-Morss, in her astoundingly lucid introduction, calls “a multipolar dialectics of the unknowable.” If that sounds forbidding, rest assured that the reading experience is less dry treatise than psychedelic amusement park ride—if the roller coaster was careening along the edge of history’s abyss. Somehow anticipating structuralism, poststructuralism, the linguistic turn, affect theory, posthumanism, and social media, Perel carries us up to the limits of our ways of knowing. As he writes in the prolegomena to the preface to the first introduction, “While as dark is to dawn so is Not to the Each, our carrying is at last unbecome, and All shall it be.” I certainly hope he’s right.

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Move over, Moncrieff! There’s a new Proust translator in town. Singer-songwriter Taylor Alison Swift may be known in recent years for her surprise album drops, but that’s not the only way she can surprise us: Last night, at midnight, she unexpectedly released a project long in the making—an annotated and translated version of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s famed epic In Search of Lost Time. Keen observers have already known Swift to be a Proust disciple. Only someone with a Proustian sensibility of memory and love, obsessed with their own narrative subjectivity, could write lyrics like “Remembering him comes in flashbacks and echoes / Tell myself it’s time now, gotta let go / But moving on from him is impossible / When I still see it all in my head / In burning red.” In fact, Swift herself has admitted in interviews that the song “Enchanted” is actually a fictional exercise written from the perspective of an anxious, lovelorn M. Swann: “The lingering question kept me up / 2 am, who do you love? /I wonder ’til I’m wide awake / And now I’m pacing back and forth / Wishing you were at my door.” Now, she brings that essential kinship to bear on the text itself, revealing a French literary prowess she’d been hiding all these years.

In the storied tradition of Proust’s English translators, Swift has taken some liberties with the text in producing Swann’s Way (Taylor’s Version). During the famous scene in which M. Swann pursues Odette after she leaves a gathering without him and officially launches their love affair, using a sly pickup line to secure a first kiss, Swift has added a sudden burst of pouring rain, despite no such referent in the original French. Elsewhere, the Princesse des Laumes is described as wearing an anachronistic shade of red lipstick. Oddly, Proust’s characteristic lengthy and dense paragraphs have been re-rendered in stanza format, which may please some overwhelmed readers but serves to muddle the rhythm of the text. Otherwise, however, she’s produced a faithful, dreamy rendition, sure to pacify critics who continue to consider her a lightweight and to enhance her chances to one day NEGOT (National Book Award Emmy Grammy Oscar Tony). If that isn’t good news enough, in a few weeks, Swifties will also be able to purchase the audiobook LP set, Swann’s Way (Taylor’s Version) (Ten-Year Version), to hear Swift sing the entire text to the melody of “All Too Well.” I’ll see you in line at Borders!

David Klion (newsletter editor): The cover story of New York Magazine this week is a profile of Adam Tooze, the absurdly prolific economic historian whose dense, rigorous, and lucid books on everything from World War I to the 2008 financial crisis have earned him a cult following among the sort of extremely online dudes who were obsessed with Bernie Sanders three years ago. That includes me, of course, and I know many of the “Tooze Bros” named in the piece, including Jewish Currents contributor Alex Yablon. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve been devouring Tooze’s latest tome, The Operation: Putin’s Challenge to the Western Financial Order, a masterful, definitive account of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine that was sold to Penguin Random House, researched, written, published, rapturously reviewed by Matt Zeitlin in The New Republic, and awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize over the course of the past week. Despite its 800 pages, The Operation is a brisk read, seamlessly synthesizing a jaw-dropping range of topics—from the intricacies of the Belarusian central bank to fluctuations in the global grain market to Joe Biden’s years of lobbying on behalf of Delaware’s shell company sector—to explain Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a major war in Europe in late February. It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder when (and whether) Tooze sleeps, how many research assistants he employs, and why anyone else bothers writing about any topic. I’m finding it riveting, as are approximately 30% of the members of my Diplomacy Slack.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Every film buff in New York this week, and around the country in the coming months, can only celebrate the discovery, restoration, and screening at Film Forum of the legendary lost masterpiece by the mysterious filmmaker Michel Habits d’Or, L’Aveugle sauvage (The Savage Blindman).

