Headline Review 2011

The List by Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books 2011

In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its writer. Since the focus is primarily on the claustrophobic world of the secret annexe where the Dutch Frank family and their friends hid from the Nazis, there is a constant tension with what we as readers know about events taking place in the world outside, and what will happen in the future. We understand that all the daily indignities, deprivations and fear Anne describes were in vain — the Franks would be discovered and deported to Bergen-Belsen.

The massive literature which has blossomed since the diary’s first publication in 1947 has told us what Anne could only speculate about — laying bare the monstrosities of the Holocaust in chilling detail. The shootings, starvings, gassings, burnings, beatings and torture, the unbearable suffering and unimaginable cruelty. But where do we go once horror and pity have been utterly exhausted? The next chapter, at least for some writers, is a move back to the kind of obliqueness achieved by Anne Frank. To the before and the afterwards, to the scars of the survivors, to the ripples cast outward and onward. Two recent novels tackle the events from opposite chronological directions — one starting with the prelude to the war, and the other the fall-out from it. It’s an oblique approach which, in the right hands, has the quiet power to disturb.

The Booker long-listed Far to Go begins in the tense months before the war, when time is running out for the Bauer family. They are prosperous, secular Jews living in an unnamed Sudetenland town in 1938. In the growing turmoil, they will put their only son on the Kindertransport before ending up on transits to Birkenau. That alone would be a familiar story, but Pick tells her story simultaneously from different points in time, spinning a spider’s web of complexity and nuance.

Both in time and place we are at one remove from the events at the black heart of the novel. Everything is anchored within the Bauer household, with the bigger political developments mediated through a prism – the gaze of the Bauer’s faithful nanny Marta. It is she who learns about what’s happening in the world outside by listening to her employer discussing politics and who feels the consequences when her beloved charge, Pepik, is made to sit at the back of the class, or when he wets his bed. On Kristallnacht, she watches aghast from behind the curtains as Nazi thugs smash up and torch a Jewish shop, and beat the owner to death on the pavement outside.

But there’s more to this than Marta’s naïve perspective on ominous events in the world outside. For this becomes very much a book very much preoccupied with the emotional wasteland beyond the war. Inserted between the chapters of narrative are letters, only some of which are written by familiar characters. The only thing we know for certain about each is their death, as each ends in a similar way, ‘(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Rosa. Died Birkenau, 1943)’

Following each letter is a confessional passage from a contemporary speaker, whose identity we can only guess at, speaking directly to someone else. A survivor, but which survivor? And how does this mysterious historian fit into the story of the Bauers? Slowly the evidence mounts to a further twist in the plot, but we must unravel the layers and straighten out the ambiguities to find out what it is. This becomes a story of multiple betrayals and devastating guilt, a future overshadowed by the past, and lives consumed by gaping absences.

The story of the Bauer family alone would be just another, sadly familiar Holocaust tale. But Pick is less interested in the details of the Final Solution than in the psychological consequences for the survivors. Thrust onto a train, arriving in a strange country among unfamiliar people, cut off from all that was known and familiar. What were the consequences of such an experience? Guilt, of course, but she suggests something far worse than that. A life determined by absence, ‘The gnawing longing, the desire to keep searching even when your rational mind knows everyone involved is gone.’

It’s that very longing which is explored further in Martin Fletcher’s The List. The year is 1945 and Edith and Georg are a young married couple trying to rebuild their shattered lives in a boarding house in Swiss Cottage. Both have made narrow escapes from Vienna alone, leaving family and home behind as the Nazis tightened their stranglehold on Europe. Like Alison Pick’s Pepik, Edith has been pushed onto a train by loving parents.

Here again the action is anchored within a domestic setting, at a distance from the portentous events that are central to the plot. The lounge of the Goldhurst Terrace lodgings is a place where a group of young refugees living with the consequences of the Holocaust commiserate over a cup of rationed tea.

The murder of millions of Jews haunts the text, although the reader only catches an occasional glimpse of its reality in characters like Edith’s cousin Anna, a lost soul ‘strange and distant, blank’ who arrives unexpectedly in their world with her flashbacks and nightmares, her hair still close cropped and a livid tattoo on her arm. Instead, we are led to discover, through Georg and Edith, the coping mechanisms, the black humour and the investment in domestic life which makes the knowledge of the past bearable. Edith is pregnant, but her excitement about the new life within her acts a constant reminder of the family that she has lost.

The hinterland of Edith and Georg’s story is the catastrophe that has engulfed their country and annihilated their community, friends and family. The list of the title is kept by Georg, which contains the names of relatives he and Edith are hoping to find. Scouring the offices of the refugee charities and Jewish organisations for news of survivors from camps and ghettos, he gradually crosses off one name after another. Finally there are only two names left — Edith’s father and his sister. But nobody, in the chaos of post-war Europe, seems to know whether they are alive or not. In both books, the survivors are left clinging to paper relics of the past —Georg’s list, the letters of Far To Go, a single photograph kept by Pepik.

Martin Fletcher depicts a post-war Hampstead heaving with Jewish refugees who frequent the Finchleystrasse, eating at the Cosmo and Dorice restaurants, their nostalgia for home refracted through black humour while they grapple with the idiosyncrasies of their adopted country and wait for news. The waiting defines them, as Fletcher describes: ‘They were all living the same blocked life. They couldn’t go anywhere until they knew.’

The Swiss Cottage that Fletcher describes is familiar to many second generation refugee children, including me, but here its cosiness is shot through with bleakness. While the cheerful couple who run the boarding house, Sally and Albert Barnes, are welcoming and tolerant up to a point, the mood elsewhere in Hampstead is turning sour. With fascist yobs patrolling the streets, a petition is raised to have refugees deported in order to free up accommodation for demobbed soldiers.

As the temperature rises, events in Palestine add to the ferment. Terrorist gangs have targeted the British troops enforcing the mandate, and they have Sergeant Eric Barnes, son of Sally and Albert, in their sights. A living link between London and Palestine, his fate threatens the precarious new lives of the émigré community. More explosive still, the terrorists have decided to take the fight with the British on their home turf with a bold plan to shoot Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in Pall Mall. The political ramifications of a successful hit would be catastrophic for the Finchleystrasse circle.

With the pieces set in place, Fletcher brings it to a dramatic dénouement, plotting his double narrative with meticulous care against a grainy backdrop of post-war London. Martin Fletcher is a foreign correspondent with a distinguished track record in the Middle East, and he’s combined his expertise with his family background to write a page turning thriller, at the same time both wryly comic and memorable.

Fletcher knows his facts but, ever the journalist, sometimes loves them too much, overburdening us at times with unnecessary back-story. Pick writes with a greater delicacy of touch which means that the facts of Far to Go fall more gradually into place, keeping us guessing until the very last about the true identity of the different narrators and the path that has brought them to this place. The truth, when it comes, is shattering.

Fabrice Humbert

Serpent’s Tail 2011

The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la Violence), the author’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, was swiftly extolled by the French press as a ‘great novel’ and a ‘revelation’. The novel won Le Prix Renaudot du Livre de Poche (the Prix Renaudot paperback award), a French literary award created in 1926 as a corollary of the Prix Goncourt. With the novel the author is also the first winner of the Prix Orange du Livre, the first literary award to involve web users throughout the award process. His latest novel, La Fortune de Sila (Sila’s Luck; Le Passage, 2010), has also been received with great acclaim, winning the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Le Grand Prix RTL-Lire.

This compelling, if flawed, novel begins with a metaphysical reverie on the nature of evil, evoking the fall of Lucifer and images of Satan remembered from Dante. Evil as an abstracted personification takes on a real dimension when the narrator, a member of an old Norman family and teacher at the Parisian Franco-German lycée, takes his pupils on a trip to Buchenwald. The story begins here, when the narrator sees a photograph of the camp doctor with a prisoner —who is the living image of the narrator’s father. This haunting image propels the protagonist’s research into the identity of the prisoner, and through it the author inscribes him into the history of the Jews — since this anonymous prisoner takes flesh as his real grandfather, David Wagner.

The narrator’s problematic relationship with his father is played out in dialogue (as are all the relationships in the book) as flat and barren as his father’s life — the contours of whose circumscribed internal world are compared to his repetitive meanders of the streets of Paris. The narratives of David’s brother and a survivor of Buchenwald — David’s steadfast friend in the camp — lead the reader into the vividly evoked life of David Wagner. Through them, the resistant silence of that implacable fortress, which is the Fabre patriarchy is shattered, and the narrator becomes witness to the rise and fall of the morally flawed David; his amorous entanglements within the Fabre family — one driven by ambition, the other, passion; the consequent birth of a bastard, the narrator’s father; and the horrors of his imprisonment in Buchenwald. The narrator professes an obsession with violence — alluding to some nebulous, unexplained origin in childhood — an obsession which seems to find its fulfilment in the hell of Buchenwald, in the murder of his father’s father.

It is indeed in the account of the violence of Buchenwald that the author writes most powerfully and hauntingly. Throughout the work the narrator situates himself in relation to other authors, claiming that he can only respect accounts of lived experience in the camps, citing, for example, Primo Levi. The novel’s compelling account of the sheer madness of the camp, an arena in which the sadistic fantasies of the camp’s perpetrators (Martin Sommer, guard, Karl Otto Koch, Kommandant, and his wife Ilse) are brutally played out, and of the hierarchy of the prisoners, ranging from the Kapo to the living dead figure of the muselmann, is in every way worthy of Levi. Each perpetrator appears to embody a different facet of the face of violence; the sheer animal brutality of Stommer, who strangled, hung, poisoned hundreds of prisoners; the depravity and promiscuity of the flame-haired Ilse Koch, drunk with absolute power; most sinister of all, the insidious violence of the camp doctor (given a fictional role and name in the novel) who, in telling David the ‘Parable of the Jew’, implicitly assigns to him the role in the parable of the poisoned rat; a role which is fulfilled with David’s murder. Particularly graphic and disturbing is the account of David’s period as a Kalfacto in the Kochs’ house, where he exists as
a ghost, stripped of his identity and manhood, and ultimately, of hope.

Such convincing and poignant accounts as David’s are not — perhaps disappointingly — to be resumed in the novel. Following this profoundly felt excursion into the past, the story becomes somewhat bathetic, and the account of the narrator’s meeting and romance with a German teacher, the granddaughter of the morally tormented member of the Nazi party who was yet not a Nazi, lacks the resonance of the account of David’s affair. At this point the subject of the story becomes the narrator’s struggle to write his grandfather’s story itself; and the chapter about David’s experience in the camp appears to the reader to be a foretaste of this imagined story. The author fills the hiatus in the action of the novel with an intelligent and searching analysis of the social pre-conditions of Nazism, which is written more in the register of an historian rather than a novelist; consequently the reader experiences a jarring of styles, and feels almost as though the author is finding himself as a writer as much as the protagonist (both narrator and author are teachers turned writers).

The reader is drawn back into the overarching drama of the novel when the protagonist is called back to Paris to visit his dying ‘grandfather’ (husband to his father’s mother), heralding the dénouement of the novel. An element of doubt in the narrator’s relationship with both his father and grandfather lends a sinister edge, a sense of an unplumbed horror within the family…the horror, ultimately, of the Fabres’ betrayal of David. As both a Fabre and a Wagner, the protagonist carries both victim and perpetrator within him, and, in bringing the truth of David to light, enacts the wider authorial purpose of giving life to an anonymous face — and playing some part in expiating France’s heritage of guilt.

