Today is both #ThrowbackThursday, as well as Bastille Day. So to celebrate, what’s Jewish, French, and a part of your childhood? Well, remember Madeline, the little Parisian girl of Ludwig Bemelmans’ unforgettable picture book?  Her idyllic life, visiting the zoo  and the Place de la Concorde, is only occasionally punctuated by the sadness of witnessing a wounded First World War veteran negotiate the non-accessible Paris streets. Suddenly, she is stricken with acute appendicitis. Her benevolent and practical maternal figure, Miss Clavel, wisely contacts…a Jewish doctor!

“And soon after Dr. Cohn/came, he rushed out to the phone/and he dialed: DANton-ten-six-/‘Nurse, he said, ‘it’s an appendix!’”

But not only is he a skilled diagnostician, he communicates kindness and strength:

“Madeline was in his arm/In a blanket safe and warm.”

Now, in spite of the way you may remember the story, Madeline is not an orphan, as evidenced by the beautiful dollhouse her papa sends her in the hospital, making her the object of her classmates’ envy.

In his 1954 acceptance speech for the Caldecott Award for children’s book illustration, Bemelmans explicitly revealed the origin of Dr. Cohn’s unmistakable profile. Hospitalized for a bicycle accident, the doctor who cared for him reminded him of Léon Blum, the first Jewish, and first Socialist, prime minister of France.  Bemelmans recalls meeting Blum, and warmly refers to him as “the great patriot and humanitarian Léon Blum,” revealing to readers that he is indeed the compassionate doctor who saves Madeline. (This hospital stay also provided Bemelmans with the famous memory that “… a crack on the ceiling had the habit/of sometimes looking like a rabbit”).

On Bastille Day, let’s say merci to Dr. Cohn, Léon Blum, and leaders who care for  society’s most vulnerable, including children.

Emily Schneider is a writer and educator with a special interest in children’s literature. She lives and works in NYC.

Images by Ludwig Bemelmans

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David Bezmozgis’ new novel, The Betrayers, follows the late-life travails of Baruch Kotler, a celebrated Soviet-Jewish-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician, who bears some resemblance to the real-life refusenik Natan Sharanksy. Like Sharansky, the fictional Kotler spent many years in jail before emigrating to Israel—where he was received as a hero—but unlike Sharansky, he finds himself embroiled in scandal when his extra-marital affair with a much younger woman is revealed.

Kotler flees the furore in the Holy Land for Crimea (because irony), where he encounters Vladimir Tankilevich, the man who once betrayed him. What follows is a delicious, compelling, literary psychodrama—and a fascinating exploration of Zionism, the right-wing trajectory of Israeli politics, and the legacy of Soviet Jewry. Writing in The New York Times, Boris Fishman (also interviewed by Jewcy) raved thusly about The Betrayers: “A novel of ideas and an engrossing story? It’s the umami experience: salty and sweet, yin and yang, the rocket scientist who is also a looker.” Tablet’s Adam Kirsch described it as “the rare book that makes being Jewish feel not just like a fate or a burden, but a great opportunity.” Michael Orbach talked with Bezmozgis about these big ideas—and more—earlier this month.

What was the genesis of the book?

I’d written an obituary in 2004 for The New York Times Magazine about a Jewish dissident in Moscow, Alexander Lerner. In researching it, I came across this detail that Lerner stood accused, along with Natan Sharansky, by a fellow Jew, a guy named Sanya Lipavsky, which I’d never heard before. I became fascinated by this idea that this one Jew had denounced his ostensibly Zionist brothers for a regime that then ceased to exist. I wondered what happened to this man when the Soviet Union fell apart; what his life would have been like. That was the beginning of it, but it led to a larger question that fascinated me about morality: why are some people—like Sharansky—incredibly principled and willing to sacrifice anything for their principles and what is it that separates them from most other people? The moral question is the heart of the book. I wondered what would happen if these two men ever encountered each other and if they did so in the present day, with the background of what was happening to the former Soviet Union and the background of what Israel had become and was changing into. That was what inspired the book.

It is a rather lovely book and it does ask that question. Do you think that question has a sort of predestinated answer?

This is part of the project of the book: one is to ask the question and then to dramatize it and the other is to pose an answer, which the book does. I don’t think we should reveal the answer during an interview; I feel it takes some of the excitement out of the reading away. But it does pose the question of what separates the highly virtuous people and most other people and how would we ever know? That was what was interesting about these two characters, Kotler and Tankilevich, because of the Soviet system a lot of the people were actually forced to declare and expose themselves morally and constitutionally: what kind of person are you and will you denounce your brother? Will you resist and, of course, what price would you pay for your resistance?

