Hero or Anti-Hero

Zero Mostel (February 28, 1915)

2012-02-28T01:39:00.002-05:00

Zero Mostel is most famous for his Broadway portrayal of Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," which ran from September 22, 1964, until July 2, 1972. Otherwise not much about him is important to me. He wasn't in the movie, so I never saw him do it.

Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533)

2012-02-27T01:23:00.003-05:00

Michel de Montaigne, the essayist and inventor of the essay form, lived his life as a French nobleman. And a fascinating life it was!

I loved the book How to Live or A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell. This book provides me with my main information about Montaigne. I had heard that his maternal ancestors were Jewish. People who are eager to know who was a Jew have ferreted through his works looking for evidence that he acknowledged this. They don't find much. For me, this means the topic should be dropped, but I find Bakewell's summary too interesting to leave it out of this blog. She writes:

"If his father's background was murky, a more significant secret apparently lurked in the family of his mother, Antoinette de Louppes de Villeneuve. Her ancestors were merchants; they were also immigrants from Spain, which, in the context of the time, strongly suggests that they were Jewish refugees, Like many others, they converted to Christianity under duress, and left following thee persecution of Jews on the peninsula in the late fifteenth century."

"Montaigne may not have realized that he was of Jewish origin, if indeed he was. He showed no more than mild interest in the subject, mentioning Jews only occasionally in the Essays, usually either neutrally or with sympathy, but never in a way that suggested he felt personally involved. ... "

"He also expressed a wry skepticism about the 'conversions' of some recent refugees -- reasonably enough, since the act was not done by choice. If, as some have speculated, this was meant as a subtle dig at his mother's family, it would not be surprising." (p. 43-44)

In my opinion, the efforts to demonstrate consciousness of his Jewish background (if he had one) are misplaced, and end up showing more about the person speculating than about this fascinating author. I think Bakewell's treatment of the question is level-headed, and I'll leave it at that.

Irene Nemirovsky (February 24,1903)

2012-02-24T01:57:00.003-05:00

Irene Nemirovsky's book Suite Française became widely popular after its very delayed publication in around 2006. The story of the author's efforts to escape the Holocaust were both dramatic and depressing (well, all Holocaust stories are depressing). The New York Times review of the book is summarized thus:

"Born in Ukraine, Irène Némirovsky had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed "Suite Française" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17." (See "As France Burned" by Paul Gray)

I read Suite Française during its period of popularity, and like the Times reviewer, was impressed by the insightful and compact nature of the stories, and agree that "a knowledge of its history heightens the wonder and awe of reading it."

Now one question: how do I feel about Nemirovsky's clear distaste for her fellow Russian Jews, a distaste that was much more expressed in her earlier books? I'm really quite uncomfortable about it, although I understand how it was a product of the times. I can't help thinking other Jewish authors were able to write with both artistic and material success about their experiences without such self-hatred, despite what was going on in France at the time. At the time I read the earlier book was only accessible in French, in the first edition from the 1920s, having been (perhaps justifiably) forgotten. Her savage depiction of greedy rich Jews was in my mind a bit shameful; what a waste of her capabilities. I believe it has been published in English since then, but I don't feel like exploring the topic further.

"A Nervous Splendor"

2012-02-20T16:09:00.004-05:00

Frederic Morton's book A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 zeros in on a tiny time-slice of the history of Vienna. As the several other books I've read, this one confronts the rising antisemitism that was just beginning to dominate Viennese life, and contrasts it to the rising activity of Jewish intellectuals. The major focus of the book is the Imperial court, especially the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf at his estate Meyerling at the end of January 1889. The frenzy of public mourning after his death, and the cover up of his relationship with the woman who jointly committed suicide with him are also presented within the context of Viennese life at the time.

Rudolf was an ineffective and extremely frustrated man without any power. His titles were meaningless, and his liberal political views inexpressible within the constraints of his life. Morton contrasts Rudolph's helplessness at age 30, and the futility of his liberalism, with the early lives of several men not far from his age: Sigmund Freud, Hugo Wolfe, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Anton Bruckner; and Karl Lueger, the antisemite. Also present, representing an older generation, Johannes Brahms and others. Morton also describes the lives of several lower-class (and never subsequently famous) families and individuals as they live through the last half of 1888 and the beginning of 1889.

I found most fascinating the author's description of how a number of individuals and families celebrated Christmas. Morton describes several of these events in detail. The well-off secular-Jewish families of Arthur Schnitzler and Theodor Herzl were decorating their Christmas trees. Not so the Freud family, who didn't participate in the holiday. Anton Bruckner played the organ for a monastic midnight mass outside of town. The poor family that figures throughout the book could afford to buy and decorate only a branch from a tree; they presented one another with second-hand goods for gifts. Gustav Klimt, Hugo Wolf, and others had conventional celebrations. Brahms enjoyed the praise of his latest work as published in the Neue Freie Presse, but kept to his usual schedule of lunch in his habitual restaurant followed by a nap at his cafe. Through these descriptions Morton clarifies the way these people viewed Christianity and its role in their lives. (p. 181-184)

As I read, I felt that every event and detail assumed a broader significance, to portend what would come after. However, Morton refuses to speculate -- as many did then and have done since -- as to how Rudolf might have altered later history had he survived and found a way to implement his liberal views. For one thing, his father, the Emperor, lived and ruled until World War I was almost over, so it's far from clear that Rudolf's pessimism about his future was unfounded.

And the last paragraph of the book reads:

"On Saturday, April 20, the day before Easter, at 4 P.M., Mozart's 'Te Deum' was sung in the court Chapel, a few yards from Rudolf's old apartment. Professor Anton Bruckner drew great chords and holy harmonies from the organ to celebrate the Resurrection. While the master's august music rose among the vaultings, a different sound was heard in Bruckner's native Upper Austria at Braunau. It was the thin cry of a baby born that afternoon. The parents were Alois and Klara Hitler. They named their little one Adolph." (p. 317)

Did Hitler's thought have roots in the Viennese currents of ideas that were swirling through the lives and times that Morton described? He definitely made a case for such roots.

Adele Bloch-Bauer

2012-02-17T10:52:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I mentioned Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose portrait by Gustav Klimt became even more famous in 2005 when her niece recovered it from the Austrians. (They had stolen it in 1938, and successfully refused to return it for the ensuing decades.) The Bloch-Bauer family were wealthy; her father was in banking and railroads and her husband was in manufacturing. Adele had a salon in Vienna.

One thing about the Viennese intelligentsia: they were close-knit group and mixed practitioners and theorists from many disciplines. Adele's salon is an example of this interaction among the arts and political life in Vienna:

"Among the prominent guests in her salon were the composers Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879–1964), the authors Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), artists from the circle of Gustav Klimt, actors from the Burgtheater, and after WWI, the Socialists Karl Renner (1870–1950) and Julius Tandler (1869–1936)." (See this article.)

Note: Klimt painted two portraits of Adele;

the earlier one accompanied my post yesterday,

and the second is above.

Vienna and Antisemitism

2012-02-16T13:01:00.011-05:00

In reading about Vienna in the 19th century, I've become aware of the simultaneous development of two groups emerging together. I meant to focus on the secular-Jewish intellectual class, which included some of the wealthy bankers as well as middle-class Jews. But it seems that you can't learn about this fascinating Jewish community without also being aware of a political, populist Austrian-German nationalism with a strong antisemitic bias as well as a bias against many of the non-German nationalities of the Austrian empire.

From the 1890s, anti-liberal leaders assumed a great deal of political power, especially the antisemite Karl Lueger who was elected mayor of Vienna in 1895, and despite the Emperor's efforts to block him from office, became mayor in 1897. Antisemitic theories and actions became widely accepted and influential. After World War I they grew predominant in both Austria and Germany as is very well known. Less well known: their origin in Austrian 19th century policies and politics and the interplay between the conservative and Jew-hating ideas with the earlier liberal thought, Jewish intellectual and commercial success, and conservative antisemitic thought.

One thing I find disturbing is that every Jewish success was spun into a negative stereotype by the antisemites of the time. Jews were blamed for success in owning and running banks (the antisemites founded their own alternative postal savings bank). Jews received opprobrium for being writers or for owning newspapers. Most hated was the liberal and influential Neue Freie Presse, founded in 1864, edited from 1908 to 1920 by Moriz Benedikt, and ultimately put out of business by the Nazis when they took over Vienna in 1938. The antisemites criticized Jewish doctors (who perhaps became doctors because not all professions were open to Jews). Jewish university students were attacked and expelled from fraternities and other organizations that had formerly permitted them; Jews had a hard time rising in academic professions and musical institutions.

Yet many Jews put aside their Jewish identity when they wrote poetry or stories, composed music or plays, conducted, developed philosophic or other academic theories, or patronized a variety of arts. They led a normal, secular life, attempting to work around the forces that excluded them, marginalized them, or attacked them.

Despite the danger of the stereotypes, I am going to mention a few of the famous members of the Viennese intellectual community in its great times, with an extremely brief summary of how antisemitism affected them. I'm not an expert, I'm just beginning to read about this.

Sigmund Freud grew up in the secular-Jewish middle class. His intellectual leadership in developing theories about the human mind is still acknowledged even if the details have been revised or rejected. In reading the chapter on Freud in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske, I learned how important to Freud was discrimination against Jews, both in terms of his career and his personal development.

Stefan Zweig was a widely-read and very popular author. His autobiography, The World of Yesterday, written when he was in flight from the Nazis and in despair about the loss of everything he had cherished, painted a fascinating nostalgic portrait of the atmosphere of Vienna before the Nazis. He put it in the best possible light, attempting to show, I think, that the Jewish writers and thinkers were able to overcome the forces that attacked them -- at least until the final disaster overtook them. Zweig's works seem to be undergoing a reevaluation: for a long time, he seemed dated, and now people are republishing and reading his novels and stories.

Theodor Herzl, a journalist for the Neue Freie Presse, is now of course mainly known for the invention of political Zionism and his pursuit of support for his dream of a homeland for the Jews. While he was originally rather indifferent to his Jewish identity (according to a number of things I've read), the ascent of Lueger in Vienna and the Dreyfus case, which he covered as the Paris correspondent of the NFP, caused him to rethink what he'd believed. His realization was a fascinating development in the context of the freedom that Jews had thought they possessed. He was ahead of his time in recognizing the force of antisemitism in many parts of Europe. Interestingly, according to Zweig, his newspaper, which had a general following, did not allow him to publish anything about Zionism.

Gustav Mahler, composer and conductor, accepted conversion to Catholicism in 1897 perhaps as the price for advancement in his career as a conductor. In that year, he was appointed as Kappelmeister in Vienna. His enemies continued to attack him, though I think it's fair to say that his music transcends all this.

Gustav Klimt, surely the most famous artist from pre-World War I Vienna, became a victim of antisemites without even being Jewish. According to Schorske, his dramatically original work was at first accepted, but soon became very controversial, and in a fight about murals to be installed at the university, he was the victim of a lot of vicious anti-modern sentiment, including being accused of siding with the Jews.

Klimt's two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer (who belonged to the Jewish community, which often patronized his art work) received a great deal of attention a few years ago when Adele's niece won a judgement that returned several paintings to her that had been among the ill-gotten gains from Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The people I've named are only a few of the famous figures living in Vienna who made important contributions, including many others from the secular-Jewish community. For some, identity was very complex, as there had been intermarriages and conversions for several generations (but antisemites might not have cared) -- examples are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.

Lueger, when challenged for having Jewish friends, evidently said that it was up to him to decide who was Jewish. I'm not sure what exactly that meant. All I know is that Hitler thought he was fabulous.

Nightmares

2012-02-14T08:49:00.004-05:00

Events in The Hare with Amber Eyes (which I started to discuss yesterday) eventually come to the Nazi takeover of Vienna in 1938 as experienced by the author's great grandparents and grandmother Elizabeth. De Waal explains how a long-employed family servant named Anna hid the collection of Netsuke (center of the story) a few at a time, so that these relatively insignificant items from the large and valuable stores of family possessions were the only ones rescued.

The Holocaust victims' shock of being deprived of all dignity and human rights is agonizing to read about no matter how many stories I've read before. Why had they not sent their money out of the country and fled before the inevitable happened? They were loyal and trusting citizens, up until then with equal rights despite the growing hatred of Jews. They were highly assimilated, Jewish but with a secular lifestyle. They saw themselves as real Austrians, and valued their position in Viennese society. However, the Viennese welcomed the Nazis with huge enthusiasm.

On a trip there, I once visited the home of Sigmund Freud, whose relatively modest apartment De Waal points out was very close to his family's palatial home in Vienna -- a video tape of the German victory parade was showing as a loop on a small TV set in Freud's one-time study, with the voice of his daughter Anna describing their shock at the frenzied anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi crowds. I thought of this as I read about the same parades, the same shock, the same sense of having been betrayed.

Elizabeth had earlier earned a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna, and with extreme bravery came to Vienna to help her parents to safety away from the Nazis. With her knowledge of the law, even in its eviscerated form, she was able to extricate her parents, who were desperately trying to escape. Her parents' first escape location was at a family vacation home in Czechoslovakia -- not safe enough. Her mother died at this once-happy refuge, but Elizabeth managed to get her father to England, where she and her husband and children were living, and where her son and grandson (the author) have spent their lives.

Later, after the war, Elizabeth tried to repossess some of the family's art collections and other property, but it was futile. The Austrians were successful in preventing Jews from returning or reclaiming what had been taken from them. I felt that the net result has this conclusion: the Holocaust was a great success. Where many Jews of all social classes and levels of accomplishment once lived peacefully in Vienna (and many other places of course), there are now virtually none, and those that survived had to start their lives over from zero.

The story is told in painful detail. Vivid and unbearable, the author makes you go through the suffering and desperate times with the family members and ask yourself for the millionth time, how did this happen?

The collection of Netsuke, small and resilient, made to be used as toggles for clothing, once used as playthings by the children of the family, survived better than many of the family members, and the post-war story is happier.

Vienna

2012-02-13T07:40:00.004-05:00

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal describes his exploration and discovery of his forbears, the vastly rich Ephrussi family. I am enjoying this best-selling book enormously, and using it to form my picture of secular-Jewish Paris before and during the Dreyfus affair and of secular-Jewish Vienna in the early 20th century, at least of certain high social strata of the cities.

The first prominent Ephrussi escaped his Shtetl origins and made a fortune by dealing grain in Odessa in the mid-19th century. Contemplating a financial and trading network, his descendants set up businesses and palatial homes in Paris and Vienna, where they lived in a world of wealth and culture.

A tiny carving of a rabbit (left) is one of several hundred Netsuke statuettes from Japan from the was acquired first by De Waal's Parisian art-collecting great-uncle, an art patron and friend of the Impressionists. By tracing the family members who later owned the Netsuke collection and the motives for its original acquisition, De Waal has created the fascinating story of these immensely wealthy members of a certain segment of Parisian Jews and Viennese Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Needless to say, the ending of the family's fortunes in 1938, when the Nazis marched into Vienna, looms over the story.

