I just finished reading Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of this year’s International Booker Prize. I started it on the way to Berlin, which seemed fitting since it is set primarily in East Berlin, just prior to the wall coming down. I like reading novels based in places I’m visiting; the experience of reading a place in addition to walking it. This was a slow read, not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it was a deliberately intentional novel, thoughtful in its composure. It made me deeply aware of how very little I know about post-war Germany (or pre-war Germany, or inter-war Germany); philosophy (of any kind); classical music (of any kind); and literature in translation (in any language). It was a very humbling read and left me in awe of the breadth and depth of Erpenbeck’s knowledge.
I’ve also been reading Bark by Georges Didi-Humberman, a short meditation on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau through his black and white photographs and accompanying essays. It is poignant and different from anything else I’ve ever seen on this topic. I saw it in the “Auschwitz gift shop” (yes, that sounds exceedingly odd), but we had already purchased too many books on our trip, so I ordered it when I got home.
My list of books to read right now is immense, but James by Percival Everett might be next. I need a good novel to sink into (and not necessarily Holocaust related, although re-reading Mila-18 and The Wall are also options. I think I’m a little nervous, though, that my memory of how good those books were when I read them in adolescence will be jarred by adulthood). I’ve also got some non-fiction lined up: Sebastian Junger’s new one, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face With the Idea of an Afterlife; and Kay Redfield Jamison’s Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind. As respite, I’m reading some poetry: Adam Zagajewski’s True Life; Dorian's Laux’ What We Carry; and an anthology of mindfulness poems (much needed by me right now), Poetry of Presence (edited by Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson).
I tried watching the movie Escape from Sobibor the other night (I’d read the updated book a couple years ago), but couldn’t finish it. One of the things I greatly appreciated about Zone of Interest (even as I am deeply disappointed by the director’s choice of words at the Oscar’s) was how little it relied on a re-enactment of prisoner life in the camp — no reconstructed gas chambers or crematoria, no actors in striped pajamas — but instead the film left it up to an (educated) audience to imagine what was evoked by the soundtrack. Admittedly, the decision to not rely on visual re-enactment assumes some knowledge on the part of the people watching it. I think I have always been more drawn to films that aren’t “cinematographic representations” of the Holocaust; there is something a little obscene to me about seeing well-fed, wealthy actors pretending to be concentration camp victims, or having a set piece of a gas chamber; more than in almost any kind of film, I just can’t break that wall of awareness of the “acting.” I know also there is a very strong case to be made in favor of depiction for educational purposes (Schindler’s List obviously comes to mind, or the exceedingly disturbing Son of Saul). I tend to see them all, but I sometimes get “stuck” as happened the other night. I also tried re-watching The Pianist, but couldn’t make it through that either.
Poetry is ever more a salve. I like especially when I am directed towards poems because of something I’m reading. Kairos has intimations of poetry throughout, including this, which I find most beautiful, by the 17th c. German Catholic mystic, Angelus Silesius (who I’d never heard of):
Nothing exists but you and I And if we two be not Then god is no more god And down must fall the sky
and this lovely from Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (have read a little Stein, but never heard of that):
And you wanted my soul what the hell did you want my soul for, how do you know I have a soul, who says so nobody says so but you devil and everybody know the devil is all lies, so how do you know how do I know that I have a soul to sell...
I often write notes to myself on my phone, or send myself emails of poems to re-read when I have more time. Sometimes I just post them right away to Story Remedy, where I have a “community” Facebook group that has been a great way to share and store poetry that moves me. I learned about the poem Good Night, World by Jacob Glatshteyn when I was in Lublin. It is deeply sad to me that I can relate so much to the sentiment of this poem in 2024. Seeing the despicable videos of anti-Israel (read antisemitic) demonstrations in New York City outside the Nova exhibit, and just the other day outside a synagogue in Los Angeles, make me feel angst and great uncertainty. Are we foolish not to heed what these might portend with regard to the future of Jewish life in America, or is that succumbing to paranoia? Did the Jews in Berlin ask these same questions in 1938, prior to Kristallnacht?
My whole life I’ve wanted to always be a part of the big wide world out there. When I left home for college, I rebelled pretty radically against what I then perceived as the narrow confines of the Jewish world; gratefully, I was drawn back to Jewishness/ Judaism (culturally and religiously) in two distinct phases (after the births of both my daughters, and my marriage to a non-Jew). I find myself now in a space of being perhaps less religiously observant than when my children were younger, but definitively more outwardly Jewish and outspokenly Zionist. I am despairing of the wider world these days, and while I may not, like the poet Glatshteyn, yearn to return to “four cubits/ on which to learn Torah,” I long right now to be with my people in a way I never quite have before.