The Glass Room

By Simon Mawer

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.

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Jews and Sex

By Nathan Abrams

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?

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Illuminations

By Eva Hoffman

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.

Forced Labour

For Charles Patterson

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

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Dictation

By Cynthia Ozick

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.

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Laish

By Aharon Appelfeld

Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

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Reform or Die by Hagai Segal

‘The essence of the problem of legislating for electoral reform [in Israel] is that the surgeon is also the patient’
Vernon Bogdanor’s comment written in the early 1990s is as accurate today as it was then. Another Israeli election has passed and another deeply unsatisfactory political picture has emerged. The Israeli public has spoken: the party that won most seats is not in government, it has taken two months for the government to be formed, and that government is a tense marriage between Right, Far-Right and Centre-Left. For anyone aquainted with Israel’s political history will not be surprised.
The current electoral system was introduced during the pre-state Yishuv — the government-in-waiting of the future state of Israel — and it was designed to be as simple and representative as possible, allowing for formal representation to the many diverse groups that made up Mandate Palestine’s Zionist community in order to ensure unity in the movement. It was never intended to be Israel’s permanent electoral system. Read more

Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

The first political pamphlet I ever wrote was in 1978. It revealed and denounced the indifference of British newspapers and television to the problems facing the black and Asian communities in the UK. It asked why there were no Afro-Caribbean or Asian broadcasters, reporters, news-readers or by-lines in our papers. I cited the anti-Semitism of the Daily Mail and Daily Express in the 1930s when they told readers that too many Jews were being allowed into Britain from Germany and that our small island could not face any more aliens arriving to disturb social harmony or compete for professional jobs. I argued that in some respects the media treatment of the then BME communities in the 1960s and 1970s had some similarities.
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Debating the Debate

‘Anglo-Jewry finds its voice’, trumpeted the front page of the Jewish Chronicle during the harrowing days of the Gaza bombardment.

What voice exactly was this? What was it saying? More importantly, for whom was it speaking?

If the tangible feelings of dismay, paralysis and incredulity around me were anything to go by, whole swathes of Anglo-Jewry were left unspoken for.

Urgently, it seemed, a platform was needed for those unheard voices. The following is a transcript of the first conversation organised by the JQ to establish what these voices might be saying. What are the issues? How might they be broached? How, as a community, might we manage these differences?

The conversation was chaired by Jonathan Boyd (acting director of Jewish Policy Research). The participants were Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg (Rabbi of New North London Syngogue), Douglas Krikler (Chief Executive of the UJIA), Paul Usiskin (Co-chair of Peace Now UK), Geoffrey Alderman, (Columnist, Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham) Kevin Sefton, (Limmud Trustee) Joseph Finlay (Musician, involved with Jewdas and the Moishe House), Keith Kahn-Harris (Sociologist, convenor of New Jewish Thought www.newjewishthought.org) and Daniella Peled (journalist and analyst who specialises on the Middle East).

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The Language Barrier by Gabrielle Rifkind

Language is the medium that allows us to understand the world. We see nature, society and human motives not as they are but as our language allows us to see.

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Three Sides of a Square by Michelene Wandor

SCENE 14

(At dinner. Sitting cross-legged on the ground.)

GERTRUDE Some more lamb? Spinach? Rice and beans.

LAWRENCE We are making schemes for the government of the universe. From Cairo.

GERTRUDE We are treating Mesopotamia as if it is an isolated unit, when it is part of Arabia. Its politics are connected with the great Arab question, We need some sort of wide scheme which will ultimately form the basis of our relations with the Arabs. Why do we continue to muddle through, wading through blood and tears which need never have been shed?

LAWRENCE The first step is to remove the Turks. Have you eaten ices, made of milk, snow and lemonade?

GERTRUDE Do you know the best way to catch fish? You put a basin weighted with stones in the stream. In the basin you put some bread. You cover the basin with a cloth, in which there are a few holes. The fish swim in to eat the bread, and can’t get out again.