Fabrice Humbert is, like the narrator in The Origin of Violence, a young teacher at a Franco- German Lycée. He will, along with the novelist Agnès Desarthe (author of The Foundling), be talking to Michael Arditti during Jewish Book Week 2012 about his novel. Both authors have written novels about men who launch investigations into their own family histories, and through them find themselves confronted by the darkest atrocities of World War II. ( Sunday, 19 February 2012, 6.30 pm, King’s Place, St. Pancras Room)

Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a portrayal that would only give succour to antisemites. Ten years later, in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint somehow scandalised an America that had witnessed a shocking number of political assassinations, watched nightly the televised carnage of Vietnam, and feared the revolutionaries that seemed to be taking over its cities. (To be fair, most Americans had never before read a depiction of an adolescent masturbating with a piece of liver.) None of the scandals that followed ever reached the heights of these first two, but Roth has, despite writing within a culture that seems to have less and less time for the printed word, shown a consistent talent for making headlines.

So it is not surprising that an apparently uncontroversial event — Roth, America’s grand old man of letters by now, receiving the Man Booker International Prize, a sort of lifetime achievement award for writers — was accompanied by yet more rancour and fuss. Carmen Callil, one of the prize’s three judges, supplemented the announcement of the award with her own announcement: she vehemently disagreed with the other judges’ choice of Roth, and was stepping down. Her stated reasons for contesting Roth’s win? “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book,” and, in a turn of phrase for which Roth scholars will be forever grateful, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” She would later clarify her position by rather sensibly arguing that North American writers such as Roth receive more than their share of such awards, and that in giving the Booker to Roth the judges missed an opportunity to highlight some of the significant writers of other literary cultures. But it is her criticism of Roth as monotonous, always writing about the same thing, that was printed in bold type. The charge strikes me as both lazy and unsupported, and yet it is one Roth has heard from critics for decades.

In 1972, back when Roth was still living in Alexander Portnoy’s shadow, the distinguished cultural critic Irving Howe took it upon himself to take the author down a notch or two. In the pages of Commentary magazine (where Roth had made a splash in 1961 with his essay ‘Writing American Fiction’), Howe tore Roth’s books apart, asserting that they were held, “in the grip of an imperious will prepared to wrench, twist, and claw at its materials in order to leave upon them the scar of its presence.” The contention throughout the piece, anticipating Callil by nearly 40 years, is that Roth goes on and on about the same subject: himself. This criticism would haunt Roth, intensifying whenever he wrote a book featuring his Roth- like alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Claiming that Roth wrote only about himself became an easy way to bash him, and to ignore the ways in which his books diverged from his biography. Carmen Callil, in dissenting from her fellow judges, has joined herself to this hallowed tradition.

What’s maddening about criticism such as Howe’s and Callil’s, to my mind at least, is that it lowers the discussion about literature to a nearly childish level. To respond to the charge that Roth, “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book” is to descend into absurdities: Look, I want to say, Roth writes about plenty of subjects — sixties radicalism! Jewish settlers on the West Bank! Baseball! Racial passing! But what kind of a perspective on literature is this? Do we read and re-read Lolita to find out more about paedophilia? Has The Great Gatsby endured merely because readers are fascinated by the roaring twenties? Surely readers find something more vital beyond a book’s subject matter — a pinhole that lets light into the dark tunnel of our own subjectivity, an urgent reminder of the variety and fullness of experience, the mysterious way a book — pages filled with typed words — comes alive in our hands. I am befuddled by those who see nothing but an author’s biography in a work of fiction, or who read a representation of subjectivity as self-obsession and solipsism. This seems to me a very simple-minded form of misreading. Isn’t this fundamental stuff — some of the very first lessons we learn when we begin reading fiction? What’s clear is that it is a criticism that has rankled Roth over the years, provoking him to respond vociferously in interview after interview, and respond, often provocatively, in his fiction.

In Roth’s 1981 novel The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is beset by the twinned calamities of chronic pain and writer’s block. These afflictions are compounded by a vicious critical takedown in the pages of Inquiry magazine by critic Milton Appel, “an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical.” Appel is modelled, of course, on Irving Howe and Roth has great fun with Zuckerman here, milking the righteous anger of a writer wronged for pages and pages of unhinged vitriol. Zuckerman, hopped up on painkillers, pot, and alcohol, calls Appel in a rage and semi-coherently gives the elder writer a piece of his mind. But more than that bit of inspiration, Howe’s piece plays a bigger role in The Anatomy Lesson, as the novel has Roth seemingly taking Howe’s central criticism seriously: what if it were true that Roth can only write about himself? What if Howe’s diagnosis is right, and Roth only has a talent for plastering himself all over his pages? He plays out these questions through Zuckerman, who has grown sick of mining his self for literature, and feels that he has exhausted that self. Zuckerman muses, “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole.” The novel takes flight when Zuckerman decides to quit the writing life to go to medical school, all the while impersonating Milton Appel, and introducing himself as a pornographer, the publisher of a magazine called Lickety Split. More than just two fingers up to Irving Howe, the book seems to show how different Zuckerman is from his author: while Zuckerman attempts to escape the writing life because he has exhausted his self, Roth clearly has no such problem, steadily producing another installment in the Zuckerman saga, his third in four years, finding no shortage of material to keep him going.

A more adventurous critic than I could make the case that not just The Anatomy Lesson, but nearly all of Roth’s 1980s publications were in some way written in perverse response to the oft-repeated criticism that he only writes about himself, that he insufficiently fictionalises experience. There are the first five Zuckerman books, each taking noticeably from Roth’s biography to enact the comedy of late-twentieth century America. There is The Facts, a seemingly straightforward autobiography bookended by letters to and from Zuckerman, throwing a wrench into the non-fictional works (the latter is a passionate missive from Zuckerman to his creator, urging him not to publish the preceding memoir). There is Deception, a novel as transcription of conversations, featuring a writer named Philip who sounds for all the world like Philip Roth. The plot, such as it is, centres on whether or not Philip will publish his notebooks (which we have been reading) as is, or change all the names (including changing “Philip” to “Nathan”). At one point, Philip barks, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” Roth’s first novel of the 1990s, Operation Shylock, took things a step further. Subtitled ‘A Confession’, the book is told in the first person by Philip Roth, who tells us the ostensibly true (though obviously false) story of how he went to Israel to put a stop to the hijinks of a man who calls himself Philip Roth, and is agitating for a meshugge cause called ‘Diasporism which advocates the wholesale migration of Israeli Jews back to Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Each of these books seemed provoked in some way by a bee in Roth’s bonnet that looked and sounded an awful lot like Irving Howe. The books seem to dramatise the process of taking experience and converting it into writing, taking great pains (and many pages) to show just how grey the area between fact and fiction really is. I happen to think that there’s a lot more going on in these books than Roth making the same point over and over again, but if ever there was a time to criticise Roth for only writing about himself, it was in 1993, after Operation Shylock capped 14 years of books that each seemed to put Philip Roth front and centre.

But something drastic changed after Operation Shylock, something that makes Carmen Callil’s recent comments all the more mystifying: Roth forgot about Irving Howe and began a stretch of books that had, at least on the surface, little to do with his old oppositions of fact and fiction, life and writing, Philip and Nathan. In 1995, he published Sabbath’s Theater, a frankly stunning steamroller of a novel, centering on the despicable Mickey Sabbath, an obscene, arthritic, and now disgraced puppeteer who wants, more than anything, to die. It is hilarious and sad and provocative and, although it does feature a white male of Roth’s vintage and plenty of talk about sex (two Rothian hallmarks), the book pretty clearly sets its sights far beyond the writing life. This was followed by the already-canonised “American Trilogy”: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Nathan Zuckerman returns for these novels, but it is a changed Zuckerman, one content to stay on the sidelines and narrate other lives, each tied to a different significant period in American history. It is these books that, for right or wrong, got many critics to sit up and take note of Roth’s greatness, often for the very reason that the books seemed to move past Roth’s old preoccupations. “What happened?” Ken Gordon asked in Slate, “The new books seem to recognize the existence of other people.” The books that have followed since the turn of the century have similarly branched outward from Roth’s comfort zone and, although their relative merits have been debated, seem to have tossed aside that old chestnut that Roth only writes about himself. To my mind, that criticism was never very convincing — doesn’t it misunderstand the very nature of literature? — but it’s all the more puzzling to hear in 2011, from a distinguished literary editor no less.

But enough already on the subject of Roth’s many subjects; I’d like to talk about a more subtle misreading that has crept into recent Roth criticism. Beginning with the publication of The Human Stain in 2000, the list of Roth’s prior publications in his books’ front matter, instead of being displayed in a single chronological block, now appears broken up, with the books divided into various categories: “Zuckerman Books”, “Kepesh Books”(the three books featuring David Kepesh as a narrator), “Roth Books” (including The Facts and Operation Shylock), even a grab-bag category called “Other Books”. One effect of this division is to highlight the diversity of Roth’s back catalogue: another shot across the bows to those critics who claim Roth has but one subject. But a more subtle effect can be seen in the way the categories seem to be telling us how to read Roth, how to conceive of his long and varied career. Just as we should be wary of readings that can’t see beyond the author’s biography, there are plenty of reasons to distrust reading Roth the way Roth tells us to. Roth long ago proved himself to be a most unreliable guide to his own work — in interviews he maintained for instance, that Operation Shylock was 100% true — and to take the author’s word for it when interpreting a book is merely the other side of the coin from assuming that he’s always writing about himself.

This phenomenon has particularly cropped up in the response to the publication of Roth’s most recent novel, last year’s Nemesis, which brought with it a new category in the book’s front matter. “Nemeses: Short Novels” includes four of the last five books Roth has published: Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and, now, Nemesis. Each of these books, so the reviews have told us, is a short, spare meditation on fate and death. They are the products of an aging author who has seen many of his friends, and his only sibling, die within the last few years. They are the works of a man bravely staring down his own mortality, and responding with an appropriate “late style”. This is, of course, a valid reading. But why should it be the only one? Discussion of Roth’s fiction should not be left to the likes of Howe and Callil, who cannot see past their prejudices as to how much distance an author must keep between himself and his books. But the discussion should not be determined by Roth either. Roth may offer an interesting reading of his own work, and can certainly grant us insight into the creative process, but it must be up to us, the dwindling mass of serious readers, to deliberate over a work’s meanings.

Nemesis tells the story of Bucky Cantor, who, in 1944, is the 23 year old gym teacher and playground director who must preside over the children of Weequahic (Newark’s Jewish neighbourhood) during a terrifying polio outbreak. After afflicting most of the city, the disease reaches Weequahic, and two of Bucky’s eighth grade charges become infected and die. Bucky’s fiancée arranges for him to take a job as a counsellor at a children’s summer camp out in the country. He initially declines the invitation, insisting that he cannot abandon his post. But then, in a change of heart nearly inexplicable to himself, he accepts and flees “equatorial Newark” for the safety of rural Pennsylvania, where the camp is a world away from the overheated, overpopulated precincts of Newark. But within a week of Bucky’s arrival, one of his campers falls prey to polio and is sped off to the hospital. Bucky himself tests positive for the disease. It spreads quickly and the camp is shut within days. In a wickedly tragic irony, Bucky, who flees Newark to escape polio, ends up bringing it with him to the camp; not only is he powerless to protect the children of Newark, he helps the disease infect still more children. After a long and painful recovery that leaves him debilitated, Bucky becomes a recluse, rejecting his fiancée (he doesn’t want her to be tied down to “a cripple”), forever cursing God for creating polio. Although polio does not kill him, his once-promising life is essentially over. He never forgives himself for his role in spreading polio, or for his fateful abandonment of the kids of the Weequahic playground.

