Jewish books: Gyorgy Spiro's Captivity portrays First Century Roman Jewry

My review of Captivity by György Spiró appears in New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Jewish books: Gyorgy Spiro's Captivity portrays First Century Roman Jewry

Was there ever an era like the current one when Jews simultaneously participated in their own and a global culture both in the land where their people and civilization originated and in a large diaspora? There was indeed in the Roman Empire during the decades preceding the First Jewish Revolt. That time and place are brought to life through the nearly blind eyes of Uri, a Roman Jew and the central character in György Spiró’s suspenseful 860 page novelCaptivity, which is now available to English readers in Tim Wilkinson’s fine translation. In my New York Journal of Books review I praise the book as a “novel that educates and entertains.”

Uri, whose Roman name is Gaius Theodorus, is a polyglot and polymath who lives in two cultures and doesn’t feel completely at home in either. He finds few aspiring scholars among his fellow Roman Jews of the working and mercantile class, and he is not always welcome among his polytheist fellow Roman citizens. Other reviewers have noted Uri’s misogyny, but that may be the result of both his cultural elitism and the fact that most women in his acquaintance are illiterate.

Uri’s adventures take him from his native Rome to Jerusalem, Alexandria, and back to Rome again. Alexandria is far wealthier and culturally more sophisticated than Rome, but the anti-Semitism Uri experiences in Rome is casual compared to the virulent form he experiences at the hands of Alexandria’s Greeks who, incited by a lame duck praefect, herd their Jewish neighbors into a ghetto and murder them in a manner that calls to mind Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Roman soldiers rescue Alexandia’s Jews in 38 c.e., which is ironic considering that during three revolts starting three decades later Roman legions would kill millions of Jews.

Alexandria’s Jewish community of 300,000 (out of a total one million Egyptian Jews) was centuries older than Rome’s Jewish community which numbered 40,000 in 35 c.e. and grew to 200,000 after the defeat of the First Jewish Revolt. Uri learns that Alexandria’s Jews were Sadducees who followed the laws of the Torah literally and did not believe in an afterlife unlike Rome’s Pharisee Jews whose interpretation of the Torah was arrived at through exegesis and who believed in the future resurrection of the dead coincident with the arrival of the messiah. Spiró’s portrayal of religiously conservative First Century Judaea appears to invite a comparison with ideologically conservative contemporary Israel.

Spiró has said that he chose to write historical fiction rather than a history book to give himself the freedom to make things up. In my NYJB review I mention several historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. In addition to those, others include his indicating that the first day of the Jewish month of Tishri is the day before Rosh Hashanah when it is indeed the first day of the Jewish New Year. Another is at a funeral where eight Jews only two of whom are adult males recite Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that readers of Leon Wieseltier’s book Kaddish know did not yet exist in the First Century, and when it did emerge centuries later would require a quorum of ten Jewish men.

Spiró also writes that the First Jewish Revolt resulted in two million Jewish deaths, but that sounds more like the total of that revolt and the Bar Kochba revolt six decades later. Prior to those revolts the world Jewish population was five and a half million of whom one million lived in Babylonia and Persia in the Parthian Empire with the remaining four and a half million in the Roman Empire the majority of whom lived in the diaspora. That means that the Jewish population of Judaea and Galilee could not have exceeded two million. Since we know that the casualties of the Third Jewish Revolt (the Bar Kochba revolt) exceeded those of the First Jewish Revolt (the Second Jewish Revolt took place in the Diaspora), the total number of Jews killed in the First Jewish Revolt could not have equalled the entire Jewish population of the country.

I close my NYJB review by advising readers not to let such inaccuracies (which only a history nerd such as I would notice) or the book’s length prevent them from enjoying this enlightening, engrossing and accessible page turner.

