The Memory Chalet

By Tony Judt

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.

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Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

By Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Queen:     If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet:     Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two

I

In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my Mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road. Read more

Elena Shvarts (1948-2010)

Elena Shvarts, the Russian poet, died earlier this year. As one of her translators I found myself summing up her life and works over and over again — a sad task, and one which feels somehow intrusive and limiting: the condensing of a life of poetry into three paragraphs, mostly for people who are not yet readers of her poems; an element of marketing, to win over the non-readers; a few anecdotes and beautiful phrases… Nothing of the bewilderment and disbelief we feel in bereavement, or even of the nature of bereavement which deceives us, tells us we should wait for more poems, convinces us it is impossible that the wise and eloquent voice is no longer at the end of the phone line in a St Petersburg flat. Read more