Shabbat
Reading List

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!

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): To dive into Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, a compilation of essays on women writers and characters, when accustomed to reading contemporary criticism is like submerging into a pleasant shock of cool water. Hardwood has no time for all of the rules I thought I had learned about Commenting on Literature—don’t overly confuse protagonist with author; don’t make sweeping generalizations about what the work suggests about humanity; don’t speak for an assumed “we” of an audience—as she proceeds to undertake character studies of women inside and outside of texts. She considers the personalities and motivations at the heart of the contrasting styles of the Bronte sisters, the thwarted dreams of Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s life of devotion. Her analysis of motivations and emotions is ever-confident and precise: “Falling in love with M. Heger laid the ground for the emotional intensity and recklessness in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. She experienced to the fullest a deep, scalding frustration. The uselessness of her love, the dreadful inappropriateness and unavailability of its object, turned out to be one of those sources of pain that are also the springs of knowledge.” Yet she also, at times, turns to simple emotional reflection: “The last years of Emily Brontë’s life are distressing to think about.”

In Hardwick’s hands, women are never reduced to their struggles against patriarchy, never made social parables; yet they are never quite free from the impositions, weaknesses, and underestimations of the men in their lives. (Many critics, in Hardwickian fashion, have read the collection in the context of Hardwick’s own processing of the betrayal of her ex-husband Robert Lowell, which adds an interesting weight to her analysis of how, for example, Thomas Carlyle takes his wife Jane for granted—though it would be a mistake to reduce any of the analysis here to personal projection.) I can think of few better testaments than Seduction and Betrayal to the fact that criticism can be as thrilling and affecting as the art it depicts.

Jacob Plitman (publisher): Some have claimed that video games are “the future of storytelling.” I have no idea what that means. Game plots are usually garbage that, at best, you endure because the particular game mechanics are fun. You are chopping someone with a sword. You are shooting up an airport. Why? Literally who cares. Also, I don’t know what it means for “storytelling” to have a past or future—but that’s not for the Shabbat Reading List. That is more of a “jewishcurrents.org” vibe.

Anyway, I want to convince you to buy a game called Disco Elysium. The game will work on your computer, no matter how lousy it is. It was made by an art collective led by an Estonian middle school dropout.

As Disco Elysium begins, the screen is black. You are in a death-like sleep. Through dialogue choices in a small menu, you engage two characters: your screeching Limbic System, and your growling Ancient Reptilian Brain. You would like to stay dead. But, they explain, unfortunately you have to wake up. Upon waking, it becomes clear that you have managed to do enough drugs to forget everything you know—the year, your name, and anything about the murder case that, as you learn, you have been investigating for some time. You are a trope. You are an alcoholic amnesiac murder detective.

What follows is a China Miéville-esque noir set in the strike-ridden city of Revachol, which is something like Marseilles plus Tallinn, run by the Dutch East India Company, and still in ruins from a revolutionary uprising decades ago. A company-hired mercenary has been murdered, lynched on a nearby tree. You walk through lushly drawn urban decay, bouncing between conversations with beautifully-acted strangers and chats among the brilliantly-written voices in your own drug-addled head. It functions, basically, like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except the pages can talk to each other, you’re not allowed to go backwards, and the writing is superb. But the stakes aren’t a murder. They are communism, liberalism, fascism, or ... Disco.

It is the confluence of the player’s fear of missing the right choices and the city of Revachol’s own post-revolutionary decay that gives the game a special power. Revachol made all the wrong choices some time ago. You are hung over. The city is hung over. You grope the body of a murdered city in the search for a murderer. But in the end something else finds you.

18/10

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The roman noir provides many of the same pleasures as its cinematic sibling, the film noir. Both present a dark, cynical, unforgiving, and largely accurate picture of the rot that is America. Horace McCoy’s 1935 classic, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is perhaps the most unrelentingly dismal and brilliant examples of this pulp genre. Its influence on some of the greatest of European writers and novels, particularly and unsurprisingly the French, is unmistakable. Camus’s The Stranger and Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends are unquestionably marked by works like those of McCoy’s.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is one of the great novels of Hollywood, even if, unlike What Makes Sammy Run? or The Last Tycoon, there is no film set in its pages. This is a novel of the dream of Hollywood, of the illusion that the surest way out of the misery of the Depression is to become like the stars onscreen at the local movie palace. Gloria, one of the novel’s two main characters, has come to Hollywood from Texas, and though she’s worked as an extra a few times, she’s not all that pretty and hasn’t been taken on by the central casting office that provides extras to the big films. Her dream for the moment, then, is to be nothing but a background figure. Robert, her co-lead, has come west from Arkansas, dreaming of being a director, of making small artsy films about the common man, of reaching the same heights as Mamoulian, of Borzage, of Eisenstein.

