Shabbat
Reading List
Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This month, New York University’s Skirball Theater staged a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the celebrated short works of absurdist master Samuel Beckett. In the play, Krapp, a rumpled sort of fellow, sits at a desk with a tape recorder in a spare room illuminated by a single hanging light. Over the course of his adult life, he has obsessively maintained a spoken diary, recorded on countless spools of tape and logged in a massive, dusty ledger.
On this particular “late evening in the future,” he listens to his 39-year-old self, who, it happens, has just re-listened to his 20-something-year-old self, full of fire and possibility. We hear of the death of his mother, of a dog and his rubber ball, of a romantic encounter with a woman on a pier. Present-day Krapp then makes a fresh recording—the titular “last tape,” in which he berates both Krapps the Younger, laments his literary failures, and once again recalls the encounter on the pier. Expectations for a full, brilliant future—how silly.
Many of the greats, including Michael Gambon and John Hurt, have played Krapp. This production, directed by Vicky Featherstone, features Stephen Rea, a proud son of Belfast known as much for his groundbreaking film and theatrical work as for his patriotism. Rea apparently recorded the younger Krapp’s dialogue years ago in hopes of one day playing the role. Watching it live, I was struck by the spare dramatics and the deliberateness of the comedic business, and marveled at Rea’s physical gifts as he shambles around a barren stage.
It’s a play very much about meditating (or obsessing) on the past, on fleeting moments, old patterns and recognitions, the curses we inflict on ourselves, and our unresolved pains and losses. Taking on Krapp requires the gravitas and clear vision of one who has lived, seen, erred, and kept going. Watching Rea as he rewinds, pauses, and fast forwards the tapes, always on the precipice of epiphany, is both aching and funny, a manifestation of how we both relive and re-edit our memories to avoid a true reckoning with who we are and who we have been.
Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): The first thing I heard at the end of Jewish Plot was the man next to me apologizing to his guest—“I’m sorry, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all”—which playwright Torrey Townsend would probably take as a compliment. My fellow theatergoer may have been surprised to see a work of meta-theater centered around a fictional play, a fact which the show’s marketing seems to purposely conceal, or he may have been caught off-guard by its in-your-face disgust with Zionism. But even though I knew to expect both of these going into it, I was still thoroughly shocked myself.
The play, which runs at Theatre 154 in New York City through November 7th, opens with actor Madeline Weinstein’s announcement that the cast will be performing the fictitious I.W. Bruntmole’s Jewish Plot, a supposed long-lost Victorian melodrama depicting antisemitic prejudices in 19th century London. What’s more interesting than the play-within-a-play itself––a story of a lover rejected by his beloved after she learns he’s Jewish, performed with flat but entertaining slapstick affect––is Weinstein’s frenetic presentation of it. She tells us that most of the cast and the director have quit at the last minute, and talks around the obviously related fact that Townsend, her friend, has gone more than a little insane over his many years of working on this show.
The first 20 minutes are just an aperitif to the show’s real meat, which begins when Townsend supposedly delivers a freshly-penned second act to the cast, sight unseen. What begins as a simple continuation of the melodrama quickly turns into Townsend’s personal rant against his agent, Joshua Harman, the theater world at large, and, most especially, against himself. “[Are you] too good at using your Jewishness to actually be successful?” an actor reads from his script.
Once we learn that Townsend’s grandfather was a Zionist propagandist, the play-within-the-play descends into an orgy of cruelty. The Jewish character is falsely accused of murder and blood libel, and is paraded through the town square; Weinstein reads off Townsend’s instructions for the audience themselves to hurl human excrement at the actor, then to strip naked and have a very literal orgy. The scene grows only more horrific as the show grinds on, transporting us into the pits of hell, interspersed with descriptions of the violence in Gaza and deranged quotes taken directly from Theodore Herzl and Townsend’s grandfather.
If the play is meant to capture what it means to be an American Jew right now––as its marketing suggests––it is a failure. Townsend’s screed is too rambly, and too specific to himself, to have any cohesive depiction of a general “Jewish experience.” Where it succeeds, and remarkably so, is in the very depiction of this failure. As Townsend’s anxiety over how to make sense and use of his Judaism spirals out of control, the melodrama’s Jewish protagonist begins to split in two. In the play itself, he is very firmly a Jew and suffers specifically from antisemitism, but as his existence becomes a general symbol of a scapegoat applied to contemporary times, his character begins to slip from a Jew into a metaphor for an immigrant or even a Palestinian. He becomes “Jewish” in scare-quotes, Jewish only in the sense that “everybody is somebody’s Jew,” as Townsend quotes Primo Levi.