91 year old William Gass' prose is still gorgeous in Eyes: Novellas and Stories

 

My review appears in New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional remarks (including a longer excerpt from the book and additional biographical info about Gass) that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

91 year old William Gass' prose is still gorgeous in Eyes: Novellas and Stories

“The brown paper wall bore tears and peels and spots made by drops of who knew what — expectorations past. Yet in such stains lay lakes full of reeds and floating ducks and low loglike boats. Instead of the sort of wall which furnished a rich many-toned background for so many of Atget’s documents: instead of the cobbled courtyard that the remainder of the photo surrounded, shadowed, or stood on; instead of gleaming disks of stone with their dark encircling lines; instead of the leaves of trees in a flutter about a field of figures; there might be — instead — a single pock, the bottom of it whitish with plaster: that’s what he had to look at, descend into, dream about, not a rhyming slope of rock, its layers threaded and inked; not the veins of a single leaf like roads on a map, or a tear of paper resembling a tantrum — his rips didn’t even resemble rips — or faded petals that have fallen like a scatter of gravel at the foot of a vase; not an errant flash of light centered and set like a jewel: instead he had a crack, just a crack in a window, a cob’s web, or that of a spider, dewdrop clinging like an injured climber to its only rope of escape; not a clay flowerpot given the attention due to a landscape; not a scratch on the hood of some vehicle, not directional signs painted on the pavement, instructions worn by the wheels of countless cars; not a black eye enlarged to resemble the purple of a blown rose. These were the images in his borrowed books, the material of his mind’s eye, the Lilliputian world grown taller than that tattered Peruvian giant.” — William H. Gass, “In Camera,” Eyes: Novellas and Stories

Literary critic Steven Moore once called William H. Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." The paragraph quoted above from the first novella in Eyes: Novellas and Stories, 91 year old Gass’ new book of short fiction, is evidence that Moore’s assessment is still accurate. In my New York Journal of Books review of Gass’ new book I write: “The two novellas and four short stories in Eyes show his prose virtuosity and his dim view of human nature undiminished at age 91.”

As in his other works of fiction, the characters in the two novellas and four short stories that comprise Eyes have flawed personalities and most are racist. Gass, who grew up with a racist and abusive father and has cited childhood anger as a major influence on his fiction, has said that he writes “to get even.”

Yet though Gass has an adversarial relationship with his characters they also have some of his own attributes, especially a love of aesthetics with respect to a variety of artistic genres and a tendency to discourse at length on favorite artists and the criteria that define their work.

Eyes’ characters include an unscrupulous fine art photography gallery owner who both verbally abuses and educates his protege/employee, a corporate lawyer overwhelmed by requests for charitable donations and other monetary assistance, the piano from the set of the movie Casablanca, a folding chair, a music professor, and a tween-age boy.

I conclude my NYJB review of Eyes with an enthusiastic recommendation “to readers who enjoy dense prose and experimental fiction” for whom “the attentive reading it requires is amply rewarded.” For a fuller discussion of Eyessee that review.

Israeli books: Ronit Matalon's autobiographic novel The Sound of Our Steps

"A fictional and more literary tale of an Egyptian Jewish family’s diminished circumstances after immigrating to Israel is The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon, a novel published today in Dalya Bilu’s English translation by Metropolitan Books. In my New York Journal of Books review I praise it as a 'beautifully written and skillfully translated book that rewards rereading.'” -- from my examiner article Israeli Books: Ronit Matalon's autobiographic novel The Sound of Our Steps, which begins with the next paragraph.

Ronit Matalon

Israeli books: Ronit Matalon's autobiographic novel The Sound of Our Steps 

However politically controversial immigration is, America is a country of immigrants and a land of second chances, so it’s not surprising that immigrant literature is a popular genre. Such stories frequently have a neo-liberal moral that hard work pays off, but there are exceptions. What about the immigrant who never fully assimilates nor attains the same socio-economic status she enjoyed in her native land? Suppose she does not have the option of returning to a country of origin that ethnically cleansed her.

When Israel was founded in 1948 Egypt’s Jewish community numbered about 80,000 the majority of whom initially stayed put. After the 1956 war Egyptian President Nasser started forcing Egypt’s Jews to leave, and after the Six Day War in 1967 those remaining Egyptian Jews were expelled. Egyptian Jews were dispersed to Israel, France, and the United States, and many members of the community were traumatized by the dislocation and never regained their former affluence and social status.

American readers were introduced to one such Egyptian Jewish exile in Lucette Lagnato’s 2007 memoir of her father,The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. In it Lagnado compare’s her father’s cosmopolitan affluence and self-confidence in Cairo with the traumatized immigrant he became who never felt at home in New York where the family lived in socially marginal and economically reduced circumstances.