Both have failed miserably, and when they meet they decide the only way to survive is to participate in a marathon dance contest—they and hundreds of others must dance continuously until only one couple is left. That winning couple will win $1,000 and, who knows, maybe make contact with a star or a director and climb to the top.

But this is America, and the motley crew of failures on the dance floor are nothing but representatives of the mass of Americans, deluding themselves that riches are out there, that all you need is a break. And in order to get that break they’re willing to torture and debase themselves before a cheering crowd of “morons” as they’re called by the organizers, morons all too happy to watch the degradation of others like them.

Everything is degraded or capable of being degraded: dancers consent to wed for pay for the crowd’s benefit, or to engage in murderous races within the dances just to sate the crowd’s blood lust. The occasional appearance of a film star—most of them long-forgotten now—makes it all worthwhile.

If Robert still thinks his chance is waiting for him, Gloria has no such illusion. Her idea of fun as she says is to “go sit and hate a bunch of people”. She’s given up on Hollywood and life. “There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me—who want to die but haven’t got the guts.” She never develops the guts herself, but she has figured out a way to get the job done. After all, they shoot horses, don’t they?

This slim volume does more to destroy the American Dream than almost any other work of fiction. It should be required reading.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): There’s a meme of a Venn diagram that has circulated a lot these past two years: in one circle “Apocalypse,” in another “Having to go to work,” with an arrow pointing to the overlap that says “You are here.” I’ve been thinking about this meme as I consider my deep enjoyment of Station Eleven—the HBO miniseries about a civilization-ending pandemic—despite its obvious flaws. Based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel (which I haven’t read and don’t plan to), the show requires a fair amount of suspension of disbelief: The logic of the spread of the virus feels dodgy, and there are whole character arcs that feel unearned or just sort of random. And yet, there is something in the portrayal of the end of everything and the human attempts at regeneration in its wake that I’m finding both soothing and agitating in generative ways.

As suggested by the Venn diagram meme, it’s become harder and harder to reconcile the dissonance between the manifest consequences of severe political and environmental collapse and how they’ve been assimilated into our “normal” lives—all of it heavily mediated by technology. In this light, the clean break, the real end of everything, presents as a kind of pleasing fantasy, even despite the assumed violence and hardship of a post-apocalyptic world. It’s a useful exercise to think about what would be worth keeping in the event of totalizing catastrophe and what is better left behind. One could argue it may be the only useful exercise left, that it should act as a compass for how we behave, and approach politics, in the here and now. For all my current exhaustion and cynicism, I surprised myself with how moved I felt by moments that transparently sought to foreground the fundamentals of human connection, (pro)creation, and care. Without giving too much away, the penultimate episode is an incredible set piece in this regard, almost independent of the rest of the show.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Last year, as part of a special section on the German-language poet Paul Celan, we had the honor of publishing a beautiful, gnomic comic by Anne Carson about Celan’s “Todtnauberg,” written in the wake of his fateful encounter with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Seeking more of Carson’s generative engagement with Celan, I recently read her 2002 book Economy of the Unlost, which sets the 20th-century, Romanian-born Celan in conversation with the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos. The pairing is unexpected, as is the banner under which Carson unites them: the idea of poetic economy. By interweaving an array of seemingly disparate approaches to that concept—from the literal (noting that Simonides is traditionally understood as the first Western poet to write poems for money) to the metaphorical (reading Celan’s relationship to German through Karl Marx’s comparison of money to translated language)—Carson produces a dazzling study of both poets, full of rigorous readings and insightful digressions. For instance, in a discussion of Celan’s “The Sluice,” Carson draws on a discussion with a rabbi friend to read the relationship the poem sets up between two Jewish memorial prayers: “Kaddish, although used for commemorative purpose, is not essentially a word of memory but rather a word that covers over the memory of human loss with praise of God’s glory. Yizkor does not cover over, it insists on remembering; indeed it insists that God do the remembering alongside us, Yizkor Jews and all.”

I was happy to discover this same theme in the next book I picked up, Gloria Gervitz’s Migrations: Poem, 1976–2020, translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer (which we recently excerpted). In a conversation with Schafer that serves as the afterword to this extraordinary book-length poem, Gervitz describes telling her mother, who says she does not find the Kaddish consoling, that “the Kaddish is a song of praise to God and also a song of thanks.” She goes on: “Poetry . . . always contains something of the Kaddish: although it can speak of the saddest things, it really is a song of praise to the Word.” I loved the way this interpretation opens up Migrations’ recurring reference to the mourning prayer (“who is praying? is it me? / who is answering? / where do these words come from? // and who will say Kaddish for me?”) and illuminates its exploration of the ways praise and pain are intertwined. I keep coming back to this early, shattering stanza: “but this is not loneliness / it is not sadness / this flow is pure joy / though joy is always sad at its root / it is delivered like death without your knowing / it is this not knowing that flows / it enters as a body enters love.”

