Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:
A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is – for me, anyway – a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:
The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.
If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.“
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.
The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days – the most serious attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thursday and Friday – but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watching TV and reading to distract myself, and so this seemed like a perfect time to start a “What I’m Reading” series of posts, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
Also from Critical Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, till I read this – yet one more from Critical Mass–appreciation of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2008. She sounds like someone I could learn something from, not to mention I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semester with the time to do nothing but read.
New York Times writer Katherine Bouton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, by Shelley Emling and Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. The first is a biography, the second is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the ethical issues that arise when doctors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, sometimes, in commercial ventures that make a whole lot of money. “A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in questions of race, class, medical ethics and more: Lacks’ cancer cells, which were taken for analysis, went on to become a mainstay of modern medical research, being used in developing the first polio vaccine and in the development of drugs for diseases including Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not incidentally have made some people in the medical field very, very rich. Lacks’ family, who can’t even afford their own health insurance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as simple a one of exploitation as that outline would suggest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth reading, but so is Grady’s opinion piece.
Due in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will contain some significant revisions that could result, according to Times reporter, Benedict Carey, in “fewer children [getting] a diagnosis of bipolar disorder[,] ‘[b]inge eating disorder’ and ‘hypersexuality’ [becoming] part of everyday language” and a significant change in the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal; changes in it could have a profound impact, therefore, on society. It is, therefore, worth paying attention to.
If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about GoutPal, the only informational site about gout that I have found – and it’s got a ton of information – that is not also trying to sell you something. I have glanced through it a couple of times, and I am beginning to realize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you probably should too.
An opinion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth reading about how to understand what happened in terms of the Green Movement in Iran on February 11th: Were the Greens Defeated?
Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehranis Don’t Revolt: Why some people who clearly see the régime as “them,” don’t see the opposition as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are willing to risk joining the protests.
If you’re an Asian American poet, you should consider applying for this retreat. Kundiman does great work. Here’s a basic description:
In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tuesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.
Writing in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine,Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:
It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just […] a textual problem. If so, then the muddle of meaning that must be analyzed lies in parsing not Palestinian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epithets have been dissevered can some sort of dialogue begin, between two political entities and not between two (or three) religions or Peoples. Until then, “Israel” will continue to be vilified as a word that means something other than what it should, while all critics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.
It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of thinking, to asking these kinds of questions, whether I ultimately agree with the book or not, is a book worth reading. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.
This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.
Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:
Working The Dotted Line
I don’t remember what vacation
I was home for, or how Beth
managed to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apartment to ourselves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hanging crystals
scattering the afternoon sunlight
in small rainbows that shimmied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
nervous along the length
of the daybed’s mattress,
and my fingers tracing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erection. I’m ready. Let’s do it!
It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first condom,
and I’d forgotten to read the directions,
so I stood there growing soft,
squinting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the cardboard open
and sat reading on the bed’s edge,
thumbing the foil-packed
lubricated circle,
trying to visualize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dotted line,
our protection, like a goldfish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was covered with the dust
and small particles of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneeling hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised herself on her elbows,
smiling that the second skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instructions called
the reservoir tip — I thought
of the dams holding water back
in the mountains near where she lived
and what would happen if they broke—
her smile disappeared
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.
I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be graceful and accurate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first grimace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
staring wide, her voice
a whisper through clenched teeth, Just do it! Get it over with!
So I entered her again, trying
from the tightness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out anyway,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing downward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks, I cannot hurt you like this!
Look, it’s going to hurt, she said. There’s no other way.
And I’ve chosen you!
And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
holding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a single motion I breathed through
like I was lifting heavy boxes.
She screamed into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.
We said nothing afterwards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My wordlessness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.
“My faith lies elsewhere.” When I finished reading Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Nightboat Books, 2007)1 and started thinking about what I would write in my review of the book, that is the sentence that came to me, almost as if it had been waiting — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the surface of my consciousness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in Kryah’s book:
Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given yourself over?
Who dissolve
your body like a host on their tongue?
What stopping place will be provided, what
rest?
Where am I in this emergence—
who comes?