In addition, as I explore my topic of secular Jewish Vienna, I'm reading The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. He begins with a fascinating portrait of late-19th century Vienna and its Jewish cultural atmosphere and numerous accomplished Jewish citizens, and continues with his life as an author and cultural observer. This autobiography, even more than De Waal's book, is dominated by the Nazi destruction of the world that he had known. Zweig wrote it during his last year, before he committed suicide in despair.

Thus I continue my travels in secular Jewish cities, and will write more about both Vienna and later Paris.

"Klezmer" by Joann Sfar

2012-02-06T14:07:00.006-05:00

Joann Sfar's Klezmer is a graphic novel about some very unlucky and also rebellious Jews approximately 100 years ago. They wander around, hungry and cold, betrayed by friends or victimized by enemies until they come to where? ODESSA! When I picked up the book I had no idea this was their destiny. Here's Sfar's imaginary scene of the Odessa they see:

As the musicians catch sight of the city, Sfar draws a series of images with quotations from Isaac Babel's description, "Odessa is a horrible town. It's common knowledge that people there butcher the Russian language," he wrote. "And yet I feel that there are quite a few good things one can say about this important town, the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the population is made up of Jews... "

And here we see how Sfar imagines it. I also enjoyed his quotations from many Klezmer songs, as the musicians entertain first one another, and then begin to perform for audiences in little towns. I also liked the sort of philosophical aspects of the musicians' struggle with their own misfortunes and their lost faith, though sometimes Sfar is a little too clever about this.

Norton Simon (February 2, 1907)

2012-02-02T01:06:00.002-05:00

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is one of my favorite museums anywhere. The gardens, interior spaces, and collections -- especially the Asian art and Impressionists -- are all splendid, and the size makes it very accessible. As I understand it, the collections very much reflect the taste and actions of the founder, Norton Simon and his wife Jennifer Jones (the actress).

Simon came from a West-Coast Jewish family. However, his Jewish background seems to have little or nothing to do with either his great success as a businessman or as an art collector. According to the museum website, "In 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, Norton Simon invested $7,000 in a floundering juice bottling company. He eventually turned his investment into the highly prosperous Hunt Foods, Inc. ... He built Norton Simon Inc., a multi-industry, multinational corporation that included Hunt-Wesson Foods, McCall’s Publishing, Saturday Review of Literature, Canada Dry Corporation, Max Factor cosmetics, and Avis Car Rental."

I place Norton Simon on my hero list because I really respect his accomplishment in developing the Norton Simon Museum. The museum website offers this quote, which I quite like:

"I am not essentially a religious person, but my feeling about a museum is that it can serve as a substitute for a house of worship. It is a place to respect man's creativity and to sense a continuity with the past. It is a place to give us a feeling of the dignity of man and to help us to strive towards our own creativity and fulfillment. - Norton Simon, 1974"

Food can be funny

2012-01-31T15:08:00.001-05:00

Anything – even hunger -- can be funny in Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s sprawling satire of early Soviet times, The Little Golden Calf. Bumbling bureaucrats, resource shortages, redistribution of possessions, and redefined relationships on all levels provided the two writers ample opportunities for broad humor. The novel is episodic: more or less centered around an informal group of con men and opportunistic thieves who take to the road in a car called the Antelope-Gnu. Published in 1936, and now somewhat culturally a bit alien, the novel is still full of really funny scenes.

Some chapters in The Little Golden Calf consist of sketches involving other people besides the road trippers -- people who are about to come in contact with the main group. One such diversion is titled “Vasisualy Lokhankin and His Role in the Russian Revolution” (The Little Golden Calf, transl. Fisher, p. 170 -177) It begins: “At exactly four-forty in the afternoon, Vasisualy Lokhankin went on a hunger strike.”

Vasisualy’s cause was simple: his wife Varvara had just told him she was leaving him with her lover, Pitburdukov. He says she can’t: “One person can’t leave another person if the other person loves her.” Varvara’s response: “She can too.” He vowed not to eat until she comes back, not “for a whole day. A week. A year. … I’ll lie here just like this, in my suspenders, until I die.”

She began to walk away: “I’m leaving. Farewell, Vaisisualy I’m leaving your booklet of bread vouchers on the table.” Now things are clearer even to a 21^st century American: food was rationed, but he was going on a hunger strike. As she walked toward the door, he ripped up the booklet and shouted “Save me!” She began to take him seriously: “Don’t you dare keep on this hunger strike! … This is stupid Vaisisualy. This is rebellious individualism.”

He replied, “You don’t fully comprehend the meaning of individualism, or of the intelligentsia in general.” In response, she took off her hat “and quickly made an open-faced sandwich with eggplant caviar, muttering ‘crazed animal,’ ‘tyrant,’ and ‘private property owner’ all the while.”

She demanded that he eat the sandwich. He refused. “Taking advantage of the hunger-striker’s momentarily open mouth, Varvara deftly shoved the open-faced sandwich into the aperture between his little pharaonic beard and trim Moscow-style mustache.” He spits it out. “Eat, you good-for-nothing!... You intellectual!”

Wait a minute, 21^st century reader. How did such political jargon get into a quarrel between a couple as they are splitting up? What’s really behind this? Lokhankin’s next gesture, while brushing the crumbs out of his beard, was to lie back down on the couch: “He really did not want to part with his wife. As well as a multitude of shortcomings, Varvara had two key advantages: a large white bosom and a job. Vasisualy himself had never worked anywhere. Work would have kept him from thinking about the significance of the Russian intelligentsia, a social group of which he considered himself a member. Thus Lohankin’s extensive ponderings all came back to the same pleasant and deeply personal theme: ‘Vasisualy Lokhankin and his significance,’ ‘Lokhankin and the tragedy of Russian liberalism,’ ‘Lokhankin and his role in the Russian Revolution.’”

Later that evening, Varvara’s lover Ptiburdukov arrived, determined to convince her to leave despite the hunger strike. She explained: “There he is! Just lying there! Animal! Vile private property owner! The thing is that this feudal landlord, this serf-owner, has gone on a hunger strike because I want to leave him.” She tried and again failed to force the now-stale eggplant-caviar sandwich on him: “Eat, you vile man. Eat, you serf-owner.”

The next morning, he said: “There, now the sharp pains in the stomach have started. … And then there’ll be scurvy caused by malnutrition, with loss of hair and teeth.” Wait a minute, modern reader! We are picking up a reference to the real results of real starvation; such starvation had been widespread during the growing pains of the Soviet system a few years before this publication.

Ptiburdukov’s brother, a doctor, was called in for a visit. His recommendation: “the patient didn’t need to adhere to any particular diet. He could eat everything. Soup, for example, or meatballs, or compote. He could also have bread, vegetables, and fruits. Fish was also a possibility. He could smoke, within reason, of course. He wouldn’t recommend that the patient start drinking, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to introduce a shot of good port into his system... the doctor didn’t really understand the Lokhankins’ spiritual drama. Puffing up importantly and treading heavily in his boots, he left, declaring in parting that the patient was also not prohibited from bathing in the ocean or riding a bicycle.”

How do we read this? Surely we are being told that the doctor is not only not understanding the family drama, but also not understanding what foods would be available even if the “patient” were not on a hunger strike.

As time passed, the hunger strike continued. Varvara continued to stay in the apartment with her husband instead of running away. But one night she awakened from a bad dream about the doctor and discovered Vasisualy “standing in front of the open cupboard of the buffet, his back to the bed, chomping loudly. … Having ravaged an entire jar of preserves, he carefully took the lid off the pot, plunged his fingers into the cold borscht, and extracted a piece of meat from it. Even if Varvara had caught her husband at this game during the happiest days of their marriage, Vasisualy would’ve had a bad time of it. Now, however, his fate was sealed.”

She left him for good. “Lokhankin suffered openly and majestically. He luxuriated in his woe… His great sorrow gave him the chance to devote even more thought to the significance of the Russian intelligentsia, as well as to the tragedy of Russian liberalism.”

I wrote this for my food blog, but have posted it here as the final Odessa post.

Saul Alinsky (January 30, 1909)

2012-01-30T02:55:00.003-05:00

In general, I'm not repeating the posts from last year, but Saul Alinsky is in the news again, thanks to Newt Gingrich, who refers to him often, claiming that he had a strong influence on Obama. See Gingrich’s Anti-Semitic Dog Whistle: Saul Alinsky in the Forward for an extreme interpretation of Gingrich's actions -- probably too extreme! Or the most recent Gail Collins column in the New York Times:

"Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky."

As I wrote last year, Saul Alinsky was a founder of modern community organizing. He wrote several books on the subject, and was the head of an influential community organization in Chicago. The commitment to social justice that inspired many secular Jews in the past -- and still does, I would say -- is among my greatest criteria for choosing my heroes.

I consider it to their credit that Obama and Hillary Clinton were associated with Alinsky's group. The fact that extreme right wing nuts find that alarming just makes me like Alinsky (and Obama and Clinton) better. Hillary Clinton received a job offer from Alinsky in 1968 when she was in college; she turned it down, though she wrote her senior thesis about him. Obama worked for an offshoot of Alinsky's group; however, Alinsky had died by the time Obama arrived in Chicago.

Alinsky, according to Marian Wright Edelman, the Children's Defense Fund leader, "was brilliant. He was working for underdogs. He was trying to empower communities, which we still need to do. He spoke plainly. He had his outrageous side, but he also had his pragmatic side. Both Hillary and Barack reflect that understanding of community-organizing strategy. Both just know how to leverage power." (Quote from "For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone," Washington Post, March 25, 2007.)

I don't ordinarily use Wikipedia, but I found it interesting regarding his view of his Jewish background. According to what I found there, Alinsky considered himself to be a devout Jew until the age of 12, after which time he began to fear that his parents would force him to become a rabbi. "I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit. . . . But I'll tell you one thing about religious identity," he added. "Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say—and always will say—Jewish."

Odessa Wrap Up

2012-01-28T01:48:00.005-05:00

Exactly a century ago, in 1912 Leon Trotsky was living in Vienna publishing a paper called Pravda – his Pravda folded in April, 1912; for Trotsky it was a year of rivalry with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, lived in Odessa during his school years, from age 9 until around 16; in his autobiography he describes how the cultural atmosphere affected him, such as inspiring him to become a fan of Italian opera. In 1896, Trotsky committed to work towards revolution; by 1898 he was sent to Siberia. Several historians find Trotsky's Jewish-Odessa background relevant to his later life. Having surveyed several other famous Odessans, I thought I should mention him, the most revolutionary of the nonconformists from there.

Evidently, 1912 was an interesting year in Odessa. In Tales of Old Odessa by Roshanna Sylvester, events and conditions in 1912 often features in her narrative. Here are a few examples:

"I.P. fon-Kliugel'gen, head of the local investigative police squad, declared in 1912 that more than thirty thousand 'suspicious characters' lurked in Odessa. While 'shady types' could be found 'in every quarter of the city,' the chief inspector continued, they lived 'primarily in Moldavanka,' where on some blocks 'ever single resident is a criminal.' Moldavanka -- if even a tiny fraction of the stories were true it was unsavory terrain, a quarter filled with dark alleys, filthy streets, crumbling buildings, and violence." (p. 48)
"Old Free Port was one of Odessa's most important avenues, having until the mid-nineteenth century marked the edge of the city limits. In 1912, Old Free Port was the site of 'a mass of charities and other civic establishments that follow each other endlessly around it.' ... the Sretenskii Philanthropic Society.., the city almshouse, the foundling home, the Massovskii night shelter, more than a dozen schools, the civic auditorium, a children's clinic and other such establishments." (p. 50)
"In his 1913 guide to the city, Grigorii Moskvich wrote that the dream of the'essential Odessan' was to strike it rich and immediately acquire a house, a carriage, and eveything else he needed in order to 'transform himself (by appearance, of course) into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat." (p. 106)
"... in the fall of 1912 ... Odessans were treated to an unusual entertainment event involving fifty-five 'Somalians' who arrived in town for a month-long engagement at the club Oginski. Even though Odessans were used to a great deal of diversity in their cosmopolitan city, the presence of the Somalians added to the mix an element of racial difference to which they wre less accustomed." (p. 126)

All the examples play up the wide social variety in the city, including character of the many neighborhoods, inner-city and suburbs; the contrast between those who saw themselves as intellectuals or as westernized Europeans and those who were still Russian; differences between the rich and the poor, and variance between the honest and the criminal. The short era between the 1905 violence and the drastic end of Tsarist times was a fascinating one in the city.

The books I read about Odessa continue the story through World War I, the Russian Revolution, the early Soviet era, and World War II. The large and assimilated Jewish community continued to be productive until the Nazi takeover during the war. The Nazis put the Romanians in charge of the city and in charge of the liquidation of the Jewish community, which was done quite efficiently, as documented in Charles King's book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.

As for my reading project, I enjoyed the rewards of reading the historic background before trying to read the famous works of fiction by Odessa authors Babel, Jabotinsky, Ilf, and Petrov. I also feel as if I received some new insights into a sort of experiment in old Russia – what would shtetl Jews have done differently if given more freedom within their native land? The answer is they responded pretty much the way they did when they immigrated to other places, especially to the US. It’s pretty clear that the old regime in Russia didn’t have the potential to sustain a free society within its severe limitations. And I really don’t understand all the things that happened in Russia later. However, I liked my exploration of the Odessa community a century ago and the writers that emerged from it.

Ilya Ilf and the Twelve Chairs

2012-01-26T01:36:00.003-05:00

"In Soviet Russia the insane asylum is the only place a normal person can live. Everywhere else is worse than bedlam. Nope, I can't live with those Bolsheviks. I'd rather live here, with the regular crazies. At least they aren't building socialism. And they feed you here, too." (The Little Golden Calf, transl. Fisher, p. 217)

Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg), co-author of the comic novel Twelve Chairs and its sequel, The Little Golden Calf, was born in the assimilated Jewish community of Odessa in 1897. A century ago, he was 15 years old, a student in an Odessa technical school from which he graduated in 1913. Needless to say, the Revolution had a major role in his formation as a satiric novelist of the deficiencies and ironies of life under the emerging new Soviet system.

His writing career began in Moscow. He teamed up with Evgeny Petrov, also an Odessan, though not Jewish. Both Ilf-Petrov novels are highly amusing send-ups of the emerging political paradoxes in the new Soviet Union – they also reverberate when you think about news from 1990s of how these disfunctional habits or forced actions were dissolved after the fall of Communism.

A passage from The Little Golden Calf illustrates the authors' attitude by explaining why one of the two con men in the novel became a con man. "The Revolution of 1917 drove Koreyko off the velvet couch." He began by noticing that good stuff was up for grabs -- "gold, valuables, magnificent furniture, paintings and carpets, fur coats... ."

He stole. However, he was soon arrested. After serving his time he realised that his goal "would requre secrecy, slow and steady action, and the cover of darkness." He began impersonating an employee of the Requisistions Department, and later teamed up with Ostap Bender, who had also been the center of the earlier Ilf-Petrov novel The Twelve Chairs.

