bound for Treblinka

This is the Handscher family in Warsaw, Poland. My father's mother, Jenny, was born Jenny Handscher. These people are her brothers and sisters - and her parents, my great-grandparents. In the bottom row, from left to right, we have Schloime (who survived and later came to the U.S.); Eliezer (father of Menachem/Mike and Meyer who also survived); the parents, Menachem and Tova; the youngest of the children, Bezalel. In the back row, from left to right: the youngest daughter, whose name we don't know; Jenny (my grandmother); Minnie (who came to the U.S. with Jenny). Killed at Treblinka, so far as we know: Eliezer, Bezalel, the youngest daughter, and both parents. This photo was given to my father by my grandmother, and by my father to me. Just today I heard from Eliezer's grandson, Nachum Handscher, who lives in Israel. Nachum is the son of Mike/Menachem, one of Eliezer's sons. The story of the survival of Eliezer's sons, Mike and Meyer, is a long, complex and dramatic one - not for this entry, but later, someday.

Judeo-Spanish in Greece

Emma Morgenstern gave a lunchtime talk recently at the Writers House to present her research into the survival of Judeo-Spanish language and culture in Greece. She travelled to Rhodes and Thessaloniki on a grant given her through our Heled Travel & Research Grant (made possible by my former student, Mali Heled Kinberg in memory of her mother). Audio and video recordings of the event are now available. Links to both are here.

it's a small world after all

This straight from Disney World. Photo taken this past weekend. Jews are now part of the "It's a Small World" exhibit. Tell your neighbors. Tell your friends.

Photo courtesy Lauren Roberts

Jews to whom nothing untoward happened (not)

Lisa New's memoir, Jacob's Cane, will be published in the fall by Perseus Books. I read it this past weekend in proofs and found it to be dazzling. I was asked to write a jacket blurb and here it is:

Elisa New’s brilliant memoir prefers convergences to chronology. That “history is a random business, made out of wanderings, guesses, and old glue” is the major idea—and also method—of the book, and its themes converge, surprisingly and pleasurably and emotionally—every which way. One moment we happily tear at Lithuanian rye jagged with caraway, its crust so tough it tugs the bones in the jaw, the next moment our guide is asking a man on the tractor to point out the spot where they’d shot the Jews. The Jews, of course, of New’s convention-defying family. These people are real, troubling every stereotype. Here is the gorgeously written, marvelously structured memoir of a person who’d been made as a child to understand why her whole clan comported themselves as though they were persons to whom nothing untoward had ever happened. But something most certainly did happen…

You can hear recordings of Lisa reading from the memoir - linked here.

believe you me

TV film: a young Jew helps his skinhead friends desecrate and try to destroy a synagogue. He doesn't protest when one of them urinates from the balcony, but some residual religiosity makes him urge the others to stop tossing around a Torah and put it back where they got it. He identifies with Hitler in part because the Nazis recognized the importance of the Jews.

It's The Believer.

Reviewed by Julie Salamon in 2002.

three from the Vienna paradox

Marjorie Perloff's PennSound page includes a talk she gave at the Writers House on Frank O' Hara, Jasper Johns, and John Cage in the Sixties; a reading from her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, at Buffalo; and remarks she gave at a 2004 conference on secular Jewish culture and radical Jewish poetic practice. All three recordings are very good - and quite different from each other. But it's surely not enough Perloff, so we'll get out there looking for more. I recommend David Zauhar's essay on her 1990s output, but it seems almost time for someone to assess her 00's too. Marjorie is good at many things. For the moment my favorite of her targets (often of satire) is the sorry state of mainstream literary journalism. Zap! Zing!

cell phone in the garden of exile

Alicia Oltuski, a fabulous writer (usually comic, in the Max Apple vein), tells a story about losing her father in the axis of death. Go to "Berlin Stories" - specifically here and listen to the audio.