Habits d’Or was a companion of the future New Wave filmmakers Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, and Rivette during their days and nights spent at the Cinémathèque. Habits d’Or, though he shared his friends’ passion for Bresson, Renoir, and Leo McCarey, was famously obsessed with the movie star Lyda Roberti, a stunningly beautiful Polish immigrant actress and former circus performer, who specialized in roles as a sexy blonde. At one point Henri Langlois, the head of the Cinémathèque, banned Habits d’Or after he violently attacked Langlois for canceling a screening of Million Dollar Legs, his favorite Roberti film.

The eccentric Frenchman worked as a hospital administrator for decades and shot L’Aveugle sauvage over the course of three years of Sundays. In it, he gives vent to his violent misanthropy, playing the eponymous blindman as he cracks and smacks the ankles and shins of people on the streets of Paris, in every case eliciting apologies from his victims. He considered the film in some ways an anthropoidal study, “une étude de la situation de l’aveugle en société.” Between ankle smackings, Habits d’Or goes from movie theater to movie theater on the Left Bank hoping to find a Lyda Roberi film showing somewhere. His ultimate failure is a perfect expression of the cynical worldview expressed in Habits d’Or’s disabused literary and film criticism, much of it published in left-wing magazines he famously refused to read.

L’Aveugle sauvage is a philosophical document, a documentary of a social experiment, and a sad tale of a frustrated talent. We’ll likely never have another chance to see this film again—a film its author never saw to completion, having lost his sight before its completion. Michel Habits d’Or was a truly savage blindman.

Before you go… April Fools’!

Every Friday, Jewish Currents staff, board members, and other supporters send out a selection of books and articles from other publications we’ve been reading (and maybe the occasional movie or TV show or album). We spend a lot of time developing and promoting our own work, but we want to offer you a look at what else is on our minds.

If you’re interested in buying any of our recommended books, whenever possible our links below go to Bookshop, an alternative to the monopolistic corporate behemoth that is Amazon. Purchases made on Bookshop directly support independent bookstores. Jewish Currents maintains our own homepage with Bookshop, and if you buy through there or through the links below we get a 10% commission, so you’ll be supporting our operations too. Doesn’t that feel much better than making Jeff Bezos a tiny bit richer?

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I just got my hands on a copy of the recently-released story collection I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To by Polish Jewish author Mikołaj Grynberg, translated by Sean Gasper Bye. The book functions as a series of short, fictional monologues, in which Grynberg, best-known in Poland as an oral historian of the Shoah and its generational fallout, channels the voices of successive generations of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles—or, as sometimes happens in these stories, both at once in the same person, either living a double life or having recently discovered a buried Jewish heritage. The stories variously push against or bounce off of or cower from or shatter the postwar silences from which the contours of contemporary Polish life have been drawn. This silence—you might also call it trauma—possesses the speakers, ventriloquizes them, sometimes telling stories other than the ones they speak.

Jewish Currents was the first to publish Grynberg’s work in English: the first several stories from this book made up our 2019 Winter Gift, published under its Polish title: Rejwach (a former editor at The New Press, the publisher of the complete volume, is a JC subscriber). I was deeply struck by these stories when I first encountered them in 2019, and the project as a whole gains something significant through accrual, leaving the reader with the feeling that they are encountering not just a collection of stories, but a taxonomy of the ways the war has been metabolized (or more often, not) by ordinary people. Critically, it also offers a multifaceted portrait of Eastern European antisemitism—from the “good liberal” Pole dressing down the author for “making a fuss” about some antisemitic graffiti, to non-Jewish members of the owning class tormented by accusations of Jewishness from their employees, to a “righteous among the nations” who approaches an encounter with the progeny of the Jew he saved with barely-concealed disgust. I’ve recalled these passages again and again in the last month of fighting in Ukraine. Putin’s “denazification” campaign is a horrific sham. But when the dust settles, questions about Holocaust memory and how they interact with questions of an inclusive Eastern European nationalism will persist. Without any political grandstanding, this book offers a window into the difficulties of these projects through the individual psyche.

P.S. Join us next Sunday, April 3rd, for a dramatic reading from I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To, including readings by the translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the legendary fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg, and the author himself.