The authors describe the age in which these con men operated:

"In those restless times, nothing made by human hands worked as well as it had before: buildings didn't protect you from the cold, food didn't make you full, electricity was only turned on for massive round-ups of deserters and looters, plumbing only provided running water to the first floor, and trams didn't run at all. At the same time, the elements turned meaner and more dangerous: the winters were colder than before, the wind was stronger, and the chill that used to make a person take to his bed for three days now took those same three days to kil him stone dead. Young men who had no steady employment stolled the streets in groups..." (p. 83)

The central character of both books, Ostap Bender, is considered to be a prototype of an Odessa con man; in both books and in the film The Twelve Chairs he's a delightful character. In the version of The Twelve Chairs directed by Mel Brooks in 1970 Frank Langella is Bender and Dom DeLuise is the opportunistic priest. Some images from the film:

A struggle over the first chair --

which didn't contain the family jewels.

Finally, in the presence of the last chair,

Bender and the rightful claimant of the jewels are first at the buffet.

The final chair.

Isaac Babel's Odessa Tales

2012-01-25T02:48:00.006-05:00

Isaac Babel was the creator of famous stories about the thieves and rogues of Odessa and still more famous tales about the Russian Revolution. Babel was born in the Jewish Moldavanka district of Odessa in 1894. His grandfather was a victim of the 1905 pogroms which accompanied the failed revolution.

While educational opportunities were more open in Odessa than elsewhere, there were quotas on the number of Jewish students in Odessa's universities and on Jewish enrollment at all Russian institutions of higher learning. Babel was unable to enroll at the University of Odessa, so left in 1911 to further his education in Kiev. In 1913 he published his first story “Old Shloyme.”

Like Jabotinsky’s novel (which I wrote about yesterday), Babel’s stories are mined for historic details by social historians writing about the city and about the Revolution. "More than anyone else, Isaac Babel popularized the image of Odessa as a city of swashbuckling Jewish swindlers and sinners, who all at once embodied the physical strength, revelry, and wit for which Odessa was famous. The larger-than-life Jewish gangster emerged as the prevailing icon of Odessa in Soviet culture, and he was depcted in stark contrast to the stereotypically passive shtetl Jew of Eastern Europe..." (Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, location 78 Kindle ed.)

Odessa historians especially cite Babel's rogue character Benya Krick the hooligan. Babel captured the atmosphere of contrasting poverty and wealth in the stories that took place before the Revolution, and captured the utter disorganization of the various revolutionary forces whose power shifted constantly and who killed one another ruthlessly. As historian Charles King says, "While Vladimir Jabotinsky was busy trying to create a fighting force for Palestine, his fellow Odessan was sitting on a horse in a Cossack cavalry regiment. It was an unlikely place for a Jew, to say the least." (Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, p. 183)

Babel’s Odessa stories and war stories are episodic and often broken off in what might be the middle of a longer development of character and plot – but the stories are about chaotic times with limited commitments; sometimes it seems as if only choppy stories can do justice to the unpredictable lives and times depicted. Or maybe Babel was just a little ahead of Hemmingway as a stylist, I don’t know -- he was a very near contemporary.

For example a story in the collection Benya Krik, the Gangster, is titled “In the Basement.” It begins: “As a boy I was given to lying. It was all due to reading.” The narrator's imagination combined with what he reads makes him well-liked, as he embellishes the historic narratives that he reads. His schoomate, the son of a rich man, finds him likable and invites him to his suburban villa.

The wealth and possessions of the friend’s family are vast: “His father … was one of those men who were making Odessa another Marseille or Naples. There was in him the mettle of the Odessa merchant of the old days.” And the villa was pure luxury, close to a beach with carefully tended flower gardens. Guests play cards, women come and go with “diamonds clapped on everywhere;” their host sits in a chair facing the sea and reads The Manchester Guardien.

The narrator, in contrast, came from a “destitute and freakish family.” His grandfather makes clever inventions, and his uncle is a successful rogue, but they live in a slum. However, he describes his feckless relatives to his schoolmate as widely traveled and accomplished, and invites the friend back to visit his hovel. The ensuing disaster is mitigated slightly by the efforts of his Aunt Bobka, who bakes a jam strudel and a poppy-seed cake, and helps him bribe his crazy and unmanageable uncle and grandfather to stay away. Obviously, it doesn’t work – they come back drunk and hurling Jewish curses and Russian obscenities. In the end, we readers have seen the two most extreme sides of Odessa Jewry.

Babel’s stories were widely read in the early Soviet era; then he fell out of favor and eventually died in prison.

Writers and Revolutionaries in Odessa

2012-01-24T10:27:00.004-05:00

The frontier-like atmosphere of Odessa appealed to creative Jewish writers, as well as to aspiring businessmen. Mendele (Yiddish writer Shalom Yakov Abramovitch) lived there from 1881 until he died in 1917. Odessa was home to Sholem Aleichem for a short time in the 1890s. Bialik, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, lived there later, leaving in 1921. The free and assimilated atmosphere and active cultural scene before World War I and the Russian Revolution was clearly condusive to creativity.

Odessa was the birthplace of several noted Jewish authors whose assimilated background contributed to their writing style. I’ve been sampling translations of three writers of Russian-language works of fiction: Vladimir Jabotinsky, Isaac Babel, and Ilya Ilf. Despite similar origins in Odessa’s Russianized Jewish community, their works almost seem designed to illuminate the various political and artistic routes open to writers of their time and place.

This post is about Vladimir Jabotinsky, mainly known as a dissident Zionist leader who favored armed struggle over the more peaceful approach of the mainstream. Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880 and attended Russian schools, which Jews were allowed to do there. He became a Zionist and journalist and activist. During World War I, he and Trumpeldor (another Zionist hero) founded a Jewish military unit, the Jewish Legion, to fight for the British.

Much later, Jabotinsky returned to his calling as a writer with the novel The Five. (First published in 1936.) The narrator of The Five, like Jabotinsky, was a traveling journalist who wrote popular newspaper articles. The book is in the form of a memoir of a family with five children, obviously depicted carefully to represent typical Jewish characters in Odessa. It begins just before the crucial events of 1905 including the Potemkin, which had already been made famous by Eisenstein’s film (as I wrote yesterday) by the time Jabotinsky wrote the book. It mentions the war with Japan, which seems to have a rather small impact on the family. I think Jabotinsky expects the reader to fill in the impact of these major events, which at this long remove is hardto do.

Whatever else it is, The Five is above all a political novel. The narrator not only describes the family, he experiences a number of revelations about Odessa life and politics –all of which one sees are there partly to advance Jabotinsky’s perspective from decades later. The narrator travels, and while abroad, first hears “the use of the words Bolshevikand Menshevik, terms that were still little known in Russia outside the underground.” He notices a “rigid hierarchy in degrees of revolutionary orthodoxy … The Plekhanovites apologized to the Leninists, the Social Revolutionaries to the Marxists, the Bundists to all the rest, the Social Zionists of various stripes to the Bundists; simple Zionists were generally considered to be out of bounds and didn’t even attempt to beg forgiveness.” (p.100-101)

Although political, The Five is also very good and amazingly readable. The very typical characters are very believable. I think it would be read more widely if Odessa at that time were better known, but it’s too full of obscure cultural references to authors, poets, plays (like a quote from Chekov’s “Cherry Orchard,” which was new the year the book’s events take place).

For example, the first chapter takes place in the Odessa Opera House – which I only heard of in my recent reading of histories of the city; it also refers to a number of operas and singers that were popular then. Anotherchapter takes place in cafes on the most famous street in the city (also described by historians).

In the end, the five children of the central family meet very sad fates because there’s really nothing else possible for them. In a way, the father – a grain dealer who came from Zhitomir and overcame his Jewish accent and culture – is more comfortable in his skin than any of his assimilated children; the mother is the anchor of everyone in the family, but her life becomes sadder and sadder until the narrator calls her Niobe, the mother from a Greek myth, who defied the gods and was punished by the death of all her children.

One son tries everything non-religiously spiritual: from Yoga breathing exercises to keeping kosher (instead of eating sausages at a café) to vegetarianism. One daughter chooses a purely bourgoise marriage; the other joins the underground. Another son becomes a philosophical gangster, who says “the initial stages of mass assimilation are very difficult.” (p. 170)

At the end, the surviving youngest son, who was always a paragon in school, decides against Zionism – which is supposed to be the obvious solution by that point – and determines that he’ll convert to Christianity. I suspect the reader in the 1930s already knows how that’s going to work for him. By then, the Russian Revolution had devastated the Odessa Jewish community, along with so much of the territory.

It’s interesting that this novel was virtually unknown when published in Russian (well, ok, in 1936 it was bound to be obscured by what was happening there). It made little impact in a Hebrew translation (well, ok, a lot was going on in pre-state Israel too). And the first English translation only appeared in 2005, by which time it had become fairly opaque to most readers.

Sergei Eisenstein (January 23, 1898)

2012-01-23T01:00:00.004-05:00

Sergei Eisenstein grew up in Latvia and St. Petersberg, and became an important early-Soviet film maker.

"Battleship Potemkin," about the 1905 Odessa uprising, is his most famous film. It especially memorialized the image of the landmark stairway that links the upper city of Odessa to the lower port area. Above all, the film is remembered for the image of a baby carriage rolling out-of-control down these stairs. The scene has been visually quoted in subsequent movies, notably in The Untouchables in a shootout between Eliot Ness (Kevin Kostner) and Al Capone's henchmen.

Charles King's history of Odessa states:

"Today it is almost impossible to separate our understanding of 1905 from the way in which the events were mythologized twenty years later. All of the key images, in fact, come from the skillful hands of one man, Sergei Eisenstein, the master of early Soviet cinematography. Through his 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, Odessa became the tocsin that heralded the coming of revolution, ground zero for the emergence of triumphant Bolshevism, and by extension the truest birthplace of the Soviet Union." (Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, p. 189)

Among other changes, Eisenstein left out the vicious pogrom that occurred during the events of 1905 in Odessa. He located the violence and heroism on the famous stairway, assigning this to a central role in the uprising. In fact most of the violence occurred elsewhere, and was mainly directed at Jews. The permanence of the imagery comes from Eisenstein's imagination.

Eisenstein's mother was Russian Orthodox, but his father was Jewish, which maybe made him especially representative of the new Soviet citizen to whom religion didn't matter. Or not.

A Not-so-religious Jew sees Jerusalem

2012-01-22T17:03:00.003-05:00

In the New York times: an interesting perspective on visiting Jerusalem titled "Lost in Jerusalem." It reminded me of my several visits there under varying circumstances -- above, my photo of a lunch at a well-known hotel just outside the Old City.

The author's explanation:

"... last fall, my friend Theodore Ross — author of the forthcoming book 'Am I a Jew?' — suggested I see Jerusalem. And suddenly feeling life calling my bluff, I booked a flight. I’d spend six December days in the holiest place on the planet and, surrounded by the Old City’s 500-year-old stone walls and legions of Christians, Jews and Muslims, I would be the lone unbeliever, walking a tightrope between belonging and individualism, observing not necessarily my faith but the faithful."

Danny Kaye (January 18, 1913)

2012-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

My whole family loved Danny Kaye movies, especially my father. I remember our going to see "The Court Jester" and "Hans Christian Andersen." We also watched TV programs where he appeared. Quite a hero!

I read somewhere, but can't find it, that the Hollywood entrepreneurs made Danny Kaye dye his dark hair blonde and suppress some of the Jewishness that might have been in his personality in order to make him more popular. This seems rather paranoid, since the Marx Brothers were dark-haired, very Jewish, and totally accepted.

I wouldn't be willing to claim that his humor was Jewish, but it's possible, since you can argue that Jewish humor became American humor in a lot of ways. I do know that Danny Kaye visited Israel in 1956 and other times, where he was insanely popular.

Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909)

2012-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Clement Greenberg was an influential art critic. His early essaysincluded “Avant-Garde and Kitsch ” (1939), “Towards a New Laocoon ” (1940),“Abstract Art ” (1944), and “The Decline of Cubism” (1948). In the 1950s hebecame a champion of abstract expressionism and its followers, writing aboutJackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, David Smith, and Helen Frankenthaler. Hepublished works in Partisan Review,the Nation, and Commentary.

While he appears not to have much talked about his Jewishorigins, Greenberg’s ideas were important to the Jewish Museum in New York inthe 1960s, when “many in the emerging art world were Jews — artists like MarkRothko and Diane Arbus, the dealer Leo Castelli, the critic Clement Greenberg(though not Rauschenberg and Johns) — and the museum made it its mission tochampion their work.” *

I first became aware of Greenberg’s role in 2008 when I sawthe exhibit “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art,1940-1976,” which was organized by the Jewish Museum and shown at the St. Louisart museum. The exhibit described the rivalry between Greenberg and another critic, HaroldRosenberg, and traced public opinion of expressionism and related art movementsby showing clippings from Life magazineand other popular culture treatments of abstract art.

Here are two photos I took at the exhibit in St.Louis three years ago:

Odessa Mama

2012-01-11T11:17:00.000-05:00

Chicago-based Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, whose song "Ach! Odessa" I posted from Youtube yesterday, included recent Russian immigrants. Singing in Russian rather than Yiddish they represent a rather different tradition from the old New York klezmer bands. Mostly, klezmer as it became popular a few decades ago focused on songs that hark back to the pre-Soviet-era Jewish immigrant music. Odessa developed Yiddish culture into a new and special thing, Russian tinged with Yiddish, and never very known to Americans. So here's a taste.

Odessa definitely had its own klezmer music before the Revolution. As Odessa humor and culture spilled over into twentieth century Russia, klezmer was part of the mix (as I read in City of Rogues and Schnorrers by Jarrod Tanny). As a legacy of Soviet Odessa, the song has lots of interesting things about it: the CD notes say it is "drawn from that same colorful period in Odessa's history when the new conditions of Socialism were infused into the thriving Jewish world of trade, talent, and the underworld." Further, according to the notes, the spoken introduction is based on a story by Isaac Babel, who wrote quite a lot about Odessa, his native city.

"Odessa Mama, dear old town of mine," say the lyrics. "Ach! Odessa -- a pearl upon the sea... you have known so much grief... Ach! Odessa -- not just a town -- a bride! ... barges full of gray mullet ... Kostya delivered to Odessa ... And the lowlife would rise from their seats. When he would enter the tavern."

A real combination of nostalgia and crime from Odessa.

Ach! Odessa

2012-01-10T20:12:00.000-05:00

I'm still reading about Odessa, not ready to write much, but here's a song.

Kurt Tucholsky (January 9, 1890)

2012-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Kurt Tucholsky was a journalist and fiction writer in the exciting atmosphere of Berlin in the pre-Nazi era, when a kind of Jewish intellectualism and freedom seemed too good to be true -- and was. He wrote all kinds of stuff under various pen names (even Kaspar Hauser), and led a mixed-up and difficult life. He's remembered vividly and loved by current Berliners, even very young ones.

