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.

Jewish books: The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. by Gina Nahai

“. . . the novel’s epic sweep, engaging prose, suspenseful plot, sense of humor, and introduction to a fascinating subculture outweigh its flaws.” - from my New York Journal of Books review. For additional remarks also see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Jewish books: Gina Nahai's multi-genre Iranian-Jewish-American epic 5th novel

Some of our finest contemporary North American writers under the age of 60 immigrated to this continent as children and occupy a cultural middle ground between their countries of origin and the United States and Canada. Most contemporary Jewish North American immigrant writers were born in the various republics of the former Soviet Union, but some also came from the middle east, most notably Iran. Members of both immigrant communities can be found on both the east and west coasts, but the Russians tend to live in the northeast corridor, while the largest Iranian-Jewish community is in Los Angeles.

Iranian-Jewish-American writer Gina Nahai’s fifth novel,The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. (published last month by Akashic Books), starts in Los Angeles but flashes back to Iran for the first third of the book, and then returns to Los Angeles while also mentioning Iranian Jewish communities in Long Island and Canada (without, however, mentioning Iranian Israelis who, though not fabulously wealthy, include a former president, cabinet ministers, and an IDF chief of staff). In my New York Journal of Books review I write, “the novel’s epic sweep, engaging prose, suspenseful plot, sense of humor, and introduction to a fascinating subculture outweigh its flaws.”

Before the Iranian revolution of 1979 upper middle class and wealthy Iranians were considered the most western-like middle easterners (though secular Turks might beg to differ), but in The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. we learn of such Iranian concepts as aabehroo, which “means making sure you do everything in compliance with society’s idea of what is right, that you live honorably and protect the sanctity of your family’s name and reputation.” Americans, by contrast, are far less conformist, and some of us are frankly shameless, though the same could be said of the novel’s Iranian-Jewish villain.

Nahai uses magical realism to represent middle eastern superstition and also reveals class and regional animosities within Iran’s Jewish community where wealthy and highly educated residents of Tehran viewed less affluent provincials with condescension. After fleeing revolutionary Iran with the clothes on their backs many of the upper class immigrants had to start over in this country from scratch. Some have subsequently risen to even greater heights while others have had to adjust to diminished circumstances.

The novel also presents the boundaries between pre-revolutionary Iran’s Jewish and Muslim communities as more porous than outsiders might have guessed. For a fuller discussion of The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. see my NYJB review.

Israeli books: Assaf Gavron's The Hilltop is set in a West Bank settlement

“The Hilltop is recommended to all readers who enjoy a good story grounded in current events.” -- from my New York Journal of Books review. Also see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Israeli books: Assaf Gavron's The Hilltop is set in a West Bank settlement

Israeli fiction writers have set their narratives in rural kibbutzim, moshavim, in small mainly Sephardic towns, in urban settings in Israel’s three largest cities, as well as overseas, and now novelist Assaf Gavron has set his fifth novel and seventh book The Hilltop (published last week by New York publisher Scribner) in perhaps the most controversial setting of all, an unauthorized West Bank settlement. In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend The Hilltop “to all readers who enjoy a good story grounded in current events.”

British author William Sutcliffe also set his Young Adult novel The Wall in what appears to be a West Bank settlement, but his settlers are represented by a single abusive two dimensional character. By contrast, Gavron’s settlers in The Hilltop are more complicated and more believable characters.

Roughly one in twenty Jewish Israelis lives in a West Bank settlement. Four fifths of these settlers live in settlements close enough to Israel’s 1949 armistice line that they could be incorporated into Israel as part of land swaps in a comprehensive peace agreement.

Gavron’s settlers in the fictional settlement Ma’aleh Hermesh C are among the fifth of settlers who would have to be evacuated in the event of such a peace agreement, and since it is an unauthorized settlement, an order for its evacuation has already been issued. Whether that evacuation order will ever be executed is a central plot element in The Hilltop.

My recommendation “to all readers” in my NYJB review may be too broad. Perhaps the ideal reader is one who can care about the novel’s characters (even though they show no empathy toward their Palestinian neighbors) while at the same time disapprove of their settlement enterprise and its objectives, one of which is to prevent a comprehensive peace agreement to end the Israel-Palestine conflict through the partition of the country into two states, Israel and Palestine.

This past spring U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

There are indeed Israelis who share Secretary Kerry’s apprehensions, but they include some of Israel’s newly affluent shoppers who consume organic produce and dairy products produced in settlements similar to Gavron’s fictional Ma’aleh Hermesh C. For a fuller discussion of The Hilltop see my NYJB review.

Assaf Gavron

Jewish books: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 “The Betrayers succeeds by combining thought provoking ethical dilemmas with dramatic tension in an engaging prose style and is enthusiastically recommended.” - from my New York Journal of Books review (which includes spoilers). For additional remarks, excerpts, and an exploration of the novel as a roman a clef see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Jewish books: David Bezmozgis' roman a clef second novel The Betrayers succeeds

Encyclopaedia Britannica defines "roman à clef, ( French: 'novel with a key')" as a "novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters." In my New York Journal of Books review (which includes spoilers) of David Bezmozgis' second novel The Betrayers (which will be published by Little Brown on September 23, 2014) I describe its protagonist Baruch Kotler as combining "some aspects of Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and even more of those of Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician turned NGO executive Natan Sharansky."

