MyJewishLearning reviews Day After Night

Posted by Naomi Firestone

In anticipation of JBC/MJL Author Blogging Series guest blogger Anita Diamant’s posts next week, Matthue Roth, of MyJewishLearning, offers a review of her newest book, Day After Night:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/blog/history-community/anticipating-day-after-night/

Sneak Peek…

Posted by Naomi Firestone

The Fall issue of Jewish Book World is in the mail! As usual, we’re posting a sneak peek from the issue: “A Conversation with Sara Houghteling” by Arielle Listokin:

Set in Paris in the World War II era, Sara Houghteling’s debut novel, Pictures at an Exhibition, is poignant and elegant, sophisticated yet tangible, and—perhaps most importantly—an incredibly satisfying read. The story follows Max Berenzon, son of a prominent art dealer, as he searches for his father’s stolen masterpieces and, in the process, uncovers his family’s haunting past. Houghteling is a graduate of Harvard College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, she lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches high school English.

Is it true that it took you six years to write this book?

Actually, it took me eight years to finish the book—I was so consumed by this story that I just never wanted to leave it or let it go.

How would you describe your novel?

It is, of course, the story of a Paris art dealer and his son who goes in search of their looted art after World War II, but it is also so much more…it centers around a family tragedy and a secret that taints and impacts the lives of all the characters.

I love it when people tell me about the core that resounded most strongly with them. It’s hard for me to see if one theme stands out more than another. I would describe it as a book about this family and the ways in which art comforts these individuals and the ways in which it is a reminder of a painful past and what’s been lost that can never be recovered.

How did the idea for the book come to you?

My grandfather worked in France for the Marshall Plan after the war and my father lived there as a boy, so my interest in France and post-war France was always very strong. I also always wanted to write about art. When I discovered that there were paintings missing from the war and the story of Rose Valland whose covert actions allowed for the eventual repatriation of much of the looted art, I became intrigued by the mystery of her life and her story—that was the spark that drove the engine. The character of Rose Clément, who plays such a pivotal role in the book, takes her name and story from Rose Valland.

I was also inspired by the story of Paul Rosenberg and his family. I found out that there was this Jewish art dealer who was so essential to the Paris art world, who mentored and fostered Picasso and allowed him to be so creative. I don’t think the Paris art world has ever recovered from what happened—the period before World War II was a golden age, both for the art dealers and the artists.

Would this book have been written without your own experience in France?

From a reasonably young age, I was in love with France. If I hadn’t gone there, it would have been very hard to write this book. Altogether I spent about two years in Paris, first as a teacher at the American School and then later as a Fulbright scholar. One of the secret, personal pleasures of this book for me is that it is geographically autobiographical. Rose’s apartment with the pull-out bed and the shoe-shaped bathtub is my old apartment in the 6th arrondissement.

Why did you name the book Pictures at an Exhibition?

It is named after a musical piece that was composed by Mussorgsky for his friend, the painter Victor Hartmann who died at a young age. The piece is the “soundtrack” to an exhibition of Hartmann’s work and is meant to accompany Mussorgsky as he walks from piece to piece in Hartmann’s memorial exhibition. The tragic irony is that Hartmann’s paintings, which were the inspiration for Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, were lost. There is this resonance of the theme of lost art, a lost friend, and the afterimage of what remains following a tragedy.

What do your high school students think about having a teacher who is a published author?

The thing they are most impressed with is that I have a Wikipedia page! Being reviewed in The New York Times doesn’t compare to being on Wikipedia.

To read the complete interview, be sure to check out the Fall issue of Jewish Book World. To order a copy, please email Jbc@Jewishbooks.org. To subscribe to Jewish Book World please click here.

Do you have more books than Facebook friends?