On a visit to Berlin a few years ago, we saw a street named after him, and we ate at Cafe Tucholsky, where the walls are covered with photos and memorabilia from his life there. As far as I can tell, he has little traction with Americans of any age.

Some of his works have been translated recently, and he's getting some attention from English speakers. Here's a quote from an anti-war poem in an article titled "I wish I had met Kurt Tucholsky"

"Lord God! If you’re really up there as we’ve been taught
Come down from Heaven or send your son.
Tear off the banners, the helmets and the medals
And tell the nations of the earth how we’ve suffered,
How we were wiped out by hunger, lice, shrapnel, and lies.
In your name, the preachers have led us to our graves.
Come down now and explain why they lied.
Those of us who have knees are kneeling before you. Listen to us.
Drive us back under the ground, but first give us an answer."

Odessa 100 years ago

2012-01-07T22:49:00.001-05:00

In 1912, Odessa was still a very new city: it had only existed for a little more than a century, and surprisingly, was dominated by Jews -- most of them secular. In recruiting a founding population the Russians had lifted the restrictions on both Jews and foreigners, and both arrived in large numbers, looking for opportunities that weren’t available in older and more rigid places. Odessa’s Jewish population had “played a pivotal role in the creation of Odessa’s dominant culture. Indeed … a secularized Jewish culture in a very real sense became the dominant culture.” (Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves, p. 5)

The vast majority of Jews in Russia a century ago lived under severe restrictions. Not so in Odessa. A third of its population of over half a million were Jews. Most spoke Russian; however, Yiddish from the Pale of Settlement and the eastern Austrian provinces, where most had come from, influenced the Odessa dialect which included many Yiddish words.

A large number of Jewish children in Odessa attended Russian schools. Jews were a majority of doctors and lawyers. Jewish members of a new middle class founded businesses and banks, played the stock exchange, went out to eat, listened to klezmer in taverns, and enjoyed (or pretended to enjoy) Italian opera in the city’s stylish opera house. Jewish journalists wrote both satire and serious articles in a number of newspapers, and Jewish fiction writers created a legacy of stories, leaving a nice record for modern scholars.

In Odessa, Jewish women aspired to be ladies with more freedom than they had enjoyed elsewhere – they dressed up to attend musical and theatrical performances, to drink coffee in the many cafes, and to eat in the European-style restaurants. Some worked as teachers or nurses; many led a pampered life.

And the Jews did all these things side by side with the non-Jews of the city.

A Jewish underworld was another widely noted presence in the city, especially in Moldavanka, the impoverished and overcrowded lower-class Jewish district. Odessan Jews thrived as thieves, con men, white slavers (who kidnapped young women and sent them to nearby Turkey or as far as Brazil), forgers, counterfeiters, fences of stolen goods, and other criminal types. The Jewish underworld fit well into the colorful and overheated atmosphere of the busy and multi-ethnic port city. Of course most Jews from Moldavanka worked at miserable but honest jobs: for example, they unloaded freight at the docks, provided household service, and worked in shops.

While Odessan Jews enjoyed freedom to worship in the city’s synagogues, they often dropped more committed religious practices, shocking visitors from villages by their casual attitudes towards dietary laws and Sabbath observances.

I’m currently at the beginning of what I hope is an ambitious project about Odessa and eventually other cities. So far, I’m reading:
• Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
• Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves
• Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa
• Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881

Coming soon: Jewish writers and revolutionaries in Odessa a century ago.

André Aciman (January 2, 1951)

2012-01-02T01:30:00.000-05:00

I've enjoyed one or two books and articles by André Aciman, and once heard him do a reading of Proust (I think) as part of a concert. His book Out of Egypt is both a personal memoir and a history of the end of Jewish life in his native Egypt, written with both chilling realism and delightful humor. He's both a scholar and an interesting writer on many subjects, not just on Jewish subjects. Here's a quote from him that I found somewhere: "I am a provisional, uncertain Jew. I am a Jew who loves Judaism provided it’s on the opposite shore, provided others practice it and leave me to pursue my romance of assimilation, which I woo with the assiduity of a suitor who is determined to remain a bachelor."

Resolutions

2012-01-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

My new goal for this blog in 2012: to read about cities where communities of assimilated or secular Jews have lived. Each city is different; sometimes anewly founded community took an unexpected direction. Sometimes new ideaswould emerge in a long-established community.

A few preliminary examples: Odessa was founded at the end ofthe 19^th century. From the start it was a very culturally and socially open place, where Jews and many others found economic and educational opportunities. This “New Russia” on the Black Sea always contrasted to Old Russia where Jewswere severely restricted in every way. The Odessa Jews became successful and increasinglyassimilated, though they kept a Jewish identity for the most part. Despiteseveral pogroms in the 1800s, Jews towards the end of the century were surethat persecution and antisemitism would soon end. I’ve been reading some veryinteresting books about this community, and will have much more to report.

Vitebsk and Vilna, in contrast, were traditional cities in the heart of the repressive Paleof Settlement. Despite the limitations, Vitebsk was the original home of several innovative 20^thcentury artists. And Vilna, famous for its religious center, was also the site of the founding of YIVO,which continues today in New York as an outstanding secular Jewish institution. Again, I’m aware of someinteresting studies of these communities and their progeny, and hope to explore them.

Venice, in 1515, invented the Ghetto so that they couldadmit Jews without actually living alongside them. The Venetian Ghetto became alively place with a strong life of its own, especially famous for Purim partiesand as a halfway stop for secret Jews escaping from the Spanish and PortugueseInquisitions. I've read quite a bit, and hope to review some of the more amusing anecdotes about this community.

Berlin allowed virtually no Jews in the 18^thcentury (Moses Mendelssohn needed a special exception to live there). However,when the situation opened up a bit, Berlin became a center of secular Jewishculture and was home to a number of interesting writers and thinkers. This fascinating era lasted from around 1800 until the Nazis solved the “problem.” German Jewish intellectual circles inBerlin are fascinating to read about, and I also have a reading list for this.

So my plan is that I’m going to learn more about these cities and Ihope many others, thus exploring a different approach to the almanach ofbirthday celebrations that I’ve done so far. I still have a few more birthdayseach month, as well as these new avenues for reading and writing.

Ben Kingsley (December 31, 1943)

2011-12-31T01:30:00.000-05:00

The actor Ben Kinglsey has a very mixed background, which has allowed him to take on roles with a huge variety of ethnic identities, including Gandhi, an Iranian immigrant to LA (in "House of Sand and Fog") and Otto Frank, father of Ann Frank.

He just did it again, playing Georges Méliès

the film maker in the new film “Hugo” (image at right). I loved "Hugo," and I think he’s an amazing actor.

Of his life and ethnic identity, Kingsley said:

“I think one in four of the students at my school was Jewish. Every single one of my friends was Jewish. My mother was half-Jewish, so I felt a part of exotic, cosmopolitan Manchester.”

He described his parents:

“'My mother was basically an abandoned child. She wasn't brought up by her own mother, who was, to put it mildly, extremely difficult. If we were trying to be really kind we would call her "a character". Murderous. Terrifying. So my mum had no role model in terms of maternal instinct and intuition.'“His grandmother was an East End rag trader who fell pregnant by a Jewish immigrant. When he ran away back to Russia she became virulently anti-Semitic. Kingsley once said that when he portrayed 'great heroic Jews and heroic dark people' such as Simon Wiesenthal and Gandhi he was 'sticking two fingers up' at her. So it must have been difficult for this fearsome matriarch when her daughter married a young man of Indian descent.

“Rahimtulla Bhanji, Kingsley's father, was a Gujarati like Gandhi, but was brought up in Kenya, the son of a spice trader. He came to England to study medicine before going on to work as a GP in Yorkshire, where his second son, Krishna Pandit Bhanji, the future Ben Kingsley, was born.” -- quotes from "The dark family secret that drove Ben Kingsley to success"

Stan Lee (December 28, 1922)

2011-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Jewish comic-book author Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber) co-created the Fantastic Four comic series in 1961 for Marvel Comics. He's responsible for Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and X-Men. Surely that makes him a hero to a lot of comic readers!

Like Jewish popular music composers, Jewish comic book creators made an enormous contribution to their field. The first tabloid-sized funny paper reprints appeared in 1934, published by an unemployed Jewish novelty salesman named Max Gaines (née Max Ginzberg) and Harry L. Wildenberg, who worked at Eastern Color Printing; their idea took off. The next big thing in comic books -- Superman -- was invented by artists who also happened to be Jewish. I have not seen a credible explanation for either phenomenon, though I found a history of their role that attempts to explain the role of Jews throughout comic history up to Mad magazine. The last paragraph reads:

MAD's conversion from a comic book to a bimonthly magazine marked the end the Golden Age of comic books, which, for its creators, was like a drama in two acts. In act one, Jews seeking to escape poverty invented a new genre that melded popular art and storytelling, and projected Jewish (and adolescent) power fantasies onto their "all-American" superhero creations. During the shorter second act, the five-year reign of EC Comics was marked by an overriding concern about morality, sometimes emanating from a Jewish sensibility. In the words of The X-Men creator Stan Lee: "To me you can wrap all of Judaism up in one sentence, and that is, 'Do not do unto others...' All I tried to do in my stories was show that there's some innate goodness in the human condition. And there's always going to be evil; we should always be fighting evil."

Latkes

2011-12-24T21:30:00.001-05:00

Tonight's latke dinner with Elaine and Larry. We had leg of lamb, latkes, and for dessert, lemon layer cake.

Yasmin Levy (December 23, 1975)

2011-12-23T01:36:00.002-05:00

Yasmin Levy is a charismatic singer of Israeli and Ladino songs. I thoroughly enjoyed a concert she gave a few years ago. I especially remember her sing-along version of the very dramatic song “Adio Kerido.”

Levy’s inspiration partly comes from her father Yitzhak Levy, thus described at her website:

“Born in Turkey in 1919, he worked as both a composer and cantor. After the creation of the State of Israel, Yitzhak was appointed head of the Ladino department at Israel's national radio station. His life's work was devoted to the collection and preservation of the songs of Sephardic Jews: these songs had been passed down orally from generation to generation over a period in excess of 500 years. During his lifetime he published four books containing Sephardic romances and another ten volumes of liturgical songs. He also recorded many of these same songs for the national radio.”

Happy Hanukkah!

2011-12-20T17:00:00.000-05:00

It's the first night of Hanukah, and time for secular Jews like me to light candles, and maybe think about Judah Maccabee, as I said in my earlier post.

Andrei Codrescu (December 20, 1946)

2011-12-20T02:31:00.001-05:00

I’ve always enjoyed Andrei Codrescu’s commentaries on All Things Considered, especially when he contrasted his youth under communist rule to his adulthood as an American poet and academic. Though I think the title of his poetry magazine, Exquisite Corpse, is delightful, I've never actually seen a copy.

For the Moment Magazine symposium on what it means to be Jewish he said:

“My family fled Hungarian-occupied Transylvania to escape the Nazis to Romania, where I was born after the war. Being a poet, I work with language, which is something we Jews are very good at. We have survived by means of a book, the perpetuation of one language and the invention of another. Hebrew words still maintain a potent link to the sacred, just as Yiddish, our other language, keeps us rooted to the bitter ironies of the human world. Of course, any language can connect to the divine under the ministrations of a poet, but there is something in our use of it that transcends both education and prayer. We offer the world a model of survival for thousands of years without a bureaucratic state (until Israel) or an official language. We are a shining and tragic example of what happens to the powerless when the powerful need scapegoats, and we provide at the same time a model for existence through learning and community. We possess a stubborn sense of justice born out of being the perennial subjects of injustice. Our moral history consists largely of reflection on the laws of men and the Law of God, a subject of existential urgency to all humans.”

Italo Svevo (December 19, 1861)

2011-12-19T02:11:00.003-05:00

Italo Svevo was the pen name of a Jewish businessman and novelist from Trieste named Ettore Schmitz. When we were in Ireland an Irish/English friend, discussing Leopold Bloom, wondered if James Joyce knew any Irish Jews. I said I didn’t know, but he did know Italo Svevo in Trieste. Svevo first employed Joyce as an English tutor, but became his friend.

Svevo's most famous novel is The Confessions of Zeno. When first published, it received little recognition, but is now admired for its early use of psychoanalysis and Freudian thought in fiction. Joyce's influence helped to make it better known and respected. I read it long ago.

From an article in the Guardian about the story of Svevo:

"What gives the story its piquancy is the way Svevo's very acquiescence in his apparent destiny as a businessman brought about his rebirth as a writer. With the expansion of his father-in-law's firm, he began travelling to London on business. Feeling the need to improve his English, he hired a young Irishman in Trieste to tutor him. James Joyce at this point was 25 and more or less unknown, but his words of praise to his middle-aged pupil, who had diffidently handed him his two long-forgotten novels, were enough to regalvanise Svevo's literary ambitions. And many years later, when The Confessions of Zeno was completed, it was Joyce - now famous - who engineered the triumphant French publication that finally brought Svevo the recognition he deserved; a wonderfully old-fashioned ending for a story involving two such uncompromising modernists.

"Zeno, like his creator, is a compulsive renouncer - most comically of cigarettes, but of other pleasures, too. The secret of the happiness he derives from his various relationships lies in the way he is constantly giving up (in his mind at least) one for another. In the charmingly devious byways of his psyche, the problem of the transitoriness of pleasure is resolved by incorporating the idea of its destruction into the experience of the pleasure itself. Enjoyment and valediction are miraculously suspended there together, at least for a period."

Hanukkah Starts in Two Days

2011-12-18T08:49:00.000-05:00

Hanukkah is the most secularly accessible of Jewish holidays, I wrote last year. I liked this post so much I've decided to re-issue it this year.

To begin: Hanukkah was invented, some say, in a secular way – imitating the habits of the Hellenists in proclaiming a festival to celebrate a military victory, instead of getting the holiday directly from God. For another thing, it provides an alternative to secular Christmas: we have candles, they have trees. Even in the shtetl, it was kind of secular – a chance to gamble and give treats to the kids, maybe.

American Jews might see the Hanukkah story as a reinforcement of American values – religious freedom, standing up to tyranny, self-determination. We are free to ignore the elements of religious fanaticism in the actual Maccabee family as presented in the sources: they were rejected as part of the Jewish canon a long time ago anyway. And skeptics among us naturally can deal with the miracle of 8 days of oil in a variety of ways.

The Maccabees have always provided lots of ambiguity – something for anyone. Here are eight ways various people have seen Judah Maccabee as a hero – one for each night of Hanukkah.

1) Judah Maccabee, freedom fighter. Judah Maccabee’s commitment illustrates the importance of following one’s own conscience. As American Jews in the 20^th century I think we learned this one in Jewish schools from Conservative to Reform to Secular.