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): I may not be as devoted to alien hunting as my colleague Arielle Angel, but I’ll admit to harboring my own alien fantasies on occasion. Specifically, I have long been fascinated by the specter of alien arrival as an opportunity for rupture and reflection: how might we rethink our base societal structures if we are suddenly forced to confront a perspective completely outside of them? Jewish Currents contributor Hannah Black’s new novella Tuesday or September or the End takes place in a 2020 that is almost exactly as ours was, only a little different: the social democratic candidate Moley Salamanders is making his last stand in the Democratic primary; president Pig is engaged in furious denial as a contagious virus begins to sweep the nation; protagonists and lovers Bird and Dog are locked in the same cyclical argument, in which each both exasperates and relies on the other: must the left adopt pragmatism, using the state as a vehicle for transformation, or settle only for total revolution? One of the main things that’s a little different is that in addition to a global pandemic and an unprecedented nationwide Black uprising, Bird and Dog’s world is beset by the mysterious, sudden arrival of aliens, which is less deux ex machina than butterfly effect for an entirely alternate set of political and personal outcomes. In a moment in which the revolutionary potential of the early pandemic social organizing and the uprising can seem hard to recall, Black’s daring and dreamy narrative asks us to think about what might have been—in the process reminding us to recover the seeds of possibility in what was.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): When I was in college ten years ago (wow!), I took a few classes on aging and ageism that were taught by an inimitable professor named Andrea Steiner as part of the Community Studies department that was unique to UC Santa Cruz. The lectures, films, and readings for the classes shaped my thinking on how power and oppression relate to age, and how relatively little attention we (the left, and certainly the younger left) pay to the structural forces—such as widespread segregation and high poverty rates—that we protest against when they affect other communities and identities. Alongside very real material impacts for many people, this failure to prioritize support for older Americans seeds a deep emotional loss in those of us who are still, for the moment, younger: many of us will one day become old, and when we get there, we’ll enter an identity that we have always held apart as if it were a stranger, rather than having been able to see ourselves in it all along.

I had a friend in those classes who, over the years, I’ve kept in touch with sporadically—a handful of letters or Instagram messages sent back and forth over a decade. (One card she sent, pinned to my bulletin board, has a drawing of a topless older woman sitting on a stool, shaded with colored pencil.) Last year, I read a review of Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, and made myself a note to send a copy to Jayme. The review framed the book beautifully, and I knew she would enjoy it. This year, upon finding the note, I bought myself a copy to read, instead. The book’s narrator shares with the reader thoughts that, clearly, she shares only very selectively outside of her own internal monologue. It’s a real gift to be let in.

Every Friday, Jewish Currents staff, board members, and other supporters send out a selection of books and articles from other publications we’ve been reading (and maybe the occasional movie or TV show or album). We spend a lot of time developing and promoting our own work, but we want to offer you a look at what else is on our minds.

If you’re interested in buying any of our recommended books, whenever possible our links below go to Bookshop, an alternative to the monopolistic corporate behemoth that is Amazon. Purchases made on Bookshop directly support independent bookstores. Jewish Currents maintains our own homepage with Bookshop, and if you buy through there or through the links below we get a 10% commission, so you’ll be supporting our operations too. Doesn’t that feel much better than making Jeff Bezos a tiny bit richer?

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I recently stumbled upon Jeffrey Yang’s brief essay “Translating the Abyss,” published in a 2013 issue of the magazine Poetry. The piece, a companion to an index Yang describes in its first line—“I used to keep a list of books in which ‘the abyss’ appeared”—carries us through some of these abysses, from Genesis to Wendy Doniger’s rendering of the Rig Veda to Roberto Bolaño. It’s a charming and haphazard tour through a void that, Yang eventually realizes, is “everywhere (at the edge of nowhere)”; appropriately, he ultimately abandons the list, choosing “to leave it to memory,” which of course has its own kind of oblivion.

Yang’s account of his vanishing catalog brought me to another inventory, assembled by Lindsay Garbutt, this one gathering instances of “abyss” in some of the work published in Poetry over the decades, from Charles Baudelaire’s “The Abyss” (through Robert Lowell) to Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” (through Robin Robertson). This list brought me to two new-to-me pieces I now adore: Mahmoud Darwish’s “To a Young Poet,” translated by Fady Joudah, and an assemblage of fragments from the notebooks of Anna Kamienska, translated by Clare Cavanagh. Darwish brings us an abyss that marks an impassibility still reconcilable with intimacy: “You are like me, but my abyss is clear.” The poem, which cleverly undermines its own straightforwardly pedagogical frame, offers a series of tender negations. The speaker advises, “Don’t tell the beloved, you are I / and I am you, say / the opposite of that: we are two guests / of an excess, fugitive cloud.” Kamienska, for her part, gives us a series of contradictory abysses. “Poem—a pebble tossed in the abyss,” she writes, then deflates the very grandiosity she just summoned: “The space of loneliness. A slit in space. The eye of the abyss. The abyss is an overblown concept. No getting around it.” Her aphorisms are so moving precisely because they marry the highfalutin to the mundane, carrying us through the nested voids with care. “Holy Never,” she writes, “have mercy on us.”