My brief summation does not begin to do the novel justice. But it’s enough to convey the fact that, yes, Nemesis shares certain features with Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. All four feature protagonists reckoning with the fateful circumstances that shape a life. All four are written in a spare, direct prose style with little of the humour that has characterised much of Roth’s previous work. And, if you see Bucky as having effectively died as soon as he discovers he is the polio carrier, all four protagonists end up dead. But when I first read Nemesis, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Roth’s earlier books — The Plot Against America and Goodbye, Columbus, in particular — and of an interview with Roth from 1984, in which he explained why he hadn’t dealt with the Holocaust directly in his fiction like, say, William Styron had:

“It works through Jewish lives less visibly and in less spectacular ways. And that’s the way I prefer to deal with it in fiction. For most reflective American Jews, I would think, it is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make use of it—it makes use of you.”

Although Nemesis is set among American Jews in 1944, the Holocaust is conspicuously absent. There is much talk of the war but no reference to the fate of European Jews. Might this be because, as in The Plot Against America, the book imagines an alternate history for American Jews, one in which they lose the security they were blessed with in reality?

“Our Jewish children are our riches,” a mother of one of Bucky’s students cries out. “Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?” Although polio, of course, does not discriminate, throughout the book the danger is figured as specifically coming after the Jews of Weequahic. In a striking early scene, a group of hooligans from Newark’s Italian neighborhood drive up to Bucky’s playground and threaten to spread polio to “you people”. As the disease spreads, many parents decide to keep their children confined at home until the danger passes. And when the outbreak reaches epidemic proportions within Weequahic, there’s talk of barricading the neighbourhood, creating a ghetto to quarantine the Jews. For some in Newark this doesn’t go far enough: “Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.” I don’t want to push these parallels too far (or make too much of the fact that the false haven is presented here as a camp); it is certainly not necessary to read Nemesis as an allegory. I am merely suggesting that a fictional polio outbreak allows Roth to put his American Jews in the hands of the sort of historical threat they never had to face.

It is a testament to Roth’s success here that Nemesis is about much else as well. Bucky’s indecision over whether to stay in Newark, or flee to the safety of pastoral Pennsylvania recalls Neil Klugman’s dilemmas over assimilation in Goodbye, Columbus. The book’s depictions of 1940s Newark are as vivid as any in Roth’s canon, and it manages the difficult trick of presenting the past in a way that doesn’t read like costume drama. And I enjoyed the book’s knotty narrative structure, in which the narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of Bucky’s playground boys, only reveals himself halfway through the novel. Before then, the events are narrated in the first-person plural, the ‘we’ an unusually effective way to convey the sense of camaraderie and affection the boys have for their hero, Bucky Cantor. What a book like this, so richly rendered, seems to me to produce is not a single, distilled meaning, like Carmen Callil might suggest (Roth once again resurrecting Jewish Newark), but rather a multiplicity of meanings, with a suggestive power that reaches out in many directions at once; it is, at once, ‘about’ polio, or the Holocaust, or assimilation, or the tragedy of having a body that ages, or the glories of growing up in Newark in the 1940s. You might say that its meanings go on and on and on, though I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way

Palgrave Macmillan. 2011

Jeremy Ben-Ami is a first rate political operator. In four short years he has made J Street a $5 million organisation and successfully built a Washington power base in opposition to the AIPAC juggernaut and the rest of the so called ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. With its mantra of ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’, J Street funds electoral battles, lobbies Congress and attempts to reframe the terms of debate. It has also spawned international imitators such as the predominantly French JCall and the recent UK start-up Yachad. Unfortunately Ben Ami’s skills as a theorist do not match his organisational success. A New Voice for Israel (subtitled ‘Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation’) proves insufficient to jump-start a renewed peacemaking effort; his preference for platitudes over difficult questions leaves the book an exercise in nostalgia rather than an effective call to arms.

The book opens well, with Ben Ami using his family narrative to explain his position today, beginning with his grandparents’ status as founder residents of Tel Aviv. He goes on to focus on his father, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, a socialist idealist in the Ahad Ha’am mould who became a Jabotinskyite revisionist following the Arab riots of 1929. After rising up the ranks of the Irgun he devoted himself in the late 1930s to bringing in Jewish immigrants to Palestine, taking him first to Vienna and then to New York. In doing so he was opposed both by the British and the Zionist establishment. The latter wanted to prioritise the legal route, operating under the British quota, despite being set at disastrously low levels. In the USA, the American Jewish establishment, comprised of anti—Zionists and socialist Zionists, fiercely opposed the work of the revisionists through every available means, with the result that far less European Jews were saved than otherwise would have been possible. Ben Ami uses his father’s life story to powerful effect — just as the American Jewish leadership was wrong then, it is wrong now. Now, as then, the appropriate way to deal with critical voices is “not to reflexively shut them down but to engage them on the merits and see what value there may be in what they are trying to say.”

Ben Ami goes on to tell a story of generational change, of the differing views of Israel held by those, like his parents, who lived through the foundation of the state, and those like him who grew up after the 1967 war. His full awakening came during an extended stay in Israel in the 1990s, when he discovered that “yes, the Palestinians are a people, and yes they do believe that my people came and threw them out of the homes and took their country away from them”. From this vantage point he views witha mix of understanding and alarm the children of the 1980s for whom “the defining images of Israel are of intifada and occupation”, alongside many who see Israel as increasingly irrelevant to their Jewish identity. While Ben Ami is disappointed by those that would prefer not to think about Israel, he is more concerned by the other outgrowth of this constituency, the pro- Palestinian and BDS movements, dominated by young Jews. Ben Ami criticises attempts to silence these younger groups, and is keen to distinguish between those who he sees as beyond the pale and those that have a legitimate point of view. But frequently he comes across as trying to stem a tidal wave, advocating piecemeal remedies when radical surgery is required. He recognises the radical changes in Jewish life, with younger Jews seeking expressions of Jewishness outside the mainstream, but laments their lack of connection to the ‘vibrant network of young activists’ in Israel. This wish for a greater sense of Jewish ‘peoplehood’ is widespread amongst Jewish leaders, but it seems rather futile, given the anti-parochial universalist stance of many young diaspora Jews, who see Israel as one country among many that do not yet live up to their view of justice.

At the heart of Ben Ami’s case is a critique of contemporary American Jewish leadership (one that could easily be applied throughout the Diaspora), describing it as out of touch, unrepresentative and committed to stymieing debate around Israel and Jewish identity. This is justified, but entirely unoriginal. Such a critique might have had an impact 10 years ago, but in the wake of a decade of criticism, most notably from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, it comes across as merely stating the obvious. The question of timing is pertinent — this is a book rooted in the early 1990s (the author was a Clinton aide) and Ben Ami is trapped in a Clintonian paradigm. Like many who came to prominence in that era, he focuses on the technocratic, believing that the ‘Clinton Parameters’ that were utilised at Camp David and Taba negotiations are sufficient to solve the conflict. In keeping with this he is resistant to making any deeper analysis; into nationalism, into inequalities of power or into the events of 1948, and he is at his least comfortable when dealing with the events of the last decade, be they the second intifada, the Wall, or the blockade of Gaza.

The book is at its weakest when it moves from diagnosis of the problem to potential solutions. Naturally, Ben Ami, like all centrist politicians, believes in the two state solution. So, however, does Benjamin Netanyahu (apparently), and he has managed to combine this professed belief with continuing settlement expansion and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Ben Ami has nothing to say about people (like the supposedly saintly Shimon Peres) who wax lyrical about the two state solution while making no criticism of checkpoints, house demolitions or collective punishment. Predictably, Ben Ami rules any kind of one state solution out of court without any discussion, and, more dangerously, declares any return of Palestinian refugees impossible, claiming that those who believe in it “oppose the state of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people”. An agreement with only limited numbers of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel might indeed be possible, but such a crucial issue cannot be ruled out of court at the outset, and the attempt to do so reveals a view of the conflict in which Israelis have red lines that must be respected while Palestinians hold extremist views that need to be watered down. Ben Ami’s most damning failure is his response to the planned Palestinian declaration of independence. Rather than welcoming a diplomatic move that is obviously a manifestation of the two state solution, Ben Ami calls for the US to “pre-empt this with an active and ambitious diplomatic initiative to achieve a two state solution”. Essentially then, the US should veto the creation of a Palestinian state, in order to make possible the creation of a Palestinian state. The subtext is clear — Israelis must be the ones to take the initiative, Palestinians the passive recipients of whatever largesse the international community decides to throw their way.

Street’s timidity was most apparent in the debacle of 2009-10, in which Obama publicly demanded that Israel freeze all settlement construction beyond the Green Line. The Israeli government, despite agreeing a limited ten-month freeze, refused to accede to the President’s demand, creating a long standoff at the end of which Netanyahu proved victorious and Obama was humiliated. At this juncture Obama needed to utilise the key sticks of US foreign policy, threatening America’s arm sales to Israel, her loan guarantees and her diplomatic support at the UN. This would surely have been the moment J Street was designed for; it needed to be there to support Obama against the furious Israel lobby and to show that such pressure was not anti-Israel, but in her best long term interests. None of this happened, because the mainstream lobby was too strong and J-Street too weak, making it politically impossible for Washington to dictate terms to its long-term ally. Reviewing this period, Ben Ami describes the call for a settlement freeze as a tactical error on Obama’s part. The president should, instead, have put his political capital into defining the borders of a Palestinian state, making it clear ‘who can build where’. It is unclear why Ben-Ami thinks this would have made any difference; the issue is that Israel’s government demonstrably no longer believes in a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, preferring a much reduced territory on the West Bank that lies somewhere between glorified local government and a Bantustan. It wasn’t Obama’s rhetoric that was the problem; it was his inability to put real pressure on the recalcitrant government of Netanyahu and Lieberman and J Street’s unwillingness to support such muscular action.

With this we come full circle. Jeremy Ben Ami’s theoretical weakness underpins a failure of realpolitik. His inability to think beyond Clinton era soundbites and his naiveté in the face of the Israeli right stands in the way of J-Street’s potential to change the terms of the political debate. This has wider implications, especially for those like Yachad, who operate in J Street’s image. The task is surely to create a diasporic movement that will put massive pressure on Israel to end the occupation, both directly and via national governments across the world. It needs to harness the energy of BDS and pro-Palestinian activists, away from purely negative condemnation of Israel towards a positive strategy of targeting the occupation with the aim of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Organisations that devote all their energy to appearing moderate enough to appease the establishment are likely to fail in this task; without a genuine and unflinching analysis they deny themselves the resources they need to actually make a difference.

Yale University Press, 2010

If the suggestive title of Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom attracts the attention of the casual passerby, it will have done more than satisfy the book’s author. Rather, it will have proven one of the book’s primary claims:a writer knows how to pique his readers’ interest. Moreover, an author knows how to anticipate his readers’ initial interpretive leap and, subsequently, how to prevent grave misunderstandings. Lest the reader think Dauber is an author of supernatural pulp fiction, he appends the subtitle:Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern. As the subtitle clarifies, Dauber’s subjects are those Yiddish authors of Central and Eastern Europe whose published works appeared between 1500 and 1700. And, just like Dauber himself, these are authors who invite readers into their demonic textual lairs in order to teach specific lessons.