Was there a good deal of research involved in writing this book?

Yes. The Betrayers derived almost nothing from my own experience so there was a research on a number of levels. First of all, to understand people like Kotler, the refuseniks and Zionist dissidents. I read memoirs they published; I visited Israel, in part, to meet some of these people, see what their lives were like in Israel and how they felt all these years later about the country. This was in 2012, before the Gaza War that proceeded this most recent war. In 2011, I was in Crimea and traveled around to find where to set the story. I hadn’t thought it would be Yalta, but Yalta was the only place I could do it.

Why?

For the very simple reason that I needed large, fancy hotels and outside of Yalta, no place on the Crimean coast had these things.

What was the difference in your writing process between writing something loosely based around your own life (like Natasha) and something like this?

I think by the time I start writing it doesn’t make much of a difference. By the time you start writing it’s just the complication, the challenge, of writing good sentences. Whether I’m writing about myself or I’m writing about someone like Kotler, it really didn’t make much of a difference. It was leading up to the process of starting—trying to understand the subject—that was the big change.

The obvious parallel to Kotler is Natan Sharansky, but I noticed there’s a section where Kotler reminisces about being put on trial in Israel by another refusenik. For some reason, this reminded me a bit of Rudolph Kastner and his experiences post-WW2. Was this based on him?

No, in fact it was this other little detail that I discovered when I was in Israel talking to refuseniks. There was an actual trial against Sharansky that I was fascinated by and it finds its way into the book. In Israel Sharansky stood accused of being a fraud, the opposite of what everyone believed him to be, not a victim but one of the villains. That was a fascinating detail. Not much directly from Sharansky’s life enters into the novel. It is significantly fictionalized, but that detail was striking.

What was it like meeting the refuseniks in Israel? I remember speaking to Gal Beckerman, the author of When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone, and he made this joke in passing that a lot of refusniks complain jokingly, but also not, that Israel is just like the Soviet Union.

That wasn’t my experience at all. In fact, that was one of the things I was curious about: how did these people, who sacrificed so much to come to Israel, feel about Israel? When they came to Israel a lot of them struggled. The people I spoke to, across the board, remained very committed Zionists and loved Israel. They were on the political right and not on the political left which is true of most former Soviet Jews.

Sharansky is on the right of the Israel political spectrum and that comes across in Kotler’s character as well.

There are people far more on the right. There are moments when [Sharansky] articulates democratic positions that other people don’t. At the time of the Arab Spring he was one of the few Israeli officials that believed this sort of thing should be supported and not immediately suspected. As the case turned out we now know what happened to the Arab Spring. But he wasn’t one of the cynics.

Tangential question: Is there a more right-wing trajectory in all Israeli politics right now?

I think Israeli politics have swung to the right. The Likud has been in power for a decade or some version of the Likud, that’s a fact. Part of what prompted me to include Israel as a part of the book has to do with how that country has changed. How it’s changed has been a function of absorbing more than a million Soviet Jews. I’ve written these three books and this last one was intended to be completely contemporary and to ask the question: what is going to be the legacy of the Soviet Jews? Their real legacy isn’t in North America; their real legacy is in Israel. They’ve changed that country. And if people are interested in why that country has swung to the right, part of the answer has to do with these Russian Jews. You have to understand the mentality and the context of what formed them politically and ideologically: what the Soviet Union was like and what it did to Jews and what it means to all these Jews, speaking broadly, to no longer be the oppressed, but to actually wield power.

They’ve also contributed a lot to the culture and economy in Israel in the best possible way, but politically they’re part of the reason why that country swung to the right. The book continues on with Kotler’s son and the difference between Kotler—who most people on the left would consider a politically conservative guy—and his son. That’s the other part of the family story, which is the rise of the Zionist Orthodox and how that has changed the country.

I’ve noticed that in your story collection Natasha and this book, bad people seem to go to minyan [services]. I think any fictional character who attends minyan in your book is bound to be unpleasant or bound to meet someone quite unpleasant.

Go to any minyan in your own world and I’m sure that one of those people aren’t as pure as driven snow either. That uncle who has some real estate holdings and maybe a scrapyard. He’s the one who sponsored the Kiddush, standing there by the herring.

You’ve spoken many times about the great Jewish writer Leonard Michaels. How were you influenced by him?