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Last year, the Marxist feminist writer Silvia Federici—whose famous 1970s activism calling for paid wages for housework received renewed attention as the pandemic exposed our dependence on care work—quietly released the essay collection Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism, a compilation of seven readable, sometimes overlapping essays written between the 1970s and today. Reading Federici on Marx as my reading group slowly makes its way through Capital, Vol. 1 was clarifying. Federici clearly elucidates how her feminist theory builds on Marx’s framework: She theorizes the feminized work of “social reproduction”—feeding, clothing, housing, and sexually satisfying the worker so that he is replenished to return to work the next day—as essential to preserving labor’s ability to generate surplus value for the capitalist and thereby an integral function of the capitalist system, and says that Marx missed certain historical developments that indicated just how much bourgeois European society depended on women’s reproductive labor. She is unsparing in pointing out what she sees as Marx’s blind spots from a contemporary standpoint, focusing particularly on the oft-misunderstood fact that Marx, in fact, could be quite complimentary of, and even awed by, the accomplishments of capitalism, since he viewed it as a necessary step before imminent socialist revolution, and saw the accomplishments of industrialization as necessary to usher in a worker-owned world. One hundred and fifty years later, with no such revolution to be seen and eco-catastrophe looming, Federici offers a compelling argument for rethinking Marx’s celebration of man’s potential for technical domination of nature.

I was especially interested in Federici’s writing on sex in “Origins and Development of Sexual Work,” in which she claims that despite a new illusion of sexual liberation, women remain in thrall to what she calls “sexual work,” and are forced to embody their sexuality under conditions that often make it feel like arduous labor performed for the purpose of male pleasure and male replenishment. If female pleasure and the female orgasm have become new societal priorities, Federici argues that this just creates new pressure for women not only to perform sexual labor but to achieve, and perform, enjoyment. “While our grandmothers could go to sleep in peace after a day of hard work with the excuse of a migraine, we, their liberated granddaughters, feel guilty when we refuse to have sex, do not actively participate in it, or even fail to enjoy it,” she writes. Parts of the argument feel reminiscent of the second-wave “sex wars,” and there’s surely much to discuss and critique here, especially given how Federici only takes up the subject of heterosexual and cisgender sex, making her theorizing incomplete. Still, in an era in which women are urged to “girlboss” their way into better sex—studying listicles and instagram graphics, buying toys, downloading sex therapy apps—while men face few similar expectations, it’s hard not to think that Federici has hit on something here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve loved Joshua Ferris’s books since Then We Came to the End was published in 2008. His cynical, smart-alecky tone has led me to look forward to each new book. His latest, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, breaks with Ferris’s established mold. Its characters, and its vision of life and of fiction, have haunted me in the weeks since I read it.

A Calling for Charlie Barnes is presented as the biography of the title character, a mid-century middle-American who has been diagnosed with cancer (or maybe not), and whose life has been eaten up by his fruitless search for success in business, marriage, and fatherhood. As Ferris writes of Charlie, “Looking for more has been, so far, just a guaranteed way of losing it all.”

Ferris keeps us on our toes throughout, and the novel is far more than a deconstructing of the American dream—it is also a questioning of the nature of fiction, of its rights and obligations. What do you tell? What do you not tell? By presenting the story as a memoir, Ferris complicates the matter even further, raising the question of what is the truth of someone’s life.

It’s here that Ferris provides a remarkable passage about who we are. “For every life,” he writes, there is “not one history but as many as there are people who observed and participated in that life; hundreds if not thousands, of accounts for just one of the billions of beings who have lived and died. If we are many it’s not just because we are a web of contradictions but because everyone has a vision of us, one that, for that person , is the truth and so is the truth.” Charlie Barnes is this in spades, with his wives, friends, kids, co-workers, and neighbors all seeing him differently, all in equally valid ways.

But this is also a moving and profound novel on fatherhood, on both the good and the damage done to us by our fathers that we then pass on to our progeny. As Charlie deals with his cancer, Ferris shows us both Charlie the self-absorbed prick and Charlie the man looking to do and be good. The final twist in the novel perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise, and it’s proof of Ferris’s gift that it does.