For Dauber’s readers, this is initially a lesson in the readability and relevance of the early modern Yiddish literary canon. Dauber repeatedly argues that Yiddish literature of the early modern period is both aesthetically rich and genuinely entertaining. Here, as he announces in his multiple close readings, is a selection of writing that demonstrates a literary dynamism. Playful rhymes, layered allegories and subtle allusions abound, and are ripe for the interpretive picking. As the title of his work suggests, Dauber also focuses his attention on those Yiddish narratives that participate in the supernatural mode. The texts under discussion cross genre boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic. Investigating fables, short stories and rhymed narratives, Dauber leads his readers into a highly-stylised literary world of supernatural adventure and romance. Readers and scholars who might have otherwise relegated early modern Yiddish literature to a cabinet of historical curiosities are persuaded that to do so would be to ignore the literary pulse of this fabulous corpus.

Yet Dauber’s meticulously- researched analysis does not aspire to be a glorified ghost story, nor should it. After all, the task of In the Demon’s Bedroom is not merely to entice contemporary readers and academics to appreciate early modern Yiddish literature, but to identify the sophisticated audience of these works at the time of their publication. Dauber rejects the assumption that Yiddish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by virtue of being written in a Jewish vernacular, was necessarily simplistic, or that it catered to a correspondingly simple-minded reading audience. Yiddish male and female readers, he contends, were not the watered-down counterparts of educated male readers perusing contemporaneous Hebrew writing. Rather, these Yiddish readers demonstrated mature reading sensibilities. Not only would they have understood various biblical, liturgical and Talmudic allusions but they would also have been able to negotiate the strong strain of Hebraic vocabulary in the Yiddish literary record. Moreover, Dauber argues, these readers were distinctly aware of genre conventions and would, therefore, interpret and assign meaning to deviations from genre norms. Similarly, if a narrative line stumbled, readers were quick to recognise the slip. For example, when the readers of a fable in R. Moses b. Eliezer Wallich’s 1697 Seyfer Mesholim (Book of Fables) are first told that a certain innkeeper is a paragon of cunning intelligence, only to see him engage in utter folly, it becomes necessary for the narrator’s voice to intrude. Accordingly,some two dozen lines justifying the discrepancy follow the incident and textually respond to the readers’ implied scepticism.

Most interestingly, Dauber recuperates the discerning profile of this Yiddish readership by turning to the supernatural mode announced in his work’s title. When these readers were confronted by images of the fantastic and demonic, he argues, they would have registered a range of responses on the spectrum of scepticism and belief. This is evidenced by various explanatory or scene- setting statements that the early modern Yiddish writers introduce at moments when supernatural narratives stretch the bounds of believability. As Dauber shows, these were techniques echoed throughout European literature of the period in works no less refined or supernaturally-inclined than Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he did in his first book: Antonio’s Devils (2004), Dauber bolsters his argument concerning early modern Jewish literature with a discursive foray into early modern English drama. It would seem that both Marlowe and Shakespeare’s work demonstrates the same awareness of an increasingly sceptical and epistemically sophisticated audience as that identified by Dauber in a Jewish context. More than a comparative digression, the analysis of the text and performance history of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s plays suggests the larger implications for Dauber’s historical reconstruction of the Yiddish audience. Although, as Dauber strongly asserts, these texts were written for Jews and by Jews at specific times and places, these are also texts in conversation with the broad concerns of early modern European literature and society. Dauber’s work further implies the potential of such a conversation by bringing together the works of leading Yiddish literary scholars, such as Jean Baumgarten, Jerold Frakes and Sara Zfatman, with
recent cultural histories of witchcraft and demonology in early modern Europe.

The texts cross boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic

Whereas Dauber must convince his readers of the literary sophisti- cation of the early modern Yiddish audience, he contends that theYiddish writers of the period did not need to be similarly persuaded. They were, as he demonstrates, already aware of their readers’ varying intellectual and analytical profiles. These Yiddish authors wrote for a readership that was attuned to subtle literary gestures and the manipulation of text and symbols towards political ends.This is most evident in Dauber’s reading of the she-demon tale, Mayse fun Vorms (c.1520s). In his analysis, Dauber attempts to recover the interpretive paradigm that may have guided the Yiddish reading public at the time of the text’s publication. Briefly put, the tale concerns the erroneous engagement of a wealthy Jewish son to a murderous she-demon. The she-demon subsequently kills off the son’s first two wives and is then, herself, destroyed by the third wife in a subterranean demonic bedroom (hence the title of Dauber’s work). At the end of the tale, the third wife is alive and wealthy. She is left in a position far from the impoverished state in which she had been betrothed to her husband—a position of poverty she had previously compared to death.

Contemporary interpreters have read the story as a polemic against intermarriage or a literary exploration of threatening female sexuality. Yet, as Dauber’s close reading demonstrates, what may appear today a moralising tale about sexual relations would have been read in its time as a warning against the exaltation of wealth and ownership as values unto themselves. Dauber carefully maps a network of biblical allusions and recurring wealth-related imagery in order to demonstrate how the text condemns the coercive power of money. However, as he carefully notes, the text does not act with the goal of disturbing a social hierarchy that privileges the wealthy over the poor; the hierarchy should persist while the values of wealthy Jews are reformed. Most interestingly, Dauber shows that Mayse fun Vorms does allow social mobility in certain cases; for example, if one follows the model of piety, obedience and normative gender roles exemplified by the third wife. The discerning Yiddish reader would decipher this social message by carefully attending to the system of allusions and symbols underpinning the narrative. Dauber demonstrates that paying similar attention to the literary techniques of such works as The Tale of the Spirit of Koretz (c.1660) and the Tale of Briyo and Zimro (c.1580s) allows contemporary literary historians to identify the former, a dybbuk tale, as a valorisation of communal action and the latter, a Judaised romance, as instructions for negotiating Jewish rights under a hostile Christian ruler. Dauber also posits the Tale of Briyo and Zimro as a test case for how the Yiddish author as cultural transmitter ‘perceived (and, perhaps more daringly, even constituted) the audience’s perspectives on cultural adaptation.’ After all, the tale directly draws on conventions of non-Jewish chivalric romances that were popular at the time. Yet Dauber shows that common tropes of the genre were adapted with various modifications and transvaluations.The text does not advocate for ideals of chivalric love. Rather, a close reading of the tale reveals the lesson that any ‘attempt to generate an authentic mixture of the external and internal, chivalric and Jewish worlds’ must be relegated to the world of fantasy. It is only in the world of the dead that the story’s Jewish heroes, Briyo and Zimro, can marry. What emerges from Dauber’s work is a sense not only of the Yiddish reader but also of the Yiddish writer as a cultural activist and moraliser who anticipated, responded to and shaped the future inclinations of his reading audience.

Accordingly, In the Demon’s Bedroom may rightly be labelled a work of recuperative scholarship. Dauber self-consciously reads each tale as an intricate artistic construct, and, in doing so, he mines the canon of early modern Yiddish literature to unearth the interpretive profiles of its readers and the moralising agendas of its authors. He demonstrates that to descend into the demonic Yiddish bedroom—into the world of early modern Yiddish readers and writers— is to discover a complex network of literary and semiotic exchange. Readers who were dismissed as merely functionally literate and authors who were labelled condescendingly as ‘popular’ appear as active, sophisticated players in a dynamic reading community. Dauber’s scholarship lays the groundwork for similar recuperative efforts and we may well wonder what other authorial and readerly spectres may be lurking in the Jewish literary archive.

‘I’m waiting for the scenery to look more like how I’d imagined Israel and less like rural Pennsylvania,’ thinks Sarah Glidden, as she stares from her bus window at the plain, flat landscape on her ride north from Ben Gurion airport. Combining light-hearted humour with both the harsh and mundane realities of Israel, this scene is representative of her graphic novel, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, the award-winning comic artist’s first book.

The memoir takes place over several weeks on the author’s first trip to the country. Twenty-something Glidden, a self-declared liberal who is pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel, and who has a non-Jewish boyfriend and few Jewish friends, decides to get to the bottom of the Arab/Israeli conflict by going on the free Birthright trip offered to young Jews who have never before been to the country. She expects to be critical of the programme’s ‘propaganda’ and, once there, does not disappoint herself: she repeatedly questions whether Israel had the right to take land from the Palestinians and Bedouins, and probes the real meanings behind nationalist myths like Masada. But soon her strict liberal outlook starts to crumble. She finds herself falling for Israel, or elements of it: its own left-wingers, its compelling history , the feeling of belonging.

Her journey takes her through the contemporary political landscape she came to explore and into a more complex landscape of culture, history and powerful emotions. At every stage, her identity and her preconceptions are challenged by the confluence of these different forces and the book’s appeal lies in the honesty with which she confronts these.

Questions rather than answers are what she collects on her journey, from characters who not only represent different political viewpoints but are themselves multi-faceted, complex, defying stereotypes: her guide, who is pro-Wall for the safety it offers but empathetic to the pain it brings; her cousin, who moved to Israel to study medicine, but hates how Arabs are treated; an orthodox rabbi who values human respect above religious law; an American who thinks the Arab nations should help the Palestinians, but can’t stand Israelis and their rudeness; an unreliable peace activist; a left-wing youth leader who asks why progressives are anti-Israel – shouldn’t they be pro things? Glidden’s smart, passionate take on complicated people and positions results in an emotional journey, complete with insomnia and tears, calmed by the presence of her level-headed, soya-milk and yoga- obsessed friend Melissa, who isn’t afraid to tell her to take it down a notch.

The book is narrated not just verbally but by watercolour graphics. Glidden paints herself as a frumpy, arty type, and the characters she meets are portrayed astutely and comically, in simple cartoonish figures with dots for eyes, reminding this Canadian of Lynn Johnson’s early For Better or For Worse. Particularly memorably drawn are the girl from Orange County, who brazenly mistrusts Arabs, wears enormous sunglasses and a scarf and is seeking to ‘meet hot Israeli soldiers…what-ever’; the fashionable New Yorkers who wear fitted vintage coats; and the chubby trip organiser in wire-framed glasses. Glidden shows us the country, too: the view from Masada, green kibbutzes in the Golan, Jaffa. Her graphics are most exciting when they jump into the surreal, casting herself in historical scenes and conversing with fantasy figures. She debates with the pioneers who came to build up Palestine (‘Wait, but what about the people who live there already?’) and her nights are peopled by imagined characters—from prehistoric man and woman to Ottoman tax collectors—who had once slept in the same spot she now lies. A painting accuses her of insensitivity; a Bedouin speaker gives her the honest speech she longs for. She listens cautiously as Ben Gurion explains how he never wanted to infringe on Arab rights. Through courtroom scenes she dramatises her recurring question:‘Is Birthright trying to brainwash me or is it actually pretty reasonable?’, including herself in these frames in a direct personal link with the political and the historical.

The narrative is strongest when she is most open abouher fears and preconceptions: are the soldiers on their trip the ones that actually bulldoze houses? She is too uncomfortable to ask. Learning that her Republican travelling companion is not homophobic, as she has assumed, makes Sarah consider whether she has misjudged others as well.‘I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I like this feeling of being in this room [full of Jews],’ she confesses. ‘I’m even more ashamed at how much I didn’t like being outside of it.’These are moments of reflection on the path to maturity as Sarah learns to tolerate people whose opinions she does not share and she starts to ask if the Israeli/Arab conflict is no-one’s fault —if both sides did what they had to in order to survive.