At the root of Jewish Plot is this fundamental anxiety of non-identity, the inability to map the historical experiences of Jewish persecution onto a present where a Jewish ethno-state actively seeks to inflict this same persecution onto others, purportedly in the name of Jews as a whole. Beyond the very real, genocidal violence playing out in this drama is a metaphorical suicide, Jews murdering “Jews.” Townsend perhaps veers more toward shock value than thematic depth in his conclusion, but he’s one of the few artists I’ve seen depict this societal psychosis with appropriate gravity.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pascal Bonitzer has been a presence on the French cinematic scene for nearly 60 years—as a critic at the Cahiers du Cinéma, as the screenwriter of countless films, and as a director. Though he has occasionally made a film that I liked, for the most part his name in the credits has signaled that I should run the other way. For every worthwhile film, like The Young Karl Marx, for which he wrote the screenplay, there have been many others I couldn’t abide. And never, until now, have I ever been emotionally touched by a film that bears his name.
Auction, his latest, is a pleasant surprise. Bonitzer has always been an exemplar of the worst form of intellectualisme, of a pretentious, self-absorbed cinema that eschews any human feeling, but here he presents a story of enormous directness and simplicity. It is a film in which the characters are recognizable human beings—flawed, changeable, and unpredictable.
Based on a true story, Auction recounts the recovery of a painting by Egon Schiele that went missing during World War II, stolen by the Germans from its Jewish owner. It is now in the possession of a simple factory worker in Alsace who, when he learns of its history, refuses to profit from it. He wants it to be returned to the heirs of its original owner. We are taken into the world of art auctions, of the wheeling and dealing of auction houses, lawyers, and collectors. Both honorable and dishonorable conduct are on display. Because this is a Bonitzer film, I spent its running time waiting for an unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Instead I got a film of remarkable warmth in which the most unexpected of all outcomes arrives for everyone involved: a happy ending.
The casting and acting are extraordinary. As strong as Alex Lutz is in the role of the auctioneer, who presents himself as a man who loves to be hated, he is overshadowed by the female leads. Lea Drucker and Nina Hamzawi are excellent as lawyers, but the film is stolen by Louise Chevillote as Aurore, a troubled woman, an emotionally unstable mythomaniac who nonetheless manages to see things more clearly than anyone else. Auction is intellectually and emotionally intelligent. It allows the characters to breathe and even redeem themselves.
One more rec: Film Forum in New York is currently screening a series of films in honor of the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, author of one of the essential books of film history, The Parade’s Gone By. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but Covid screwed things up. It will be running until November 6th, when it will screen two fascinating films by Brownlow himself. Winstanley (1975) is his telling of the story of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader and theoretician of the 17th century radical Levelers. The other is the cinematically and morally challenging It Happened Here (1965), which imagines an England that was invaded during World War II, was defeated, and became a collaborationist-run National Socialist state opposed by a not especially savory resistance movement. One character in the Resistance explains that “sometimes to fight fascism you have to use fascist methods.” A curious idea, and one that merits reflection.
Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This month, New York University’s Skirball Theater staged a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the celebrated short works of absurdist master Samuel Beckett. In the play, Krapp, a rumpled sort of fellow, sits at a desk with a tape recorder in a spare room illuminated by a single hanging light. Over the course of his adult life, he has obsessively maintained a spoken diary, recorded on countless spools of tape and logged in a massive, dusty ledger.
On this particular “late evening in the future,” he listens to his 39-year-old self, who, it happens, has just re-listened to his 20-something-year-old self, full of fire and possibility. We hear of the death of his mother, of a dog and his rubber ball, of a romantic encounter with a woman on a pier. Present-day Krapp then makes a fresh recording—the titular “last tape,” in which he berates both Krapps the Younger, laments his literary failures, and once again recalls the encounter on the pier. Expectations for a full, brilliant future—how silly.
Many of the greats, including Michael Gambon and John Hurt, have played Krapp. This production, directed by Vicky Featherstone, features Stephen Rea, a proud son of Belfast known as much for his groundbreaking film and theatrical work as for his patriotism. Rea apparently recorded the younger Krapp’s dialogue years ago in hopes of one day playing the role. Watching it live, I was struck by the spare dramatics and the deliberateness of the comedic business, and marveled at Rea’s physical gifts as he shambles around a barren stage.
It’s a play very much about meditating (or obsessing) on the past, on fleeting moments, old patterns and recognitions, the curses we inflict on ourselves, and our unresolved pains and losses. Taking on Krapp requires the gravitas and clear vision of one who has lived, seen, erred, and kept going. Watching Rea as he rewinds, pauses, and fast forwards the tapes, always on the precipice of epiphany, is both aching and funny, a manifestation of how we both relive and re-edit our memories to avoid a true reckoning with who we are and who we have been.
Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): The first thing I heard at the end of Jewish Plot was the man next to me apologizing to his guest—“I’m sorry, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all”—which playwright Torrey Townsend would probably take as a compliment. My fellow theatergoer may have been surprised to see a work of meta-theater centered around a fictional play, a fact which the show’s marketing seems to purposely conceal, or he may have been caught off-guard by its in-your-face disgust with Zionism. But even though I knew to expect both of these going into it, I was still thoroughly shocked myself.