Let's explore the similarities and differences between these fictional and real life men. Like Sharansky, Kotler is short and bald, was a human rights activist in the USSR who sought the right to emigrate to Israel, was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag (Kotler serves all 13 years but Sharansky was released after nine years in a prisoner swap) which separated him from his wife who had already emigrated, upon his release emigrated to Israel and became a successful politician leading a political party representing a voting bloc of fellow Russian immigrants. Kotler remains in politics in 2014 while in real life Sharansky left politics in 2006. Avigdor Lieberman filled the vacuum created by Sharansky's exit from politics and created his own political party which won the allegiance of the same Russian immigrant voters who had previously supported Sharansky. Like Sharansky, Kotler is a saintly idealist, but unlike Sharansky (as far as we know) the fictional Kotler is also an adulterer. Unlike Sharansky, and like Lieberman, Kotler stood trial in Israel and was exonerated. Kotler is six years younger than Sharansky and four years older than Lieberman.

In my NYJB review I advise liberal readers to "ignore or overlook the protagonist’s right-wing Zionist politics; the correctness of his principles matters less than his steadfastness in standing by them." It is interesting to note how in a swing of the political pendulum many post-Communist Russian gentiles have become conservative Christians and likewise many Russian Jews (both in the diaspora and in Israel) have become right-wing Zionists.

Bezmozgis uses a Russian television game show to represent the vacuousness of contemporary Russian popular culture: "This is what they had raised from the scraps of communism. This was what the struggle for freedom and democracy had delivered. Bread and circuses. Mostly circuses. From one grand deception to another was their lot. First the Soviet sham, then the capitalist. For the ordinary citizen, these were just two different varieties of poison. The current variety served in a nicer bottle."

The novel's title refers not only to Kotler's adultery but also to the supposed friend who decades earlier had denounced Kotler to the KGB. In this book about moral choices Kotler, who refuses to be politcally blackmailed, advises his son who contemplates disobeying a military order he considers immoral, "If you think you have no choice, look harder. There is always a choice. A third way, if not a fourth. Whether we have the strength to make those choices is another matter. Of which I am no less guilty than anyone else."

The advance uncorrected proof of The Betrayers refers to the novel's venue as “Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine” and the date as summer 2014, but in the real world Crimea was invaded and annexed by Russia in March 2014. In an afterward Bezmozgis acknowledges “Clearly setting my novel in the summer of 2014, as I intended, is no longer feasible. I will have to find another solution.” It will be interesting to see what that solution looks like in the published edition.

For a fuller discussion of the novel see my NYJB review, which concludes, "The Betrayers succeeds by combining thought provoking ethical dilemmas with dramatic tension in an engaging prose style and is enthusiastically recommended." 

  David Bezmozgis

Book review: 10:04 by Ben Lerner

“. . . the pleasure this novel provides is found less in what happens to the characters than in the language Lerner commands to relate that and his various cogitations, as well as in time spent in the company of a first rate mind.” -- from my New York Journal of Books review. For additional remarks and excerpts from the novel also see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Books: Ben Lerner's 10:04 fulfills and surpasses the promise of his 2011 debut

Ben Lerner’s second self-referential novel 10:04, which is published this week by New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Faber and Faber imprint, fulfills and surpasses the promise of his 2011 debut novel Leaving Atocha Station. His best writing, however, is found in his poetry. In my New York Journal of Books review of 10:04 I write, “the pleasure this novel provides is found less in what happens to the characters than in the language Lerner commands to relate that and his various cogitations, as well as in time spent in the company of a first rate mind.”

One of the plot elements in 10:04 is how Lerner’s conception of the work we are reading evolves. When at the outset his agent conveys the news that a handsome advance for the as yet unwritten book is forthcoming and asks what he plans to write, the fictional Lerner answers to himself “‘I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously,’ I should have said, ‘a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.’” His conception of the book will continue to evolve at different points in the narrative until he replaces the earlier concept with the book we are reading.

Lerner like his fellow New Yorkers has a heightened awareness of the electrical grid’s vulnerability because the action of the novel takes place between Hurricane Irene (which was disastrous for upstate and parts of New England but a big nothing here in the Big Apple) and Super Storm Sandy (which destroyed shorefront homes and blacked out parts of the city and left other parts unaffected other than rerouted transit lines).

10:04 also includes other bits of recent history such as Occupy Wall Street one of whose out of town protestors Lerner provides a shower and home cooked meal. An inexperienced cook, as Lerner cooks for a stranger he chastises himself for not reciprocating the meals his friends have cooked for him, “but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn’s boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism.” The novel also includes a description of a work shift at the Park Slope Food Co-op.

The novel’s title 10:04 comes from Christian Marclay’s 24 hour video The Clock which the fictional Lerner watches and critiques. “When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one on the screen, I was indicating that a distance remained between art and the mundane.” And that reminds us of the distance and presumed difference between Lerner’s fictional narrative and the life he actually lived at that time.

In his previous novel Leaving The Atocha Station the fictional Lerner is a self-described bipolar compulsive liar, but in10:04 he appears comparatively even tempered. As I point out in my NYJB review, in 10:04 “the fictional Lerner has a real potentially life threatening medical condition, a minuscule perforation in his aorta, that must be monitored.” And having something real to worry about turns out to be emotionally healthy, as the fictional Lerner remarks, “the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence.”

So how do things turn out for Lerner? To learn that you’ll have to read the book, a fuller discussion of which is found in my NYJB review.

Ben Lerner