Every memoir is a selective retelling, but some of Glidden’s omissions are distracting. It remains unclear why she chose to go on Birthright—a state-funded trip known for its agenda—when there are many ways for a first-timer to explore Israel (there’s no such thing as a free trip!). I was left wondering why she was looking for this fight, and wanted to know more about the background to her identity issues: Where did she get her liberal politics? Did she have any Jewish sympathies before? Glidden mentions that her non-Jewish boyfriend is concerned that she is being brainwashed by Zionists; I wondered how the trip made her feel about their relationship. She also briefly notes that her brother died in an accident. This harrowing insertion took me out of the story—I wondered if that was the same brother who had gone to Israel in the past, and how this tragedy may have played into her identity struggle? I would have preferred more of this backstory, in place of her longer researched segments about Israel’s history: though interesting, they sat awkwardly in the personal story, and her emotional demeanour detracted from their credibility. Ultimately, perhaps, this remindsus that most arguments about Israel are emotionally driven, and drives home her point that objectivity is difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Despite being 200 pages, Understanding Israel is a quick read and a compelling tale, presenting varying arguments and stories about Israel in an easy-to-understand way. Glidden should be commended for taking on this heated topic and treating it with honesty, self-reflection and humour (‘So it looks like Purim really does have a lot in common with Halloween in the states… it’s just an excuse for girls to dress like sluts.’) The book will appeal to those who have felt a conflict between their liberal views and their connection to Israel.The blend of simple prose with sparse drawing style gives the serious themes additional impact; and though the memoir poses rather than answers questions about how liberal Jews can feel sympathy for Israel, it also captures the tastes and smells of Israel with great accuracy. I could taste the borekas as I read.

William Heinemann, 2010

The death of the historian and essayist Tony Judt in August 2010 attracted a great deal of media attention. Much of it was dedicated to his journalistic writings on Israel, including the first three paragraphs of the obituary in The Daily Telegraph, five paragraphs in the obituary in the New York Times and three paragraphs in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s piece on Judt in The Guardian. Most extraordinary of all, the BBC News website dedicated almost its entire news story about his death to his views on Israel.

This is simply bizarre and distorts Judt’s achievements as one of the outstanding historians of his generation. It is true that Judt wrote a series of polemical articles about Israel, mostly for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation and The New York Times and that these did receive widespread media coverage, especially in the States. However, most of these articles were written over just four years, between 2002-06, with a couple more op-ed pieces for The New York Times in the last year of his life. These coincided with a series of polemical (and equally fashionable) articles attacking Bush’s foreign policy, especially the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. But this was only a tiny period of Judt’s career. It was hardly the main focus of his work even at the time, when he was completing his most famous book, Postwar (2005) and writing several important essays on social democracy and modern European memory. And without being particularly disrespectful to Judt, his writings on Israel were hardly very original or interesting, and pale beside the importance of the rest of his writings in recent years.That they caused such a stir reflects more on the strange state of the Anglo-American Left than it does on Judt’s career.

Now that the dust is settling, a few months after his death, it is possible to see his legacy more clearly. Several interesting essays, especially in The New York Review of Books, including an outstanding tribute by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, have redirected our attention to Judt’s work as a historian. Now we have a new book of essays, The Memory Chalet, which remind us of his range, his central passions, and his outstanding qualities as an essayist and intellectual.

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Rethinking God & tradition

By Arthur Green

Yale University Press, 2010

Everything is God:

The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism

By Jay Michaelson

Shambhala Publications, 2009

What does it mean to be radical? In the context of religion, the term can conjure up images of extremism, violence and fundamentalism (as in ‘Radical Islam’), often through strict adherence to orthodox norms. But to be radical is paradoxically both to depart and return—to depart from conventional or accepted forms, and to return to something essential, the ‘root’ of an ideology or philosophy.

What then would ‘Radical Judaism’ be? Perhaps the gun-toting hilltop nationalism of the Settlement movement? Or the ultra-Orthodoxies of Stamford Hill or Mea Sharim? Or could it be something altogether non-Orthodox, a return to a perceived essence prior to or beyond those outer forms and beliefs?

Two recent books that emphasise their radical credentials are Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition, by Arthur Green, and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson—and they have far more in common than merely their titles. Michaelson, a scholar and activist who writes on spirituality, Judaism, sexuality and law, and Green, rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College Boston and a major scholar of kabbalistic and Chassidic thought, both eschew conventional conceptions of a personal God who is outside of creation and intervenes in the world, in favour of a more mystical—yet immanent and accessible—Oneness.

These works of theology are certainly very far from Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, and much of what dominates public discourse on God. Green states at the very start of his introduction that he is not a ‘believer’ in the conventional Jewish or Western sense. He simply does not encounter God ‘as ‘He’ is usually described in the Western religious context, a Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it.’ Instead, when Green refers to ‘God,’ he means ‘the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ He also refers to it as the ‘One’ ‘because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is.’

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by Edward Skidelsky

Princeton University Press

Sitting on the judging panel for this year’s Wingate Literary prize, I noticed several patterns emerging. One was the length of most of the entries; it seems that following the model of the 37 volume Babylonian Talmud, many Jewish authors cannot seem to express themselves in less than 600 pages. Another is their secular bias: while there is a proliferation of American Jewish books on Judaism as religion, UK Jewish writers are more likely to steer clear, preferring the safety of Jewishness as culture, warm families, and an ever decreasing Yiddish vocabulary.

The overwhelming trend however, is of an abundance of books dealing either with Israel or the Holocaust/Second World War era. The focus on these two areas is hardly surprising; they continue to be the foci of Jewish identity for a large numberof Jews. It is, however, disappointing that there is not more focus on other aspects of Jewishness. A Judaism that is rooted in the memory of the Shoah and a connection with Israel holds little promise for survival and renewal, at least for those of us in the diaspora. Is there no space for Jewish philosophy, religion and culture, for a Judaism of ideas rather than a Judaism of survival?

I was therefore drawn towards submissions that had a wider take on Jewishness, even if that take was tangential or concealed. This is certainly the case with Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer; The Last Philosopher of Culture. The book hardly views itself as a ‘Jewish book’, rather it is an intellectual biography of a neglected modern philosopher, which explains his work through the lens of the intellectual currents surrounding it. That the subject is Jewish is a minor point, indeed Cassirer himself, coming from the German Jewish liberal assimilationist tradition, would hardly have flagged up his Jewishness as being particularly central. Nevertheless, Cassirer’s work is arguably closely linked to the concerns of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals; the promotion of political Liberalism, a utopian belief in the power of culture, in particular literature, and an attempt to defend rationalism against its ‘mythic and ‘spiritual critics’. The role of Jews in propagating liberal, secular, and internationalist outlooks in 19th century societies has been well documented. Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century documents the evidence, and comments on the Jewish ‘search for a neutral society where neutral actors could share a neutral secular culture.’ The role of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia was to create societies in which they could be full members; that meant playing down bloodlines and Christianity and playing up national literary canons, liberal media and organisations and the idea of a state that, as much as possible, belonged equally to all its citizens.

Skidelsky takes as his starting point the event for which Cassirer is most famous: his public debate with Heidegger in Davos in 1929. This event has come to symbolise the changing of eras; Cassirer representing the Weimar period and the idealist tradition, Heidegger the representative of the new philosophical irrationalism and the harbinger of the new Germany which, if not yet fascist, was certainly illiberal. Cassirer, then, is on the wrong side of history. An heir to the neo-Kantian ‘Marburg School’ of Hermann Cohen, he represents a school of thought that comes to a standstill at the end of the 1920s. While Heidegger was a leading inspiration for the modern continental philosophy of Sartre, Levinas and Derrida, the rationalist tradition of which Cassirer was part, became ever narrower and more technocratic, leaving no room for his expansive worldview of culture intertwined with the ethical and political.

Skidelsky gives us a glance of what his book might have been; he confesses that he had originally planned to argue that Cassirer was the last thinker to bridge the ‘Two Cultures’ that have become analytic and continental philosophy. Cassirer attempted to reconcile the quasi scientific logic of Wittgenstein with the ‘irrationalism, literary modernism and political of extremism’ of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, seeing that both systems had their own truths and believing that synthesis was both possible and necessary. Boldly, Skidelsky turns away from this move, and offers a critique of his subject; Cassirer’s ideas, he believes, are so of their time, so rooted in 19th-century Germanculture as to be virtually useless to us today. He describes Cassirer’s writing as ultimately not really philosophy as we know it today, being ‘inductive, not deductive in its method’, being so tied to its era that it is ultimately untranslatable.

This view gains weight as Skidelsky explains Cassirer’s key work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer views language, science, art and myth not as radically different ways of seeing the world, but as symbols through which reality is experienced. Symbols allow us to transcend distinct phenomena and construct a wider picture.‘If animals are captive to their environment, reacting to it in purely instinctual fashion, man the “symbolic animal”, is able to grasp it as a world, as the object of aspirations, projects and theories. Symbolism thus opens the way “from animal reactions to human responses”’. Cassirer views this process in Hegelian terms, as a series of stages. The first symbolic stage is that of myth: ‘expressing and organising man’s most deeply rooted instincts, his hopes, his fears’. The next stage is religion, ordering and refining these myths, and giving them an ethical character. Finally, the process reaches its zenith, via linguistic development, in natural science, the ultimate form of conceptual organisation. Cassirer’s process, however, is not entirely teleological. He believes that each symbolic stage continues to exist, each symbolic expression retaining its autonomy. This is demonstrated through the metaphor of a tree ‘each branch of which nourishes new branches while continuing to exist in its own right’.

Skidelsky makes two arguments for why this is untenable, one philosophical and one historical. On the philosophical side, Cassirer wants to say that the many branches of the tree, the diversity of symbols, can be resolved into an underlying functional unity, thus avoiding each going its own separate ways. Given however, Cassirer’s insistence on the independence of each symbolic form, how can they be brought into a totality? Historically, Skidelsky suggests that Cassirer’s work relies on a fundamentally optimistic belief in the progressive tendency of history. Given that this approach took a battering following the First World War, how much more so in the aftermath of the Second. On this view, Cassirer in simply a product of his time, despite trying to engage with the new ways of philosophy, he is condemned to be viewed as a representative of a more innocent age.

Even if we accept Skidelsky’s verdict, and write off Cassirer’s philosophy, there is much in this overall thought that seems immensely appealing. On religion, he treads a line that successfully navigates the poles of rising fundamentalism and the ‘new atheism’. Following Hermann Cohen, he sees religion as a transformation of myth into reason and ethics, but allows room for the ritualistic, viewing it as ‘the intermixture of the spiritual with the material’. On culture, Cassirer’s view of a society’s value system sustained by its cultural life may be old fashioned but it will continue to be attractive wherever materialist instrumentalism and the rule of the market are the only guiding values. In terms of politics, following the collapse of Marxism, and the rise of the far right in much of Europe, the liberalism and democratic socialism of Cassirer and Cohen seem utterly necessary. Finally, ‘the two cultures’, of analytic and continental philosophy, lie as firmly apart as ever. Cassirer’s attempt to synthesise them may have been ultimately unsuccessful, but the notion of a discourse that drawsboth on literature and logic, myth and science, is still one that demands to be pursued.

