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

© Yuri Dojc. Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova published by Indiana University Press

The Street of Crocodiles—Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories (originally published in Polish under the title Cinnamon Shops)—is the tree from which Jonathan Safran Foer carves his latest work, Tree of Codes. Carves, with a knife—a real rather than metaphorical one—excising most of Schulz’s words to form new phrases and sentences with those remaining. Foer writes that he has long wished ‘to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book’ and that he chose The Street of Crocodiles, being the richest text that he knows,‘feeling that [he] was…transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had’. Tree of Codes, he acknowledges, ‘is a small response to that great book’ and part of ‘The Great Book’ from which all Schulz’s stories come. Foer takes his place in a line of western writers who have appropriated not just Schulz’s modest oeuvre but also his life story, rendering the figure of Schulz himself as a symbol of loss and absence.

Bruno Schulz’s literary career began in 1934 and was abruptly cut short by the Second World War.As early as the 1920s he had received some recognition as a graphic artist but his discovery, by the psychological-realist prose writer, Zofia Nałkowska, led to the publication of his short story collection, Cinnamon Shops.This established him as one of the leading proponents of the Polish avantgarde, alongside such writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’). Following the war, all experimental writing was suppressed by the Communists, who enforced a rigid cultural agenda of Socialist Realism, and it was not until the Thaw in 1956 that Schulz’s works were published again. Schulz’s biographer, the poet Jerzy Ficowski, dedicated much of his life to tracing his lost letters and drawings; he never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah, which is said to have been given to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping (or perhaps sent to Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he greatly admired).

When Schulz’s work began to appear in English it was accompanied by the dramatic story of his death. As a Jew with valuable artistic talents, Schulz had enjoyed the protection of a Nazi officer named Felix Landau who employed him to paint murals for his children. During an anti-Jewish action known as ‘Black Thursday’ in Schulz’s home town of Drohobycz on November 19, 1942, Landau allegedly shot a Jewish dentist who was protected by another Nazi officer named Karl Günther.The story, told by Izydor Friedman to Ficowski, is that Günther shot Schulz in revenge, with the line ‘you shot my Jew; I shot your Jew’. These words, uttered over the body of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, are so ghoulishly mesmerising that they threaten to overshadow Schulz’s own luminous words.

He never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah

This death-scene has acquired mythical status. For many Jewish writers, it has come to represent the rupture with a golden age of Jewish writing to which they lay claim by virtue of their own second-generation experience of displacement and unresolved trauma. David Grossman (See Under: Love), Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), and Philip Roth (The Prague Orgy) have all built legends around Schulz, invoking his biographical figure as a trope in their own stories. Each of these works incorporates a fictionalised character or lost literary father based on the figure of Schulz, who is easily identified by references to his stories, the lost manuscript of his novel, The Messiah, and the dramatic story of his death.

Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm recounts the obsession of Lars Andemening, an unappreciated literary reviewer for The Stockholm Morgentorn, with the stories and drawings of Bruno Schulz, whom he believes to be his actual father. He embarks on a quest to find the lost manuscript of The Messiah and is aided and thwarted in his goal by an elderly book dealer, Heidi, and her usually absent husband, Dr. Eklund. He obtains a manuscript, authenticated by Dr. Eklund as Schulz’s, that describes a desolate Drohobycz in which the people have been replaced by stone idols.The Messiah arrives—a feathery creature with wings resembling pages from a book—to find the idols burning each other. The Messiah gives birth to a small bird that lands on all the idols, causing them to burn up, leaving Drohobycz empty. Having read it, Lars becomes suspicious. He accuses Dr. Eklund of forging the manuscript and rashly sets it on fire in its brass jar. Eklund is an acknowledged forger, but it is unclear in the end whether he has forged the manuscript or if the manuscript itself was real but he had faked other documents for the purpose of smuggling the manuscript out of Poland.

The symbolism of Ozick’s proposed reconstruction reflects a postwar vision of a Jewish land without Jews. Its former population, having escaped to the familiar destinations of Jewish emigrés, are replaced by stones. Even the stones are burned up,like the markers of Jewish graves bulldozed after the war to make way for progress.The remarkable fiction of Drohobycz has been ‘invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet’.With the former Jews of Drohobycz succeeded only by their remnants, the text experiences its own Holocaust inside the brass amphora.
The problem of the work, and one it shares with Grossman’s and Roth’s, is the seeming incommensurability that the postwar generation feels with regard to the world of their parents and grandparents.With the loss of family ties to Russia and Eastern Europe, those born in the West also lost the linguistic ties necessary to maintain continuity with that culture. The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the Age of Genius was for Schulz, as he described it in a 1936 letter to the critic Andrzej Plesniewicz—a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the age of genius was for Schulz… a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