The play, which runs at Theatre 154 in New York City through November 7th, opens with actor Madeline Weinstein’s announcement that the cast will be performing the fictitious I.W. Bruntmole’s Jewish Plot, a supposed long-lost Victorian melodrama depicting antisemitic prejudices in 19th century London. What’s more interesting than the play-within-a-play itself––a story of a lover rejected by his beloved after she learns he’s Jewish, performed with flat but entertaining slapstick affect––is Weinstein’s frenetic presentation of it. She tells us that most of the cast and the director have quit at the last minute, and talks around the obviously related fact that Townsend, her friend, has gone more than a little insane over his many years of working on this show.
The first 20 minutes are just an aperitif to the show’s real meat, which begins when Townsend supposedly delivers a freshly-penned second act to the cast, sight unseen. What begins as a simple continuation of the melodrama quickly turns into Townsend’s personal rant against his agent, Joshua Harman, the theater world at large, and, most especially, against himself. “[Are you] too good at using your Jewishness to actually be successful?” an actor reads from his script.
Once we learn that Townsend’s grandfather was a Zionist propagandist, the play-within-the-play descends into an orgy of cruelty. The Jewish character is falsely accused of murder and blood libel, and is paraded through the town square; Weinstein reads off Townsend’s instructions for the audience themselves to hurl human excrement at the actor, then to strip naked and have a very literal orgy. The scene grows only more horrific as the show grinds on, transporting us into the pits of hell, interspersed with descriptions of the violence in Gaza and deranged quotes taken directly from Theodore Herzl and Townsend’s grandfather.
If the play is meant to capture what it means to be an American Jew right now––as its marketing suggests––it is a failure. Townsend’s screed is too rambly, and too specific to himself, to have any cohesive depiction of a general “Jewish experience.” Where it succeeds, and remarkably so, is in the very depiction of this failure. As Townsend’s anxiety over how to make sense and use of his Judaism spirals out of control, the melodrama’s Jewish protagonist begins to split in two. In the play itself, he is very firmly a Jew and suffers specifically from antisemitism, but as his existence becomes a general symbol of a scapegoat applied to contemporary times, his character begins to slip from a Jew into a metaphor for an immigrant or even a Palestinian. He becomes “Jewish” in scare-quotes, Jewish only in the sense that “everybody is somebody’s Jew,” as Townsend quotes Primo Levi.
At the root of Jewish Plot is this fundamental anxiety of non-identity, the inability to map the historical experiences of Jewish persecution onto a present where a Jewish ethno-state actively seeks to inflict this same persecution onto others, purportedly in the name of Jews as a whole. Beyond the very real, genocidal violence playing out in this drama is a metaphorical suicide, Jews murdering “Jews.” Townsend perhaps veers more toward shock value than thematic depth in his conclusion, but he’s one of the few artists I’ve seen depict this societal psychosis with appropriate gravity.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pascal Bonitzer has been a presence on the French cinematic scene for nearly 60 years—as a critic at the Cahiers du Cinéma, as the screenwriter of countless films, and as a director. Though he has occasionally made a film that I liked, for the most part his name in the credits has signaled that I should run the other way. For every worthwhile film, like The Young Karl Marx, for which he wrote the screenplay, there have been many others I couldn’t abide. And never, until now, have I ever been emotionally touched by a film that bears his name.
Auction, his latest, is a pleasant surprise. Bonitzer has always been an exemplar of the worst form of intellectualisme, of a pretentious, self-absorbed cinema that eschews any human feeling, but here he presents a story of enormous directness and simplicity. It is a film in which the characters are recognizable human beings—flawed, changeable, and unpredictable.
Based on a true story, Auction recounts the recovery of a painting by Egon Schiele that went missing during World War II, stolen by the Germans from its Jewish owner. It is now in the possession of a simple factory worker in Alsace who, when he learns of its history, refuses to profit from it. He wants it to be returned to the heirs of its original owner. We are taken into the world of art auctions, of the wheeling and dealing of auction houses, lawyers, and collectors. Both honorable and dishonorable conduct are on display. Because this is a Bonitzer film, I spent its running time waiting for an unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Instead I got a film of remarkable warmth in which the most unexpected of all outcomes arrives for everyone involved: a happy ending.
The casting and acting are extraordinary. As strong as Alex Lutz is in the role of the auctioneer, who presents himself as a man who loves to be hated, he is overshadowed by the female leads. Lea Drucker and Nina Hamzawi are excellent as lawyers, but the film is stolen by Louise Chevillote as Aurore, a troubled woman, an emotionally unstable mythomaniac who nonetheless manages to see things more clearly than anyone else. Auction is intellectually and emotionally intelligent. It allows the characters to breathe and even redeem themselves.