Sadly the book failed to make the Wingate shortlist. Despite Skidelsky’s elegant prose and clarity in explaining complex ideas, the other judges felt that it wouldn’t reach ‘the wider reading public’, one of the key criteria for the prize. The book sits between the two poles of academia and popular non-fiction, trying to have a foothold in both, and despite its brilliance, may be limited in its readership as a result. This is an elegant metaphor for Cassirer, reaching out both ways: to the linguistic formalism of Bertrand Russell and the Vienna School, and to the mythic existentialism of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and being spurned by both camps. Sitting between two worlds, trying to hold them together is an often impossible, but necessary endeavour. Jews, caught between the sacred and the secular, the stranger and the citizen, understand this all too well. Ernst Cassirer may have failed to do so, but through his attempt he leaves a range of powerful tools with which we can continue the struggle.

William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).  [hidepost]
Ashery and Sansour felt that the ‘notion of a fictional graphic novel alone’ is not enough, and wanted the ‘process behind the book to be transparent and grounded in our daily reality’. Therefore, the graphic chapters unfolding the storyline are interspersed with photographs of the two in relevant locations in Israel/Palestine and London — from the separation wall to a Sunday roast meal and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth piece in Tate Modern, better known as ‘the crack’ — probably the most engaging and communicative piece of contemporary art in recent memory. Posing as two rather experimental performance artists (Ashery last seen dressed up as controversial 17th century  messianic figure Shabbtai Zevi; Sansour notorious for her Sombrero-donning, gun-slinging character Bethlehem Bandolero) next to a piece of art popular enough to become a tourist attraction speaks volumes of the main question posed herein: can art change the world? Old question – fortunately, this book articulates it in novel (or should it say Nonel? Or Vovel?) ways.
There is a reason why it will only be revealed at this point that Ashery is Jewish Israeli and Sansour Palestinian. There is a reason it will only now be mentioned that the central concrete nemesis (notwithstanding a handful of sci-fi ones) they confront as superheroes is the separation wall in Israel, which they intend to break down. There is a reason why this review will refrain from making an analogy between Ashery and Sansour asking themselves whether their artistic practice places them in a ghetto separating them from the ability to influence reality, and indeed the wall, stranding the Palestinians in a tragically non-metaphorical ghetto. And the reason for that is that the emotions, prejudices, fears, mistrust and pre-conceptions we have in regards to the conflict on either side of the wall and of the left/right political fence constitute the more elusive and therefore more difficult wall to demolish.
Simply by revealing that this book is made by a couple of lefty arty-farty bleeding hearts, one risks erecting a wall between the crucial insights offered in their book and considerable potential readership. How sad it is that being divided to camps doesn’t mean dialogue, even polemic – but a secret, crawling civil war. How sad it is that global political discourse is light years away from the level offered by this book. How tragically deep the chasm between what politicians and artists see, how uncompromising the latter’s honesty, self-doubt, investigative drive and clarity.  How seemingly easy it is for an Israeli and a Palestinian to find common ground anywhere besides their shared homeland.
Ashery and Sansour are lefty arty-farty types perhaps, but they are certainly not naïve and wide-eyed about it. On the contrary, they are only too aware of the traps and pitfalls they face, and go through acrobatic twists, leaving no stone unturned in their determination to understand their position as politically-engaged artists, and the relevance of said position for the rest of us unsuspecting fundamentalists. The quoted bitter assertion opening this review reveals their familiarity with the ways the world always finds ways to erect a dialogue-blocking wall around them: in 2000 their agenda is too ahead of its time to be noticed, and in 2009 they’re allegedly jumping some ridiculed bandwagon. To paraphrase Reem Fadda’s (rather opaque) text in the essay section closing the book, Ashery and Sansour seek a present where their voice is heard.
Therefore, the main conflict tackled by the book is not the Israeli-Palestinian one, but that besieging the artist torn between self-fulfilment and political commitment. The novel begins as our two artists are infected by a mysterious virus that is revealed to imbue them with ‘context-responsive’ superpowers, alas it comes on account of losing their creativity. Ashery and Sansour look political art in the eye as a praxis that often betrays selfish privilege camouflaged in good intentions. Ashery and Sansour ask one another the cruellest question: are we forced to choose between a life in pursuit of artistic goals and a life of committed activism? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, facing the severity of a century-long conflict, is the solution in the hands of heroes, freedom-fighters and messiahs? Are artists — and ordinary people for that matter — out of their depth in this equation? Is the position of the artist as a passive anarcho-pacifist — always averse to violence and to the notion of wielding any level of power — the privilege of those who are living a safe, sheltered life where strife and oppression are confined to the TV screen?
Ashery and Sansour’s quest for an answer constantly breaks the book’s ‘fourth wall’: their aversion to political power is exchanged with treating their practice as control freaks; they express reluctance to go with the flow of the genre and become ‘real’ heroes who at least make a difference in this imaginary realm. This compulsion to disturb narrative as such, shatter illusion whatever form it takes, refuse to serve as propagandists to their own agenda — as if illusion, myths, and propaganda are by definition enemies one must slay to unravel a precious, forgotten, common sense clarity — condemn them, and to a considerable extent every political activist, to remain perpetual underdogs — noble losers. Ashery and Sansour confess to being trapped; yet sharing this existential cul-de-sac with us stems out of a sense of responsibility and the urgency of a desire to break free.
The biggest underlying fear keeping every concerned citizen awake at night is, to quote John Lydon, that ‘better days will never be’: the impossibility to even imagine a world based on justice and peace. This fear underpins the superior text in the book’s essay section, curator Nat Muller’s allegorical sci-fi ‘Proposal for the Venice Biennnale Intergalactic Pavilion’. Muller is masterful — and hilarious — in imagining futuristic conflicts and trends leading up to ‘galactic liberation’, a utopian ground zero after which it becomes much harder to visualise the ways of the world and the role of its artists.  Muller suddenly needs strife to trigger interest and tension. Under the ‘foreseeable obstacles’ section of her surreal proposal she details ‘unstable meteorological conditions across the Mediterranean’ threatening the realisation of Nonel and Vovel’s project. The next section ushers back what we’d think we managed to get rid of by the year 2212 — security, needed as precaution against a cult of revisionist settlers who falsely maintain that Palestine was never liberated.
If the only function we can imagine for future peacetime art is a bizarre repetitive re-enactment of a by-then unneeded heroism; If the only possible excitement, the only projected life-force is nostalgia for the extinct need to resist, aren’t we admitting our secret collaboration with the present’s state of strife to which we seem to be addicted? Nonel and Vovel make the bold step of asking this question. Possible answers contradict the aforementioned essayist Fadda’s ‘liberation through entering history’ position — three hints will be provided. First is Lydon’s above quote. Second is Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence (resonating with pre-historical ‘dreamtime’ and negating monotheism’s linear history). Final is something the recently departed thinker, essayist, columnist and artist Amos Kenan said in relation to Zionism, quoted in the biography written by his partner Nurith Gertz, ‘Unrepentant’. I paraphrase: ‘if the dream comes true and it’s not what we thought we wanted, it means there must have been something inherently faulty with the dream to begin with. We must therefore examine what is wrong with our dream’.[hidepost]

Heinemann, 2008, £20

In the early 1990s Tony Judt was in his mid-40s, a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history. Three things happened to make him one of the best-known historians of his generation. First, in 1995, he became Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, just at the time when historians in New York were redefining  the way we think about modern Europe. Then, in 2005 he published Postwar, the masterpiece of the new European history, a monumental 900-page, acclaimed account of Europe since 1945. Finally, at around the same time as Postwar, he wrote a number of controversial articles attacking Israel and Bush’s war on terror. He had become one of the best-known public intellectuals in America.

Reappraisals is his first book since Postwar. It is a collection of essays published between 1994 and 2006. These two dozen essays mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. This is Judt as essayist and public intellectual, writing about writers, thinkers and politics from the Cold War to the Bush Years. He is opinionated and fluent, a sort of east coast David Starkey, with more than a touch of nastiness. He rages against Israel, dismisses French Marxists like Louis Althusser, and eviscerates a recent biography of Arthur Koestler. But he has his heroes, too. Koestler and Primo Levi, Edward Said and Albert Camus, ‘the best man in France’. His heroes are Jews and exiles, mostly men (and the occasional woman) in the dark times between the Russian Revolution and the height of the Cold War.

There are interesting continuities between these essays, mostly written while he was working on Postwar, and his acclaimed history of post-1945 Europe itself. In both there is a dark vision. He has no illusions about Europe (or America). There is no happy story of progress and he reserves some of his sharpest polemics for the post-1989 optimism and faith in free-market democracy that followed the fall of the Wall. Much of the history in these essays is brutal. He writes of the violence of Prussian troops in 1815 and what Romanian soldiers did to Jews in World War Two. He admires Hannah Arendt for the way she grasped the central importance of terror in totalitarian regimes and approvingly quotes the Polish thinker, Leszek Kolakowski: ‘The Devil is part of our experience… Evil, I contend, is not contingent … but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.’

The rise and fall of Communism was, according to Judt, one of the defining features of the twentieth century, especially the mid-twentiethth century. He keeps coming back to the great anti-Communist tradition, both critics of Communism and ex-Communists like Koestler and Camus. ‘They are,’ he writes, ‘the twentieth century’s Republic of Letters.’ Some of his fiercest scorn is for Marxists who never saw the light — the French Communist, Louis Althusser, and the historian, EJ Hobsbawm. His review of Hobsbawm’s memoirs is one of the best essays in the book. How could Hobsbawm stay loyal to Communism, after all that had happened? ‘Seventy years of “real existing Socialism” contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.’ And yet Hobsbawm remained a Communist. He was undoubtedly one of the great historians of his time, and yet, ‘he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.’

A third theme in these essays, also familiar to readers of Postwar, is memory or rather, mis-memory.  Perhaps the most impressive essay in the book is a magnificent review-essay on the colossal seven-volume Les lieux de memoire, about French memory and history. Judt has a keen sense of the feeling of loss at the heart of this project. Despite its apparent solidity — 5,600 pages — Les lieux de memoire is an attempt to preserve a living sense of peasant and rural France at the very moment it was disappearing. At that time the French Left and the Catholic Church, indeed France itself, as a great power, were all in decline. ‘France,’ writes Judt, ‘was thus modernizing, downsizing, and splitting apart all at once.’ France in 1960 would have been recognizable to Flaubert or Hugo. ‘The France of 1980 did not even much resemble the country just ten years earlier.’ This Herculean attempt to capture the essence of France and its past was problematic from the start, writes Judt. The problem was that the French had lost a sense of a shared past: ‘there no longer is a received version.’ Since 1918, the story becomes more confused, less glorious, more troubling. The Third Republic was easy to commemorate — all those streets named after Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur. But the shame of Vichy? The dirty wars of Algeria and Indo-China? The decline of rural France? This is not unique to France. In the essays on Blair and ‘Heritage’ Britain and ‘The World We Have Lost’ we see that our relationship to the past is becoming more, not less, complicated. Even the recent past seems already remote. ‘The twentieth-century is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.’ ‘We wear,’ he writes, ‘the last century rather lightly.’

What can this mean? Surely the twentieth-century is still close to us? But Judt digs down to larger social changes which are cutting us off from the central experiences of the twentieth -century. As he writes about Koestler and Camus, he realises how remote these debates about Communism are to a generation born after 1989. War, or civil war, touched every European life in the first half of the twentieth- century. Now it is something which happens somewhere else.

