The Bread of Affliction
Passover (still one of my favorite holidays) is almost done, although I did not have the energy to host a big Seder this year. Because finishing a book is exhausting, apparently!
I also spent a few days trying to write something meaningful about Passover’s message of solidarity with the oppressed—very much including Palestinians—and how Zionism robs Jews of what makes our culture special. But I was having trouble putting it together so, lucky for me, Naomi Klein went ahead and did all that perfectly in The Guardian.
[Zionism] is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
I strongly recommend reading the whole article.
Reading from Cutthroat
Last week, alongside some amazing authors, I took my first crack at reading out loud from Kalyna the Cutthroat. (Which is now available for pre-order in hardcover and audiobook—the latter is not narrated by me, baruch Hashem.)
It was a little nerve-wracking, but mostly fun! Thanks to everyone who came out, and if you’re in NYC, Brooklyn Books & Booze is a great time.
Commonplace Book
Since 2020, I’ve kept a sort of commonplace book, where I write interesting quotes, thoughts on what I’m reading/watching/playing, and whatever else I feel like. (I do this all by hand, with pen and paper, because of my various mental disorders and their attendant coping mechanisms.)
So! Here are some things I excerpted recently that I find particularly interesting, fun, or what have you. I promise they aren’t all bummers, but some are!
Let’s get more on Zionism, etc., out of the way first. From Pankaj Mishra’s incredible piece for the London Review, “The Shoah after Gaza.”
In the journals he kept from the 1960s onwards, the literary critic Alfred Kazin alternates between bafflement and scorn in charting the psycho-dramas of personal identity that helped to create Israel’s most loyal constituency abroad:
The present period of Jewish ‘success’ will some day be remembered as one of the greatest irony ... The Jews caught in a trap, the Jews murdered, and bango! Out of ashes all this inescapable lament and exploitation of the Holocaust ... Israel as the Jews’ ‘safeguard’; the Holocaust as our new Bible, more than a Book of Lamentations.
Kazin was allergic to the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and unrepresentable, and that Palestinians had no right to Jerusalem. In Kazin’s view, “the American Jewish middle class” had found in Wiesel, a “Jesus of the Holocaust”, “a surrogate for their own religious vacancy”.
Mishra has more to say on Wiesel, including that he “claimed to have been [Primo] Levi’s great friend in Auschwitz; Levi did not recall ever meeting him.”
However important the other motivations [for the Balfour Declaration] may have been, this was the central one: the British Empire was never motivated by altruism.
—Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (emphasis his)
But [rage] is not bitterness. Bitterness is anger with nowhere to go. Bitterness and resignation are close and tempting cousins. Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary.
—Micaiah Johnson, showing why we became friends so quickly in her Author’s Note to Those Beyond the Wall
In his feral youth, Yakin had learned that power was ethereal; in a vacuum, if the skin of power was donned quickly enough, if those first few rivals were put down fast, if those first adherents did not falter, then it all became real.
—Saad Z Hossain, Escape from Baghdad!
You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us.
—Brandon Taylor unknowingly giving me, personally, some tough words regarding Emile Zola’s novels in London Review
[Sculptor Antonio] Canova insisted on portraying Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker in the guise known as “heroic nudity,” well aware, as the art historian Christopher Johns has gleefully noted, that viewers would compare the statue’s rugged features and toned physique with the flaccid lines of its moon-faced, middle-aged model and ponder the paradox—Canova’s own invention—of the Roman war god proffering a gilded orb on which a tiny winged figure of Peace trips like a blithe fairy. Napoleon’s agent, Dominique Vivant Denon, reported to Canova in 1811 that
His Majesty has seen with interest the beautiful execution of the work and its imposing aspect, but he thinks that the forms of it are too athletic and that you may be a bit mistaken about the character that eminently distinguishes him, that is to say the calmness of his movements.
Today that muscular Bonaparte lords it over the stairwell of Apsley House, the London home of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, a trophy of war from the Battle of Waterloo.
—Ingrid D. Rowland on Canova in New York Review
Finally, just take a look at the title page for J. P. McEvoy’s epistolary (plus some other mediums) jazz age fantasia Show Girl, which Tough Poets Press just put out as part of the Dixie Dugan Trilogy.
Tried wearing them a little longer this time…
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