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Communal Singing

These days, when only the mentally ill, the professionally hired and the irrepressibly Welsh have the nerve to do it, it’s easy to forget there was a time when public singing was as much a part of daily life as public drinking and public moaning about public transport. Students crooned the anthem of their academy, factory workers lullaby’d their shift away, pubs rattled to the rafters with cryptic lyrics involving sailors (I am basing this largely on Ken Loach films: although of the right age to remember such things, I’m also Jewish, with about as much experience of singing in pubs as I have of abseiling down the Alps). My wife’s grandfather serenaded her grandmother beneath her window through the cruel Transylvanian winter. And while not everyone could be a nightingale, even the croakiest crow knew whether he was tenor, alto or baritone. But say serenade or baritone to my teenage Zak, and he’d assume it was new medication for his attention-deficit disorder.

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Jews and Shoes

By Edna Nashon

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.

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There’s No Place Like Home by Joseph Finlay

Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as children of modernity, that we can never be fully ‘at home’, that communities are virtual, free flowing and in flux, and that identities are multiple. We know, from the tradition of post-colonial thought that homelands are always ‘imagined’. We know these things as a society, at least in part, because Jews have taught them to us. As the pioneers of the modern project, Jewish ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were instrumental in creating a world where the borders of nation states were transcended and internationalism became a defining value. Read more

The Talmud

Ed. Rabbi Norman Solomon

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.

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Faith and The Believers

What prompted you to explore a specifically Jewish family?

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. Read more

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

By Tony Judt

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.

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Shadow Play

On summer evenings, Uncle Nathan used to put on shadow plays. With nothing but ten fingers and a beam of light against a plain white wall, he astounded us with lions and monkeys, alligators and train engines. All eyes watched, riveted, when the silhouette magic began. He didn’t ask for much — a wall, a light. In the back rows of wedding halls, or when holiday dinners were winding down, his fans would gather to marvel: a butterfly, an antelope, Theodor Herzl, a turtle.

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Putting the Id back in Yid by Stephen Frosh

The Freudian century began in Vienna but found its eventual home in America. There it was that most psychoanalysts wound up and entered the blood stream of the culture so that Freudian speech and American speech — or at least a certain kind of American speech: broad, aspiring, complaining, witty, frenzied, guilt-ridden — ran together.
At its height, mid-century, American psychoanalysis testified to the presence of unconscious sexual or violent wishes that were geared towards producing trouble. Ego psychology assumed that something explosive (the id) needed controlling and turning to good use. Freud lived at a time of social upheaval and genuine revolutionary fervour, in which the masses, like the unconscious, were breaking free from centuries-long repression. It was also the start of a period of Jewish emancipation that shared these same characteristics. The Jews of the West had burst out of their ghettoes like water breaching a dam, and, despite their continuing exclusion and the continued growth of anti-Semitism (or maybe because of it), their immense, pent-up energy was visible everywhere. Freud’s own work depended on this moment of Jewish freedom which existed in complex relation to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism.

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Afterword: on translating The Seventh Well

Fred Wander called his recollections Das gute Leben,  The Good Life — good not in either of its narrow senses of virtuous or epicurean, but rich, full, kindly, generous.  Its alternate title is Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken — something like ‘remaining cheerful in the midst of horror. ’ He was born in Vienna in 1917,  and died there almost ninety years later,  in 2006. The horror was, if one may so put it,  in the midst of the cheerfulness. Between 1939 and 1945,  he was an inmate of twenty different Nazi camps in France, Germany, and Poland.   Read more

A Catalogue of Jewish Symbols by Ilan Stavans

I feel a contentment in defeat.
— J.L.B., ‘Deutches Requiem’

Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the Left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn’t overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.) More often than not, Jews and their contribution to Western Civilization, are ignored. Is this silence a form of attack? Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, never addressed Jewishness in an upfront fashion. Paz covered every single imaginable topic in the humanities in his magisterial oeuvre yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. Exceptions to the rule are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Fuentes has several novels on the subject: A Change of Skin on the Nazis, The Hydra Head on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Terra Nostra on the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492; and Vargas Llosa authored The Storyteller, about a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon. Vargas has also, in his sustained non-fiction career, debated issues such as anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Borges was interested in Jews, not as people overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervour and personal passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors. This is not to say he didn’t socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he befriended a number of Jews of Polish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and Simón Jichlinski. They were ‘my two bosom friends,’ Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces published in The New Yorker. He also became close to Rafael Cansinos-Assens, the latter a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted him was the Jew as symbol. Read more

Now

the last leaves

on the trees

leaking their slow

reds and golds

the workers

sluggish in the fields

who are you

that I don’t know

how to look away

don’t want to    your eyes

entering mine

the day is short

the night

long the Master near

The Outrage: a true story

‘Some people have ingrown toenails. This guy has an ingrown soul,’ Thomas grumbled. It was 1960, and he had just returned from an interview about his final-year project with a professor he wholeheartedly disliked. ‘He talked to me as if I was subhuman,’ he fumed.

Thomas was an English-speaking European, born in Sri Lanka. His parents had a penchant for Eastern meditation. His mother was a Spanish artist, who had a disconcerting habit of  leaving the table in the middle of a meal to stand on her head in a corner. His father was a Swedish architect, who would go out for a short walk and forget to return for several days. Unsurprisingly, Thomas too was an unconventional character. From the mid-1950s he was studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of  Technology in Zurich. When he decided to apply for permanent residence in Switzerland he began his CV with the words: ‘My father and mother met on an adventurous journey to India.’ I warned him that this would not predispose the Swiss authorities in his favour, but he insisted and was duly turned down. Read more

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

In Empire of Their Own, a worthy, scrupulous and curiously dull account of how immigrant Jews founded the state of mind known as ‘Hollywood’— first in America, then latterly throughout the wider world — its author, Neal Gabler, glosses their Diaspora from the European ghettoes and shtetls, thus: Carl Laemmle, born 1867 in Laupheim, a small village in south-western Germany, ‘…prevailed upon his father, a penurious land speculator, to let him come to America to seek his fortune. He would eventually found Universal Pictures.’ Adolph Zukor, who was born in the Tokay region of Hungary and orphaned as a child, ‘…was bundled off to an uncle nearby, a steely, bloodless rabbinical scholar. Lonely, independent and unloved, Zukor, like Laemmle, petitioned to leave for America and a new life. He would later build Paramount Pictures.’ Then there was William Fox, also from Hungary, whose parents were the émigrés, but whose experiences of ‘hawking soda pop, sandwiches and chimney black he would… parlay into the Fox Film Corporation’.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

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When Walking Next to Chain Link Fences

I love to strum the run

of tuneless anti-notes

these braided harps have strung

from post to post to post,

dividing fenced-in dogs

from lucky ones on walks

and Barbie-trapping bogs

of grass from sidewalks.

And when stray branches beckon

like wishbones from a shrub

I wish for one good weapon

and break off a billy club

with which I investigate

a picket fence’s gaps;

with which I decapitate

the weed between each slat.

And when the fence is iron

I clang my club across

its bars the way a warden

patrols his problem blocks.

But when these fences give

way to boundless lawns

my hand becomes the sieve

that can’t contain my yawns.

The Persistence of Memory: Text and Image in the Art of Arnold Daghani

According to those who knew him best, the artist Arnold Daghani (1909–1985) had an exceptionally retentive memory for events, names, dates and places. For him, as for other survivors, memory became what Laurence Langer, in his study Holocaust Testimonies, calls an ‘insomniac faculty’, implying that the process of remembering is not one of reviving memories, for ‘there is no need to revive what has never died’. Read more