Philip Roth’s epilogue to the Zuckerman trilogy, The Prague Orgy, is cast as a fragment from Nathan Zuckerman’s notebooks, in which he meets a Czech writer, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his companion, an actress, Eva Kalinova, (famous in Prague for her Chekhovian roles). Sisovsky describes his father as a Jew who wrote stories about Jews in Yiddish (unlike Schulz). This father has a Czech wife and children (who do not resemble him), but then the resemblance to Schulz grows: he is a shy high-school teacher who is protected during the war by a Nazi until he is killed by a rival Gestapo officer, a revenge killing for a Jewish dentist killed by the first officer, explained by the unmistakable line: ‘He shot my Jew; so I shot his.’ It later transpires, however, that Sisovsky’s father was hit by a bus, and the story about the revenge killing ‘happened to another writer, who didn’t even write inYiddish.Who didn’t have a wife or have a child.’ On the one hand, it seems that Roth is indulging in the creation of a literary father from Schulz’s biography, and at the same time, he recognises that it is a lie.The strength of Roth’s story rests in that tension between the desire to have had such a literary father and the acknowledgment of its impossibility. David Grossman’s ‘Bruno’ section of See Under: Love begins with an author from Drohobycz named Bruno, who is taken under the wing of the Polish writer and artist Zofia Nałkowska (known for his grotesque drawings in which he often portrays himself in submissive positions under the heel of a servant girl named Adela). Grossman’s Bruno is described as carrying a manuscript called The Messiah and jumping off a dock in the port of Danzig where he has escaped to see the Edward Munch exhibition.These details come from Schulz’s biography (except for the escape to Danzig) and several lines quoted later in the chapter come from Schulz’s texts and are attributed to those works by title: Bruno’s works are the works of Bruno Schulz, though Grossman’s Bruno is not actually Bruno Schulz—a fact acknowledged by the author-narrator within the work, who confirms that‘[i]t’s not their Bruno I’m writing about’ and then recounts his first encounter with The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. It goes without saying that he retells the ‘I killed your Jew’ story of Landau and Gunther, although Grossman reverses the sequence of events.Then he spins a tale of his Bruno being consumed by the ocean, stirring elements of reality (the words ‘I killed your Jew’) into fantasy—the moment of death expanded over about a hundred pages. Still haunted by these words years later, Grossman went on, in 2009, to publish an interview in The New Yorker with Ze’ev Fleischer, a survivor of the Nazi ‘Black Thursday’ action in which Schulz was killed. Fleischer’s account of the sequence of events leading up to Schulz’s death affirms the rivalry between Landau and Günther, but raises questions about whether Schulz was actually shot by Günther or by common soldiers, and whether he said those dramatic words at the time of Schulz’s death, if at all.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss does not have an explicit Schulz figure or a manuscript called The Messiah but is shot through with fragments of Schulz: a lost manuscript that emerges from a correspondence between the author and a woman who inspired him; several references to The Street of Crocodiles; a mysterious writer character named Bruno who functions as the conscience of one of her protagonists;Leo Gursky, an aging retired Jewish locksmith who once aspired to be a writer but here functions as a lost father in search of his son. Gursky’s structural counter- weight—perhaps a literary granddaughter—is a young woman named Alma Singer in search of the ‘Alma’ she was named after, who inspired a character named Alma in a novel entitled The History of Love. In keeping with the ancient mythology mapped out in Schulz’s own writing, the evanescent Yiddish manuscript is drowned in a flood, although in the supremely interconnected world of Krauss’s novel nothing is ever quite lost: the lost father knows where his son is, and the son eventually knows where the father is, and the author of the lost manuscript knows who has it, and even when the original is lost it appears in translation and a translation of a translation. There is some hope, in the fragmented world, of restoring lost connections.

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths.

Salman Rushdie offers a fascinating and unmistakable homage to Bruno Schulz, first identified by Canadian scholar and novelist Norman Ravvin, in the last section of The Moor’s Last Sigh. The hero and narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, travels from Cochin, India, to Benengeli (a mountain village in Andalusia) to see Vasco Miranda, a long lost admirer of his mother’s. The village takes on a magical quality akin to Schulz’s Drohobycz, particularly a district called the Street of Parasites which resembles the very ‘parasitical quarter’ Schulz names the ‘Street of Crocodiles’:
…I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. [...] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town.
The hourglass is a clear reference to Schulz’s second collection of stories—The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—and is translated into Polish as klepsydra (either a sandglass or a mercury or water clock—‘clepsydra’ in English). ‘Under the sign of the hourglass’ is a common idiomatic form in Polish for referring to a business establishment, usually a cafe or restaurant, denoted by a distinctive sign or architectural ornament above the door. What Rushdie borrows from Schulz, however, is not merely an architectural idiom or biographical detail, but a metaphysical essence of Schulz’s imagined world: a sense of suspended time and a feeling of rootedness in displacement itself, which he transposes onto his own historical and cultural context.

In contrast with Western writers at pains to use Schulz as a cultural conduit to their own European past, are Polish and East European writers who come from the same cultural tradition as him. For these writers, Schulz is not a distant figure representing absence and loss but an exciting figure of the interwar avantgarde that paved the way for the most adventurous work of the postwar era in Poland. Key to this movement is Schulz’s idea that there was a mythological structure underlying all language and repre- sentation, which he articulated in his brilliant essay ‘The Mythicisation of Reality’:

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths. . . . Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth,isn’t transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology.The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales. . . . [T]he building materials [that the search for human knowledge] uses were used once before; they come from forgotten, fragmented tales or ‘histories’. Poetry recognises these lost meanings, restores words to their places, connects them by the old semantics.

This idea—that even the trivial and mundane had an underlying mythic structure—shaped the imaginations and work of countless Eastern European writers and artists, and the proliferation of Schulzean figures and references across this work testifies to this legacy.The Polish dramatist and visual artist,Tadeusz Kantor, uses characters and images from Schulz and from the work of Witold Gombrowicz’s interwar avant-garde fiction, in his great work for the stage, The Dead Class. Kantor’s work in the theatre began with underground productions of the pre-war dramas of Witkiewicz, who was also a great advocate of Schulz’s work. Kantor adapts characters like Adela the servant-girl, a sexually dominant woman in Schulz’s mythology: in Schulz, she sweeps her broom through the air to clear the birds from the father’s attic but in Kantor’s mythic world she becomes a force for destruction.There is a distinct pall of death hanging over this work,but it comes from Kantor’s own experience of the war rather than his references to the world of Bruno Schulz.