2) Judah Maccabee, defender of the Jewish state. The Israelis have their own view of Judah the heroic soldier. In modern Israel, he not only stands for American-style freedom, but also for defending the Jewishness of the Jewish state:

“For modern Zionists, no group in Jewish history was better suited for the role of heroes than that band of irregulars whose guerilla war against the imperial rulers (in this case, Greek-speaking Hellenists based in Syria) ended in victory and national liberation – the Maccabees.” From “A Zionist Hanukkah”

3) Judah Maccabee, military genius. This is another one that seems appealing to Israelis. It definitely comes right out of the original sources. For Jews of practically any persuasion, the idea that the small, underpowered Jewish fighters could defeat the well-equipped regular armies of one of the world’s biggest empires has evident appeal.

4) Judah Maccabee, religious leader struggling against defilers of pure Judaism. This one is a little anti-heroic for secular Jews like me. If you look closely at the actual motives of the Maccabee family, they wanted everyone to be a more orthodox Jew. The Temple needed purification after the battle – but there were also questions about how pure the prior practices had been, before the fight began. The Maccabees threw out the corrupted hereditary priests who had held power before the battle.

5) Judah Maccabee, martyr for his cause. Remember, he died before the oil miracle took place. Another not-too-secular aspect of our hero.

6) Judah Maccabee, anti-assimilationist and anti-Hellenizer. The Hasmoneans, another name for the Maccabee faction, did not like the introduction of Hellenistic political structure, art, literature, and outlook into their own culture. They especially and most famously opposed Jews who capitulated to adding pagan cult objects and practices into the Temple rituals. The Hasmoneans weren’t the most fanatic anti-Hellenizers (that would be the isolationist Qumram sects), but they were obviously very opposed to much assimilation with the tempting Hellenistic ways. Since secular Jews in modern western countries are mainly assimilationists, we do a little glossing over here. Anyway, no one has made us worship the emperor recently.

7) Judah Maccabee, warrior for God. In Medieval and Renaissance Christian art, many artists included him as a kind of generic Biblical military hero and symbol of Christian triumphalism -- the Old Testament prefiguring the New Testament. Not a popular view with Jews.

8) Judah Maccabee, hero of Handel’s Oratorio. Handel dedicated his magnificent treatment of the Book of Maccabees to a military victory by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, celebrating his triumph over the recent Jacobite rebellion. England at the time had a very small Jewish community, but they were active patrons of the arts, and quickly made this work a favorite of theirs, and commissioned more Handel works. Check Youtube to hear the beautiful aria:

“See, the conqu'ring hero comes!
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums.”

Hyman Feldman (December 15, 1905)

2011-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Last year I wrote a fairly long post about my father, Hyman Feldman, on his birthday. This year, I'll just post a photo of my father in front of our Chevrolet that he drove from around 1950 until 1960.

A Wandering Jew

2011-12-14T09:54:00.001-05:00

Interesting article by André Aciman: "Convivencia: A plaintive Gypsy song, possibly of Ladino origin, is hybridized and reinterpreted, then viewed on the Internet, where roots and homelands blur." Aciman's writings on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish wanderings in the twentieth and now twenty-first century are always fascinating.

Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928)

2011-12-12T03:14:00.003-05:00

Helen Frankenthaler was a central figure in the New York School of painting, a movement that emerged in the early 1950s. She was involved with the art critic Clement Greenberg, and later married and divorced the painter Robert Motherwell.

Frankenthaler's background was Jewish and intellectual. Her father was a New York State Supreme Court judge, and she grew up on New York’s Upper East Side. According to the Jewish Women's Archive , "Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive Jewish family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers."

Frankenthaler was widely recognized when she was in her early twenties, especially for a work titled Mountains and Sea (shown above). "The color field painting that came to prominence during the later 1950s and 1960s, by Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Dzubas, and Jules Olitski, among many others, can be said to have had its origin at that moment." In an art world that discriminated against women, she managed to create and maintain a distinctive reputation.

Christmas by Jewish Songwriters

2011-12-09T09:56:00.002-05:00

One subject that intrigues me is the high number of Jews in American popular music. Of course there are books about this subject, which I haven't read, and might get around to reading some time. Meanwhile, there's Tablet magazine and it's continued coverage of popular culture.

Today: a list of Christmas songs by Jews, reprinted from 2009: "Have Yourself a Jewish Little Christmas: The top 10 Christmas Songs written by Jews" by Marc Tracy.

Here's the bare-bones list from bottom to "White Christmas" (for details see the original article) --

10. “The Christmas Waltz”
9. “Silver Bells"
8. “Winter Wonderland”
7. “Santa Baby”
6. “Sleigh Ride”
5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”
4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”
3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow”
2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”)
1. “White Christmas”

Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913)

2011-12-08T15:08:00.001-05:00

From the indispensable Tablet Magazine:

"Schwartz ... became a central figure in the emerging group of New York intellectuals who would come into their own in the 1940s, but his writing was palpably different from theirs. Most of them were Jewish, but they showed little interest in their Jewishness, except for their urge to leave it behind. Marxist theory and the appeal of Western culture helped make them universalists, quickening their flight from their immigrant beginnings. Their facility with ideas typically made them critics rather than poets or novelists. Personal writing held little appeal for them, at least until they began to look back years later. During the Depression it seemed an indulgence, even an embarrassment. It could only drag them back to the poverty and, as they saw it, the cultural poverty of their family backgrounds.

"For Delmore Schwartz, what lay behind him was everything. His family history, and especially his Jewishness, was the medium that would help him fathom the enigma of who he was. His most ambitious work was a failed book-length autobiographical poem called Genesis. No writer believed less in the Emersonian vision of personal freedom, with its faith in the individual’s power of self-making. In one of his short plays, titled Shenandoah, Schwartz derided the notion that “a man/ Creates his life ex nihilo.” Instead, he took up Freud’s exploration of the family romance, which fed his own bleak sense that family was destiny. He never tired of musing on the cultural contradictions of his own name and the burden it placed on him. In Shenandoah, the mock-tragic verse play, his 25-year-old alter ego, Shenandoah Fish, is transported back to the scene of his own bris, the moment when he, at eight days old, received his impossible name. He blames his parents for their eagerness to gain a foothold in the gentile world while at the same time being tone deaf to its language and culture. The incongruous name came to stand for his divided being, at once comically native and ethnic."

Sammy Davis Jr. (December 8, 1925)

2011-12-08T03:03:00.002-05:00

I don't really know anything about Sammy Davis, Jr. except that he belonged to the "Rat Pack," Las Vegas entertainment circle with Frank Sinatra at the center, and he converted to Judaism for what appear to have been not-very-religious reasons. He was also a Republican at times, so evidently he didn't convert in a totally cultural way.

Ira Gershwin (December 6, 1896)

2011-12-06T14:46:00.003-05:00

George and Ira Gershwin

Ira Gershwin was the lyricist for many of his famous brother George's songs. He also collaboraed with Kurt Weill and Moss Hart on Lady in the Dark, with Jerome Kern, and with Harold Arlen. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing.

George and Ira Gershwin were raised as Jews in New York, but though their Jewishness is widely known and always included in their biographies, I've found nothing indicating that they recognized direct Jewish influence or inspiration for their work. Why were so many Jews successful in creating the American brand of theater music and so many popular songs of the early and mid-20th century? I've also never seen a plausible explanation. It just happened!

Marty Peretz (December 6, 1938)

2011-12-06T03:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a real antihero! As far as I’m concerned the following sentence from GAWKER summarizes this guy: “Martin Peretz is an obscenely wealthy moral cripple who owns the New Republic.”

Peretz married a very rich woman when he was in his 20s, and bought influence and access to power in various ways, eventually using the New Republic to further his ends. While he did hire accomplished left-wing editors to run the magazine, his contribution seems to have mainly been curmudgeonly comment becoming more and more grumpy and neocon over the years. I can’t imagine why three or four major publications devoted huge amounts of space to him in December and January of last year, but they did. Hero or anti-hero? Who cares. Secular Jew? Yes, but who cares? What’s so great about buying your way into fame and influence?

Gershom Scholem (December 5, 1897)

2011-12-05T14:26:00.000-05:00

Gershom Scholem was a scholar of Jewish mysticism. In one of his books he said that you could study the history of Jewish mystics and the Kabbalah without being religious yourself, and this was his approach. I find it memorable. His numerous books and articles, based on his wide knowledge of history and languages, made an enormous difference in the perception and scholarship of Jewish history and culture. I have read and enjoyed many of them, most famous of which is his long biography Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah.

Before Scholem's works were published, scholars were in a weird kind of denial about Jewish mystics, because the scholars themselves were trying to invent a sort of sanitized history of Judaism, making it respectable to the rational 19th century views they themselves held. (Maybe this is an exaggeration, but there's a grain of truth in it. Anyway I find many of those pre-Scholem scholars deadly dull!) He founded the entire field of study of Jewish mystics, and his books are fundamental.

Scholem's autobiography, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, tells the really compelling story of how he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism as well as being an early Zionist and one of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As an adolescent, he found life in Germany uncomfortable and untenable because of the anti-Jewish climate throughout the society, especially in academia, and he committed himself to earn a doctorate and then go to Jerusalem. Obviously he wrote after the Holocaust, so he had hindsight, but the foresight that he demonstrated was clearly unusual and penetrating. His friendship with Walter Benjamin was full of contradictions, as Benjamin wasn't as forward-looking.

Calvin Trillin (December 5, 1935)

2011-12-05T01:50:00.001-05:00

Calvin Trillin does some of the funniest food writing I've ever encountered, while still really talking about food. Although he refers to his Jewish background from time to time, I've never thought about him as a particularly Jewish writer. Like me, he's from the Midwest, although unlike me, he's a very-long-term resident of New York and his writing is quite New York-centered, especially when he's reminding the New Yorkers that the rest of the country exists. I loved his books about his wife Alice and the way she tried to get him not to eat 12 meals a day, or however many it was.

An interviewer from Forward once asked him "Would you say yours is a Jewish sense of humor?"

Trillin answered: "All of me is Jewish. You get a lot of theories about Jews deflecting pain through humor. I don’t know about that. I think there is sort of an irony built into the faith. Even in the Talmud where they argue 'maybe' and 'but on the other hand,' that I always found funny."

In the same interview, he described how he discovered he could be funny: "We were studying that section of the Bible where it says, 'If I forget thee o Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning and let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.' I was kind of a shy little boy. I think I was in the sixth grade, and I suddenly got up and said, 'If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,' and I had my right hand dangling by my side. And then I said, 'Wet my tongue kweave to duh woof of my mouf.' That won me over to comedy, and, if you can have an epiphany in a non-Christian school, I had an epiphany."

Arny Feldman

2011-12-04T01:02:00.001-05:00

Happy Birthday to my brother Arny! I remember the day he was born, a bleak, cold day in December, and how happy my father was.

Etta Cone (November 30, 1870)

2011-11-30T11:10:00.003-05:00

Etta Cone collected her first Matisse and Picasso paintings during a trip to Paris in 1905. The Matisse shown above was one of many in her immense lifetime collection, now on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art. At the time of the first modern art purchase, she was under the influence of the Stein family: Gertrude and her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sally, all of them intense art patrons and collectors. She had an intense friendship with Gertrude Stein (who knows how intense?) which was excised from history later, probably to please Alice B. Toklas.

Throughout her life, Etta Cone and her sister Claribel Cone (whom I wrote about earlier this month) continued to create an amazing collection of modern art, though she handled it in a very modest and private way. In The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone, author Mary Gabriel documents the somewhat unequal relationship of the two Cone sisters, who are now recognized as visionaries in the early appreciation of modern art.

Though not religious, and not active in Baltimore's Jewish community, Etta had some vague Jewish identity, and once wrote to Gertrude Stein: “Happy New Year to you, you heathen." *

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835)

2011-11-29T01:23:00.000-05:00

Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- that's Mark Twain to most of us --belongs on my list of heroes for two reasons:

First, because Huckleberry Finn so perfectly highlights what is wrong with bigotry.
Second because upon meeting the famous Jewish author he (allegedly) said: “I wanted to meet you because I'm told that I'm the American Sholom Aleichem.”

Stefan Zweig (Nov. 28, 1881)

2011-11-28T01:35:00.002-05:00

Stefan Zweig's autobiography The World of Yesterday depicts the vanished world of Vienna 100 years ago. Jews were a major factor in the intellectual life in that famous era, and he describes it with painful awareness that the Nazis had destroyed everything he cherished. He also documents his experiences as a pacifist during World War I, and other elements of his life as a highly successful and rewarded author. Soon after writing the book, in exile, deprived of his success and of the Europe he had valued, he and his wife committed suicide in despair.

I've read some of his stories, the autobiography, and his novel “Beware of Pity.” The latter explored an interesting side of what it meant to be Jewish at the time, through depiction of a Jew who has tried to repudiate his background, but suffers for his pretensions. The focus of the book is on a rather unimaginative officer who can't resist an overdeveloped sense of honor. Zweig's works can at times seem dated, but at times also offer really interesting insights into the past. Recently, a number of his books have been republished and readership, which declined for many years, has increased.

Leonard Woolf (November 25, 1880)

2011-11-25T01:27:00.001-05:00

From a review of a biography of Leonard Woolf by Victoria Glendinning in the Guardian:

"The centre of the mystery is why Virginia Stephen, who shared the conventional, mild anti-semitism of pre-Great War, upper-middle-class England, married 'a penniless Jew' who looked like an Old Testament prophet. ...

"There is a good deal to be learnt about multiculturalism from examining Woolf's early life, for the Woolfs were assimilated to the extent that his father was a QC and Leonard was educated at St Paul's and Trinity, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles, the secret society then in its golden age, including as members GE Moore, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes.

"Though part of the English establishment, Leonard maintained a relatively uncomplicated Jewish identity (perhaps by refusing to take personally anti-semitic remarks made by TS Eliot, Harold Nicolson and his wife). This had nothing to do with the religion of his fathers, for he was, like his fellow Apostles, a militant atheist. His grandfather, Benjamin, had already discarded Orthodoxy in favour of the Reform movement and joined a Mayfair synagogue."

Jews and Vegetarians

2011-11-23T13:16:00.003-05:00

Today's Forward has an article about Jewish vegetarianism, going back to “The Theory of Vegetarianism” published in Russia in 1884 by I.B. Levinsohn. Later, Yiddish activists even wrote and sang ”The Vegetarian Hymn.”

The main subject of the article is a vegetarian advocate named Fania Lewando, who wrote “Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh,” that is, “Vegetarian Dietetic Cookbook.” The book was published in Vilna in 1938; it's taken a long time, but along with some of the original colorful illustrations, a translation of the work is scheduled for publication next spring.

George Eliot (November 22, 1819)

2011-11-22T10:03:00.003-05:00

George Eliot (real name: Mary Anne Evans) was author of a book that should be fascinating to modern, secular Jews: Daniel Deronda. I found the novel readable and intriguing and, it seemed to me, ahead of its time. The Jewish elements in the novel still seem controversial now, as they did when it was published in 1876. Eliot's interest in Jews and the beginnings of Zionism extended beyond the book; she later wrote an essay against antisemitism. Daniel Deronda was made into a mini-series that was shown on Masterpiece Theater several years ago.