One more rec: Film Forum in New York is currently screening a series of films in honor of the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, author of one of the essential books of film history, The Parade’s Gone By. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but Covid screwed things up. It will be running until November 6th, when it will screen two fascinating films by Brownlow himself. Winstanley (1975) is his telling of the story of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader and theoretician of the 17th century radical Levelers. The other is the cinematically and morally challenging It Happened Here (1965), which imagines an England that was invaded during World War II, was defeated, and became a collaborationist-run National Socialist state opposed by a not especially savory resistance movement. One character in the Resistance explains that “sometimes to fight fascism you have to use fascist methods.” A curious idea, and one that merits reflection.
Larry Bush (editor emeritus): The first time I heard Arthur Waskow speak was at the founding convention of New Jewish Agenda in Washington, DC in December 1980. I was there as the 29-year-old assistant editor of Jewish Currents, and I was sitting alongside Itche Goldberg, then 76, a Yiddishist editor and literary meyvn who was a very influential figure in my secular Jewish universe. Arthur, who was then 47, was in the middle of presenting a Big Picture political-spiritual shpil when I heard Itche mutter: “Sophistry!”
For Itche, anything having to do with “God” was sophistry (that is, the use of fallacious, deceitful arguments). But Arthur’s vision—of a world that reveals truth to us—had already captivated me. Eventually, it was Itche’s dry atheism, his rejection of all Jewish ritual as bunkum, that I would set to the side.
Particularly through Arthur’s writing (most particularly his Seasons of Our Joy), he became an inspiration and a teacher to me. His colorful, incisive, expansive interpretations of Jewish tradition opened me up to an appreciation of the Jewish calendar as a year-round celebration of the natural world and of our interconnected reality as human beings. His interpretation of God’s name, YHWH, as the breath of interconnected life—inhale, exhale, animals and plants, and microbes, too—helped me realize that I could simply place “God” in quotation marks and stop boycotting the word. His interpretive wrestling with the Torah and Talmud helped me realize that I could enter Jewish texts beyond the lovely writings of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz. Eventually I was able to redefine “religion” for myself as our ongoing, cumulative discussion about the deepest realities and moral requirements of human life and I grew into an atheist with an oddly powerful interest in Judaism’s ethics and philosophy (and, to a lesser extent, its rituals).
Unknown to Arthur, his effect upon me often made me very nervous. It was not easy for me, after all, to walk down a path that led away from the secular mindset with which I’d been raised. Then came his prescient concern with ecology (the “messianic science” he called it, “the realm where science and the religious recognition of interconnection come together”), which had me fumfering for at least a couple of years: Is it true, this global warming thing? There was also his fearlessness about getting arrested, which challenged me to find more political courage, and his prophetic powers, which challenged me to find motivations in life beyond self-aggrandizement.
His astonishing productivity also kept me on my toes! As I wrote in my introduction to an interview I conducted with Arthur for Jewish Currents in 2013, “Much of what progressive, observant Jews today embrace as basic to their Jewish practice—non-gendered language for God-talk and prayer; the plumbing of Judaism for its ecological wisdom; “eco-kashrut” (a kosher system that includes ethical considerations in evaluating food); homemade hagodes of every stripe to make the Passover story relevant—all of this and more has been invented, unveiled, or reimagined and popularized by Waskow through his many books, his many activist campaigns, his widespread teaching, and his prolific blogging.”
Arthur was a powerhouse, and he charged my batteries again and again. “God” bless him! He has two new posthumous books—Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World—coming out next year. Watch for them.
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Heather Christian’s sacred and sumptuous Oratorio for Living Things, like most oratorios, has a holy subject, Christian’s note in the program tells us. For this piece, it is time.
Her plotless libretto certainly addresses that theme, as the piece considers three temporal scales: quantum, human, and cosmic. But strangely—and gloriously—its primary effect on me was to take me out of time. Twelve virtuosic singers and six musicians (on reeds, strings, percussion, and piano) suspended me in a surround-sound experience at once intimate and vast, and when it ended after some 90 minutes, I had no idea whether I’d been there for 20 minutes or for hours.
The effect comes not from contemplating the libretto (much of which, and not only the sizable section in Latin, is difficult to understand in performance; a booklet for sale in the lobby bar provides the full text). Rather, it’s the enveloping physical and sonic space shaped by Krit Robinson’s scenic design, Lee Sunday Evans’s direction, and Christian’s genre-blending score that lifts one into an alternate internal—yet publicly shared—universe.
Robinson has reconfigured a space at the Signature Theatre into a cushy blue oval with highly raked, fabric-draped bleachers, where spectators sit in the round, constantly visible to each other. Singers, and sometimes musicians, move among the audience, perching in the aisles and stairs, and occasionally gathering on the floor below. Seldom was a singer more than a few feet away from me. When they look you right in the eye as they intone gorgeous plainsong or bluesy lines or Glassian syllables, they aren’t singing to you so much as through you.
Sometimes they are singing in rich harmonies, as the music ranges seamlessly through gospel, pop, liturgical, and minimalist styles (and lyrics sung near you ring with clarity), and sometimes in percussive unison. Sometimes they are humming beneath or beat-boxing alongside a cast member who breaks out into a spectacular aria. They are not characters in a story, but their organized gestures—all swaying their hands to a waltz beat at one point, or clapping out a multi-layered rhythm at another—heighten their corporeality.