The contemporary Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, whose own novel Primeval and OtherTimes is required reading for Polish high school students, recently cited Schulz as one of her greatest influences. Unlike other writers she does not appropriate the paraphernalia of Schulz’s world. But she comes closer to its essence through this infusion of the everyday with the mythic. but As a trained Jungian psychologist, her work deals with the intersection of the archetypal with daily life and her recent novel, Drive Your Plough Through the Bones of the Dead (not yet translated into English) reveals a keen interest in astrology. A pre-scientific art of psychological or social types (like astrology) should, she suggests, be seen as a rich source of symbolism and wisdom, a power Schulz acknowledges in the story ‘Tailors Dummies’ in which the sight of two fish top-to-tail on a plate transforms ordinary time into mythic time:
We assembled again around the table, the shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and the prose of their conversation suddenly revealed a full grown day, a gray and empty Tuesday, a day without tradition and without a face. But it was only when a dish appeared on the table containing two large fish in jelly lying side by side, head-to-tail, like a sign of the zodiac, that we recognised in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of the nameless Tuesday.

In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery.

An obsession with Schulz seems to satisfy a particularly American search for the self, a trope not lost on the Eastern European writers of today. Anya Ulinich, the young Russian-American translingual author of the satirical novel, Petropolis (2007) about Russian immigration in the United States, has a story called ‘The Nurse and the Novelist’. This includes a conversation between a young male novelist and a woman who has sacrificed her own education to work as a nurse to support her graduate-student husband. The novelist, now successful and living with his family in a condominium near the nurse’s apartment, began his career as a depressed Manhattan writer wrestling with the demons of his identity and searching for his East European roots in a suburb of Minsk that had once been a shtetl destroyed during the war. They meet in a grocery store and arrange to have coffee, where the nurse tells the novelist: ‘In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery. The central question is: “Why am I collecting toenails in a jar?” It only takes a village of dead Jews to figure it out.’ Ulinich denies, despite the resem- blances, that this is a satire on Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, but it is instructive that it was widely ready as such, because it seems to capture what Foer’s detractors find so infuriating—the assumption of the identity, and, by implication, the suffering of others for narcissistic ends. Beyond Schulz and his oeuvre, there is a broader tension around the appropriation of East European identity that has manifested itself in contemporary ‘translingual’ writers like Gary Shteyngart, Andreï Makine, and Wladimir Kaminer—Russian-born writers with Western literary careers, writing in Western languages. Adrian Wanner, in an excellent essay on this subject published in The Slavic Review in 2008, recounts the illustrative tale of two reviews of Makine’s Le Testament Français by the Russian writer Tatiana Tolstaia, praising the novel for its ‘Russianness’ in The New York Review of Books and vilifying it in her review for Znamia for a Russian audience. Everything is Illuminated, in which an American student sharing the name of the author travels to Ukraine in search of the rescuer of his grandfather, likewise wasn’t received with as much enthusiasm in Ukraine as it was in the United States. Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski typified this response in his review in The Prague Post in 2004, criticising the novel for its negative stereotypes of Ukrainians and for omitting important details about the role of Ukrainian partisans who resisted the Nazis and defended Jews during the war in the towns named in the novel.
Perhaps these works that revive Schulz in fiction are only a sign that what we want is more Schulz. Krauss, at least, offers the hope that something lost is only lost to those who don’t know where it is or haven’t looked hard enough to find it. Perhaps the reason that Schulz appeals to writers struggling with a very personal sense of loss is that though he appears, from the postwar perspective, to have come from an Age of Genius, he, too, is writing about a lost world.The Drohobycz of Franz Joseph and the Emperor Maximilian, figures in Schulz’s postage stamp album, was actually a childhood legend (Franz Joseph having passed through the region in 1880, twelve years before Schulz’s birth): oil refineries and businesses were pushing aside the culture of that former era,and transitional urban spaces like the ‘Street of Crocodiles’ were displacing the ‘Cinnamon Shops’ of old. If modern readers don’t always recognise the absences in Schulz’s world, it is because he paints such a vivid picture with the remnants of the lost world that we can hardly recognise it as already lost. And if we strip away that richness, and use him as a proxy for a sense of loss we cannot remedy, we willfully blind ourselves to what does, miraculously, survive.
David A. Goldfarb is Curator of Literature and Humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and is currently working on a book about the work of Bruno Schulz.

And once again, a feeling of superstitious terror took hold of the enemy: Were the ones attacking them people, could they be mortal?’ In a slightly modified form, these and other words from Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘The Direction of the Main Strike’ (1942) are engraved on Mamaev Kurgan memorial on a hill overlooking Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Grossman’s words refer to the shock of Nazi forces as they faced the heroism of Soviet soldiers fighting under Stalin’s order: ‘Not a step back’.The Soviet victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, but it could not stop the Shoah. When the Soviet troops, Grossman embedded with them, came to the death camps in Poland in the summer of 1944, most of the Jews of Europe had been annihilated.

The Jewish-Russian writer and political thinker Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is not identified as the source of the seething words carved out on the Stalingrad memorial. Grossman’s deletion—words ‘popular’ author ‘unknown’,— constitutes much more than a double twist of black Soviet humour. According to John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s dedicated biographers, the absence of Grossman’s name on the Stalingrad memorial is an ‘open wound’ on the writer’s legacy. Fifty-nine year old Vasily Grossman died in Moscow of stomach cancer, devastated by the Soviet efforts to erase him from history. His novel Life and Fate, a comparative indictment of Stalinism and Hitlerism, had been ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961, leaving him free to die of illness and grief during the headiest years of the Thaw. ‘They strangled me in the back alley’, Grossman had said to Boris Yampolsky, author of the novel Country Fair (1940), a lament for Jewish life in the former Pale. Ironically, some of Grossman’s loyal official supporters were the ageing generals he had interviewed at Stalingrad, who understood his love for the ‘holy Red Army’ and the extent to which it had bolstered the war effort. In orchestrating Grossman’s literary death, the regime was symbolically murdering the legacy of the people’s war against Hitler while also pogromising the Soviet memory of the Shoah.