According to a review in the Guardian:

"Deronda was the first of Eliot's novels to be set in her own period, the late 19th century, and in it she took on what was a highly unusual contemporary theme: the position of Jews in British and European society and their likely prospects. The eponymous hero is an idealistic young aristocrat who comes to the rescue of a young Jewish woman and in his attempts to help her find her family is drawn steadily deeper into the Jewish community and the ferment of early Zionist politics.

"Their appearance in the book was as unwelcome to some of her readers as it is to some of the characters. While the novel's Lady Mallinger bemoans Daniel's 'going mad in this way about the Jews,' Eliot's friend John Blackwood noted upon publication: 'The Jews should be the most interesting people in the world, but even her magic pen cannot at once make them a popular element in a Novel.' Many years later, FR Leavis called for the Jewish sections of the novel to be cut out completely, leaving a country-house romance to be called Gwendolen Harleth, after the fatally self-absorbed gentile who falls for Deronda."

In the novel, the character named Mordecai is particularly interesting. Mordecai, according to the Guardian article is a "visionary intellectual." He is "a complex character with both sympathetic and unsympathetic sides and reveals a sometimes overwhelmingly detailed fascination with the minutiae of Judaism, its religious practices, culture and literature. The fact that Daniel becomes Mordecai's disciple and agrees to carry on his work to seek a homeland for the Jews after his death -- an idea presumably as baffling to Eliot's readers as it is to most of the book's gentile characters -- also shows a real commitment to the subject by the author."

Jewish Book Month (November 21-December 21, 2011)

2011-11-21T01:21:00.001-05:00

Jewish Book Month has been celebrated the month before Chanukkah since 1940. When I think about Jewish books, one institution that comes to mind is the National Yiddish Book Center, and its founder Aaron Lansky. The photo above is from my visit there in 2003.

From the Center's website:

"In 1980, when Aaron Lansky issued his first public appeal for old Yiddish books, it was estimated that only 70,000 Yiddish volumes were extant and recoverable. He rescued that many within six months. Today the National Yiddish Book Center’s collection totals over a million volumes, with the core collection stored in our state-of-the-art repository and 11,000 titles available online from our Virtual Yiddish Library. The Book Center also sponsors public events, internships and a wide range of cultural and educational programs designed to 'open up' the treasures of Yiddish culture for a new generation."

Myla Goldberg (November 19, 1971)

2011-11-19T01:57:00.001-05:00

I read Goldberg’s novel Bee Season for two different book clubs – both liked it! Her use of Jewish material in a very strange context was interesting. About her identity as a Jewish American she said:

“The diversity and vitality of American Jewish practice today means that I can be a secular humanist married to a non-Jewish atheist and still be part of a vibrant Jewish community that embraces my family. For such a long-lived, established religion, Judaism has remained steadfastly and impressively committed to its founding spirit of questioning, which has led to our current freedoms in belief, philosophy and practice. On a spiritual level, that means that eschewing a traditional deistic God concept in favor of a humanistic one hasn’t made me a pariah: I can derive inspiration and meaning from the limitless potential of collective humanity and still feel welcome within the larger Jewish community. Though my Jewish identity informs my writing, it does not define my writing, nor do I feel the need to put a label on myself to find readers, as previous generations of Jewish writers may have felt compelled to do. I find the whole Chosen People thing outdated and distasteful, nor do I think that we have a monopoly on any particular set of values, but there are some fantastic ideas contained in Judaism that we can and should offer in our engagement with the world. We find ourselves in an extraordinary place and time in Jewish history, with unprecedented freedom to define who we are and who we wish to be. We should strive to engage the world with the same qualities of open mindedness and empathy that have led to our own success.” – Moment Magazine Symposium on what it means to be Jewish

Naomi Chazan (November 18, 1946)

2011-11-18T01:50:00.000-05:00

Naomi Chazan, former Israeli Knesset member and outspoken human rights activist is currently the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to promoting equality and social justice for all Israelis. Through grassroots organizations, NIF leads many efforts to keep Israel a multi-ethnic, tolerant, democratic society in the face of many trends to the contrary.

One of her recent causes is fighting the boycott law, which would institute punishments for Israelis who engage in a boycott of the settlements. She wrote: “The Boycott Law is in some ways the most problematic in terms of basic rights in a democratic society. It touches on fundamental freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of association and certainly also freedom to protest. The law rules out any possibility of protest. From the point of view of democracy, this is a wrong that almost beggars description. Every person who, for reasons of conscience, does not buy products made in the settlements becomes a criminal. What have we come to? At the constitutional level, we are simply starting to unravel the last of the rules of the game. It’s not a flashing yellow light anymore − it’s very red.”

Pierre Nora (November 17, 1931)

2011-11-17T01:38:00.001-05:00

Pierre Nora is an important writer and editor for major French publishers and a member of l’Académie Française, and he has played a major role in French intellectual life. His most famous accomplishment was as editor of the series titled “Lieux de Mémoire” from the publisher Gallimard. I wrote about him here: French Secular Intellectual Jews.

Lee Strasberg (November 17, 1901)

2011-11-16T01:20:00.000-05:00

Lee Strasberg, actor, director, and coach to many famous stars, was one of the founders of the Group Theater with Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford in 1931. He later headed the Actor's Studio. From the Actors' Studio history:

In 1948, Lee Strasberg was asked by Elia Kazan to join the Studio as one of its teachers and in 1951 he became its Artistic Director, a position he maintained until his death in 1982. Strasberg’s deep understanding of the Stanislavski System and the reformulations of Vakhtangov, together with his own personal discoveries and improvements on the acting process, provided the foundation on which the Actors Studio based its work.

At the same time the work of Elia Kazan as a theatre and film director demonstrated in the most powerful way the extraordinary results of the deep and personal process of acting espoused by the Actors Studio.

Strasberg's family immigrated to New York early in his life. His first acting experience was in the Yiddish theater, and he is well-known as a director and as the influential leader of the Actors' Studio and its predecessor the and the most important American proponent of method acting. He was also important for his influence on Hollywood actors -- especially on Marilyn Monroe; the photo above shows them together.

According to an article in the Jerusalem Post, Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote that Strasberg "carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... [H]e was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them 'permanent.'"

Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900)

2011-11-14T01:28:00.002-05:00

Aaron Copland's music created a special mythological America. He wrote of farms, cowboys on the frontier, Lincoln, and "the common man." He borrowed tunes from 19th century American music, New York jazz, and Mexican folk music for use in symphonies and ballets that seem overwhelmingly American. Maybe he defined what American sounds like.

Critic Robert Goldblum writes:

"Aaron Copland grew up in the cramped quarters of Brooklyn, the child of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, but in his music he lit out for the territory. The architecture of city life — Deco skyscrapers and imposing Beaux-Arts museums — defined his early life, but in his music he sought sanctuary in the prairie."

According to a PBS story: "As a spokesman for the advancement of indigenous American music, Copland made great strides in liberating it from European influence."

Understanding how Copland transformed himself is mysterious.

Claribel Cone (November 14, 1864)

2011-11-13T01:47:00.000-05:00

Sisters Claribel and Etta Cone of Baltimore were friends of Gertrude Stein -- the three are shown in the photo at right. The Cones had an independent income from a family business, but Claribel worked as a medical doctor and successful researcher. According to the Jewish Women's Archive:

First in her class [at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore], she graduated in 1890 and undertook postgraduate study at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She won one of five internships at the Philadelphia Blockley Hospital for the Insane. On returning to Baltimore in 1893, Claribel Cone announced that she preferred medical research and teaching to clinical practice. She secured a position as a lecturer in hygiene at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore. Appointed full professor in 1895, she taught pathology at the college until it closed in 1910.

From Gertrude and her brother Leo, Claribel and Etta Cone learned about the breathtaking modern art that was being produced in Paris a century ago, and became splendid collectors with amazing taste. They were quite friendly with some of the artists of the era as well, especially Matisse. Their collections are now in the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The Cone sisters' lives and accomplishments as collectors are documented in Mary Gabriel's book The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone. Gabriel emphasizes their originality and imaginative recognition of the great artists of their time, and makes the case that being women caused them to be overlooked by history (as did Gertrude Stein's dismissal of them in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas).

The same article mentions "Though described by a nephew as a “freethinker,” Claribel Cone was quite conscious of her identity as a Jew."

Barbara Boxer (November 11, 1940)

2011-11-11T01:15:00.002-05:00

Barbara Boxer doesn't play up her Jewish identity, but also doesn't hide it. For me, she's a highly admirable figure because of her consistent stands on many issues that matter. If being Jewish motivates her consistent support of high-quality Supreme Court nominees (like Sotomayor), drives her to favor individual liberties and feminism, or makes her get high marks from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, that's great. But I'm not sure it really makes sense to judge cause and effect like that. I wish Judaism caused everyone to agree with me politically but it doesn't seem to work that way, does it Eric Cantor?

Jacob Epstein (November 10, 1880)

2011-11-10T15:35:00.003-05:00

Jacob Epstein, born and brought up in New York, became a thoroughly British avant-garde sculptor, a leader in 20th century modern art. His work appears in every collection from his era -- here, "The Rock Drill" from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Epstein and two other early 20th century giants inspired the following limerick:

I don't like the family Stein,
There is Gert, and there's Ep, and there's Ein,
Gert's poems are bunk,
Ep's statues are junk,
And nobody understands Ein.

I've already written about Gert and Ein!

To be serious about Epstein here is a summary from the Courtauld Institute:

"Jacob Epstein ... was born in America, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants who ran a successful business on the lower East side of New York. He spent the formative years of his childhood drawing the exotic, down-at-heels crowds which gathered from all over the world in the city’s poorer districts. Throughout his life, he remained fascinated by the variety of human races and traditions, looking to distant countries for his artistic inspiration.

"The caricature of Epstein as iconoclast, wreaking havoc on traditional art, scarcely fits his own explanation of his work. Repeatedly, he asserted his enormous respect for tradition. Only, his definition of tradition departed from the norm, in that he rejected the development of European art since the Renaissance."

Karl Shapiro (November 10, 1913)

2011-11-10T01:25:00.002-05:00

Here, from the Poetry Foundation website, is part of a poem by Karl Shapiro:

I Am an Atheist Who Says His Prayers
I am an atheist who says his prayers.

I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.

I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.

I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.

I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.

A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.

I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.

I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.

I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me.

I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance.

I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever.

Neil Gaiman ( November 10, 1960)

2011-11-09T01:08:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman and his weird myth-based world, especially of the books American Gods and Anansi Boys. I would say there's nothing at all noticeably Jewish about any work of his that I've read, but I have read in various sources that he identifies with his Jewish ancestors.

Gaiman was brought up in England. His parents were not practicing Jews; rather, they were Scientologists. However, Gaiman emphatically says he's not a scientologist. He immigrated to the US some time ago, and lives in Minnesota.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Gaiman elaborated on his background:

"It was when Gaiman was 12 that he first came across a seam of mythology unlike anything his childhood collections of Greek and Roman tales had yet exposed him to. That was the year he got to be 'really Jewish', as he puts it. For this pre-bar mitzvah year, he was sent each weekend to stay with observant cousins in Wembley. 'I had this wonderful bar mitzvah teacher. He was a cantor, Reb Meyer Lev. He was very, very into all of the stories of Jewish mythology. I was the kind of kid who, given the opportunity, would derail the stuff I was meant to be learning and get him on to mythological subjects. And he, bless him, would always go there.

"'Which meant that in my mid-twenties, when I was writing myths and writing comics, I suddenly discovered that I knew all this incredibly obscure stuff, I mean way beyond imagining, and it was marvellous. And I'd write stuff, and people'd come up to me, and say, OK, the thing about Adam having three wives - marvellous stuff.'"

And from another interview:

"Gaiman acknowledges there is little that is particularly Jewish about his life in the United States. 'For me, the funny and the weird thing about being Jewish in the US is that in America they only have room to put you in one box or another. So, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show gets to be Jewish, I'm English and so that puts me in the English box.'

"But he does think that Judaism features in his writing, 'because fundamentally the perspective on almost all of my fiction, particularly something big in Sandman, is 'outsidery'; being part of a culture but also being part of the 'other'."

Very interesting!

S. An-Sky (November 8, 1863)

2011-11-08T01:31:00.000-05:00

S. An-Sky, born Shloyme Zanvel Rappaport, was a writer, photographer, and collector of Shtetl history, folklore, and artifacts. His most famous work is the folk-based play "The Dybbuck," which is still performed and re-interpreted.

In 1912-1914 An-Sky visited Jewish towns in Russia, taking photos, collecting stories, looking at synagogue record books, and generally preserving the culture that has subsequently been destroyed.

The photo shows a scene from the 1920 performance of the Dybbuck by the Vilna Jewish Theatre Group.

Natalie Zemon Davis (November 8, 1928)

2011-11-07T01:47:00.002-05:00

Natalie Zemon Davis is a historian who changed history as we see it. Instead of writing about boring powerful white rich men, she looked at the lives of highly ordinary people -- before that became the norm. Or to put it another way "she has been especially concerned to get at the lives and values of peasants, artisans, and women, and to analyze their relation to other social groups and to power, property, and authority." *

I've really enjoyed several of Davis's books about a variety of topics, especially Women on the Margins, which includes a chapter on Gluckl of Hamlin, the first Jewish woman to write an autobiography. Davis's book The Return of Martin Guerre, which she wrote in the 1980s, was made into a well-known French movie with Gérard Depardieu. Besides writing, she has been a feminist activist and an advocate for women in academia.

The Jewish Women's archive characterizes Davis as what I would think of as an ideal secular Jew: "While Davis’s work has not been centered on Jewish issues, she has explored Jewish subjects in her research and cited her Jewish background as a factor shaping her identity as a historian. She recalled that feelings of being an outsider in the majority culture prompted her curiosity about social construction and identity. As a Jew and a woman, Davis gravitated toward exposing and bringing to life the histories of those groups often suppressed in traditional historical narratives."

Ruth Handler (November 4, 1916)

2011-11-04T03:12:00.002-04:00

Ruth Handler was brought up in a Jewish family in Denver. She and her husband had a toy furniture business during World War II. After the war, the Handlers "took their two teenagers -- Barbara and Ken -- on a trip to Europe .... There, they saw a doll that looked like an adult woman, vastly different from the baby dolls most little girls owned. Ruth was inspired. Three years later, Mattel's version, Barbie, would debut, with a wardrobe of outfits that could be purchased separately. In 1960, the Handlers took Mattel public, with a valuation of $10 million ($60.3 million in 2003 dollars). It was on its way to the Fortune 500, and Barbie quickly became an icon, with ever-changing wardrobe and career options that mirrored women's changing aspirations." --From PBS.org

In the photo: my Mona Lisa Barbie. This is my first -- and last -- Barbie doll in my whole life. I guess. Unless they make a Leonardo Ken with a paintbrush or something. Tablet magazine recently wrote up these art-inspired Barbie dolls that appeal to adults, not pre-teens. They say: "Though she was an immediate hit, Barbie was long maligned by intellectuals for her anatomical and political incorrectness. But now Handler’s creation is finally enjoying a post-modernist, post-feminist bump. The doll who has been toyed with by so many artists—sometimes lovingly, sometimes sadistically—is now a museum piece. The original 1959 Barbie Teen Age Fashion Model, known as Barbie No. 1, was recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which will feature her (and Ken) in its upcoming show 'California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.'"