A fictional and more literary tale of an Egyptian Jewish family’s diminished circumstances after immigrating to Israel is The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon, a novel published today in Dalya Bilu’s English translation by Metropolitan Books. In my New York Journal of Books review I praise it as a “beautifully written and skillfully translated book that rewards rereading.”

The book, whose Hebrew title is Kol Tsa’adenu, won Matalon several awards including Israel’s Bernstein Prize (2009), Bar-Ilan University’s Neuman Prize (2010), and France’s Alberto Benveniste Prize (2013). In 2010 The Hebrew University in Jerusalem awarded her an honorary Ph.D. for her contributions to literature and for her social activism.

The Sound of Our Steps’ non-linear narrative is fragmented into very short chapters whose titles often are the last words of the previous chapter in the manner of arabesque visual arts and literary styles (Matalon once mentioned in an interview that one of her most prized possessions is her father’s Arabic edition of The 1001 Nights) and is shaped in the author’s varied prose styles to create impressionist, cubist, and collage portraits of the immigrant family members in individual chapters and a kaleidoscopic effect overall.

Often readers cannot be sure where a particular chapter fits in the family’s chronology or what precisely is the child narrator’s age, but Matalon does provide a few clues. We know that the mother was 16 when she had her first child, that the oldest child was four when the family immigrated from Egypt to Israel, and that the narrator, who is the author’s alter-ego, is 14 years younger than her oldest sibling, which means her mother was 30 when the narrator was born, and towards the end of the novel when the mother is 70 the narrator is 40. For most of the novel the narrator’s age ranges between pre-school and middle school.

Matalon was born in 1959. If the narrator is her age then the oldest sibling would have been born in 1945 and the family would have immigrated in 1949, and though the characters are fictional and their ages are imprecise, Matalon provides sign posts such as the father’s references to the 1956 war and the Ben Gurionists (David Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister of Israel in 1963), as well as other historical events, such as the 1967 Six Day War and the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt.

For a fuller discussion of The Sound of Our Steps see my NYJB review, which includes character and plot outlines as well as an excerpt from one of the novel’s lyrical passages. Let’s close this article with an excerpt in which Ms. Matalon employs anaphora:

“Apparently she was married against her will.

“Apparently she was tortured.

“Apparently she was beaten during pregnancy.

“Apparently she escaped from her husband’s house in the dead of night, dressed only in her nightgown

“Apparently she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy with my brother when she ran away.

“Apparently there was a scandal: Egypt, Cairo, a girl from a good family.

“Apparently her husband divorced her, he never saw her again, he never acknowledged the child as his son.

“Apparently Maurice (a close friend of her elder brother, a frequent visitor to her parents’ home) was waiting only for this, for her, never mind her condition.

“Apparently they got married, she and Maurice, when she was about to give birth.

“Apparently ‘he was the only one who would have done such a thing,’ only Maurice: to not give a damn about convention or blood ties, to take the child as his son, to love him like a son, to raise him or not, just as he didn’t raise his biological children, with no discrimination.”

Jewish books: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers is a high tech epic

What happens when a down on his luck luddite novelist is hired to ghostwrite a memoir by a math whiz tech mogul who shares his (and the author of this novel’s) name? …At close to 600 pages of dense prose Book of Numbers is not light reading. I close my NYJB review by recommending it to “readers as ambitious as it is.” — from Jewish books: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers is a high tech epic Also see my New York Journal of Books review. Overall, a challenging but fun and rewarding read!


Jewish books: Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers is a high tech epic

What happens when a down on his luck luddite novelist is hired to ghostwrite a memoir by a math whiz tech mogul who shares his (and the author of this novel’s) name? That’s the basic premise of Joshua Cohen’s novel Book of Numberswhich was published last month by Random House.

My New York Journal of Books review opens by comparingBook of Numbers’ many allegorical layers to three dimensional chess. The novel is divided into three sections. The first and last feature the ghostwriter who is also the narrator, while in the middle section the tech mogul who calls himself Principal narrates his life story and that of his company to his ghostwriter.

There is a division of opinion among critics as to whose story and which section(s) of the novel is/are more compelling, including between The New York Times’ daily and Sundaybook reviewers. I side with those reviewers who favor the ghostwriter and his sections of the novel. The fictional novelist is more emotionally complex, whereas Principal is an obsessive compulsive, anal retentive, high functioning autistic person whose narrative doesn’t reveal much of an inner life.