Cynthia Ozick

My hour-long discussion with novelist Cynthia Ozick is now available as a downloadable mp3 recording. Cynthia came to the Writers House as a "Fellow" in 2006. Our conversation took place on March 21.

wailing wall of sound

I've just read a pre-publication draft of an essay by Maria Damon on the creative world/work of Jewish-Canadian feminist Kabbalah scholar/poet Adeena Karasick. I've read Karasick's Dyssemia Sleaze (2000) and after reading Damon's inspired, breathless essay I'll buy The Empress Has No Closure if not other books as well. Perhaps Maria D. will ask me not to quote this draft, but I'm so taken by Damon's own lyrical verve here that I can't help myself. She begins by describing Rock n Roll's "Wall of Sound" as "an aural cenotaph for those lost in diasporic lines of frightflight." This takes us to Karasick's major piece in Dyssemia Sleaze, "The Wall," which (obviously) refers to, among other things, the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) of Jerusalem. To Damon "The Wall" as a poem is itself "a tsunamic wall of words and images bearing down on the reader, a chaotic pile of junk, a roaring whirl." Then there's this phrase, describing the female performance poet: "the (coded-female) reproductive body spew-shpritzing verb-effluence as it it were a bodily fluid."

Much of this is overstated but I take it--and appreciate it--as Damon's attempt as a critic to be a participant in such a radical Jewish experimental poetics, with plenty of cognizance and self-consciousness that she herself, Damon, commits the imitative fallacy. This is indeed, as she puts it, "the danger of 'falling flat' [that is] always present in such specifically corporealized work and [thus] lends it some of its interest--as in (I can only hope) the overload of corny puns with which I tend to freight my essays." Wow, what a shrewd way of anticipating our objection to aspects of this tour de force (not "The Wall" but Damon's essay about it) that indeed fall flat. So why not? It seems to me all part of what Alfred North Whitehead calls a proposition--a "lure of feeling." (Damon herself quotes this phrase.) If the purpose of such an essay is to get me as reader to read more of its subject - Karasick - then it succeeds in a way most essays I've read about relatively unknown contemporary writers fails. Failure, in a sense, is not an option. Worth the risk.

Damon’s apparently whimsical essay on academic affiliation (published years earlier in a book on the academy*), while also interesting in its own right, seems to me most helpful as a provider of context for this critic’s personal intellectual origins. Affiliation is, after all, a function of the individual’s sense of her life-work. That long ago (as a student at Hampshire College) Damon was encouraged (“trained” is actually her word) to think of intellection in terms of “mode of inquiry” rather than “objects of knowledge” goes a long way toward explaining her orientation to process and her insistence on and devotion to self-disclosure. Non satis scire is or was Hampshire's motto: it is not enough (simply) to know. The literary historian of modern and contemporary poetics cannot (simply) describe, especially when she is actively a part of the scene she is describing.

And so I would suggest that Damon's Karasick essay makes emphatic and structurally/formally appropriate a tendency that Damon obviously feels she’s at her best when giving free reign to it. Even her essay on Alan Sondheim's intrusive/disruptive alienating art, for Damon a more academically rigorous critical performance, makes explicit her desire always “to some degree” to be writing essays which are themselves participants in the disjunctive “bricolagarie” (“repeating, quoting, and [self-]interrupting”) that is her main topic.

Adeena Karasick is a wonderful temptation for the critic who thinks of herself or himself as a writer--to cross from critic to poet or, a bit less obviously, to carry criticism across.

* "Memoirs of a Mutable Thoughter," Affiliation: Identity in Academic Culture, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Nebraska, 2003).

Is "Filreis" Portuguese?

In 2003 I corresponded with the cultural director of a Portuguese foundation. He responded to the possibility that my family's name is indeed Portuguese. I'm not sure what the origin of this family assumption is--perhaps it's been passed down to my father's older brother through his father or his brother who passed through western Europe on the way to Brooklyn twice in the 1910s and '20s (once before WW1 and once again after). Western Europe--France, we assume--where one of these Filreises made contact with French or Spanish/French Filreises and learned of the ancestral connection to Iberian peninsula. We put that "news" together with the clear sense that the families were part of a Sephardic community in Warsaw and have assumed that they were part of the exilic migration away from Spain to northeast Europe in the late 15th-century and early 16th. It is very difficult to track this but since Jewish families typically bred very closely within the Jewish community, there is probably a way of following the lineage. I haven't figure out how yet. I suppose first would be to find out definitely where the members of the Warsaw family were killed during the Holocaust; I'm 99% sure it was at Treblinka, the killing camp that destroyed Warsaw's Jews in 1942 and '43.