Born Iosif Grossman but accustomed to being called Vasya (diminutive of Vasily), Grossman adopted the emblematic Jewish-Russian pen name ‘Vasily Grossman’. His first novel, Glück Auf!, a Soviet Germinal devoid of desire or violence, is stronger and less formulaic than his next novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937-1940), a story of a working class youth’s path to Bolshevism. His early prose of the 1930s is a search for his own voice, via the styles and artistic devices of other Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Perhaps Grossman’s greatest inspiration was Chekhov (he would title one of his Stalingrad essays ‘Through Chekhov’s Eyes’; the essay zoomed in on the experience of the famous sniper Anatoly Chekhov). To write in a form that resisted pathos and narrative closure would remain a lifelong aim, even as a Tolstoyan novelistic ambition pulsed in his temples. These early works gave little indication of the authorial voice Grossman would acquire in 1941 at the war front reporting from the trenches, gathering his material directly from the fighting soldiers. There is courage and sacrifice in his wartime articles, but there is also humour and tenderness; despite being a time of personal trauma the war against Nazism was also, for Grossman, a time of glory—literary, civic, and military. For him and many other Jewish soldiers, including poets and novelists serving as military journalists, this was a war with double the cause and double the commitment. (In the notebooks, Grossman recorded a comment by a Jewish commanding officer that ‘in a war like this Jews should be fighting like fanatics’).

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I knew early on that I wanted to write about the child of atheist parents becoming religious and the daughter of atheist Jewish parents becoming a ba’al teshuvah, it seemed particularly rich in possibilities. I liked the idea of having one kind of religious Jewish identity confront another secular form of Jewish identity based on progressive politics and social activism. My husband and I have had a series of debates/negotiations over the years about Jewishness and Judaism and in particular how we want to raise our children. (We are both atheists, but I grew up celebrating Christmas and my husband was raised Orthodox). Making my fictional family Jewish was, at one level, a convenient way to translate some of these discussions into the novel.

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As Das gute Leben relates, he did plenty of things besides  merely — merely — survive. He was born into a Jewish working-class family in Vienna; his father, an itinerant salesman, was often away, and, too much for his mother to manage, the young Fred grew up largely on the street. He left school at fourteen, kept himself by casual labour in Austria and, later, in Holland and France, was a vagrant, an autodidact. He was often hungry. As he beautifully puts it, he had an ‘ahasverisches Selbstver ständnis’ — he was, by instinct and conviction, a wandering Jew. After 1945, he returned to Vienna, as a self-taught photographer and reporter. In 1955, he took up an invitation to study at the newly created Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, in East Germany, where he lived with his second wife, Maxie Wander, and wrote books, including illustrated travel books and reportage (most notably about Corsica and the south of France, for which he felt a lifelong attachment). In 1983,  following Maxie’s death in 1977, he went to live in Vienna again, with a third wife, Susanne.

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Brandeis, 2008, £29.95

Yehuda Amichai is one of that great generation of Israeli poets who shattered traditional forms and used the materials of daily life and the language of the streets. The voice in his poetry is unapologetic, wry, matter of fact. It was very much the voice of the man I first met in Jerusalem at a party given by the theatre director Arieh Sachs. Amichai was then in his forties, short and compact,with an amused shrug I thought peculiarly Israeli: that is to say, less weary than an Eastern European shrug, but acknowledging equally the awkward unpredictability of events.
Amichai was a courageous soldier who ran guns for Haganah in 1948 and fought in all Israel’s subsequent wars. Like most Israelis then he recognised a human dignity in fighting, after so many European Jews had found the limits of putting their faith in law-abiding passivity. But he didn’t like soldiering, and he never forgot the murderous cost of war.

The bereaved father
has grown very thin:
he has lost the weight of his son

Two decades later, when I met him again in his refurbished home in Yemen Moshe, I remembered his poem about the impermanence of any building in Jerusalem where the stones of the mountains roll down at night towards the stone houses ‘Like wolves coming to howl at the dogs/Who have become the slaves of men’.  The last time I saw him in London he had just been given a literary prize in Egypt and was uncharacteristically glum. When I asked why, he said simply: ‘They hate us.’
The man I knew is not much present in this book. This is partly because it is not in the ordinary sense a biography, though it illuminates much about Amichai’s life I did not guess. It is a scholarly exploration of his German childhood, a painful early love affair and the years before the state of Israel was established. Nili Scharf Gold was given access to a box of letters, sealed in 1948, by Ruth Z, — as she is named in the book — in New York, after Amichai’s death. This is a treasure trove of 98 love letters written by Amichai to Ruth Z after she left Israel for the States. They were written in the months after the United Nations vote on 29 November 1947, which recognised the right of the Jews to a sovereign state in Palestine.
Read alongside jottings in two hand-bound notebooks from Yale’s Beinecke Library, the letters serve as a journal of the period before Amichai became a published poet. The material chronicles far more than Amichai’s youthful emotions at the end of a love affair; they also record, invaluably, the details of his daily life, his early ambitions to become a poet and his determination to build a life in Palestine. The letters resurrect the voice of a boy whose proud Hebrew surname, Amichai — ‘my people lives’ — was chosen for him by Ruth Z. The name was eminently suitable to an Israeli poet, whose aspirations were already clear to the poet himself. Sadly, as Amichai wrote in a poem 33 years later:

she fled to America
and left me with my new name

Our attention is held because Amichai writes as if every feeling he has will be of interest to the woman he loves. So it is he reveals openly his memories of growing up in Wuerzberg, Germany, a city of bridges, statues and cobblestone alleys, surrounded by a Bavarian landscape wholly different from that of Israel. Ludwig, as he was called in those years, lived in an orthodox Jewish home filled with books and music, in which Shabbat was a special day, but not an oppressive one. His father was much loved by his children, and his love filled the household. The Torah service was familiar to the young boy.
His girlfriend in his school days, before the Nazi threat led the family to leave for Palestine, was Little Ruth, who was also Jewish. In December 1934, after some childish argument, Little Ruth rode off angrily on a borrowed bicycle and was pinned so seriously between two cars that one of her legs had to be amputated. Amichai felt some responsibility.Their friendship did not come to an end, however, and Amichai remembers an occasion when they were both attacked by boys from Hitler Youth, and the sound of the thugs beating Little Ruth’s wooden leg continued to haunt him. He always felt remorseful at failing to write to her after his family left Germany. The girl died in the Holocaust.
The letters give a memorable picture of Amichai as a young man who was a teacher by day and a soldier by night. It wasn’t the life he wanted. But the letters show him as an obedient if reluctant soldier. They describe his first encounter with gunfire on 11 December 1947 while on guard duty — to which he took a bag of books — his first battle, and his blowing up of the Arab houses from which gunfire had come. His own wish to be out of the conflict is expressed in a refrain running through one of his most famous poems:

Like slits in a tank, their eyes were uncanny
I’m always the few and they are the many.
I must answer. They can interrogate my head.
But I want to die in my own bed.

The sketches of daily life in these letters are invaluable. These are days that many Israelis and most of the outside world has forgotten, days when the outcome for Israel was far from certain: the daily risks palpable, the details vivid and surprising. For instance he describes the special scent of children’s fear: ‘sweat and wool wet with urine’
.    All this is fascinating, but the driving thesis of Nili Scharf Gold’s book is her contention that he needed to cover up the depth of his involvement with his German childhood and particularly his love of German literature in order to become a good Israeli citizen, and even more so to become a national poet. I was not altogether convinced by this. I find his wish to bury that part of his life less surprising than she does. Memories of Germany were raw, and fugitives from European murders customarily shed more than their names. The brilliant novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who survived in the forests as a young child, abandoned his native German speech altogether when he reached Israel. Amichai’s family of course arrived in what was then Palestine not long after the Nazis took over, and so made a less brutal transition. Nevertheless, there were many reasons other than ambition to make the young Amichai reluctant to identify with the European world he had left.
Scharf Gold has discovered in these papers a part of Amichai’s development which she insists he has decided to erase. If this were so, would he have used similar material in his novel Not of this time, not of this place? She makes much of his reverence for Rilke, but is there any European poet of that period who did not feel the power of Rilke as a poet?
There is genuinely new and useful material is this book. Scharf Gold modifies Amichai’s account of Israel’s War of Independence as the trigger for his own poetic aspirations, and shows that his emotional situation in 1947–48 was far more complex. She finds that Amichai’s important poem, ‘In the Public Gardens’, was intended as a birthday poem for Ruth Z. But Amichai wanted to become an Israeli even more forcibly and with stronger reasons than immigrants to the United States wanted to become Americans. He wanted to write in the present about the world around him. He was not unreasonable when he pointed out in a poignant lyric: ‘Jerusalem is full of used Jews worn out by history.’
He was not insensitive to the conflicts within his homeland, but unlike, say Natan Zach, he was compassionate rather than indignant, more sad than angry. In his poem, ‘Jerusalem 1967’, he wrote memorably, as he looked at an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop selling buttons and zippers and spools of thread close to the Damascus gate,

I told him in my heart that my father too
Had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
And the causes and the events, why I am now here
And my father’s shop was burned there, and he is buried here’

Nili Scharf Gold is an impressive scholar, and her reading of Amichai’s poems is enormously valuable. She presents us with a vulnerable and charming young man, as good looking as the young face on the cover of this book. The portrait is not much like the man I knew, but then I never knew Amichai as a young man, and this is a peril all biographers have to confront. I remember him as less desperate, more affectionate, warmer. He was always Israel’s best ambassador whether on a public stage or in a social gathering, and that is the memory that will endure. But Nili Scharf Gold has given us fresh look and an important book. Anyone interested in Amichai will be grateful for it.

By Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, Barbara Rosenbaum (eds.)

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

When Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) announced its existence in February 2007, with an article in The Guardian by Brian Klug and the publication of a founding declaration with one hundred signatories, it created a stir of controversy in the British Jewish world and beyond. They were described as ‘Jews for Genocide’ by the Jewish Chronicle’s columnist Melanie Phillips, who accused them on a Newsnight debate of straying ‘into the realm of demonisation’ of Israel. Even the vastly more thoughtful Howard Jacobson characterised IJV’s position as ‘self-indulgent fantasy’ and ‘gesture politics’. But the new group also received enthusiastic praise, and the initial signatories were soon joined by hundreds more.
Most of IJV’s founding statement consists of generalities in favour of human rights, peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians, and against racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. These are sentiments to which one hopes any mainstream British Jewish leader would subscribe. Similarly, the aspiration for a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians (without mentioning specifics in terms of timetable, territory, refugees, the status of Jerusalem or anything else) is not in itself especially contentious. What really caused the vitriol was IJV’s challenge to the institutions and attitudes within British Jewry in their declaration that ‘those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain (my italics) and other countries consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power [the Israeli government] above the human rights of an occupied people [the Palestinians]’. They also reject accusations of ‘disloyalty’ made against Jews who oppose Israeli government policies. The bitterness that IJV generated was not really surprising; no issue has the potential to generate bad feeling more quickly among British Jews than the politics of Israel-Palestine. IJV’s platform was as much about this community as anything happening between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.  Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection will be holding an exhibition ‘Treasures of the Black Death’, Jewish jewellery from Thuringia from 19th February to 17th May 2009. Details from the Wallace Collection: The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN; tel.: 020 7563 9500. The exhibition was first shown in Paris in 2007. The exhibition’s curator, Maria Stuerzebecher, will be giving a lecture on the subject: ‘The Erfurt Treasure: A Jewish hoard from Thuringia at the time of the Black Death’ at the Society of Jewellery Historians at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House on February 24th, 2009. Enquiries to the Society of Jewellery Historians
Scientific Research, The British Museum, London WC1B 3DG; contact: info@societyofjewelleryhistorians.ac.uk

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Granta, October 2008, £15.99

Seven Days in the Art World is a slightly misleading title. The book doesn’t cover a continuous week, but takes place over seven disparate days, during which Sarah Thornton attends seven very different contemporary art events. It’s a testament to Thornton’s skill as a narrator that she’s able to combine these distinct facets into a coherent account that’s informative and entertaining, and that never feels weighted down by her five years of research.
Opening with a vignette of a Christie’s auction in New York in 2004, and ending with a chapter on last year’s Venice Biennale, this is a portrait of the art world during the peak of its boom years, marked by crazily escalating prices and levels of hype. Thornton visits the annual Basel art fair, the Turner Prize awards ceremony in London, and the Tokyo studios of superstar-artist Takashi Murakami. She also, as an alternative to such glittering occasions, attends a student seminar at a Los Angeles art school and drops by the New York offices of Artforum magazine.
Thornton has a doctorate in sociology and the most engaging parts of the book are when she’s describing human relationships and social hierarchies: Murakami lording it in first class during a plane journey while fawning museum curators sit back in economy; dealers desperately competing for the best location for their booth at Basel; the sneering condescension of established collectors towards arriviste ‘speculators’. As a ‘statusphere’ — Thornton borrows the word from Tom Wolfe — the art world revolves around these sorts of rituals of power and authority. Sometimes it’s Thornton herself on the receiving end: when she asks a friend of Turner Prize-nominated Rebecca Warren to help broker an interview with the sculptor, Thornton gets told: ‘She doesn’t need to talk to you. She’s going to win anyway!’(In fact, painter Tomma Abts wins.)
Fortunately others are more forthcoming. Each event is interwoven with conversations with art world players, some of whom are surprisingly upfront: Nick Serota quietly criticizing previous Turner Prize juries for not choosing enough women winners, for instance; Amy Cappellazzo, a Christie’s codirector, advising on the kind of works that sell well at auction (blue or red paintings, not brown ones, is the first rule). Though, it has to be said, many interviewees are much more circumspect; or, alternatively, tend to endlessly spout vacuous art-speak.
Still, for a casual overview of how the international art scene operates, in all its ruthless, eccentric, spectacular glory, Seven Days in the Art World is hard to beat. Apart from a few omissions — no mention of the explosion in Chinese contemporary art, for example — Thornton manages to evoke this giddy global circuit well, with its merry-go-round of bi- and triennials, its perpetually itinerant curators and artists. In particular, she captures the atmosphere of fraught, febrile excitement that accompanies such unprecedentedly vast sums of money — where every auction and fair breaks previous sales records, but where dealers can be heard anxiously whispering about how the bubble has to burst sometime.
As it turns out, they’re right. While Seven Days in the Art World could have been written at almost any time during the past decade, it has the misfortune to be published in what’s suddenly a completely different economic climate. Although nobody really knows yet how the art market will fare, Thornton’s book already seems rather dated — not that that’s her fault, of course.
What is her fault, though, is the rather superficial tone that runs throughout the book. While she carefully notes all the peripheral details — the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, the kind of desk Serota has in his office — the art itself tends to get skated over too briefly, as if it was merely an adjunct to the real business of selling — which to be fair, is how a quite a few of the dealers seem to regard it.
For this reason, the most interesting chapter in the book is the one set in the Artforum offices — not only because it’s one of the few times when the value of art, beyond its commodity status, is considered; but also because it reflects on what Thornton herself is doing: writing about art. During a conversation with Thomas Crow, a regarded art historian and critic, a comment gets made that functions as an indictment of Thornton’s book as a whole: bemoaning the art world’s cult of personality, Crow states that ‘there has to be a space between you and the people that you’re writing about, so you’re not just echoing the situation you’re trying to analyze.’.
It’s this distance that Thornton’s own writing lacks. Although she’s not writing art criticism as such, Seven Days in the Art World could have done with being more opinionated and analytic; more, well, critical. As it is, Thornton gives the impression of sharing the art world’s values too fully. There’s too much respect given to the personalities she interviews, too many questions that go begging — about how the art market shapes art historical importance, for instance; or about the effect of the endless biennial circuit on the kind of art that gets made. Without these sorts of issue being explored, there’s little sense of why any of this art stuff should actually matter in the first place.

