Jewish history: January 2008 Archives

The Sunday New York Times Art & Leisure had a nice piece on Jimmy Breslin, who increasingly seems the last link to a generation of columnists such as Murray Kempton, and others who predated him such as Joe Mitchell and A.J. Liebling and Damon Runyon.

 

David Denby goes to great length in The New Yorker to explore Otto Preminger’s famous “lack of style” – his lack of a signature style or of passion in the exploration of various adult dramas, but never attributes it to Preminger’s Viennese or Polish Jewish émigré background. I take Preminger’s style to be the kind of facility for self-invention and fluency with genres that one could also attribute to producer Alexander Korda, or director Michael Curtiz or Billy Wilder for that matter.

 

Searching for Bobby Fischer

What was missing from the numerous obits of Chess phenom Bobby Fischer was both an acknowledgment of the great pride Jews took in his Jewish heritage at the time of his championship in 1972, and any insight into his anti-Semitic ravings in recent years which could be seen as the self-loathing flip side of his grandiosity.

 

HERE COMES the "NIGHT"

Rachel Donadio’s NYT Book Review essay on Wiesel’s "Night" was interesting in tracking down the actual sales history of the novel. Donadio finds Wiesel’s protest of President Reagan’s visit to Bitburg as the tipping point. In some ways it was a tipping in my life as well. I traveled to Bergen-Belsen with a group of survivors and children of survivors as a protest to show where Reagan might have a laid a wreath instead. I had met my future wife a few weeks before and the fact that I went on this trip seemed to impress her in ways that changed my life. And the following year I came across a story that became my first book. More recently, I made note of the reissue of Wiesel’s night in a column about how my own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the years.

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Sign and Sight is a website that provides a roundup of European cultural journalism. In this week's magazine roundup there was this item:

Le Nouvel Observateur 10.01.2008 (France)

"What he says is scary." With these words the magazine introduces its interview with Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whose new novel "Le Village de l'Allemand ou le journal des freres Schiller" (Gallimard) relates how two Algerians living in the Parisian banlieues discover that their father, a hero of the Algerian liberation movement FLN, had formerly been an SS officer. For the Nouvel Obs, the novel "strikes at the heart of our illusions." Sansal has this to say about the situation in his country: "We live under a national-Islamic regime, in an environment heavily influenced by terrorism, and it's patently clear that only a very thin line separates Islamism from Nazism. For Algerian youths, their country is an 'open-air prison.' And for those gradually perishing in the cities, it's a 'concentration camp.' They feel imprisoned not only by walls and impenetrable borders, but also by a dark and violent regime that doesn't even leave them room to dream."

Under the old rule of two times, it's a pattern, three times it's a trend -- I've noticed that French literature seems to be tackling the subject of Nazis and its own complicity -- sometimes from the point of the view of the Nazi officers.
Last year's award winning "Les Bienveillants" by Jonathan Littell , which has yet to come out in English (but should soon), Another novel -- whose name escapes me right now (I promise to track it down later) about the infamous Velo D'hiver roundup in France, as well as Marc Levy's novel, "Les Enfants de la Liberte" and now Boualem's Algerian prism on the events.

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This morning’s New York Times carries a review of David Ives’ play, “New Jerusalem: the Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation, Amsterdam, July 27 1656,” capping a veritable trifecta of publicity for the 17^th Century Philosopher who was excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Jewish community (interestingly, his grandparents were conversos who fled the Spanish inquisition, and were expelled from France. It was only his father Miguel who returned to the Jewish faith upon arriving in Amsterdam).

First there was Matthew Stewart’s well reviewed tome, “The Courtier and the Heretic” (Norton); then Rebecca Goldstein’s “Betraying Spinoza” from Nextbook/Schocken –where it’s been one of their best selling titles. And now (off) Broadway!

What next: Spinoza, the musical? Or “Search for Substance: the Bento Spinoza story” ?

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