Reappraisals is shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss: from the speed of social change that has eroded our sense of a shared world to the decline of the two great intellectual faiths of modern Europe, Catholicism and Communism On the disappearance of central and east European Jewry he quotes Manès Sperber, born in Galicia: “I am one of the last, one of the walking coffins of an exterminated world.”’

The nearer Judt comes to the present, the emptier and more desolate the scene. All the ideals are in the past. Communism; the belief in a free world, shared by Camus and Kolakowski; the idealism of the first generations of Zionists. All gone. . America has become shallow, unequal and strident. The hopes of post-1989 free market capitalism have become empty illusions. Blair’s Britain is ‘often squalid,’ the railways and hospitals don’t work, poverty is rampant.

And then there is Israel. There are only three essays on Israel, but they loom large. The first is a handsome tribute to his late friend, Edward Said, the second, a reassessment of the Six-Day War (his last piece for The New Republic) and the third, an all-out attack on Israel today, ‘The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up.’

Taken together, these essays are the most provocative and controversial part of the book. A number of key points run through them. First, ‘Israel’s international standing has precipitately collapsed’, and, conversely, the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the object of international sympathy. Israel, writes Judt, is internationally isolated, a pariah, dependent only on American support. Secondly, the ideals of the European founding fathers have given way to a new militarism, nationalism and religious irrationalism. Finally, Israel needs a dramatic change of strategy, ‘a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies…’ These would include; dismantling the major settlements, ‘opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’s bluff by offering its leaders something serious [sic] in return for the recognition of Israel and a cease-fire…’

At this point, Judt’s prose loses its analytic rigour and precision, becoming vague. Negotiations with ‘Palestinians’. Who exactly? Edward Said or Hamas (mentioned just once in the whole book)? Offering ‘its leaders’ (who?) ‘something serious’ (what?). Judt is quick to condemn, but he has nothing constructive to offer. His lack of empathy — Israel today is only the aggressor — leads to a jarring  one-sidedness quite distinct from his masterful, nuanced balancing of complexity in other chapters of history.When he writes about Israel Judt the historian and intellectual essayist descends into polemic and brawl. His tone becomes angry, hectoring and imprecise, as it does in his later attack on intellectuals — Bush’s ‘useful idiots’ — who supported the invasion of Iraq.

Raised in the East End, all his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. His parents, he told The Guardian, ‘were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against Communism.’ As a teenager he was passionately pro-Israel — ‘I was a gung-ho, utterly committed, leftwing Zionist.’ Now, sixty, he has two modes for dealing with the loss of the two faiths that once drove him. One is a kind of mourning for a lost world, the other is a form of contemptuous rage Neither have much to do with the great historian who wrote Postwar and has helped us, through a lifetime’s work, with great sublety and care, understand the complexities, silences and darkness of our recent history.

Penguin, 2009, £16.99

Talmud is essentially an activity, not a book; you engage in it, rather than read it as you would a piece of literature.

Thus Normon Solomon introduces the challenge of how to reduce this epic work, how to capture the intricacies and richness of the Babylonian Talmud that shaped rabbinic Judaism and remains today a core element into a one-volume anthology. The Talmud consists of law and lore, literature and theology, humour and intellectual debate. It contains discussions of historical figures, commerce, Temple offerings, torts, holiday observances, family relationships, agriculture and capital punishments, to name but a fraction of the subjects covered within its 63 volumes. The task of selecting representative sections which reflect the diversity of the entire work is mammoth.

Some have attempted this feat before using different presentation methodologies. They have chosen their favourite sugyot (sections), their personal ‘top ten’ list of passages they think capture the essence of the Talmud. Others have shared passages outlining the various styles of writing or methods of reasoning that the Talmud utilises. Normon Solomon, however, has chosen to follow the classic outline of the Babylonian Talmud, maintaining the identity and integrity of the original volumes by selecting a passage from each to present in this anthology. In this sense, the anthology follows a very traditional pathway — parallelling the daf yomi model where Jews study a page a day of Talmud from the beginning to the end — so too does this anthology lead its readers through an abbreviated version of the Talmud, briefly touching on each masechet before moving to the next.

In other ways this anthology diverges significantly from tradition. The introduction expresses an appreciation of scholarly methodologies for studying Talmud, providing historical context, social and cultural history, literary analysis and even some references to textual criticism. In addition, the appendices contain numerous reference tools for those beginning their exploration of  Talmud, including maps, illustrations, timelines and an extensive bibliography and index.

The selections themselves are uneven in terms of both length and accessibility to the novice. This is perhaps unavoidable within the framework that Solomon has chosen, as most modern readers will find that the selections from tractates about Shabbat or marriage will be more relevant and engaging than those chapters regarding purity of Temple objects or tithes to the priests. Solomon has seemingly tried to offset this ‘relevance imbalance’ by allowing for longer selections from tractates that might resonate more with the modern reader.

The use of different fonts, spacings, upper and lowercase letters, and bold typeface makes the intricacies of talmudic discourse more accessible to the beginner. In addition, Solomon provides a useful introduction to each tractate, summarising the contents and contextualising the particular passage. All of these elements — the introductions, the appendices, the typeface — make this edition eminently readable.

The question is, however, how best to use this resource. Ironically, it suffers from the same challenge as the Talmud itself; as talmudic material is organised according to a logic of its own, it is difficult to find a particular passage that speaks to the issue you want to explore. The stream-of-consciousness methodology of talmudic discourse defies modern taxonomic categories. Therefore, without an index and/or extensive knowledge of the entire Talmud, this remains a resource that requires a teacher or a guide. What Solomon does not provide is a commentary to walk one through the passages themselves. Though this is understandable as adding commentary would have expanded an already substantial tome into at least a second volume.

It is the perfect text for a university professor to assign varied sections of Talmud for study in a history of Judaism class. Alternatively, a rabbi might use it as the text for an English language ‘Introduction to Talmud’ adult education course. The casual reader picking it up off the shelf in a bookstore, however, will be at a loss to utilise this resource. Perhaps Solomon’s next project could be to write a mishneh torah to guide students through the intricacies of the passages he has chosen.

This weakness, however, is also the very strength of the Talmud. While it is not readily accessible to the casual reader, it remains one of the richest ever literary and legal creations. This new anthology is a welcome addition to the ever-growing bookshelf of Talmudic literature in English translation, which allows teachers to guide those without knowledge of Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew into the ‘Sea of Talmud’.

As it is written in Pirkei Avot ‘Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.’ One could apply this same statement to Solomon’s anthology. It contains everything, which is exactly what makes it difficult to navigate. But if one invests the time to ‘turn it’, it has everything, or at least a little bit of everything, and more than one could rightfully expect from 822 pages.

Harvill Secker 2008, £16.99

Reading Eva Hoffman’s new novel is a mixed experience. At first, I found the rarefied and brittle consciousness of the protagonist, Isabel Merton, hard to engage with. Her life as an internationally famous concert pianist seems both admirable and enviable, yet she is dissatisfied. However, Isabel herself experiences unease at what she thinks of as her ‘hard’ but also ‘de luxe late capitalist life’ as a concert pianist. We read of a European tour she undertakes, travelling between Sofia and Prague, Vienna and London and the cities blur into an indistinguishable round of concert halls and hotels. What stands out for Isabel is a meeting with Anzor Islikhanov, an exiled representative of the Chechen government, and a man driven by energies at odds with her distanced and orderly life. Each recognizes in the other a capacity for passion and commitment: in Anzor’s case, to vengeful patriotism, in Isabel’s, to the power of music. They embark on an affair that seems unlikely; like her namesake Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Merton is a young American confronted by European wiles — but this time of a profoundly historical nature.

Berg Publishers, 2008, £17.99

The startling image on the cover of this book is a work by the Israeli artist Nechama Golan. It is a high-heeled sandal made of paper, ink and glue. The shoe is printed with a rabbinic text which explains how a woman is acquired, bringing together a number of ideas discussed in this book. In her introduction Nahshon alludes to the ‘special niche in the Jewish closet of memories’ occupied by shoes and their makers. Her book includes research ranging from commentary on shoes in the Bible, to Jewish art, drama and films featuring shoes, via the cobblers of the shtetl and the figure of the Wandering Jew.

The collection is divided into themed sections. The first of these, entitled ‘Religion and the Bible’, begins with a psychoanalytically inflected discussion of the meanings of shoes and shoelessness in the context of God’s desire for an intimate relationship with human beings. This is followed by a study of Halitzah (the ceremony of removing the shoe from her brother-in-law by the childless widow of his dead brother, releasing him from the obligation of marrying her). In this chapter the shoe aspect, though explored in the context of which kinds of shoes were permitted for the performance of Halitzah, is secondary to a feminist enquiry into the history and meaning of Halitzah and Levirate marriage. The next chapter considers late nineteenth and early twentieth-century shoe-shaped tombstones found in cemeteries in eastern Europe. Even though the primary data (the tombstones) is damaged by acid rain and human forces, and there is no scholarship on them, Rivka Parciack offers two fascinating suggestions to account for these unusually shaped tombstones. The final chapter in this section deals with the wearing of sandals as an expression of ideology in the modern Israeli state, and traces back the forging of the new Jewish identity through the wearing of what became known as Biblical sandals from the 1920s onwards.

The first two chapters of the next section, ‘Memories and Commemoration’, are rooted in early twentieth-century Europe. Nahshon reprints an extract from a memoir describing the different shoe-making professions (making the soles, making the uppers, mending shoes) in the Polish village where the author, born in 1916 and briefly apprenticed to a shoemaker, grew up. This is followed by a collection of Yiddish expressions and proverbs about shoemakers. Accompanying these, and offering its own commentary on this period, is Jeffrey Feldman’s essay which draws on his first encounter with the piles of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and accounts of the Eichmann trial where shoes were first held up as evidence of the mass murder of children. Feldman questions the meanings of these exhibitions and compares them with the exhibit about the Iraq war made of boots arranged in fields in the formation of tombstones. He is interested in the decay and conservation undergone by the hair and shoes remaining in the death camps and, above all, in visitors’ confrontations with the smell of the decaying leather.

The third section, ‘Ideology and Economics’, contains two chapters. The first traces the history of the Wandering Jew in drama and art, setting out a range of arguments about the place of the Wandering Jew in anti-Semitic discourse in Europe and the adoption of this figure by early Zionist thinkers who rejected the idea that Judaism is built on exile. Zionists are said to have ‘converted’ to the Christian theology of nineteenth-century nationalism, seeking to reinscribe the Jewish people in the pages of history and reconnect them to their land. The chapter is extremely well researched but only tangentially related to the idea of shoes. It is followed by a history of dress, including shoes, in the early history of Jewish settlement in Palestine and later in the new state of Israel.  A different context for some of the material discussed in the ‘Biblical Shoe’ chapter is offered here, suggesting that, despite its title, the earlier chapter might have been better placed in this section.