Posted by Naomi Firestone

This week, in Shelf Awareness :

Random House has created a Facebook group called “I have more books than Facebook friends” to help promote E.L. Doctorow’s new novel, Homer & Langley, which chronicles the curious lives of the Collyer brothers, who accumulated so many books and newspapers over the years that they were literally killed by their accumulated clutter. Random House calls its Facebook page “a celebration of all who hoard literature,” and is sponsoring a contest there: “Post a picture of your literary clutter. Best photo wins a prize (um, not that you need a prize . . . it’s all about bragging rights). But a first edition signed copy of E. L. Doctorow’s new book Homer & Langley could be in your future if you play your cards right.”

Heeb Collection Reviewed in PW

Posted by Naomi Firestone

Publisher’s Weekly’s review of the Heeb storytelling collection: Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish: The Heeb Storytelling Collection (Edited by Shana Liebman, foreword by A.J. Jacobs):

Liebman, arts editor of the hip Jewish lifestyle magazine Heeb, introduces a refreshing set of essays that reveal an array of both ordinary and extraordinary modern-day Jewish experiences. Arranged by theme (sex, drugs, work, youth, family, body and soul), these four dozen essays—the products of a Heeb storytelling performance series—explore the humorous, scandalous and often sentimental moments in life…Read the complete review here

A Golem in Brazil

In his last blog, Benjamin Moser wrote about chasing Clarice Lispector around the world and the oldest Jews in Brazil.

The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector’s fourth novel, was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, five years after she completed the last of its eleven drafts. Begun in Agatha Christie’s hometown of Torquay, where Lispector’s husband, a diplomat, was a Brazilian delegate to an international conference, The Apple in the Dark was finished in Clarice’s home in the Washington suburbs, where she spent most of the fifties.

“It was a fascinating book to write,” she wrote a friend back in Rio de Janeiro. “I learned a lot doing it, I was shocked by the surprises it gave me—but it was also a great suffering.” Her suffering was not over when she finished it, however. Despite the best efforts of her friends and admirers, the book, like so many others later acclaimed as masterpieces, languished for years in manuscript, as one publisher after another declined.

“When I write something, I stop liking it, little by little,” she wrote in a letter home, suggesting her increasing despair. “I feel like a girl putting together her trousseau and storing it in a chest. A bad marriage is better than no marriage; it’s horrible to see a yellowing trousseau.”

As a diplomatic spouse, Clarice had been absent from Brazil for the better part of two decades, living in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. She was increasingly unknown to the Brazilian public. She could still count on the small circle of artists and intellectuals who had been fascinated by her since 1943 when, twenty-three years old, she published her debut, Near to the Wild Heart. The novel was recognized as the greatest a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language.

Despite that early success, her second and third novels struggled to find a broader audience. After she left Brazil, a friend recalled, “publishers avoided her like the plague. The motives seemed obvious to me: she wasn’t a disciple of ‘socialist realism’ or preoccupied with the little dramas of the little Brazilian bourgeoisie.”

During her years abroad, Lispector wrote, “I lived mentally in Brazil, I lived ‘on borrowed time.’ Simply because I like living in Brazil, Brazil is the only place in the world where I don’t ask myself, terrified: what am I doing here after all, why am I here, my God.” Perhaps her professional difficulties contributed to Clarice’s decision, in 1959, to leave her husband and return with her two young sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life.

The country she returned to was changing fast. This was the age of the bold new capital, Braslia; bossa nova, which became an international sensation; and Pelé, who led Brazil to back-to-back World Cup victories. Clarice’s modern style would soon be part of this modern resurgence, but when she arrived in Rio in July 1959, she herself was unknown.

The now-classic story collection Family Ties appeared in July 1960, after years in the same frustrating limbo that faced The Apple in the Dark . As a result, a reporter wrote, “There is a great curiosity surrounding the person of Clarice. ‘Clarice Lispector doesn’t exist,’ some say. ‘It’s the pseudonym of someone who lives in Europe.’ ‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ claim others. ‘I don’t know her,’ says a third. ‘But I think she’s a man.’”