One detail many book critics get wrong is the name of the ghostwriter's wife. Early in the novel she is introduced as Rachava and is referred to thereafter as Rach. Numerous critics assume Rach is short for Rachel, but they're wrong; Rach (rhymes with Bach) is short for Rachava.

In interviews in Bomb Magazine and Vice Cohen revealed that to mimic Principal’s obsessive compulsive fixation on numbers each section of the book has an even number of paragraphs in which each paragraph contains an even number of sentences in honor of computer languages’ base 2 binary code and the base 4 employed by search engines .

His ghostwriter, on the other hand reveals himself to be a word maven with a vocabulary exponentially richer than even Norman Mailer’s. When I read Mailer I have to look up a new word every second or third page. For the first 90 or so pages of Book of Numbers I had to look up two or three new words on every page! So is he just showing off? More often than not after looking up the word and then rereading the sentence in which it appears it turns out that the word in question is indeed le mot juste.

The fictional novelist also has a very high degree of Jewish literacy and is authentically comfortable in his Jewishness. That and the fact that like me he writes book reviews and has translated from Hebrew to English makes me predisposed to like him, though that is tempered by his clueless ambivalence towards women.

At close to 600 pages of dense prose Book of Numbers is not light reading. I close my NYJB review by recommending it to “readers as ambitious as it is.” For a fuller discussion of the novel see that review. 

Milan Kundera's new novella The Festival of Insignificance

"... likewise 86 year old Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera’s new work of fiction, The Festival of Insignificance, which was published last week by New York based publisher Harper in Linda Asher’s fine English translation from the Kundera’s French, is a 128 pp. novella that revisits its author’s recurring themes but in a shorter format." -- from my examiner article (see below). Also see my New York Journal of Books review.

My review appears in New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional excerpts and remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Books: Milan Kundera's new novella The Festival of Insignificance 

Elderly writers tend to write shorter books than they wrote earlier in their careers. Why start a project you might not live to complete? In the decade prior to his announced retirement Philip Roth wrote several short novels; Norman Rush’s most recent novel Subtle Bodies is a fraction of the length of his earlier novels; Amos Oz returned to the short story in his two most recent adult fiction books after decades of writing novels; Lore Segal’s most recent novel Half the Kingdom is under 200 pp.; and likewise 86 year old Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera’s new work of fiction, The Festival of Insignificance, which was published last week by New York based publisher Harper in Linda Asher’s fine English translation from the Kundera’s French, is a 128 pp. novella that revisits its author’s recurring themes but in a shorter format.

One of those themes, Communist politics, is handled with humor based on anecdotes concerning Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as recalled by Nikita Krushchev in his memoir. In one such anecdote Stalin tells his politburo underlings a hunting story in which he found 24 partridges in a tree but had brought only 12 bullets, so he shot 12 partridges, brought them home, got 12 more bullets, returned to the tree and shot the remaining 12 who had not moved from the spot. But Krushchev and his colleagues assumed Stalin’s story was a tall tale and failed to laugh not realizing that Stalin meant it as a (dark allegorical) joke (the partridges representing the politburo members).

Later the politburo members adjourn to the lavatory down the hall except for Stalin who has his own private bathroom. There in supposed privacy they express their revulsion at the callousness of Stalin’s story. But again the joke is on them since the room is bugged, and Stalin is listening to their every word. Readers may wonder where was their indignation when millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the early 1930s or during the purges and show trials of the late 1930s.

Kundera was a member of the Czech Communist party from late adolescence until his expulsion in 1970 when he was in his early forties. His preoccupation with Cold War themes may seem like an anachronism, or perhaps not in view of Russia’s current antagonism towards Europe and the West. Other themes in the book include the virtue of simple living, philosophy, and sex.

In my New York Journal of Books review of the novella I write, “The Festival of Insignificance is being marketed by its publisher as a novel, but this invites unflattering comparisons with Kudera’s previous longer, richer, and more complex novels. On its own terms it is a very good novella, one that extracts and summarizes many on the themes of Kundera’s previous work and offers readers intimidated by philosophical fiction or novels of ideas an appetizer after which they can decide whether to order a main course.” For a fuller discussion of the novella read that review.

Books: Nell Zink's smart and witty 2nd novel Mislaid

"Looking for a brainy yet breezy novel that addresses gender, race, and class issues with levity and has a happy ending? Try Nell Zink’s Mislaid, her second published novel following her critically well-received debut The Wallcreeper in 2014." -- from my New York Journal of Books book review: Mislaid: A Novel by Nell Zink 

"To sum up, Mislaid is an entertaining book worth reading on a plane or train ride to a vacation destination or on a poolside chaise lounge when you get there." -- from my examiner article, Books: Nell Zink's 2nd novel Mislaid is smart and witty

Books: Nell Zink's 2nd novel Mislaid is smart and witty

Seven months after the publication of her critically acclaimed debut The Wallcreeper by indie micro-press Dorothy, Nell Zink’s second novel Mislaid will be published tomorrow by Ecco, an imprint of New York based publisher Harper Collins. In my New York Journal of Books review of Mislaid I praise it as “a funny, entertaining, lightweight highbrow novel . . .” while also noting its lack of depth and character development.

Are levity and depth mutually exclusive? I think not, but to achieve both probably requires more than the three weeks in which Zink claims to have written Mislaid. But rather than dwell on the hypothetical novel Zink or someone else might have written readers should enjoy Mislaid for the smart, witty beach book it is.

LGBTQ readers might also take exception to straight author Zink placing her lesbian and gay male central characters, Peggy and Lee, in a heterosexual marriage, but Mislaid is not only humorous but also an historical novel that begins in 1965. Anyway, sexuality is not either/or but a spectrum as Lee, who had previously only been attracted to other men, discovers when he meets Peggy.

Then there is the novel’s racial aspect. Another reviewer referred to Mislaid as the inverse of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain whose African-American protagonist passes as white. After fleeing her marriage, Peggy and one of her two children pass as black in a poor, rural, African-American community. The dialogue of the white characters passing as black is nearly all in standard English as is that of their nerdy African-American best friends. To her credit Zink does not resort to Amos and Andy style pseudo-ebonics.

The Wallcreeper also featured a failed marriage, and Zink, who has lived in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Israel, Germany and has been married several times, takes a skeptical view of marriage. Her last marriage was to an Israeli poet, and when it ended 15 years ago she moved from Tel-Aviv to Berlin where, as she told The Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “I could have hot superficial sexual relationships with guys I otherwise ignored. This is so, so key for artistic praxis – frees up incredible amounts of time.” According to an article that appeared several years ago in Psychology Today Tel-Aviv has three single women for every two single men; it’s a terrific place for straight single men, but not so great for straight single women including ones who aren’t marriage minded.

To sum up, Mislaid is an entertaining book worth reading on a plane or train ride to a vacation destination or on a poolside chaise lounge when you get there. For a fuller discussion of the novel read my NYJB review.

Books: Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere by Georges Perec

What does fiction about art forgery have to do with Jewish identity?

Books: on Jewish and artistic authenticity wrt Georges Perec's first novel 

In my New York Journal of Books review I praise Perec’s first novel as “a fully realized and mature work of fiction.” For a fuller discussion of Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere read my New York Journal of Books review

My review appears in New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

On Jewish and artistic authenticity wrt Georges Perec's first novel

Shortly after Germany’s surrender in 1945 Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration, specifically for selling one of Holland’s national art treasures, a Vermeer painting, to Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Van Meegeren’s defense was that he had not sold Göring a genuine Vermeer but a fake, and as proof he painted another copy of the same painting in his jail cell.

This incident inspired at least two works of literary fiction about art forgers. The first was American writer William Gaddis’ 1955 experimental 958 page long novel The Recognitions, which enjoyed a status in the 1950s comparable to that achieved by David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the 1980s.

The second was French writer Georges Perec’s 1960 initially unpublished 144 page first novel Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere whose original manuscript was lost and whose text was posthumously reconstructed from carbon copies by Perec’s translator and biographer David Bellos, whose English translation of the book was published by University of Chicago Press earlier this month. In my New York Journal of Books review I write that this first novel “will provide Perec’s fans a fuller view of his oeuvre, can serve as an accessible entry point for readers who are new to its author, and is recommended to readers of literary fiction who enjoy dense prose presented in multipage paragraphs.”

In his introduction to the novel Bellos points to another of Perec’s possible sources of inspiration, Jean Paul Sartre’s discussion of authenticity and inauthenticity in his 1944 book Réflexions sur la question juive (in English Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946). To Sartre an authentic Jew is one who acquires some degree of literacy in Jewish languages and literature, performs Jewish rituals, and affiliates with the Jewish community and its institutions, while an inauthentic Jew is one whose Jewish identity is merely a defensive reaction to anti-Semitism.

Perec inferred a similar artistic authenticity and inauthenticity exemplified on the one hand by real artists who create original works of art and on the other hand by art forgers. Portrait of a Man’s protagonist is an art forger who attempts to create a work of art that is both a convincing fake and at the same time an original work of art. When he fails to achieve the impossible he blames and murders his boss. In our own time we have seen personal failure precede murder in the cases of Timothy McVeigh whose application to an army Special Forces course was rejected several years before the Oklahoma City bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev whose lack of U.S. citizenship prevented him from qualifying for the U.S. Olympic boxing team and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who flunked out of college shortly before the Boston Marathon bombing.

Ironically although Perec grew up in a Yiddish speaking home as the child of Eastern European immigrants, and though, according to Bellos, Perec’s correspondence when he was writing Portrait of a Man was full of Yiddish influenced witticisms, there is no Jewish content in Perec’s fiction, not in this first novel nor in his subsequent books (Perec, a life long smoker, died of lung cancer at age 46 in 1982).

In an article in the anthology The Yiddish Presence in European Literature Bellos points out that in the 1950s Eli Weisel and André Schwarz-Bart were ghettoized within French publishing as “Jewish writers” and how contemporary aspiring Jewish French writers including Perec decided to avoid being similarly marginalized. Bellos explains: “The secular and universalist ideals that brought Perec’s relatives from Poland to Paris in the first place had forged the young man’s conception of what it meant to be a writer, and that conception allotted no role to linguistic or ethnic or religious particularity.” It also indicates the nature and extent of cultural diversity in post-war France and its literature.

All this suggests the following questions: can an inauthentic Jew be an authentic literary artist, or are those two forms of authenticity in fact not analogous, and is authenticity an objective and definable quality, or is it subjective and visceral? In my New York Journal of Books review I praise Perec’s first novel as “a fully realized and mature work of fiction.” For a fuller discussion of Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere read my NYJB review.

Portrait of a Man (The Condottiero) by Antonello da Messina (1475,Venice, Italy), Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Jewish books: The Empire of the Senses probes Jewish identity in Weimar Germany

"Alexis Landau’s cinematically descriptive, character-driven debut novel explores ethnic identity via an intermarried family in WWI and Weimar era Germany, i.e. before anti-Semitism became official state policy legally codifying ethnic definitions." -- from my New York Journal of Books review in which I praise the book as “handsomely written” as well as a “powerful and compelling novel.” My additional remarks and excerpts from the book, which appeared in a different and now defunct publication, begin with the next paragraph.

Jewish books: The Empire of the Senses probes Jewish identity in Weimar Germany

Where does acculturation end and assimilation begin? How do overlapping ethnic/religious and national identities on the one hand, and majority and minority cultures on the other, shape our individual identities? These are some of the issues Alexis Landau explores in the setting of an intermarried family in Germany in the second and third decades of the Twentieth Century (before the Nazis took power) in her debut novel The Empire of the Senses, which was published earlier this month by New York based publisher Pantheon, an imprint of Random House/Bertelsmann.

In my New York Journal of Books review I praise the book as “handsomely written” as well as a “powerful and compelling novel.” I also point out a few historical errors which can be viewed as rookie mistakes. The wealth of detail with which Landau describes Berlin in this period is impressive, but her knowledge of eastern Europe’s political geography between the wars is less reliable.

The family whose story the novel relates is the Perlmutters: Lev, the Jewish German husband and father whose family immigrated to Germany from southern Poland (then part of Austria-Hungary) when he was two; Josephine, the aristocratic Christian German wife and mother; and their children Franz and Vicki. The first third of the novel takes place during the First World War and describes Lev’s army service in Latvia with the occasional scene of Josephine and the kids back home in Berlin. The final two thirds takes place in Berlin in 1927-28 when Lev and Josephine’s marriage is in trouble and the young adult children each identify with his/her opposite gender parent.

Although the temporal setting predates Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933 and the Holocaust in the early 1940s, Landau foreshadows these with place names. When in 1914 Lev asks a fellow soldier where he’s from the man replies Dachau, the suburb of Munich where the famous concentration camp would be built 19 years later. When Vicki enjoys walks along the Wannsee lakefront in the 1920s knowledgable readers will associate the spot with the January 1942 Wannsee Conference where Nazi officials planned the Holocaust.

Later historic events are also called to mind by the activities of Nazi thugs in the 1920s, as when Lev, Josephine, and Vicki witness a young gentile woman having her head shaved for associating with a Jewish man.

“Lev glanced over at Josephine, standing on the other side of Vicki. She held her head high, staring impassively ahead, as if surmising the sunset or some other benign natural phenomenon. How did she not feel shattered by this? She, who had also committed the sin of loving a Jewish man, now gazed stonily at the poor girl. Perhaps she’s afraid too, Lev thought, and she’s trying to put on a strong front for Vicki, as I am. Or perhaps she’s oblivious to the implications of this, thinking it unfortunate but impersonal, as if witnessing a half-dead bird twitching on the side of the road before speeding by, already on to the next thought.”

Landau’s command of figurative language is also evident in this description of Josephine walking home from a bakery:

“Holding the bread to her chest, she made her way home, thinking of those dreamy winter afternoons, when the light looked as it did now, the crystalline blue of the sky slipping into a faded purple, as faint as a bruise.”

Sensory language such as this in part explains the novel’s title, which unfortunately is similar to and reminiscent of the titles of Japanese director Nagisa Oshima's art house erotic movies In The Realm of the Senses (1976) and The Empire of Passion (1978). I conclude my NYJB review by recommending The Empire of the Senses to readers of literary historical fiction. See that review for a fuller discussion of the novel.

In an interview Landau said that one of this novel’s minor characters will be the protagonist of her next novel, which will be set in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s. I look forward to reading it and this talented author's other future books.

Israeli books: Five Selves explores five inner lives

“...recommended to readers who enjoy interior prose and psychological literary fiction.” -- from my review of Five Selves by Emanuela Barasch Rubinstein in New York Journal of Books. My additional remarks and excerpts from the book that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Israeli books: Five Selves explores five inner lives

Five Selves, a book of five short stories and the first fiction book by Israeli humanities scholar Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein published last month by British publisher Holland House Books, explores the psyches of five characters, three of whom are nameless and female, while the two with names are male. Perhaps the three female protagonists represent different sides of the author, or maybe not.

In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend Five Selves “to readers who enjoy interior prose and psychological literary fiction.” All five characters are ill at ease in their social environments. Some seem to be temperamentally outside the mainstream, introverts in an even more extroverted society (Israel) than America, though the first one we meet is in mourning and the last is hospitalized after a traffic accident and suffering from amnesia, extreme conditions that tell us little of what they are normally like.

The first character has the most personal voice of the five and like the author is an academic who has lost her father. Going straight from the shiva to an overseas scholarly conference, in her bereavement she lacks the strength to shake loose her clingy, also mourning, misery-loves-company host and explore the foreign city on her own. Back in her hotel room she recalls her father in his final illness:

“Unconscious, surrounded by endless tubes, he seemed like a complete stranger, and it was impossible to recognize the man that he was. His vital, sharp expression was replaced by a deep coma, and my attempts to trace the familiar features were futile. It seemed to me that a terrible mistake was taking place here, and we were all gathered around the bed of another old man, a stranger, to witness his death. By his body you could tell he had reached a very old age—apparently he ate very little in his last years since he was skinny, and the tone of his face was grayish, almost silver, creating the notion that he was already in the process of passing to another world. Wrapped in a hospital robe, tubes and needles piercing his thin body, the dreary light of the hospital didn’t bother him at all, and he was entirely indifferent to the loud whistles of the machine inserting oxygen into his lungs.”

The characters in the other stories include a young woman who identifies more with her immigrant grandmother than with her Sabra mother, a rigidly neurotic teacher, and a boy who must overcome an irrational fear of dogs. The young woman and the teacher are old-school and at odds with their more modern peers, while the boy has a clearly defined disorder which he gradually learns to overcome in what is the most hopeful of the five stories.

But from the hopeful end of the penultimate story we are cast into the despair of the last one whose protagonist like the first character’s father lies helpless in a hospital room:

“If I could, I would escape from this place, abandon these oppressive lights lacking the slightest compassion, penetrating me, ignoring the pain they cause, attempting to illuminate without mercy what should be left in the dark. Even if they can be endured for a minute, this beam of light leaves me breathless, suffocated by a desire to throw myself into the darkness.”

For a fuller discussion of Five Selves see my NYJB review.

Israeli books: Gail Hareven's Lies, First Person is a visceral novel of ideas

  "There are books that make us feel intensely and others that make us think deeply; one that does both is Gail Hareven’s opalescent and psychologically complex eleventh novel Lies, First Person (in the original Hebrew Hashkarim Ha’aharonim Shel Hagoof which literally translates as The Body’s Last Lies), which is only the second (The Confessions of Noa Weber) of her 13 books for adults to be published in English in Dalya Bilu’s fine translation." - From my New York Journal of Books review

Lies, First Person, Gail Hareven’s second novel to be translated into English (the eleventh of her thirteen adult books published in Hebrew), which is published today by Open Letter Books, is both an emotionally compelling narrative and a novel of ideas. Its characters find different ways of coping with the emotional aftermath of an unreported and unpunished crime, and the novel invites its readers to consider such questions as the nature of evil and the justification of vengeance and retribution." - From my examiner.com article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Israeli books: Gail Hareven's Lies, First Person is a visceral novel of ideas

Lies, First Person, Gail Hareven’s second novel to be translated into English (the eleventh of her thirteen adult books published in Hebrew), which is published today by Open Letter Books, is both an emotionally compelling narrative and a novel of ideas. Its characters find different ways of coping with the emotional aftermath of an unreported and unpunished crime, and the novel invites its readers to consider such questions as the nature of evil and the justification of vengeance and retribution.

In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I praise it as a “beautifully written and powerful” … “multifaceted book that rewards rereading.” But I also have several reservations not least of which is the first person narrator’s endorsement of vigilante retribution. I unpack these issues in my NYJB review which also includes a plot synopsis. In an interview in the Jerusalem Report Hareven says “that vigilantes do not generally add justice to the world.”

But in the same interview Hareven finds “The use of the first person creates identification with the narrator.” For her narrator Elinor, “evil is a tangible being incarnated in Gothilf” (Elinor’s sister’s rapist). Hareven continues, “I don’t share all of the viewpoints of my characters, but I completely share this feeling of Elinor’s.” Hareven goes on to endorse a view of evil she attributes to American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor as “an ancient drive,” and that people commit evil deeds because they are indeed evil.

In my NYJB review I cite American writer Ron Rosenbaum’s diametrically opposite view expressed in an interview in The Daily Beast, “I’ve come to think that evil adheres in ideas more than in people. People are seduced by evil ideas.” Readers of Lies, First Person can decide for themselves whether to side with Elinor and Hareven or with Rosenbaum on the nature of evil.

In the Jerusalem Report interview Hareven also said that after writing Lies, First Person she began to question prisoner exchanges in which terrorists are freed: “I tried to understand in a serious way what this does to the victims and their families.” But Elinor and Hareven’s apparent endorsement of retribution has wider implications for their country which often finds itself, as was the case last summer, in retributive cycles of attack and counterattack with those very terrorists from which it is difficult to extract itself.

In my NYJB review I also point out that although Hebrew is a more concise language than English the two editions are the same number of pages. What, I wonder, is missing in the English edition? In the Jerusalem Report interview Hareven reveals that at least two sections of the novel contain literary allusions that non-Hebrew readers will not get, and so she decided to omit them from the English edition. Local Hebrew readers can find three copies of the Hebrew edition (ha-Shekarim ha-aharonim shel ha-guf) in Brooklyn Public Library. For English readers BPL has ordered eight copies, and New York Public Library has ordered ten copies. With so many ideas and emotions to discuss, Lies, First Person is an excellent choice for book groups.