When the work begins, a glowing orb hangs near the ground at the center of the space. As the oratorio unfolds, it slowly rises to the ceiling. A crumpled geodesic polyhedron, it calls to mind Ruth Asawa’s milk-carton sculptures—simple homespun objects that make perfect mathematical sense yet are full of mystery. Here, it seems to serve as a binding, possibly holy, focal point: a nucleus around which human atoms bounce, a campfire where they commune, an altar where they secure their memories.
The language also shifts as the oratorio unfolds. The first section’s descriptions of photosynthesis and water molecules give way, as we move from quantum to human temporality, to an often funny accounting of how humans pass their time on earth: “fourteen months looking for your phone/ ten hours defogging your glasses / fifteen minutes attempting to skip AP Biology/ sixteen days trying to remember what you were just about to say . . .” Memory is central to the middle section, for which Christian solicited stories of strangers’ first recollections and transformed them into lyrics that tell of childhood occurrences that inexplicably lodged in their minds for decades—trying to get a train conductor to blast the horn, climbing an apple tree. Each story fades out before it is completed with another rising to the fore.
The quotidian human activities of the first two sections seem to add up to even less significance in the oratorio’s final, cosmic section, which figures hydrogen and helium as violently quarreling parents who cannot stay separated, and the music finds its most propulsive and dissonant passages. Christian has cited Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as one of many musical influences, and Orff is one of three Carls to whom the work is dedicated. The others are the astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli and the astronomer Carl Sagan.
Sagan’s concept of the cosmic calendar frames the oratorio’s coda, a largely spoken section in which we learn that if the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, was represented as a single calendar year, the period from the European Renaissance to the current moment would take up only the last seconds of December 31. Somehow, that doesn’t make one feel small and pointless. Having been invited to stand for these last moments, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year,” I sensed myself both as a mass of particles and as a consciousness sharing, and thus shaping, an experience with others.
“Music is time made audible,” wrote the pioneering philosopher Susanne Langer some 70 years ago; it creates “felt time” as distinguished from “clock time” and gives form and substance to subjective experience. I had never quite understood that idea before being subsumed in Christian’s glorious oratorio.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller is certainly among the strangest documentaries I’ve ever come across. There have been more earth-shattering or socially explosive documentaries made, to be sure, but none I can think of that documents a profession as utterly unexpected and unlikely.
In contemporary China, a society that combines the worst aspects of communism and capitalism, we meet an unhappy middle-aged couple. The husband has taken to coming home late and disappearing after dinner. The wife is certain he is having an affair. She doesn’t go to a private eye for him to track the errant spouse, but to a mistress dispeller. It’s not enough to find the truth of the affair; the goal instead is to ruin it, to put an end to both the threat it poses and the happiness it brings.
The mistress dispeller herself, we discover, works by inserting herself through ruse into the life of the married couple. She joins them in their badminton games, posing as the wife’s coworker. She gets herself invited to dinner with them and, before arriving, lays out the plot: She will encourage the wife to cause a scene and storm out. She will then stay behind and pump the husband for information. So great is her skill that he reveals everything she needs to know to locate the mistress.
She then inserts herself into the life of the mistress, a beautiful young woman, far younger than the husband, with a job far below her capabilities. In fact, everything she is doing is far below her capabilities, including her affair with an older, uninteresting man. But the dispeller senses, and gets the mistress to reveal, the personality flaws that led her to this—information she then uses to undermine the affair in the eyes of both the husband and the mistress.
Ultimately, her intricate plot works. But to what end? The marital misery and boredom remain, now covered in the memory of betrayal on one side and lost happiness on the other. How Lo managed to get such access to the lives, inner and outer, of her subjects is never explained. It’s certainly best left as a mystery. Perhaps mistress dispelling is a synecdoche for Chinese capitalism. A need was located, and a unique method developed to meet it.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For fans of the Florida issue of Jewish Currents, I recommend Sasha Wortzel’s new film River of Grass, a meditation on the Everglades. The film braids the writing and activism of environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who died in 1998 at 108; the struggles of those currently fighting the environmental degradation of the area by the likes of Big Ag and others; and the author’s own personal recollections of growing up amid the unique ecology of South Florida. While it provides a useful, cogent portrait of current political action—most prominently through the work of Miccosukee activist and educator Betty Osceola, whose indigenous-led “prayer walks” have recently targeted the notorious detention camp Alligator Alcatraz—it is not afraid to slow down, to let the filmmaker think aloud, remember, dream.
Having myself grown up on the dredged swamp that is South Florida, with evidence of its wildness always threatening to come in—the storm leaking through roofs and window frames, the alligators in swimming pools, the gnats and mosquitoes in swarms—I felt that potent mix of despair and love that is sometimes called “climate grief” in Wortzel’s close attention to the landscape, and to the people who are trying to stave off the destruction one Burmese python at a time. The necessity of this work in a circumstance perhaps past hope is what lends the film its spiritual core.
