Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): A New York City family relocates to Australia in the 1970s, unwittingly renting a mansion-like residence in Sydney. The husband goes to work, the kids go to school, the wife tries to keep house. But the house is too big, with a staff that prefers to keep to the owner’s ways, and the babysitters the wife hires aren’t quite right—until she finds one that seems, well, too good to be true. A slim novel of careful character studies laced with lies and moments of humor, Claire Messud’s A Dream Life is a worthwhile short read. It is also one of the first books published by a new Australian press called Tablo Tales, as part of a series focusing on short works by women writers from around the world.

David Klion (newsletter editor): Last week I finally saw Reds, a movie I can’t believe I’d never watched before and also can’t believe got made. It’s remarkable that a three-hour historical epic about the love story of journalists John Reed (Warren Beatty, who also co-wrote and directed the film) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), culminating in their abandoning a comfortable bourgeois bohemian life in the Hudson Valley to become active participants in the Bolshevik Revolution, exists—all the more so since it portrays its leads as flawed but ultimately likeable and heroic, and given that it premiered in Ronald Reagan’s first year in the White House, to the delight of Reagan himself. Somehow, a movie about leftists that turned 40 last month is revered by everyone from Jacobin to National Review. That pan-ideological consensus reflects the undeniable quality of the writing, acting, and production, as well as the nuance with which Marxist ideas are translated to the big screen such that both supporters and opponents of Marxism can recognize them.

Reds is narrated by a Greek chorus of (then-)living participants in the pre-World War I American left, blending a bit of documentary realism with Hollywood spectacle. Before they witnessed the October Revolution and recounted it, respectively, in 10 Days That Shook the World and Six Months in Russia, Reed and Bryant were part of a Greenwich Village radical scene that also included Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson) and Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton). Roughly the first half of the movie is set in that world, and it’s striking how little the left has changed in over a century—still hanging out in dingy bars, still getting jealous over open relationships, still trying to reconcile earnest pro-labor principles with inherited privilege, still fighting over whether electoralism and the Democratic Party are worth engaging with at all, still ruining friendships over half-baked interpretations of faraway political events. In the film’s second half, there’s a stunning scene between Bryant and O’Neill, fueled by the latter’s unrequited affections, that functions as a confrontation between world-weary cynicism and blind idealism, and that should hit a nerve with anyone who’s ever participated in a left space.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): A few weeks ago, just as the Omicron variant descended on New York, my high school friend Marissa came to Brooklyn and stayed in my apartment for a weeklong visit. We watched a lot of movies and TV shows, and most evenings we worked on crossword puzzles together. I enjoy doing crosswords—puzzling out the wordplay, trivia, and sometimes cringey jokes—but it can feel like a self-indulgent way to spend time. What good does working on them do for anyone but myself?

The week that Marissa flew back to Portland, The New Yorker published an article that begins: “A grid has a matter-of-fact magic, as mundane as it is marvelous.” The author, Anna Schectman, traces her twin teenage experiences of becoming interested in creating crossword puzzles around the same time as she developed—and later recovered from—an eating disorder, and she explores the history of both phenomena. Now publicly known in the crosswording world as a woman creator, she reflects on her younger and diversifying cohort and rejects the idea that the puzzles are frivolous: “We are men, women, and nonbinary constructors who know that what makes for a ‘good crossword word’ is recognition, the pleasure of finding something you know fit neatly into the cramped corners of a newspaper grid. To see increasingly more of the world reflected in this admittedly specialized leisure-class activity is not just satisfying; it’s political.”

When Marissa and I were lounging on the couch, filling in the grids of crosswords I hadn’t yet completed from the back pages of old magazines, we came across one that felt particularly thrilling. We kept encountering clues that we enjoyed (two about Serena and Venus Williams; my favorite: “Housemate who never does the dishes?”—answer: “Cat”), and we’d say, “Who is this person?!” We eventually looked up the creator, Erik Agard, to find photos of a smiling, 28-year old biracial guy who once won on Jeopardy! and who is a bit well-known for his interventions in the crosswording scene. It felt unusually fun to finish his puzzle: our reference points and sensibilities were there, recorded, on the page. A week later, in Covid quarantine, I received a package in the mail: Agard’s spiral-bound book of culinary crosswords, Food for Thought Crosswords, now a nightly routine kept within easy reach on my bedside table.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I picked up Alexander Wolff’s family memoir Endpapers expecting to read an account of the publishing career of his grandfather, Kurt Wolff, whose German publishing house originally published Kafka. After fleeing Germany, first for France, then for the United States, and eventually for Switzerland, Wolff founded Pantheon Books and later had his own imprint at Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. The book covers little of that; it is, instead, a gimlet-eyed account of his family’s history, one that included Jews and Nazis, a father who fought in the Wehrmacht, and a maternal family fortune—his mother was part of the Merck pharmaceutical dynasty—that grew, prospered, and was protected during the Hitler years.

Wolff’s book is in an odd way refreshing: he never hides the indefensible actions of his family members. Where no excuse is possible, he makes no attempt to concoct one. While his grandfather fled Germany with his second wife right as Hitler was taking power, he didn’t do so because there were Jews in his family tree, but rather from fear of imprisonment as a “cultural Bolshevik.” He left behind his first family, and his son Niko, the author’s father, served on both fronts in the Wehrmacht. While there’s no indication that he participated in any atrocities, Wolff does not attempt to downplay the crimes of the regular army, of its living high off the hog while the peoples of the occupied countries starved.

The key section of Endpapers appears midway through the book, in an epistolary exchange between Kurt Wolff and his daughter Maria. Maria, who survived the Allied bombing raids of World War II, condemns them bitterly and denies anyone who was not in Germany the right to pass judgment on the German people, going so far as to condemn Thomas Mann for his principled stand on the collective guilt of the German people. Kurt, to his credit, is not interested in any distinction between the German people and their government. He wrote his daughter:

“You describe the hell of [German life] of 1944 and ’45. Where was your conscience between 1939 and ’43? … In a metaphysical sense, the Germans brought their suffering upon themselves.”

Alexander Wolff is equally cutting about the conduct of his mother’s family in running the Merck factories and collaborating with the Nazis. But Endpapers is also a tribute to German society today, which has confronted its past and made an effort to act humanely. Woolff frequently quotes an essential recent volume, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans, which deserves to be at the center of American discussions of dealing with our own murderous past. He closes his book by paradoxically explaining that “embrac[ing] my German roots was ...a way to signal that, for the moment, Germany is doing a better job of being American than America is.”