Hero or Anti-Hero?

2011-11-02T12:38:00.002-04:00

It's been a year since I published the first birthday commemoration on this blog. Before that, there were a few introductory posts. While thinking about the approximately 300 individuals I have written about, I've developed my ideas about who might be meaningful to secular Jews like me. I've also identified quite a few additional subjects for future blog posts. In a few cases, I have thought of more to say about those I discussed in the last year. I will not repost any entries unless I want to add something to them, however.

So this blog will continue until I run out of heroic figures -- and anti-heroic ones.

Sholem Asch (November 1, 1880)

2011-11-01T01:04:00.000-04:00

Prolific and sometimes controversial, Asch is one of many Yiddish writers that I've never read. His earlier works appear to depict many social and economic levels of pre-World War I Jewry, though he is said to have had little real sympathy for the poor and for political movements that were attempting to create a better life for them. Later, just as the Nazis were coming to power, his exploration of the life of Jesus and early Christianity were intensely disliked by his Jewish audience. The Forward, where he had published before, refused to accept any more of his works. I read about him in the YIVO encyclopedia.

After Weegee

2011-10-31T13:07:00.005-04:00

The Forward today has a fascinating review of the book After Weegee by Daniel Morris. The author, David Kaufman, also mentions several other recent books on photojournalism. He starts by quoting an observation: "there are two kinds of photographers: 'Jewish and goyish.'" Among the Jews: Weegee, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank; that is "funky photographers." Non-Jews like Weston and Ansel Adams "go out in the woods."

One of the themes of Morris's book is a defense of photojournalism against the criticisms of Susan Sontag. At the core of the matter, according to Kaufman:

"For Morris, every picture tells a story because it is placed in a web of implication. The photojournalists he covers do not let their pictures drift. And because their subjects are social and political, their implications are both political and ethical. Morris sees these photographers’ identification with the urban poor as a secularized but nevertheless Jewish demand for justice. He can do this in part because the specific photographers he writes about do so. Despite what Sontag might claim, these guys do not have an interest in the status quo. They are interested — as secular Jews — in changing it.

"The photographers whom Morris discusses demonstrate their Yiddishkeit in still another way. Morris argues in several places that their documentary impulse follows the biblical injunction to remember. These photographers are witnesses and recorders. In a very real and basic way, their photo essays serve as Yizkor books."

I've heard lectures about Jews in modern photography, but none of the content seemed to make any point about what they might have had in common or whether their Jewish identity was related to their artistic choices. The idea expressed here is that the 20th century Jewish interest in social justice is reflected in these Jewish photographers. Their choices of subject matter made a difference by highlighting social inequality. Kaufman writes of the photographers discussed in the work: "because their subjects are social and political, their implications are both political and ethical. Morris sees these photographers’ identification with the urban poor as a secularized but nevertheless Jewish demand for justice."

Fanny Brice (October 29, 1891)

2011-10-29T01:45:00.000-04:00

I remember listening to Fanny Brice on the radio as “Baby Snooks” when I was a small child. She seemed to mean more to my parents than just being the voice of a silly adult pretending to be a precocious baby. Brice, of course, was the subject of the musical "Funny Girl," but I've never seen it (sorry, can't stand Barbra S.)

So why was she so famous? For her comedy routines? For her notorious marriages and life style? Her criminal husband that she was more or less faithful to? Her influence on later female comedians?

According to Jewish Virtual Library:

"Born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1891, the third of four children of immigrant saloon-owners, Fania Borach decided early in life to become a performer. Historian Barbara Grossman notes that in an era in which entertainment was typically based on ethnic stereotypes -the drunken Irishman, the ignorant Pole, the Yiddish-accented greenhorn - Brice's 'Semitic looks' slotted her into Jewish roles. Despite her efforts to succeed as a serious actress and singer, Brice - who spoke no Yiddish - rose to stardom performing comedy with a Yiddish accent."

I suspect that she's nearly forgotten today, except to those who love the musical.

Kibbutz Degania Alef founded (October 28, 1910)

2011-10-28T01:38:00.000-04:00

This is what the pioneers wrote:

“On the 28th of October 1910, there arrived at Umm Juni, ten men and two women. We came to establish an independent settlement of Hebrew laborers, on national land, a collective settlement with neither exploiters nor exploited – a commune.”

Also from the Kibbutz website about the founding pioneers:

"The will to revive the people in the Land of Israel as a working people, returning to nature and to the tilling of the land, living from the fruits of its own labor with neither exploiters nor exploited, brought them to recognize that this could only be realized through communal living."

Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908)

2011-10-27T14:37:00.001-04:00

For a time Lee Krasner was mainly known as the wife of Jackson Pollock, but recently, finally, has been recognized for her own substantial accomplishment as an artist. Image: Krasner's "Portrait in Green," 1966.

Krasner was raised in an observant Jewish immigrant family in New York, educated at public schools and institutions that provided such wide opportunity to immigrant children – Cooper Union, National Institute of Design, the WPA. Recognition came late: a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was six months after her death at age 76.

Roberto Benigni (October 27, 1952)

2011-10-27T03:33:00.003-04:00

Not everyone agrees with me, but I loved the movie "Life is Beautiful." I saw it before it was widely released, so I had no pre-formed ideas about it -- in fact, I didn't even know it was going to be about the Holocaust. And my reaction was to feel as if it showed me the horrors through a new lens, offering a perspective that was valuable and amazingly fresh after so many other treatments of the imponderable subject. The negative reaction of others to this film has always therefore puzzled me.

I also admire Begnini's other films that I've seen.

Leon Trotsky (October 26, 1879)

2011-10-26T01:30:00.003-04:00

There were definitely a lot of non-Jewish Jews at one time who regarded Lev Davidovich Bronstein, a.k.a. Leon Trotsky, as a hero. I think they belonged to an earlier generation. Is anyone still fighting about whether Lenin or Trotsky was right about whatever they disagreed about? Search me.

I chose the image above for its seeming hero worship. It's from a site called Deviant Art. The site mostly has rather strange, sci-fi type imagery.

Martin Gilbert (October 25, 1936)

2011-10-25T01:30:00.003-04:00

Martin Gilbert's books and atlases are indispensable for studying Jewish history, so I think he's a hero no matter what his personal religious views or practices.

Gilbert is also the official biographer of Churchill. Some titles: Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction; Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship; and The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War.

Georges Bizet (October 25, 1838)

2011-10-24T01:41:00.003-04:00

Was Bizet Jewish? No. His wife and some of his collaborators, yes. About Bizet, however: "Many have claimed Georges Bizet himself was Jewish. Much has been made of his dramatic use of the augmented second — a melodic interval typical in Jewish music, but not so prominent in classical music — in this opera’s [Carmen's] ever-present motif for Fate. His ancestors may or may not have been converts, but the composer himself was baptized at the age of 2. Still, his attitude towards Christianity was far from respectful. As a student at the Conservatoire assigned to write a Mass, he submitted a short comic opera instead. When reprimanded, he offered to write a pagan service as a compromise. After Wagner published the odious essay 'Jews in Music,' he defended Wagner as a composer but dissociated himself from the antisemitic baggage. Many of Bizet’s collaborators were Jewish, and his wife was half-Jewish." *

Sarah Bernhardt (October 23, 1844)

2011-10-23T01:26:00.003-04:00

Sarah Bernhardt's mother was Jewish. Probably. Bernhardt seems to have been brought up and lived her life as a Catholic. I'm not sure it's reasonable to count her as Jewish unless you have some unpleasant racial or racist theory in mind.

"Laughing in the Darkness"

2011-10-20T21:35:00.007-04:00

Tonight we saw the film "Laughing in the Darkness," a documentary about the life and work of Sholem Aleichem (IMDB entry here). The Michigan Theater showing was advertised among the beer taps on the bar at Red Hawk where we had dinner first -- I thought the juxtaposition was amusing so I took the photo above.

The film was very intense: it included interviews with a number of heavy hitters of Yiddish literary scholarship as well as with Bel Kaufman, Sholem Aleichem's granddaughter, now 100 years old. The development of Yiddish literature within the constantly changing environment of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was a predominant topic. A large collection of photos and a few moving pictures from shtetls and Russian cities provided very interesting visuals -- though sometimes the Ken Burns effect was exploded into a dizzying zoom around the street scenes and vivid faces of the subjects.

The end of the film summarized the continuing reaction to Sholem Aleichem's work in Soviet Russia, Israel, and the US. Interestingly, our friend Baruch, who was with us at the film, said that as a young man in the Soviet Union he read Sholem Aleichem in Russian translation, which was his only window on Jewish culture. This corresponded to the information in the film.

Of course the musical and movie of "Fiddler on the Roof" was noted as major evidence of recent American love of Sholem Aleichem. The scholars summarized how American Jews first turned their backs on Yiddish culture and the works of Sholem Aleichem and then revived their interest in a search for Jewish identity.

Art Buchwald (October 20, 1925)

2011-10-20T01:08:00.002-04:00

Long ago, I read Art Buchwald's columns in the St.Louis Post Dispatch. He wrote amusing letters about his life in Paris. Later he wrote satiric columns from Washington. At the end of his life, he had a terrible illness which was expected to kill him, but he survived to write about one more interesting experience with humor and insight.

All that time, and I never knew he was Jewish. Maybe it wasn't that important to him.

A quote from Art Buchwald's “Hunting Down the Secular Humanists"

"...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn....
"No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.”

Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859)

2011-10-18T01:21:00.002-04:00

Henri Bergson was born to Jewish parents in France, but became an original non-Jewish moral philosopher (famous in his day, winning the Nobel Prize, now basically forgotten). He said he would have become a Catholic except for the persecution of Jews that he witnessed at the end of his life. He died in Paris – where he had lived his entire life -- in 1941. Although he was offered a sort of honorary non-Jewish status to protect him from the persecutions that were about to occur, he refused the "honor" and stood in line to get a Jewish identity card just a few days before his death. Maybe that makes him an unusual secular Jewish hero.

Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915)

2011-10-17T09:51:00.003-04:00

Arthur Miller's autobiography Timebends chronicles his rather typical Jewish childhood and early education in New York and his development as one of the most highly regarded American playwrights. And he married Marilyn Monroe.

Nathanael West (October 17, 1903)

2011-10-16T01:03:00.002-04:00

"In West, Jewishness is subtext or invisible." * Critics dispute the Jewishness of various themes and characters in West's novels (except for the antisemitic portrayals he sometimes produced). He changed his name and hid his Russian-Jewish immigrant background.

Miss Lonelyhearts is a novel about the writer of a newspaper advice column. The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood and the movie industry. To find a Jewish consciousness in West, some critics point out that Jews were involved in writing advice columns (Abraham Cahan's Bintel Brief...) and in running Hollywood. This is the kind of overinterpretation that I think of as wishful thinking.

I enjoyed these novels. However, I'm interested in the potential influence of his background on West even if he reacted by changing his name and becoming an antisemite. He's claimed as an American Jewish writer. I'm not sure what that means in his case.

Ralph Lauren (October 14, 1939)

2011-10-14T01:48:00.003-04:00

When I feel like splurging on clothes, Lauren is my favorite brand. It’s a commonplace that Bronx-born Ralph Liftshitz morphed into the high priest of aging preppy fashion, and lots of serious fashion commentators like to speculate about how being Jewish specifically positioned him to get into the mind of American women who want to look classy (or whatever it is they want). I don't take that very seriously. I think attributing Jewish motives to every success is an exaggeration. I just like the clothes.

Of course his high-end fashion is not what I'm talking about:

-- image from current Ralph Lauren web magazine.

Sacha Baron Cohen (October 13, 1971)

2011-10-13T09:42:00.004-04:00

“In a rare interview as himself (and not one of his characters) Sacha told NPR’s Terry Gross that he didn’t believe that the people Borat encountered agreed with his racist statements just to be polite, and even if that was their motivation, he was concerned."

Sacha Baron Cohen's travesties of racists from many countries have fooled Americans into making some amazingly racist statements, and his many assumed characters made him a popular comedian on TV a few years ago. He has a quite serious side as well, reflected in his work:

“‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference,’ Sacha, a Cambridge University history graduate said, quoting British historian Ian Kershaw. 'It’s that indifference that’s quite dangerous.'

"Sacha, through his satirical characters, and Erran [Baron Cohen], through his musical fusion, are pushing back against prejudice, which has played a powerful role shaping Baron Cohen family history. The two brothers are members of the fourth generation of Baron Cohens, which also includes their first cousins Ash, a Hollywood director of small-budget independent films such as Bang and This Girl’s Life, and Simon, a prominent Cambridge psychologist promulgating controversial theories about sex differences and the brain.” *

Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925)

2011-10-13T01:32:00.004-04:00

Censored! That was Lenny Bruce. His shocking language had an impact that is unimaginable in the current world where the bleeps on TV don’t even disguise which taboo word is coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Even if Lenny Bruce hadn't attacked public prudery, I doubt if the rigorous avoidance of this vocabulary would have survived. However, he seems to be widely acknowledged as the originator of blue blue monologues in respectable public arenas.

One of Lenny Bruce's memorable stand-up comedy routines was titled "Jewish and Goyish." Way ahead of Woody Allen he said:

Kool Aid is Goyish. Evaporated milk is Goyish, even if Jews invented it. All Drake's Cakes are Goyish. Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is Goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very Goyish. Instant potatoes - Goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime jello is Goyish. Lime soda is very Goyish.

If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't even matter if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you are Jewish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them. The Jack Paar Show is very Goyish.

What is Jewish Art?

2011-10-11T20:05:00.004-04:00

In today's Tablet magazine -- "Seeing Double: A Jewish literature is easy to identify. But defining Jewish art is a task of Talmudic complexity, as a new book, Jewish Art, makes clear," a review by Adam Kirsch. The article includes a summary of some of the earlier writers who dealt with the question of what could or should make an artist "Jewish." Was it subject matter? The artist's personal history? And in some sense, did the designation suggest some hint of lack or respect for the artist as an artist?

Imagery and stereotypes about Jews are one focus of Jewish Art, written by Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver. Kirsch discusses, for example, the book's treatment of the use of Christian imagery in the World-War-II era paintings by Chagall, such as the one above.

Kirsch wrote: "For many 19th-century thinkers, the principle that Judaism was incapable of, or hostile to, visual beauty was taken for granted. In his passionately revisionist study The Artless Jew, Kalman P. Bland shows that this belief was shared by Gentiles hostile to Judaism, including Hegel and Wagner, as well as by Jews like Freud and Rosenzweig."