Family Ties at least put to rest the rumor that Clarice was a man. With The Apple in the Dark —at 980 cruzeiros, the most expensive novel ever sold in Brazil—found an eager audience in a nation in the grips of a modern cultural fluorescence. With it, Clarice Lispector earned a position in Brazilian culture unmatched by any other twentieth-century Brazilian writer.

Yet if the novel is quintessentially modern, its sources were older and deeper than was generally understood. Clarice Lispector was born Chaya in 1920 in Podolia, in what is now southwestern Ukraine. Her work is steeped in the mysticism of that area, just as she herself would be forever pursued by the horrifying violence that surrounded her birth. The relationship between knowledge and sin animates many of her greatest works.

The Apple in the Dark is the story of an engineer, Martin, who flees to the countryside to escape the consequences of a crime whose nature only becomes clear at the very end of the book. The detective-story setup is a flimsy pretext for the real drama, which is linguistic and mystical. Martin is cast out of the world of language, a “contented idiot,” only to gradually reacquire the human personality he had lost with his crime.

Clarice Lispector often reworked and disguised Jewish motifs in her work, but never with the allegorical force deployed in The Apple in the Dark . She hints at the very beginning of the book that Martin is Jewish, when she identifies his shadowy pursuer as a German who owns a Ford. There is no reason of plot or character to assign this vague figure German nationality, especially in a book in which few characters have so much as a name. The word “German,” in a work by a Jewish writer of the 1950s, was not a neutral description, especially when applied to a figure of harassment and oppression. And “Ford,” the only brand name in the book, suggests Henry Ford, the notorious anti-Semite whose racist writings were widely distributed in Brazil. Both names suggest that the German’s victim must be Jewish.

The book is a Jewish creation allegory, but of an odd variety. It is the story of the creation of a man, but also the story of how the man creates God. This is Martin’s essential, heroic invention, and it comes through the word. “Then in his colicky flesh he invented God […] A man in the dark was a creator. In the dark the great bargains are struck. When he said ‘Oh God’ Martin felt the first weight of relief in his chest.”

Yet this story is the opposite of the Biblical creation story. The man is himself created through sin, and the sinning man creates God; that invention, another of Clarice Lispector’s great paradoxes, redeems the man. The moment Martin invents God is the moment he can finally come to terms with his crime: “I killed, I killed, he finally confessed.” Without God, even an invented God, there can be no sin.

In these particulars, especially in the way Clarice reverses the creation story to which she alludes in the title, Martin suggests that most famous figure of Jewish folklore: the Frankenstein-like Golem, who was the mystical reversion of the creation of Adam.

Golems are made of earth; at the beginning of the book, Clarice emphasizes Martin’s identity with the rocky soil. Like the Golem, Martin cannot originally speak and is used as a house servant. Like the Golem, he is not allowed to go out alone. And as he masters human language, he grows to a position of power over the original inhabitants of the house. “He increases from day to day and can easily become larger and stronger than his house-comrades, however small he may have been in the beginning,” the German folklorist Jacob Grimm wrote in 1808. Golems are associated with murder, as is Martin; and as he masters human language, Martin grows to a position of power over the house’s inhabitants. Fearing him, they have him taken away.

Martin’s crime ushers him into a greater reality. Redemption through sin, enlightenment through crime: it is the kind of paradox in which Clarice Lispector delighted. With it, Clarice goes further than she ever had in her approach to the God she had abandoned when he killed her mother, raped in a Ukrainian pogrom. And she goes further, too, than Kafka. Like him, she found locked doors, blocked passageways, and generalized punishment. But she also saw a different possibility: a state of grace.

Benjamin Moser’s Clarice Lispector Reading List

The Apple in the Dark

Near to the Wild Heart

Selected Cronicas

Soulstorm

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He has been guest-blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council. Be sure to visit his website at http://benmoser.com/