Souvenir Press Ltd, October 2008, £12

There’s a sentiment halfway through François Maspero’s biography of Gerda Taro that speaks volumes about both the young war photographer and about the author himself. People must, Maspero supposes, feel a twinge of sadness not to have been the famous photographer Robert Capa. And women must surely also experience a longing, occasionally, to have been his lover Gerda Taro. It’s quite a claim. It is through this lens that Maspero views the brief yet eventful life of Taro and this ardour that motivates his struggle to bring her out of the shadows. Yet it is also this sentiment that at times renders the telling problematic.
Spain. July 1937. Fifteen miles from Madrid, the Battle of Brunete is waged in a desperate attempt to push the nationalists back from the capital. By mid-July the Republican offensive gives way to a fierce nationalist counter-attack. Both sides are raving with thirst, heat and hunger. The countryside is flecked with the human debris of conflict. And then come Franco’s planes, soaring overhead. In the midst of this chaotic scene on July 25th, a petite blonde crouches amid the Republican fighters sheltering in a dugout. She takes picture after picture, calmly reloading her camera as shells explode around them. Her name, La Pequena Rubia, is Gerda Taro.
Whereas other correspondents had fled Brunete, Taro remained, excited to be taking her best pictures yet. But she knew it was time to leave. That afternoon she jumped on to the running board of a vehicle transporting wounded to the nearby village of Villanueva. It proved a fatal leap. A Republican tank struck Taro and threw her from the car. She died hours later, her stomach lacerated by the impact. She was 26 years old: the first female correspondent to die on the front line.
It is here, at her dramatic death in Spain, that you feel Maspero should begin his telling. Or perhaps at her grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris, where Taro was given the funeral of a martyr, mourned by thousands, her tomb designed by Alberto Giacometti. Today, wandering its overgrown paths, the tomb lies neglected, its inscription illegible. If anything inspires a refocusing of the spotlight of history, it is this sight. But instead, Maspero’s mission to bring Taro out of the shadows begins with an imagined interview, an illusory meeting with an elderly Taro, fragile and tiny, who talks about Spain, about Capa, about her cats. You can’t help but feel cheated by his crafted conceit. And it’s with relief when the true narrative of her life begins.
Gerda Taro was born Gerta Pohorylle to Polish Jews in Stuttgart. By the time Hitler took power Gerta was already involved in anti-Nazi activities. It was this political commitment that led to her arrest in 1933 aged 23. The young Gerta fled to Paris where she met Hungarian émigre Andrei Freidman. He was 20, she was 24. Both were well read, left wing and idealistic. Both were good looking, struggling but ambitious. Both were Jewish refugees living in Paris. It wasn’t long before they fell in love.
It was through the couple’s shared émigre identity and their mutual love of photography that the phenomenon of Robert Capa was born. It was in fact Taro who created Capa. In a city reverberating with anti-Semitism to have a professional name that sounded German and Jewish was a hindrance at best. Instead, Taro picked a new name: Capa. Aurally it evoked the quality of Hollywood director Frank Capra and, crucially, seemed to be a name from nowhere. Inspired by the same reasons, and no doubt by the allure of Greta Garbo, Gerta Pohorylle also changed her name, to Gerda Taro. But for now, the two would work together under the contrived guise of photographic legend Robert Capa.
Andrei taught Taro how to use a Leica and Rolleiflex camera. They began to cover the war in Spain, travelling from Barcelona to the front at Cordoba. Today’s dispatches of rolling news and instant pictures were a mere glint in the eye. The wireless let the voices of war drift into living rooms, but they were faceless voices. Editors were desperate for photographs from the front, true images of the war that had gripped Europe’s imagination. Taro and Capa provided publications such as Ce Soir and Regards with that visual immediacy, confronting readers with unprecedented realism, and suffering.
Maspero is at his best when placing Taro in context of place and time, in characterising her as a free spirit, achingly glamorous in the midst of the dust and detritus of war. It is in the details that his book succeeds: the description of Taro arriving in a German prison cell dressed to go dancing. Or the stylish figure she cut, always in heels, even on the front line. The minutiae of the Capa invention and of her growing professional independence are beguiling. Maspero paints a picture of a woman whose career was in the ascendant, who resisted Capa’s proposal of marriage but loved him and worked with him, criss-crossing Spain to bring images of the war to Europe’s readership. The book grapples with the question of whether Taro was a communist but leaves you little the wiser. Maspero loads his discussion by siting at its climax Taro’s famous photo of a republican soldier replacing the nationalist slogan ‘Ariba Espana’ with ‘Viva Russia.’ What matters, surely, is that Taro — like Capa — was passionate about the need to stem the fascist tide that was sweeping across Europe.
Maspero depicts Taro and Capa as electrons, with the autonomy of free movement, despite being effectively embedded with the Soviet-controlled troops. There is no doubt that Taro was light of touch and seduced everyone she met, as did Capa. She was a risk taker, both politically and in her work. But she was also fiercely intrepid. This fact doesn’t come through enough. Lightness, bravery and political commitment are not mutually exclusive. Taro may have been a woman in a man’s world, but you never forget this biography is written by a man.
Maspero’s passion for Taro is an enticing premise, yet is undermined by the unsatisfying truth that he never really allows Taro to step out of the shadows, despite his title’s claim. The book’s greatest irony is that it is Maspero himself who overshadows Taro with his narrative intrusions and conjecture. His quest for biographical truth descends repeatedly into hazy fictionalised imaginings. Maspero admits in his postscript that his fascination for Taro took form through fiction: first through two characters in his novel The Fig Tree then through his short story Gerda. This genesis is apparent throughout, and the frequent vacillation from biography to fantasy is disorientating.
Any biography of Gerda Taro deserves promotion without caveats. Her story needs to be told. Taro was the woman who invented Robert Capa; who when she died Capa claimed his life ‘came to a kind of end’ despite later affairs with Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman. She was the woman who fled the Nazis to pursue her political ideals; the woman whose photos encapsulate what Orwell famously remembered of the war: ‘First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.’
And as to Maspero’s claim that each of us must harbour a desire to be Taro or Capa? His claim is true, at least for me. Gerda Taro has long lingered within the perimeters of my imagination. My great uncle, Dezo Hoffmann, was a Czech photojournalist sent on assignment to Spain in 1936. He was soon caught up in the impassioned anti-fascist struggle that gripped Taro and Capa. His story, like that of Taro and Capa, has always inspired me. But Maspero’s claim is also accurate because we all surely aspire, to some degree, to the tight fit between conviction and existence that Taro, in her brief tragic life, achieved.

Photographs by Gerda Taro
Previous spread:
Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography.
This spread:
Boy wearing cap of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography.
Recruitment and training of the new People’s Army, Valencia March 1937 © International Center of Photography.
Republican soldiers La Granjuela, Cordoba front, Spain, June 1937, © International Center of Photography.
A Gerda Taro exhibition is on at Barbican Art Gallery until 25 January 2009.  www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

What remains?