Helen Engelhardt (member, JC Council): I pressed play on the first disc of The Golden Peacock/The Voice of the Yiddish Writer, and after a brief introduction in English and in Yiddish by editor/producer/reader Sheva Zucker, I heard the authoritative voice of Yankev Glatshteyn reciting his poem 1919. I paused the CD and replayed the track to listen to his voice again.

There are many good anthologies of Yiddish poetry, some of them only in English, some of them providing the original text next to a translation. I have several of them. But this is radically different: This is the voice of the poet himself at the peak of his powers, savoring the music of the words he has chosen—the pauses, the intonations—performing his work as he meant it to be comprehended. There are two photographs of Glatshteyn, one on the cover and the other in his section, taken at different times in his long life, but neither of them bring me into an intimate connection with the artist the way the recordings of seven of his poems do.

At the time of the release of Zucker’s first all-Yiddish CD, Di Goldene Pave, in 2001, the idea of assembling an audio collection of writers reading their own poems in Yiddish with a copy of each poem was quite revolutionary. If you were able to find such a recording, you’d then have to go on another search for the text. Zucker began this project as an outgrowth of her textbook, Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language. She feared that the very sound of Yiddish was fading out of consciousness as the last generation of European-born native speakers died off. It’s true there is a whole community of Orthodox Jews who speak Yiddish, but the average secular and even observant but non-Haredi Jew living outside New York (or even in the city), has little access to it. How, she wondered, were people studying the language supposed to learn what Yiddish really sounds like, and what it sounds like at its best? She realized she should collect recordings of Yiddish writers reading their work.

This new bilingual edition of The Golden Peacock is curated to include not only audio recordings of different dialects of Yiddish, but also the texts and translations, as well as brief biographies in Yiddish and English and introductory notes on each piece. For new students of the language, here is a gorgeous sampler of poetry as spoken by the men and women who created modern Yiddish secular literature. It is also an abbreviated anthology of Yiddish literature. Although it is by definition limited in scope—there are no existent recordings of Y.L. Peretz or Mendele Moykher Sforim (Abramovitsh), nor, as far as we know, of Anna Margolin, of A. Lutzky, or of many others—it provides readers and listeners with a broad view of Yiddish literature highlighting many of the main themes: the clash of generations, parents and children, biblical stories, love, the Holocaust, and Yiddish itself. Some of the works are unfortunately all too relevant today, such as Elie Wiesel’s speech on Babi Yar.

I have a very personal relationship with one of the readers. Celia Dropkin was the mother of a close family friend, the grandmother of a friend I had grown up with. She sometimes turned up on a Sunday morning when I was having breakfast with the Dropkins. Celia was a short sturdy woman with a big smile and a commanding voice, who walked with the help of a cane. By the time I met her, she was no longer writing poetry. She was painting small jewel-like oil paintings which decorated the walls of their living room. I didn’t know she was a poet, let alone an important one. Years later, when Yiddish poets of the 20th Century were being reclaimed by Jewish feminists, I was astonished to learn that Celia Dropkin was their voice. I had forgotten her actual voice. Sheva gave it back to me in Di Goldene Pave.

To purchase the book and/or the CDs, contact Sheva at sczucker@aol.com.

Before you go, here are two events we wanted to make sure you were aware of. First, the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene are hosting a virtual benefit for the soon-to-be-erected Triangle Fire Memorial on Thursday, March 24th at 7 pm Eastern. More information here!

Plus, on Sunday, April 3rd, at 2 pm Eastern, join Jewish Currents and The New Press for a celebration of Mikołaj Grynberg’s exquisitely original and darkly funny collection of stories I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, excerpts of which were first published in Jewish Currents as Rejwach. Grynberg, a psychologist and photographer, spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. His first work of fiction recrafts those histories into dazzling first-person vignettes that explore Jewish identity and the contemporary lives and tensions of a generation still haunted by the Holocaust and its afterlives. The event will feature a conversation between Grynberg and translator Sean Gasper Bye, as well as readings by translator Antonia Lloyd Jones and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg. Sign up here!