There are upcoming showings of River of Grass in Miami and New York City, including one sponsored by JC, and moderated by me.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): Early in Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, in the year 1998, our then-15-year-old protagonist Bunny Glenn finds herself in an apartment in Baku, in conversation with Fuad Bay, her Azerbaijani neighbor, and Eddie, a crushable British documentary filmmaker. The setup gives Eddie an opportunity to enlighten both Bunny and the reader about the political economy of the oil trickling beneath the “knobby paved streets” of Baku that Bunny, a lonely Foreign Service brat, wanders for hours each day. He rehearses the story of “Mr. Five Percent,” a man who happened to get in just on time on the “Contract of the Century” for Azerbaijan’s oil rights as the Soviet Union was dissolving. The conversation also gives Bunny, sporting freshly blow-dryed hair and a new pink dress, the opportunity to fantasize: “Bunny let herself imagine that she and Eddie were a couple, say a royal couple, going off to a state dinner . . . Eddie had recently come from the shower, Bunny knew from his damp hair, the visible smoothness of his cheek, some faintly herbal smell.” So established are the two overlapping frames of Mobility. Always hovering in the background is the oil industry, the awe-inspiring feat of transporting the substance beneath oceans, the billions of lives powered by its byproducts, the unfathomable wealth earned along its path. In the foreground is the more manageable story of one Bunny Glenn as she confronts the vagaries of adolescence and early adulthood: vexing men, family drama, postgrad drift, calorie counting, the corporate ladder. Kiesling writes deftly in both registers, precise and descriptive but never overwrought.
After the early scenes in Baku, Bunny once again finds herself shoulder-to-shoulder with the world of oil a few years after college when she winds up back at the family home in Beaumont, Texas, nursing a breakup and navigating bleak career prospects. Hired as a temp admin at a local engineering firm, she impresses her boss with her copy-editing skills and finagles her way into a communications position at his in-laws’ family oil company. An Obama devotee who “believes in global warming,” Bunny has some discomfort with her new field—“the flares, the sour gas, the oceans slicked with crude”—but not enough to overcome her relief at finally being able to move into her own apartment, to afford health care and Zumba classes. She takes heart in promises that she will eventually get to work on the company’s burgeoning “renewables” division (an attempt to fortify the business against shifting political winds) and aligns herself with campaigns to diversify the racial and gender makeup of the oil industry, allowing her to feel that she is fighting some dragon after all. And, industry compatriots and her consultant fiancé remind her, what might society look like for a woman like her without oil? Wouldn’t she be reduced to giving birth “outside in a shed,” rather than a hospital full of machines?
While Bunny is a shallow and oblivious character, Kiesling is gentle enough with her that she sometimes still earns the reader’s affinity, especially given how often the accurate political rebukes to her line of work come dripping in misogynistic condescension, whether from the dirtbag muckraking journalists in ‘90s Baku or, later, from her older brother John, who runs free in leftist intellectual circles in Ukraine while Bunny gets stuck in suburban Texas supporting their newly divorced mother. The exception is Sofie, John’s girlfriend, a Swedish environmental journalist whose cocktail of kindness, coolness, conviction, and intellect most unsettles Bunny’s confidence in her path. During one political argument with bystanders, Bunny observes that “Sofie was like a man in that she could speak confidently and at length, but like a woman in that she could read and direct the energy produced by the things she said.” And still, Sofie’s terms of articulating political resistance rarely connect with Bunny in ways she could imagine applying to her own life. “I’m not having children . . . the world does not need another child of affluent people in the West,” she tells Bunny, who “had never heard anyone say this before.”
On the whole, as it tracks years of such discussions amid its main character’s pursuit of career mobility, Mobility is a novel about the temptations of complicity, and how difficult they can be to resist when the negative externalities are still a few years and miles away, less tangible than health insurance or a nice hotel on the company card. And, in its final pages, in a turn towards somber speculative mode, it becomes a novel about what it might look like when those compromises finally catch up with us.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Iranian director Jafar Panahi is world cinema’s symbol of resistance. Arrested and banned from making films by the Islamic Republic, he has, since his release from prison, remained in Iran. During the years-long ban he found clever and successful ways to continue producing films, including one called This is Not a Film. He had other people direct his films for him at his ultimate direction, or instead of making a film shot on film or digitally, he would make one with his phone. Through all this, a humanist refusal to submit to repression and a mocking resistance to the state has been a constant in his work.
It Was Just an Accident is his first film under the new dispensation. One might think Panahi would avoid controversy his first time out, but instead he has produced his fiercest, most directly political film. Resistance to the mullahs is everywhere present in It Was Just an Accident. Women go scarfless, and a couple is preparing to wed even though the bride is already pregnant—proof of the crime of premarital sex. The petty criminality and venality of Iranian society is laid bare. Bribes are demanded by everyone in the film: police, gas station attendants, nurses, everyone. Iran’s ostensibly Muslim society is rotted and rotten.