Part of the experience in encountering a writer you connect with is also recognizing something of yourself, that feeling of identification: this person has written the book that you were meant to write. There was an instant of admiration and envy when I encountered Lenny’s stories. His approach to his childhood and upbringing seemed in line with mine. The way he looked at urban Jewish life wasn’t purely intellectual, he had these athletes and hustlers. It wasn’t bookish nebbish-ey representation of Jews, and growing up in a community surrounded by Soviet Jews. All the men of my grandfather’s generation served at the front; my father was in sports and many of his friends were athletes. That was the world that made sense to me: where Jews could be both physical and cerebral.

And the beauty of his prose: how economical it was and yet not at the expense of just being evocative and poetic. I still haven’t encountered very many writers that move me the way that Leonard Michaels moved me. I go back and re-read him all the time.

I don’t think anything can match his story ‘Murderers’. That’s a perfect story.

It’s a perfect story. And you can read it, and re-read it and find something new. There’s not a wasted image and everything comes together. There’s humor in it; there’s a real understanding of the darkness that attends being mortal and there’s just great artistic beauty. “We sat on the roof like angels, shot through with light, derealized in brilliance.” My God, somebody else write a better line than that.

Read also: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

(Image: author’s website)

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Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

The post Jewish Authors Land on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014 appeared first on Jewcy.

Inspired by this historic, poignant correspondence, comic artist Liana Finck—a Fulbright and Six Points fellow whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Forward and Tablet—wrote a graphic novel, also called A Bintel Brief. Slate‘s Dan Kois describes her style as “sharp, evocative,” and reminiscent of Ben Katchor and Roz Chast. I spoke with Finck talk about art, becoming a book person, and the making of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.

So, basic question: how’d you get to A Bintel Brief?

It started as a grant proposal for the Six Points Fellowship. I decided to become a serious comic book artist after college, and I gave myself one year. I had a Fulbright grant that was going to last less than a year, so I needed to finish a great comic. I was planning this amorphous, ambitious first novel and when the nine months were almost up I realized it wasn’t going to be finished and I needed another grant that would give me another year or two. I wanted something less ambitious and more limited, so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to locate and bare my soul. I was being calculating; jadedly I thought, “I can pretend to be the version of me that I’m not.” I can pretend to be this nice Jewish girl from the suburbs and write this small, nostalgic, non-intellectual Jewish story. If I could’ve sold my soul and done something that wasn’t me, that’s what I would have done with A Bintel Brief, but I really fell in love with it long before I finished the grant proposal—I fell in love the minute I started reading the letters. Once I read the letters I wasn’t jaded anymore.

What spoke to you from the letters?

They’re very simple and at the same time they’re seething with emotion. I’d always felt apart from the people I knew, especially people who were artists. I think I had a lot of feelings when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and I related a lot more to books and art than to people. I was expecting these letters to be things that I didn’t relate to, because they weren’t literature in my mind; they were in the human camp. But I did relate to them. Reading them made me realize that I wasn’t actually a high art person in an ivory tower; I was just a person who seeks human intensity.

Do you think that’s a part of growing up?

I think when you’re in your teens and early twenties—at least for me—you are a much more intense person than a full-fledged adult. I felt like I was miles away from other people with their small talk. I couldn’t find humanity in them. Just in Chekhov, etc.

I used to like books about people, but not people.

It’s so strange. I’m still like that, but I think it’s a delusion. We refuse to see humanity in people because we are so scared of them. They are layered and full of veils and contradictions. I used to think I liked it because only smart people could understand it, but I’ve realized that I like it because it’s abstract, and not trying so hard to make sense of all the feelings and mysteries. Abstraction does not lie.

It was The Catcher in the Rye’s anniversary last week. I re-read that book five times before I really got it—

I keep on seeing people reading it, I look at this guy and think, “He’s a brute of a Wall Street stock broker,” or “He’s a gangster wannabe,” and then I’ll see he’s got Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. It changes everything. That’s the best feeling, seeing Catcher in the Rye in the back pocket of a pushy guy in a loud suit. I have to read it again. I read it when I was a young teenager and then an older teenager. I liked it but I don’t think it changed my life. I didn’t understand parts of it, and I wasn’t a book person yet.

When did you become a book person?

I became a poetry person at 13 and then a book person at 17. I stayed a poetry person until I was 21 and realized I wouldn’t be a poet because the poetry world seemed like a storm of ice crystals. I think I was always a story person, fairy tales and kid novels, but poetry was something totally different. When I was seventeen I realized that there were books that had the things I loved about poetry. I had a teacher who recommended great books to me when I was a junior in high school, and I started to read modernist novels like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Much earlier, my mom had given me [Vladimir] Nabokov and [Isak] Dinesen; I loved them the way I loved fairy tales as a kid, then I rediscovered them as puzzles as I got older.

Does your art mimic the puzzled thing that you liked in poetry?

I think working on art is a puzzle in of itself. I tried to be a poet and abstract painter when I was in college because that was the kind of art that really moved me, but I realized I liked abstract art and poetry because, looking at and reading it, I was doing a lot of work in my head that the artist or poet generously left unfinished. I’m not that generous in my work. I like to figure out the puzzles myself, and give the reader something more packaged and dogmatic.

What’s your favorite piece in the book?

I liked the first stories I started. I did more drafts of those, and was able to figure out slowly what the mood of the story was—time was my friend. I’m also fond of the blue parts [between the stories], I made those pages after I made the stories. The stories are adaptations—which is a limiting, tricky form to work in—you keep having to ask yourself, “Why does this letter need to be transmuted into comics?”—but also a safer art form. You aren’t telling your own story, so if the story turns out badly it’s not a reflection on your soul. Working on the narrative between stories gave me a very small, safe venue for telling my own semi-autobiographical story. I felt so free when I made it. It was also the least ambitious work of fiction I’ve ever tried to make, and working on it taught me that dry ambitiousness is NOT my friend.

One last question: Why did you draw Abraham Cahan with a heart-shaped face?

Because my mom used to draw heart-faced people on my lunch bags as a kid. She said I had a heart-shaped face. Cahan was a total brain-man. In creating A Bintel Brief, he tried to access his heart and he succeeded; he turned his brain into a heart. Sometimes I’m afraid his head looks like a turnip like the guy in Howl’s Moving Castle. Afraid is not the right word. The right word is delighted.

Image: © Liana Finck, reprinted from A Bintel Brief, published in 2014 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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Imagine this: you’re at Chipotle, chowing down on your liberal, guilt-free, ethically-sourced burrito, when—horror of horrors—you realize you have nothing to read. Your smartphone’s out of juice, you left your kindle at home, and you don’t have a paperback in your back pocket (because, hello, 2014, death of the novel, etc). What do you do? Eat without distraction for ten blissful, quiet minutes? GOD FORBID. This is America, not France.

Such a fate befell Jonathan Safran Foer recently, and he wanted to “die with frustration.” That is a real quote, you guys. But from deprivation comes innovation! Vanity Fair breaks the news that as of today, you’ll be able to read flash fiction and mini-essays by Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Michael Lewis on Chipotle’s bags and cups.

What happened was this: frustrated Foer emailed Steve Ells, Chipotle’s CEO, and suggested putting words on their food packaging. He told VF, “I said, ‘I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text… So I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service.'”

The union between Chipotle and Foer is a curious one. In 2009, Foer penned Eating Animals, a searing critique of America’s meat industry, and consequently became a vegetarian. Chipotle serves meat, albeit “naturally-raised” meat, procured from farms and slaughterhouses that allow their animals to roam free (or free-ish). But dead animals are still dead animals, and when asked how he felt about working with a company that serves meat to a lot of people, Foer replied: “I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”

You can read Foer’s contribution, ‘Two-Minute Personality Test,’ here. He posits some interesting questions, like “Are you in any way angry at your phone?” and “Is it any way cruel to give a dog a name?”

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“My friends Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon live in a shingled Berkeley Craftsman bungalow that reminds me of my days as the child of local radicals.”

Thus begins Remodelista‘s paean to the literary super-couple’s gorgeous Berkeley home. This piece is something else, you guys. It’s book porn meets real estate porn meets writer porn; all enhanced by Waldman’s anecdotes. Here’s one about their office, which was once a doctor’s consulting room: “‘Someone in the historical society told us he did abortions. I have this image of this warm and lovely guy doing a public service for the women of Berkeley.’ The gilded body cast on the wall is of Ayelet during one of her pregnancies.”

The house is very beautiful indeed: book filled (as you’d expect), faithfully restored, and charmingly appointed with sentimental family tchotchkes—here a candlestick smuggled out of Minsk by Waldman’s grandmother, there are photo of her grandfather’s furrier union in New York City. Art inspired by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is found in the living room and study. There’s also a velvet-covered window seat (drool), and a cute havdalah spice box.