The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, according to the monotheism I was taught growing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two questions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into themselves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, therefore, in itself perhaps the deepest and most fundamental test of faith — who will those people be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that something is emerging — something which, based on the first two questions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clarity another question emerges. What is the speaker’s position in the emergence, not in relation to it, as if he were standing outside of it, watching what was happening, waiting to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places himself within this emergence, who is emerging is no longer clear. The possibility exists in the language that it is the speaker who is emerging, that he is watching himself become, that he has discovered his god within himself, that he has come to accept that he is himself, somehow, within his god.
Questions of faith have been important to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rabbinate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, however, I did not set aside the struggle to come to terms with the final, indifferent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a measure of Kryah’s success that, despite the fact my faith lies somewhere very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spirituality — the poems in Glean nonetheless confronted me with the question of just where, precisely, my spirituality does lie. In large measure, the poems accomplish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for example, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”
Breathbloom, the resurrection lily
spent on its stem,
the pale throat thrown back
announcing — what?
Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mistakably and
already gone.
And here is “O Hieroglyph (forgotten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:
As if the wet vowel might speak.
As if, plundered,
it might give up its blank stare, and
suddenly, shudder in my mouth.
We exchange a language
dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recognition, its only response the black eye’s dull circle of speech.
Blue, blue-brown
each color offset by the surrounding skin,
the calcite thought of your returning again.
I cannot muster
what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more steadfast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,
a message that now only speaks
with its fist.
The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, simply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Sonnet #14, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself thinking of Donne’s Holy Sonnets often while reading Glean, so much so that I read through the sampling of them in the edition of the Norton Anthology that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very differently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the physical world in general, to give presence to the absence in the face of which he questions, asserts and maintains his faith, Donne positions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose presence in the world the poems themselves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Sonnets while reading Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are written in a very free verse — the sentence fragment and the unconventional spacing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two formal devices used consistently throughout the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of language as something physical, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.
In all honesty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not something I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and commitment, the honesty and courage that went into writing it. It is the kind of book I think everyone should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will treasure for the rest of their lives.
This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available. ↩
Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side.1 I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization — not Israeli, but Jewish — who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,2 except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.
During lunch that day — her reading was in the evening — Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims — approximately 100 were injured — in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.
When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.
My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, andsinceI do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.) » Read the rest of this entry «
This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available. ↩
The link is to an educational page about the Protocols that contains a link to a pdf version of the text, if you want an html version click here↩
I just finished reading The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal whom we have invited to read as part of Nassau Community College’s Literature, Live! reading series, sponsored by The Creative Writing Project (CWP).A memoir that is at once a love letter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chronicles the difficulties Lagnado’s family faced as they navigated the often tortuous path they were forced to travel from the privileged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the difficult and, especially for her father, often humiliating existence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arrogance with which European and American Jews – as individuals and as workers in agencies that were supposed to help families such as Lagnado’s – treated their Mizrachi coreligionists, who fled or were forced to leave their home countries in the years following Israel’s founding; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) caseworker assigned to the Lagnado family, and how Kirschner refused to find any compromise between her progressive values relating to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patriarchal old world values, it is hard not to sympathize with Leon. Not because there is anything defensible in his desire completely to rule the lives of the women in his family, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intolerance only served to accelerate the unraveling of the Lagnado family by encouraging the independence of Lagando’s older sister Suzette. I’m not suggesting that Suzette should have allowed herself to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patriarchal thumb, but surely there were gentler ways of introducing Leon and Suzette to the greater independence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dismissal of and disrespect for the values Leon had brought with him from an older generation in a far more traditional part of the world.
There are many other moments in this memoir that are worthy of note – the Italian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a housing dispute between their parents and the neighborhood’s antisemitic response to that dispute; the contrast Lagnado draws between her experience being treated for Hodgkin’s disease by a private physician in New York City and her father’s dismal treatment at the Jewish Home and Hospital, and then at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in the last years of his life (and each of these contrasted with the medical treatment the family had been able to command when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could summon the best doctors in Cairo to look after him and his family); Lagnado’s meeting with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had negotiated the purchase of the Lagnado family home when Leon finally, reluctantly, realized he and his family could no longer remain in Egypt – but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s family was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s discussion of that culture’s family traditions left me frustrated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was hammered into us that kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, all Jews are responsible for each other. That lofty sentiment notwithstanding, the curriculum we were taught certainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mattered, were those of European, and especially eastern European, descent.