I found the ideas here thought-provoking, especially the discussion of the numerous abstract expressionist artists of Jewish origin. Kirsch wrote:"Perhaps, then, we would better off talking not about Jewish art, but about a Jewish way of seeing and talking and writing about art—one that situates paintings in a universe of Jewish discourse about the power and danger of the image. This concept restores primacy, in what feels like an authentically Jewish way, to the word and the interpreter, rather than leaving it with the image."

Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884)

2011-10-11T01:15:00.003-04:00

As this Israeli stamp says, Eleanor Roosevelt was a defender of human rights. She was often ahead of her husband in championing badly-treated groups, especially Blacks, when they really needed respect and recognition from national leaders.

A review of a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt points out that early in her life, she was antisemitic, in keeping with her upper-class American background. She gradually changed her attitudes, as she did towards many minorities:

"By the time of the New Deal, she was coming around, risking criticism to meet with Jewish groups, supporting an array of Jewish causes and writing articles urging tolerance. 'It is the secret fear that the Jewish people are stronger or more able than those who still wield superior physical power over them, which brings about oppression,' she wrote in Liberty magazine. 'I believe that those nations which do not persecute are saved only by confidence in themselves and a feeling that they can still defend themselves and their own place in the world. Therefore, I am forced to the conclusion that the Jewish people though they may be in part responsible for the present situation are not as responsible as the other races who need to examine themselves and grapple with their own fears.'''

Harold Pinter (October 10, 1930)

2011-10-10T06:13:00.003-04:00

Pinter, an English playwright and Nobel laureate, had Jewish parents, but like many English Jews, did not retain a public Jewish identity. According to Jewish Virtual Library, Joshua Cohen of Forward said, “Pinter is too much of a Modern to define himself as a Jew,” and that he “has downplayed his Judaism many times in conversation, and has consciously ignored it in his characterizations.” In what I see as an excess of pride, some Jewish critics have tried to assign Jewish sensibilities or motives to Pinter's writings. I am not convinced.

Pinter, sad to say, was not the only successful English Jewish intellectual to attack Israel and to assume as his own the left-wing attacks on Zionism and the defense of all Palestinians no matter what they did. I can only think about the caricature of this type of person in Howard Jacobson's book The Finkler Question.

Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963)

2011-10-10T06:11:00.000-04:00

The hideous execution of Daniel Pearl by Islamic extremists in February, 2002, is unforgettable. His affirmation of his Jewish identity just before the executioner acted makes him a tragic hero.

Alfred Dreyfus (October 9, 1859)

2011-10-09T01:58:00.001-04:00

Alfred Dreyfus is an important figure in modern Jewish history, but he's actually more of a victim than a hero. The Dreyfus Affair, as the event came to be called, divided late-19th century Republican France. Someone had been passing military secrets from the French to the Germans, and one officer with access to the documents, Dreyfus, came under suspicion because he was a Jew. The evidence against him was dubious, but his race was enough to convict him. This was the era when hatred of Jews was a political position, with every effort on the part of the haters to make anti-Semitism respectable -- in fact, they had coined the term itself to justify their beliefs.

After Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, evidence against another officer came to light. A major cover-up followed this discovery, including falsification of documents and widespread conspiracy to change facts and create contradictory evidence. The guilty man, Esterhazy, was the perfect opposite of Dreyfus. His family were old European nobility, he was politically right wing, and he appealed to the anti-Semites. His trial was politically charged; after five minutes of deliberation, the judges declared him innocent, and crowds in the streets cried "Long live the Army!" "Long live France!" and "Death to the Jews!"

I wrote much more about the Dreyfus affair in connection with Emile Zola.

Yom Kippur (October 8, 2011)

2011-10-08T13:37:00.004-04:00

Secular Jews at various times have handled Jewish holidays in various ways. 100 years ago, secular Jews of some persuasions in New York and Warsaw had Yom Kippur parties where they ate and drank, and where they especially ate not-kosher foods, as in the headline above from 1898. They sent a message to the others, didn't they?

Says Eddy Portnoy in Tablet magazine:

"What does one do, after all, when prayers and traditional customs no longer hold any meaning yet you still want to be part of a Jewish community? Eating with intention on a fast day allows you, in one fell swoop, to thumb your nose at the religious establishment and create a secular Jewish identity."

In Israel today, the whole country has shut down, without much push-back from the non-religious as far as I can tell. Said Haaretz yesterday: "Public opinion surveys over the past few years show most Jews in Israel observe Yom Kippur. A survey conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2009 found 26 percent of Israeli Jews who describe themselves as 'secular' or 'not religious' fast on Yom Kippur and 24 percent of them have attended prayers at a synagogue."

As for me: I'm aware today that it's Yom Kippur. I am not doing anything that I wouldn't do anyway. I neither purposely violate the spirit of the holiday nor do I do anything to uphold it. There have been years when I wasn't even aware of the holiday, and years when I was invited to "break the fast" dinners which I attended even though I wasn't fasting. I maintain a neutral attitude, I guess. You?

Diane Ackerman (October 7, 1948)

2011-10-07T01:54:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed Diane Ackerman's World War II story of two quiet heros and how they used the Warsaw Zoo as a hiding place for Jewish and other refugees.

She recently wrote a very nice article for the New York Times about recent astronomical observations: Planets in the Sky with Diamonds. She said: "The past month has been a marvel in the planetary world. In addition to HD 85512b [an Earth-like planet that might harbor life], astronomers spotted a planet that may be fashioned entirely of diamond, a brilliant diadem set in the black velvet of space. For all we know, it has baguette moons in tow. And a few weeks later, planet hunters confirmed the discovery of Kepler-16b, a planet that circles two suns in the constellation Cygnus."

Marjorie Guthrie ( October 6, 1917)

2011-10-06T01:19:00.003-04:00

By her own description, you might know Marjorie Guthrie as Woody Guthrie’s wife or as Arlo Guthrie’s mother – depending on your age. I've heard that she taught Woody some Yiddish folk songs, and I've always wanted to hear him sing them, but I don't know if any recordings are available.

Marjorie was a dancer with the Martha Graham company, using the stage name Marjorie Mazia. After Woody’s death Marjorie became an advocate for medical research on chronic disabling illnesses such as the one that had taken his life.

Her mother was a Yiddish poet, Aliza Waitzman Greenblatt, and she donated her mother's papers and important books to the National Yiddish Book Center.

Gertrude Berg (October 3, 1898)

2011-10-03T01:18:00.001-04:00

Gertrude Berg created, wrote, and starred in a weekly situation comedy, The Goldbergs. First on radio, then TV, she acted Molly Goldberg, a Jewish-American mother. If all the stereotypes of the Jewish mother transferred to secular Jews, we have Molly Goldberg to thank. Thanks.

Mahatma Gandhi (October 2, 1869)

2011-10-02T06:16:00.001-04:00

How can Gandhi be anything but a hero? No matter what he specifically said about Jews and Hitler, or no matter how perverse antisemites might turn his thought or methods to unfortunate ends.

Walter Matthau ( October 1, 1920)

2011-10-01T06:04:00.003-04:00

I have enjoyed a number of movies starring Walter Matthau, and admired him for the wide variety of roles he played, while as far as I know not playing himself (as many actors do). While he sometimes played Jewish characters -- including Albert Einstein -- his repertoire wasn't limited by his ethnicity. My favorite of his films is "Hopscotch."

As far as I know, he was in fact religiously observant, and outspoken against antisemites like Vanessa Redgrave when she denigrated Israel. I find him admirable.

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928)

2011-09-30T01:57:00.000-04:00

"Only those who were there know what it was like. We must bear witness. Silence is not an option."

"Not in the Heavens"

2011-09-28T05:52:00.005-04:00

I mentioned recently that I have been reading historical and theoretical treatments of secular Judaism. One recent book -- published this year -- is David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought.

Biale’s book is a historical and social study of Jews who rejected Judaism, who engaged with Jewish ideas “if for no other reason than to reject them.” He chose such individuals throughout history who made a contribution to a more universal culture. His view is that these secular Jews were “able to create their original theories because they stood at a conscious distance from the conventions of society.” The distance came both from their Jewish background and from their chosen ideas. (p. xii - xiii)

For Biale, secular universalism becomes a Jewish identity. Historically, Jews made a distinction between that which is holy and that which is for every-day use, while Christians contrasted a holy world beyond their lives to a secular world in which they lived. This colored the development of secular Jewish thought, leaving a different space for secularism than their Christian counterparts experienced. Biale explicitly contrasts his view with that of Isaac Deutscher in “The Non-Jewish Jew.”

Modern secular Judaism has roots in thinkers who were reacting to medievalism, especially Maimonides and Spinoza. Biale explores each of their contributions, and continues by explaining how Enlightenment and 19^th century thinkers reacted to them and incorporated their ideas. Two main examples: Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine. In particular, Heine’s writings on the Jews “constitute the first coherent statement of Jewish secularism in a language that clearly resonated with his contemporaries.” (p. 36)

Biale discusses many of the important secular Jewish intellectuals of the early 20^th century. He describes various secular Jewish accomplishments and trends: the beginnings of secular Zionism, writers like Kafka, and other thinkers. Freud, he says recognized Spinoza as a “founder of the congregation of unbelievers.” Einstein specifically studied Spinoza. Not brought up in a religious home, he constructed his own secular Jewish identity, and said he believed in “Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world.” (p. 42)

Secular views and interpretations of the Torah and the Bible are the subject of one chapter of Biale’s book. Abraham Ibn Ezra and other medieval interpreters were at times secular in their approach. In the recent past, the Zionists, including Ben Gurion, created their own interpretations.

Nineteenth-century theories about race influenced both Zionists and other secular Jews. These made an important contribution to their views of Jewish identity. Zangwill and Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky are two examples. Jabotinsky, “founder of right-wing Revisionist Zionism,” also borrowed from other popular European theories such as positivism and social Darwinism, creating the idea of Jews as a race and a nation, not so much a religious group. (p. 92)

Languages also played a role in secular Jewish thought of that era. Not only the well-known question -- Hebrew or Yiddish? – but more nuanced ideas also emerged. Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto, wrote a work on Yiddish linguistics – and created the ultimate in a universalist language. (p. 137)

One interesting figure that Biale often invokes is Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg, 1856-1927) – sometimes called the ‘secular rabbi’ of Zionism. He was “the idealogical leader of ‘cultural Zionism,’ the strand of Jewish nationalism that saw in Zionism primarily a movement of cultural renewal rooted in a spiritual center in Palestine. …, Ahad Ha’am sought a nonreligious foundation for the Jewish national spirit.” Perhaps “the most important theoretician of secular Jewish culture,” he was also the first Zionist of importance to emphasize the darker side of the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Turkish Palestine.” (pp. 40 & 82)

Wrapping up the threads of his many and fascinating chapters, Biale provides an interesting observation about creative American Jewish secularists: the way that they often use the Kaddish as a theme in their works, in particular poets Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg and composer Leonard Bernstein. He says “since a secular culture may not provide the tools with which to confront death … even the most secular Jews turn to this quintessential expression or religious tradition to mine its historical associations for nonreligious ends.” (p. 189)

Finally, Biale mentions the “explosion of interest in academic Jewish studies” in recent years, with offerings at most major universities. The postmodern definition is that everyone is a “Jew by choice” and also most American Jews are secular, with a fluid identity not limited to their Jewishness. The categories of religious and secular are no longer fixed as they may have been in the past. (p. 190-191)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (September 27, 1966)

2011-09-27T01:51:00.002-04:00

From the official biography of Congressional Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, representing the 20th District of Florida since 2005:

"The first Jewish Congresswoman ever elected from Florida, Rep. Wasserman Schultz, introduced a resolution, which passed the House of Representatives and called on the President to declare an annual Jewish American Heritage Month. The President subsequently did so, with the inaugural month in May, 2006. Since then, Presidents have proclaimed Jewish American Heritage Month annually." -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Biography

George Gershwin (September 26, 1898)

2011-09-26T01:21:00.003-04:00

Details about the enormous amount of popular and now-classical music by Gershwin are so well known I hardly need to provide them. Who can't hum the tunes from Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess, or Fascinatin' Rhythm?

The Jewishness of George and Ira Gershwin, children of immigrants to New York, is widely known and always included in their biographies, but I've actually found nothing indicating that they recognized direct Jewish influence or inspiration for their music. There's a lot of speculation -- does the start of Rhapsody in Blue or the wailing note of Summertime reflect a Jewish musical echo? But no hard evidence.

I found one indication that George Gershwin was conscious of a Jewish identity. Here's a quote from a letter he wrote in 1936: "Of course, there are depressing moments too, when talk of Hitler and his gang creep into the conversation. For some reason or other the feeling out here [in California] is even more acute than in the East." -- from Jewish Theater.

Louise Nevelson ( September 23, 1900)

2011-09-23T01:51:00.000-04:00

Louise Nevelson was a prominent sculptor and a leader in several areas of modern art. She was an innovator in the field of assemblage.

Nevelson, who was born in a shtetl near Kiev, was brought up in a Yiddish-speaking traditional Jewish family. They had immigrated in 1905, and settled in Maine.

As a young adult, Nevelson moved to New York. Her life there initially was not as an artist but as a society matron, wife of a rich businessman. However her marriage failed and she turned to art and a bohemian lifestyle. She developed her own spiritual philosophy, studied with several well-known modern artists in New York and Munich, worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera, and began to exhibit her sculpture in 1935. Like many artists of that era, she worked for the WPA.

In the 1950s and later, Nevelson became well-known as she developed her technique as a maker of assemblages -- a medium that received its name in 1961. The characteristics of this style:

"Assemblage transforms non-art objects and materials into sculptures of all sizes and persuasions. Its limitless range and evocative use of materials distinguish it from traditional fine-art sculpture. The very fragility of its materials, which in some instances only precariously endure, defies the notion of art's timelessness. Its rejection of craftsmanship completely redefines the status of the artist. In their desire to abandon permanence and dispense with chisels and awls, artists such as Joseph Beuys, Louise Nevelson, Bruce Conner, Arman, and Louise Bourgeois composed pieces that address change and chance and that appeal to the senses. ... The nonrepresentational work of Louise Nevelson stockpiles mostly wooden objects into abstract, monochromatic pieces that are unexpectedly sensuous."

In interviews after she became famous, Nevelson was reticent about her Jewish background:

"Nevelson was typically willing to weave any intriguing material into her personal myth, but she was notably reticent on the subject of her Jewish heritage. When questioned in interviews on this topic she replied that it was too personal to discuss. The spirituality of Louise Nevelson’s work might best be understood by considering her repeated emphasis on a search for harmony.

"Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan commissioned Nevelson to design entirely the interior for their Chapel of the Good Shepherd. ... When asked about designing a Christian chapel as a Jew, Nevelson replied, 'To me there is no distinction between a church and a synagogue. If you go deep enough into any religion you arrive at the same point of harmony.'”

Sources (and for further details): Jewish Women's Archive and Art + Culture.