But not for nothing does Gawker describe Waldman as a “lifestyle controversialist“: apparently, the photograph of books just scattered about la-di-da at the bottom of the stairs was not staged. What a way to live.

See it for yourself here.

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Pulitzer Prize winning poet Maxine Kumin has died at the age of 88. She was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1981-82, and of New Hampshire from 1989-94.

Kumin’s Reform Jewish family lived next door to the convent and teaching order where she attended elementary school, which, she said, accounted “for the juxtaposition of Jesus and Jewish rituals in many of her poems.” (With an education like that, you’re bound to end up a writer and/or the inspiration for a character in a Wes Anderson film.)

At Harvard, Kumin’s poetry was workshopped by Wallace Stegner. By her own admission, her early poems were “terribly sentimental,” and Stegner wrote at the top of one of her submissions,  “Say it with flowers, but for God sakes don’t write any more poems about it.” (At the time he was only 23; Kumin, 17.)

In this fantastic oral history published in 2013, Kumin describes her experience as a working mother in 1958:

On the home front, Danny was in kindergarten, and I had a neighbor who happily walked him to afternoon kindergarten and picked him up afterward and walked him back to her house, where he had milk and cookies. My neighbors were so upset that I was abandoning my children in this hideous way. I remember being told by my next-door neighbor that I was a failed mother. I might as well have been having an affair rather than commuting to Medford three afternoons a week to teach one course.

But the sexist social mores of the post-war era were no match for Kumin’s tenacity, talent, and originality. She went on to publish dozens of books—not only poetry, but short stories, novels, children’s books (some with her close friend and artistic collaborator, Anne Sexton), and essays. Though she “was not influenced by women writing poetry”—she’s most often compared to Robert Frost—Kumin credits the women’s movement with widening the scope of what was considered acceptable subject material:

“It’s okay for women to write about their bodies now. It’s alright to write about childbirth. There is no subject that’s off-limits… It took a long time for women to be acknowledged as capable of writing the kinds of poetry that men traditionally were expected to write. I don’t think the playing field is quite even, but it’s getting there.”

Here’s a stanza from her gorgeous poem “How It Is,” which she wrote following Sexton’s suicide in 1974:

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Those lines seem a fitting tribute to Kumin today as well. May her memory—and words—be a blessing.

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Over the last few years, I’ve heard the following ideas thrown around recklessly:

• Jews never win book awards/the always hilarious “the people who vote on most literary awards don’t like Jews.”

• If traditional publishing is going the way of the dinosaurs, I’m not going to be the one to try and stop that from happening.

• What literary people don’t like Jews?  I thought Ezra Pound and Céline died years ago?  In fact, if you think that people who vote on literary awards aren’t tossing trophies at Sam Lipsyte and Cynthia Ozick because they are members of the Tribe, you’re an absolute fool.

The idea that Jews don’t win book awards is actually the idea that Philip Roth never wins the Nobel for literature award.  And to be frank, so what? He’s won several major awards including 3 PEN/Faulkners in the last 20 years alone. People who say this base so much on the fact that year after year he seems to be “snubbed” for the Nobel.  It’s too bad that “Jewish writer” consistently means “Philip Roth.”

So what if Philip Roth never wins the Nobel for literature?  He will continue to fart out a new book every year for the rest of his life, then fart out a hundred more after he’s passed on to the next world, and people will continue to buy them long into the future.

Please don’t worry — I’m willing to bet that in the next 20 years, Jonathan Safran Foer will end up winning a Nobel.  Disregard your personal feelings towards the guy, because (somewhere) people really love him and his books, and those people tend to be the people voting for the Nobel.  In the meantime lest we forget, Harold Pinter won the Nobel five years ago.  That should be more than enough to fill the ridiculous quota some people seem to have in terms of Jews becoming Nobel laureates for writing.

With all that said, the Man Booker Prize is no joke, and Howard Jacobson, a Jew, is the newest recipient of the award.  That should really put to rest the stupid discussion that Jews don’t win major literary awards.  Not only that, he gave a serious boost of credibility to the comic novel, which is coming back into vogue (thank god).

Not making Jacobson’s victory into a Jewish thing is difficult for me.  I tend to define my Jewishness as the one characteristic I share with many amazing Jewish writers.  Sure, it’s only my ethnic background, and I can’t write half a lick as good as any of them, but it’s still nice to be able to say “hey naysayer, Jews got the literary game on lockdown, yo.  Step the funk off.”

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