The focus of the film is Vahid. He’s a schlubby nobody who is first presented as a side character in what looks like it will be a story about a family who, on their way home through a dark night, accidentally run over a dog. Is this the accident of the title? The car breaks down in front of a warehouse, where one of the workers fixes the car. The boss, Vahid, drives into town in his van and suddenly he stops, swings open the passenger door, and knocks out a pedestrian, who he loads into the van. He drives to the desert and digs a grave, into which he throws the pedestrian and proceeds to bury him alive.
What follows is a tale of resistance, and a reflection on revenge and retribution. Vahid, we learn, was a prisoner of the regime, arrested for participating in a strike. He recognized the pedestrian, whose car had broken down in front of his shop, as his torturer. Or is he? Vahid drives around picking up people who shared his time in jail in an effort to have his suspicion verified.
With the supposed torturer locked in a crate, the former prisoners, two of them in their wedding attire, attempt to definitively determine if their captive is Pegleg, the man who tortured and raped them. Panahi, almost in the style of Hitchcock in The Trouble With Harry, treats the progress and process of judgment with a light, at times comic touch. The former prisoners want to kill Pegleg, but is this Pegleg? Justice must be done, but it won’t be meted out unless they are certain the right man will pay for the crimes.
Throughout the film the former prisoners, resisters all, maintain their humanity. They refuse to act in the arbitrary fashion they know from their dealings with the state’s repressive apparatus. They even assist their captive’s wife when her labor begins and pay for her admission to the hospital.
Panahi’s final message in It Was Just an Accident is that those who resist the theocrats and pay dearly for their refusal to submit will never become like their foes. The inhuman treatment they have received has not dehumanized them. Panahi’s return to making actual films is a tribute to his bravery and decency.
Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): When Zalmen arrives in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of Hanan Ayalti’s astonishing 1936 novel, Boom and Chains, he and the other passengers on board a ship from Europe must wait before disembarking. A general strike among Arab workers has brought everything to a halt. “It’s a strike against the British and against the Balfour Declaration,” explains an official from the Jewish Agency. The next day, when the passengers manage to leave, Zalmen grabs a ride to Tel Aviv in a car with five halutzim and three English policemen wielding guns. “How strange,” he thinks to himself. “I came to fight British imperialism together with the Arab masses, and here I am getting protected and escorted from the harbor by armed English soldiers.” Ayalti continues: “He bit his lip and uttered, ‘Nu, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”
The roughly 250 pages that follow show exactly that—and a lot happens. Zalmen labors in a kibbutz among fellow leftists who sink knee-deep in mud to dig canals to drain swamps, sweat and shiver through bouts of malaria, plow scrubby ground into fecund fields to pave new roads, and never stop debating how to bring about the glorious revolution. The book is more atmospheric than plot-driven at first, and Ayalti evokes landscape, insects, and bone-soaking rain in beautiful impressionistic strokes as he brings to life the characters’ erotic yearnings and ideological fervor. A wry, mirthless humor breaks through from time to time. “Spring continued,” Ayalti writes. “Nights of white moons. The kind of nights described in fundraising speeches by the Jewish National Fund.”
The main event is internal: the process of disillusionment. “We’ve always regarded the kibbutz as the exemplar of the new society,” Zalmen tells his comrade, Motke, after a year or two trying to build and live that new society. “It turns out, it is actually the vanguard of expelling Arabs from their work and from their land.” This recognition requires them to take sides, heightening the action—and shining a rare, riveting light on joint Jewish-Arab resistance.
Zalmen reflects a good measure of Ayalti’s own experience. Born in 1910 in the Grodno region, then part of the Russian Empire, the author arrived in Palestine in 1929 as a teenage zealot of the socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair, and soon abandoned Zionism for the nascent Arab-Jewish Communist party. Although he had published his first novel in Hebrew, Ayalti wrote Boom and Chains in Yiddish because, as the translator Adi Mahalel explains in an illuminating introduction, no Hebrew publisher would have touched an anti-Zionist novel. Arrested by the British for his own political activity, Ayalti ended up fleeing Israel for Paris after a short stint in prison. He covered the Spanish Civil War for a Yiddish paper, fled Hitler’s rise, found safety in Uruguay, and eventually settled in New York, where he joined the students protesting at Columbia University in 1968 with his good friend, Hannah Arendt. He died in 1992.
Mahalel notes that Ayalti repudiated Boom and Chains in his later years, citing his change of political allegiances—more because of the book’s pro-Soviet implications, it seems, than because of its critique of Zionism. Either way, one result has been decades of obscurity, even among Yiddish scholars. Mahalel has retrieved this enthralling dissident work at a crucial moment.