Elaine Feinstein’s The Russian Jerusalem calls itself ‘a novel’, and so it is. It’s a time-travelling, magical-realist compendium of a fiction, in which the protagonist — a British Jewish poet, somewhat resembling the author herself — is transported into the lives of the Russian poets of the Silver Age. That it tells the life, and often tragic death, stories of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Ehrenburg and Babel means that a swathe of history from the dark days of the twentieth century is covered by its less than a hundred and fifty pages. However, Feinstein writes with a passionate celerity which makes The Russian Jerusalem the very opposite of trite costume drama or literary-biographical summary.
It is in particular a book about poetry, and the costs poetry exacts from those who believe in and write it. Arguably, this is what deepens its concerns and, indeed, informs its high style. Fourteen of Feinstein’s own poems stud the text. These are themselves inlaid with quotations from the author’s beloved Russians, as is the surrounding prose narrative, which serve as both summary and breathing space. The effect of these palimpsests is of a conversation between poets; one which the author, with her specialist’s knowledge and wearing her poetic identity-like colours, enters as an equal protagonist.
Its epigraph, Marina Tsvetaeva’s All poets are Jews, sets The Russian Jerusalem’s tone. The protagonist enters ‘St Petersburg, 1913’ by way of ‘Raskolnikov’s police station’ and its literate inspector, and: ‘Was this the Underworld? A steamy cloud which smelt of hot irons on damp cloth like an old-fashioned laundry. There were twittering sounds, like birds. Or the sound of grasshoppers rubbing their legs together. It was the sound made by human shadows: a crowd of them pressed towards me, blindly, their flesh seemingly as flimsy as that of moths.’ For this is more than merely the ghost town of history.  Feinstein shows us that the hellish fate of Russia’s twentieth-century poets, especially those with Jewish backgrounds or connections, still matters. Marina Tsvetaeva — whom Feinstein was the first to translate into English — becomes the poet’s Virgil as she enters this Inferno.  The charged writing demonstrates instantly how Tsvetaeva is both role model and symbol. Despite her first appearance in its pages as an anonymous refugee, she is presented as an object of literary and personal admiration.
For this is a book which deals not only with the roles of poet, Jew and woman as heretic, but with the passionate romance between writer and reader. That enchantment, the novel seems to suggest, is so potent it can break through the page, precipitating the reader into a writer’s world with all the immediacy of which imagination and emotion are capable.  That it does so here is a function of the high literacy of the writing. But Feinstein is also a master storyteller.  There’s no tricksy palimpsest narrative or role-swapping here. Instead she tells the story of that romance in straightforward terms: as a quest for how things will turn out, in which the reader is led on — educated in the true sense of that word — by the writer.
The world into which Feinstein herself leads us is of course highly educated in every sense. Not only is her own knowledge of Russian literary history displayed with the casual touch of thorough-going authority; but the world about which she’s writing is a highly-cultivated one, in which a group of exceptional protagonists are alert and more than sympathetic to the giant strides each accomplishes and the challenges each faces. Sometimes, as on the famous occasion when Stalin rang Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam was a genius, their fates collide. The collegiate sense of a generation that became a movement binds the book’s individual stories skilfully together. What might otherwise read as a series of hammer blows emerges instead as pattern. This is largely that of the Stalinist purges; but such is the book’s coherence — and indeed its page-turning intensity — that Feinstein is able to finish with the exile and fatal illness of Joseph Brodsky, at the very end of the century, with no sense of its consistency being broken. Indeed, it’s to Brodsky that she gives The Russian Jerusalem’s last word.
His verdict is that ‘what remains is the book’ . But, at least for British readers, it’s hard to escape hearing in these words an echo or contradictio to Philip Larkin’s famous ‘What remains of us is love’. And, indeed, The Russian Jerusalem itself suggests that something more than books does remain. The passion — both intensity and sacrifice — of poets from the Russian Silver Age and beyond does count for something: whether to inspire the poets who follow them or remind us all of the lessons of history.  Feinstein shows us all this with the lyric intensity of a true poet.

Fiona Sampson’s latest book is Common Prayer (2007), shortlisted for the T. S.Eliot Prize.  She is the Editor of Poetry Review.

Pantheon Books, June 2008, $20

The comingled complexities of love and food are familiar ingredients in modern fiction, but in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories it is largely the absence of love that is assuaged or intensified by cooking and eating. Like Vapnyar herself, the protaganists of Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love are émigres from Eastern Europe, cast dazedly adrift in the United States, suspended between assimilation and homesickness. Varying in age, gender and preoccupations, the characters nonetheless share an air of stunned dismay, a somnambulant passivity akin to depression. In each of these six elegantly crafted stories, it is the experience, memory or consequences of a meal that in some way bring them back to life.
Vapynar left her native Russia in 1994 and became fluent in English only after settling in New York. She drew on the immigrant experience in her first collection of short stories, the critically acclaimed There Are Jews in My House, and her subsequent novel, The Memoirs of a Muse. Here she continues to address displacement, loneliness and loss of status with wry humour and lightness of touch, sidestepping sentimentality and inviting genuine sympathy for her disenfranchised characters; isolated individuals slaving to send money to their aspirational families back home; scientists, artists and intellectuals turned into computer programmers in the heat of the melting pot.
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The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Moskver idisher melukhisher teater), usually referred to by its Russian acronym, Goset, was one of the crown jewels of modern Jewish creativity. Its story has the making of Shakespearean drama: daring, uplifting and tragic. It is a tale of innovative artistry, personal talent, Jewish commitment, political shenanigans, great hopes and broken promises which ends with assassination and institutional liquidation. 
During its lifetime (1918–50) and the decades following its brutal demise, the theatre has been the subject of several books of scholarly and semi-scholarly nature, as well as personal memoirs, written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, French and German. Essays in English appeared every so often in specialized academic journals, yet in the absence of an English-language monograph, Goset remained below the radar. Two reasons for this relative obscurity appear to be the cultural tensions created by the Cold War and the fact that the theatre never toured Britain or the United States.
This situation began to change sixteen years ago. In 1992, the Guggenheim Museum presented Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theatre, an exhibition that captivated New York, and later Chicago, with a display of the large mural paintings Chagall had prepared for Goset’s first home in Moscow. The fate of the murals was tied to the oblivion to which the Soviet authorities had consigned the theatre: after its demise in 1950, the murals had been rolled up and left in storage in the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow; Goset was written out of theatre history. Chagall himself did not know if his work had survived, and only in 1973, when he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1922, did he reunite with the murals and apply his signature to the canvases. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.