The final section of the collection, ‘Theatre, Art and Film’, begins with a discussion of sexuality centering on shoes and religion in the work of Bruno Schulz, whose drawings feature androgynous yeshiva boys and high-heeled dominatrixes with their abject admirers. The essay balances description and the contextualisation of Shulz’s work in theories of art history and psychoanalysis. Sonya Rapoport’s chapter describes how her 1970s work Shoe-Field was put together, but the discussion does not place the piece within any theoretical context, and her reason for choosing shoes is never explained. ‘The Theatrical Shoe’ is a textual, theatrical and cultural history of Gronemann’s comedy King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler, later translated into a Hebrew musical and first staged in Tel Aviv in 1943. It is a well-researched cultural history of theatre in Palestine and then Israel, but the topic seems to have been slightly wrenched to fit the shoe theme. Finally, in ‘The Cinematic Shoe’ Jeanette Malkin discusses an early film by Ernst Lubitsch. She interrogates the ‘Jewish’ portrayal of the petit bourgeois milieu, concluding that Lubitsch drew on the East European Jews often portrayed in the Jewish theatre. Lubitsch’s portrayal aroused controversy because he was working in a mass medium: he produced a too-public depiction of a reviled section of the Jewish population of Berlin at a time of rising anti-Semitism. The piece includes some discussion of the role of objects in Lubitsch’s films and notes the early product placement evident in the fashion show featuring shoes lent by Berlin emporia.

The book is generously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings and drawings. Each essay is accompanied by footnotes and bibliography, and the index is meticulous. The question I was left with, however, was whether scholars and general readers interested in the many fascinating topics discussed in this book would think of looking here for them.

Little, Brown, 2009, £ 16.99

‘Light and space…that is everything you need’. So declares a visitor to the spectacular Landauer House, the architectural apotheosis of modernity erected in the days before the black nightmare of World War II. There would be something almost too neat about this perfect construction, this paean to rationality and progress, emerging just at the point the forces of barbarism are about to descend on Europe, were it not of course essentially true. (The story of the Landauer House, the Glass Room, is based in large part upon the modernist Villa Tugendhat in Brno.) The bright dawn of innovation, of creativity and expectation, slips into twilight even as the Glass Room’s final fittings are being made, without ever seeing the expected day of its promise fulfilled. It is an anachronism almost from the moment of its completion.

Insatiable as our appetite seems to be for the full bloody history of the collapse of ‘rational’, ‘progressive’ Europe into insanity and savagery, we are fascinated also by those moments just preceding it, as if, were we to look in the right place, we would somehow discover the point of return, the stone that, placed just right, might alter the flow of history. Mawer himself seems similarly fascinated by the years and months leading up to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, with the first half of the novel reconstructing the early days of the spectacular Landauer House, of its creation by the brilliant architect Rainer von Abt and inhabitation by the Jewish automobile tycoon Viktor Landauer and his non-Jewish wife Liesel.

Yet it remains nigh on impossible to read a novel such as this without an overwhelming sense of fatalism, of all roads leading only to one place — and for the most part Mawer does not attempt to force us to abandon this oppressive sense of inevitability. (Viktor Landauer feels ‘the tremors of uncertainty’ in Czechoslovakia, while his wife Liesel is struck by the image of herself and her husband as ‘evanescent creatures within the transparent walls of glass, like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives’). He is interested in all the contradictions — personal and political — inherent in the erection of this impressive, rational building just at the moment it becomes clear that it cannot be built to last, that if it survives at all it will be through sheer luck. What, and where, are the shadows cast by this palace of light?

Beyond the Glass House, the shadow of Nazism and genocide naturally looms large. Within it is drawn Viktor’s working class lover, Kata, a Hungarian-Slovak Jew he meets in Vienna, whose figure casts a shadow of its own over the Landauers’ marriage. Viktor’s discovery ‘that love, the focused, thermic lance of passion and hunger should be centred not on the figure of his wife, but on the body and soul of a half-educated, part-time tart’ is a shock to him, and to his wife when she discovers that, for all his championing of transparency, he is drawn to the ‘shabby opaque world’ he shares with Kata. And Liesel herself has her own shadowy secrets — the love Hana, her closest friend, has confessed she has for her, and her conflicted, uncertain response to this revelation. The Room ‘is only as rational as the people who inhabit it’, Hana claims: it cannot bestow rationality, only reveal the complex patterns of desire and deceit formed by those beneath its roof.

The subsequent history of the house suffers by contrast, as if, once the original inhabitants have been forced to flee for their own safety, Mawer knows it is necessary to bring us up to speed in time for the eventual reunion (the novel opens with Liesel’s return years later), but is nowhere near as careful about getting there as he was in building up to the moment of the Landauers’ exile. Though the later characters are linked to the Landauers both by theme — of art, of music, of questions of faith and faithlessness in love — and through Hana, the links have a tenuousness about them. Hana’s declaration of love to Zdenka, who works in the house in its later years under Communist rule, is so similar to her prior declaration to Liesel years earlier that it’s hard to think of it as anything other than Hana’s pursuit of the shadow of her lost love, rather than a true expression of feeling.

Perhaps this is because, for all its promise of the future, the Glass Room has been unavoidably claimed by the past. That it was created to be the herald of a new dawn just at the moment darkness descended ties it irrevocably to the past it sought to be free of. Von Abt’s great project was ‘to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air’, away from the shadows and into the light. But to float forever is to exist beyond history, outside the unpredictabilities of human behaviour, an impossibility. Any space that Man inhabits can only bring the shadows rushing back.

Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99

In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young adults. Notwithstanding the naivety and crudity of some aspects of Jewish Continuity’s ‘anti-intermarriage’ agenda, a detailed picture emerged that contributed to the understanding of British Jewry. But I couldn’t help feeling then, as now, that something was missing — we didn’t investigate what young Jews thought about the prospect and the reality of sex with other Jews. Was intermarriage partially a result of young Jews finding other Jews a sexual turn-off? Are non-Jews more sexually alluring to Jews (and visa versa)? What, in short, is the ‘sexual economy’ of British Jewish life?

It struck me then as now that the topic of Jews and sex is a crucial one if we are to understand Jewish behaviours and attitudes, particularly towards assimilation and intermarriage. So I was eager to read the unambiguously-titled collection Jews and Sex edited by British-Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams. The book has its roots in Abram’s essay on Jews in the porn industry, published in the Jewish Quarterly in the winter 2004/5 issue, and the nude cover photo of Jewish porn star/performance artist Annie Sprinkle suggests a welcome openness about sexual matters.

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Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

And Laish is a strange and wonderful book, a curious story of an extraordinary journey: a convoy of Jews travelling through Eastern Europe on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The travellers are all strangers to each other — old religious men, traders, thieves and murderers are crammed together in the wagons — and none stranger than the narrator, the orphan Laish, because nothing could ever be familiar to a boy with no family. Laish knows nothing about his parents and does not know much about himself either, not even the meaning of his name, only that ‘the name comes from Hungary’. (But Laish, your name comes from the Bible, from the story of Palti, son of Laish, who tearfully followed his wife Michal to the gates of Jerusalem. She was reunited with David and he was ordered to turn back. So he, like you, tried to reach Jerusalem.) Aharon Appelfeld the boy was orphaned at a young age. Eight years old when World War Two broke, young Aharon escaped from a labour camp and spent several years hiding in the forests of Ukraine, somehow surviving and waiting for his parents to come back to him. Appelfeld reached Palestine in 1946 and today lives in Jerusalem.

When Laish is ordered to record the names of those in the convoy who die along the way, he too, like Appelfeld, finds himself in the role of the storyteller. Speaking from the depths of loneliness, his voice, the voice of the uprooted, comes from nowhere, with no vantage point of space or time.

Telling stories does not come easily to the boy. He is a cautious narrator, not used to being listened to, or to making himself too visible. In the dangerous environment of the convoy, a child alone is wary of getting in people’s way. He tries to disappear in the story and carefully encodes his emotions. ‘In his last days,’ he says of the man for whom he used to run errands, ‘although he goaded me, he did not make me hate him, even though his wickedness overflowed from him’. Then, after the man dies, Laish remarks dryly, ‘I became someone else’s property’.

Laish is unlike other orphan storytellers. The orphan in Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous ‘The Voices’ cycle, for example, directly confronts the readers with the abysmal agony of his being. His tone is disturbing and accusatory. Pip, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, is a self-helping Victorian. True to the ideology of his time, Pip leads himself from orphaned boyhood to independent manhood by the power of his storytelling. But Jewish Laish narrates as he lives, almost in hiding. He is reluctant to talk about himself too much. He opts for the ‘we’ instead of the ‘I’ and does his best to blend in with the rest of the human mass moving towards Jerusalem. It is easier to chronicle the journey, other people, other people’s heartaches. So he quietly observes the bizarre collection of human beings on the wagons: Mamshe, the girl who lives in a man-size birdcage; Ephraim, who has visions from other worlds; the dumb, the drunk, the demonic. Some live their nightmares in their sleep and some live them in waking. Some are haunted by their past, others by an unknown future.

The convoy is delayed again and again, by greed, violence and disease. But maybe it is not delayed at all. Laish’s ‘employer’ believes that the pilgrimage is nothing but a fraud. ‘I don’t believe that the convoy intends to reach Jerusalem,’ the boy admits. ‘Even though wherever we arrive, the dealers declare our destination at the top of their lungs.’ The dealers deal, the beggars beg and no one is nearer Jerusalem. Yet somewhere else Laish confesses he dreams of the city, ‘a broad, light-filled city — a city where there is no frost or dampness, where a man can lay his head on a stone and fall asleep.’ But then, quickly, apologetically, ‘I must surely be wrong.’

So the days are full of deception, and the nights are full of terror. Bundled in their corners, the weak suffer. The thieves, quick-fingered and ghost-like, rob them of the little they have and the thugs threaten to throw them off the wagons. And in the midst of this, the old men, desperate to reach Jerusalem, slowly die one by one, as the convoy continues to stall. The book’s chapters are short and disorienting, and reflect the movement of the convoy. This is no straightforward movement. It is slightly out-of-time, slightly otherworldly, slightly not what it appears to be.

In this time-out-of-time, there are moments when compassion comes stiffly, in small measures,‘Once he bought me a bar of halva’, Laish remembers of his ‘employer’. Sometimes, there are even shows of affection: ‘From time to time people will say, ‘Laish is a good lad, he helps the old men’, and I am moved’. At these moments, the convoy briefly becomes something like a community. And then there is finally a hint of redemption, and a glimpse of Jerusalem.

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For class acts, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick are a match for any literary backfield Boston, San Francisco, or other cultural capitals might field. In individualised manners, the first three are all realists whose imaginative work is significantly coloured by social or political concerns. Ozick, on the other hand, a keen observer of wounded conscience and blindsided consciousness, is more cerebral than the others as well as less absorbed in the ebb and flow of history.

This is not to say Ozick stands aloof from the passing scene, but her concerns tend to be more instrumental than thematic. A chronicler of human fallibility, her characteristic tone is ironic or derisive. Of the four stories in Dictation, her current collection, two culminate in lacerating laughter and another with the revelation that lying or self-deception is the universal language of mankind. Consequently, although she never tires of acknowledging Henry James as her Master, her work is equally redolent of the mature visions of Twain and Melville.

Of my Bronx quartet, Ozick, craftiest at her craft, is by far the most difficult for many readers to grasp. To that end Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), her most recent novel, may be confidentally exploited as a kind of concordance to this new compilation of not-so-very short stories. In one of them, for example, the surviving Jewish sect of Karaites of Heir to the Glimmering World are reincarnated as sectarian exponents of a utopian, universal language aimed at ameliorating the global discord etiologically symbolised by Babel and its Tower.  Another Heir to the Glimmering World recurring, apposite motif in these new stories are mistreated babies who, symptomatic of an adult world that has lost its bearings, serve not as symbols of hope or redemption but as heirs to victimhood, mayhem, and murder.

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