Nathan Goldman (senior editor): For those of us who find some relief from the abundant horrors of reality in ones that are merely imagined, the hour is upon us. Since I adored Mike Flanagan’s Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, I started my spooky season with his equally moody The Haunting of Hill House. The show, inspired by more than adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, follows five adult siblings who spent a formative childhood summer in the eponymous mansion, which ended in their mother’s tragic death amid mysterious circumstances. Despite an often overwrought script and sometimes tropey depictions of trauma, its energetic performances, carefully crafted atmosphere, and imaginative scares make it perfect October viewing.
Less familiar—if also less coherent—was Tilman Singer’s recent film Cuckoo. In a promising first venture into scream queendom, Hunter Schafer stars as an American adolescent reeling from her mother’s death who must move to a remote resort in the German Alps to live with her father and stepmother, who’ve designed an expansion for the creepy hotelier. She’s soon unsettled by a pattern of female guests inexplicably vomiting, her stepsister’s sudden onset of seizures, and a strange screeching from the woods that causes time to stutter and loop. Insanity ensues.
Readers with no stomach for on-screen horror may still appreciate the podcast I’ve been bingeing, Too Scary; Didn’t Watch. The premise is simple: One host recaps recent releases or genre classics for the other two—who are, as they say in the intro, “too scared to watch scary movies”—with ample interjections and digressions. For someone interested in seeing the films themselves, it works well as a chat show with a lightly spooky flavor rather than a substitute for watching, and I’ve been using it to relive movies I enjoyed earlier this year like Weapons, Final Destination: Bloodlines, and Late Night with the Devil. But for anyone for whom that’s still too much (or anyone with small children) I’d heartily recommend Raahat Kaduji’s I’m Not Scary, which my kids picked up from a free books table at the farmer’s market last weekend. It’s the adorable tale of a bat who hopes to convince his fellow woodland critters that he’s not the monster his shadow suggests; he’s just a little guy who loves to bake. Autumnal, cozy, and totally fright-free.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I don’t, as a rule, read history or fiction for the lessons they can teach us about today, but reading Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, I frequently felt chills of recognition running up and down my spine. M is a tetralogy of novels about Mussolini, beginning in 1919 with the founding of the fascist movement and continuing on until Il Duce’s death in 1945. Only the first volume is available in English, but polyglots like me can read the remaining volumes in Italian, or volume two in French.
Scurati is a competent though not a great writer, but in his hands the mere recounting of Mussolini’s life and deeds is a compulsive read. Scurati doesn’t dwell on Mussolini’s political beginnings as one of the most radical of Italy’s socialists, a phase that covered his first decades and ended when he became a militant supporter of Italy’s entry into World War I. Mussolini’s betrayal of everyone and everything in his life is a constant theme of M. True beliefs are seldom taken on, or are cast aside with ease. Fascism was not an ideology; it was a punch in the face.
Betrayal existed in every sphere of Mussolini’s life. He cheated both on his wife and on his primary and most important mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was Jewish. He cast aside friends and allies—anyone who got in his way or was no longer of use to him.
And yet, Scurati shows that Mussolini—despite the fanatical anti-leftism of his fascism, the beatings and murders of socialists and Communists, the burning down of left-wing meeting halls, the constant reign of terror—was haunted by his socialist past. Among the few people to whom he was loyal was Nicola Bombacci, a Communist Mussolini befriended in his youth when both were socialist teachers and who, after being expelled from the Italian Communist Party, was the foremost left-fascist, insisting on fascism’s socialist nature. Bombacci was among the four people other than the Duce himself who were killed by partisans and left hanging on Piazzale Loreto in Milan.
Scurati presents an unvarnished portrait of Mussolini, a man moved by ego, animal needs, and a sick desire for power and for national and personal aggrandizement. Reading his insane diatribes, his boastful style, and his constant belittling of others certainly struck a familiar chord.
The first volume builds to a conclusion that is undeniably a warning to us. It recounts what should have been the end of Mussolini’s career, the murder of the reformist socialist politician Giacomo Matteoti in 1924. Despite his moderate politics, Matteotti was a ferocious foe of fascist rule. While other politicians and intellectuals like Pirandello and Benedetto Croce were lining up behind Mussolini, Matteotti was speaking and writing scathing attacks on Il Duce. Mussolini and his fascist squads finally had enough of him, and he was kidnapped in broad daylight and murdered behind the closed curtains of the getaway car.
It was obvious who was behind his disappearance and murder, and Mussolini looked to be doomed. But cowardly opposition politicians did little, and the king stood by and didn’t remove Mussolini from office. His back seemingly to the wall, Mussolini stood in the chamber of deputies and, knowing he had the support of a significant segment of the public and that politicians lacked backbone, said “Well, then, gentlemen, I declare here, before this assembly and before the people of Italy, that I and I alone assume the political and moral responsibility for everything that has happened…If fascism has been a band of criminals, I am the leader of the criminal band.” Like the man who claimed he could shoot someone on the corner of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he read his country well, and was in power for over 20 more years. We already have a wannabe Mussolini in our present. Is there a Matteotti in our future?