It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I certainly cannot blame my contemporary ignorance on the faulty education of my youth. After all, nothing has stopped me from educating myself other than the way I have set the priorities of my life (and it’s entirely possible that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has chosen to invite her), but so much of my early Jewish education was focused on Israel – the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the struggle to found Israel – that it’s surprising I remember no attention being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, nearly a million Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their countries or chose to leave because the conditions there had become untenable. Surely learning about Israel ought to have meant learning something about the culture of the millions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to settle there. Equally surprising to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s memoir is Israel mentioned except as either a primary cause of the problems the Jews of Egypt were starting to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them without fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jewish homeland, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egyptian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as desperate, not as one that might contain within it some small part of the hope with which the European Zionists clearly embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland there.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, however, is a memoir, not a history. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the founding of Israel as fervently and hopefully as the European Zionists did. More, I am sure that the feeling I had after reading Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far better off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the privileged life her family lived there than with the reality of the lives of all Egyptian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more complex than anything I could learn from reading Lagnado’s memoir;and yet reading the book, especially the chapter called “The Last Days of Tarboosh,” brought me back to a translation conference panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroccan, if I remember correctly). During his talk Chetrit spoke of how – and I am paraphrasing here; I wish I could remember his exact words – the European Zionist Jews colonized the Mizrachi Jews, replacing the Mizrachi narrative with the European Jewish narrative, even to the point of usurping the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speaking for centuries, if not millenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a reference to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jewish national language or to some other conflict over language.) His statements surprised me in much the same way that reading Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.
Like Lagnado, Chetrit obviously has a perspective, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accuracy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jewish education worth its salt should have as one of its goals making its students that informed, or at least teaching them that they should feel responsible for informing themselves; and that most certainly is not the Jewish education I received. Indeed, the Jewish education I received rendered both Chetrit’s perspective and Lagnado’s story entirely invisible, and it did so not only in the interest of making Israel central to Jewish-American identity, but also to establishing the Zionist narrative of the founding of Israel as the universal Jewish narrative of the founding of Israel. Stories like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demonstrate that such universality is a myth. Confronting that myth is important not because it calls into question Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because coming to terms with the full complexity of the narrative of Israel’s founding is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew – and maybe this applies to concerned people who aren’t Jewish as well – cannot not take a position regarding Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Lucette Lagnado’s reading at Nassau Community College is scheduled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Project website.
I don’t know Maryland geography well at all, but if you are anywhere near either of the places where I will be appearing, it would be lovely to see you there.
Reading from The Silence Of Men
On Friday, May 15th,I will be reading from my book of poems The Silence Of Menat Coco’s Butter Café, which is located at 7361 Assateague Dr., Unit 1040, Columbia, MD 20794 (directions). From what I have been told, the café serves great chocolate and other desserts, great wine and lovely appetizers. Here’s the rest of the relevant information:
Doors Open/Open mic signup: 7 PM Open Mic Begins: 8 PM Feature Begins: around 9 PM Cover: $10 general admission/$5 for open mic poets
Translation as Plagiarism as Cultural Transmission: How Benjamin Franklin Helped Bring Classical Iranian Literature Into American English
On Sunday, May 17, at a meeting of the Iranian-American Cultural Society of Maryland, I will be giving a talk and reading from my translations of two masterpieces by the 13th century Iranian poet Saadi, Gulistan and Bustan. At the center of my talk is the story of a plagiarism scandal involving Benjamin Franklin that resulted from publication of a story that he claimed was a chapter of Genesis, but which had actually been written by Saadi.
In April of last year, I had the opportunity to read at the PeaceSmiths Coffehouse on Long Island. They videotaped the reading, but tonight is the first time I have seen the video online. Here ’tis: