Published Essays and Reviews in 2020

 

1.      Review of Martin Jacobs, Reorientating the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World in Journal of Religious History 20 (2020)

2.      Review of D.I. Shayovitz. A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural ibn Medieval Ashkenaz in Journal of Religious History 20 (2020).

3.      Review of Bruce Henderson, The Ritchie Boys: The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler in Shadow of the Shoah (6 February 2020) online at https//www. shadowofshoah.com/blog/2020/2/1/the-ritchie-boys-the-jews-who-escaped-the-nazis-and-returned-to-fight-hitler

4.      with Thomas Klikauer, review of Paul S. Adler, The 99% Economy: How Democratic Socialism Can Overcome the Crises of Capitalism in Marx and Philosophy online at https:/marxandphilosophy.org.uk/book/17776_the_99_percent_economy_how_democratic_    socialism_can_overcome_the_crises_of_capitalism

5.      with Thomas Klikauer, “The Economics of Democratic Socialism” Counterpunch (3 March 2020) online  at https://www/counterpunch/org/2020/03/03/the-economics-of-democratic-socialism

6.       “The Dancing Goblin” review of  Helga Schneider, The Bonfire of Berlin: A Lost Childhood in Wartime Germany on  Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (20/03/2020) and East European Jewish History  (11 March 2020) eejh@yahoogroups.com

7.      with Thomas Klikauer, review essay, Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays To Be Privileged in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (11 March 2020).

8.      with Thomas Klikauer: “Austria’s Cover-Up of Former Nazis: Review of the Film Murer—Anatomie eines Prozesses” in Tikkun (13 March 2020)

9.      with Thomas Klikauer, review of Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play itself Out in Marx & Philosophy: Review of Books (20 March 2020

10.    with Thomas Klikauer, “Corona in Germany: Hording and Authoritarianism” Counter Punch  (26 March 2020 and reprinted in Tikkun as “Antisemitic Covid-19 Conspiracies in Germany” 25 May 2020) online at https://www.tikkun.org/antisemitic-corvid-19-conspiracies-in-germany.

11.    with Thomas Klikauer, “There’s Class Warfare and the Rich are Winning” Countercurrents (4 April 2020) online ay https://counjtercurrentsd/2020/04/04/theres-class-warfare-and-the-rich-are winning

12.   with Thomas Klikauer. Review of Kieran Setiya. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide in Philosophy in Review (May 2020)

13.   Holocaust Book Reviews: “A Theatre of Cruelty and Horror” a review essay in five parts of Heather Dunne Macadam. The Nine Hundred: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz.  London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2020. Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations

14.   with Thomas Klikauer, “Neo-Nazis and Ant-Semitism in Germany” CounterPunch (25  June 2020) online at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/25/neo-nazis-and-antisemitism-in-germany

15.   with Thomas Klikauer, “The End of the American Newspaper” CounterPunch (6 July 2020) online at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/08/the-end-of-the-ameriocan-newspaper.

16.   “Tide and Time: Midrashic Commentaries on the Phantasmagoria that is History” Literature & Aesthetics (2020)

17.   Review of Sebastian Haffner. Defying Hitler: A Memoir on EEJH  (19 July 2020) and Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (20 July 2020).

18.   With Thomas Klikauer, “The Revival of Hating Jews as the Fantasy of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ is Spreading” Tikkun (24 August 2020)

19.   Holocaust Book Review Essay “Dita Kraus and Horror” Holocaust Review Essay: Antonio Iturbe, The Librarian of Auschwitz, trans. Lilit Żekulin Thwaites. New York: Godwin Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2017.   iii +  424 pp.  Original Spanish, La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz, (Planeta, 2012) and Dita Kraus. A Delayed Life. London: Penguin/Random House, 2020. 474 pp. Literature & Aesthetics 30:2 (December 2020)  Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (10 September 2020) and EEJH (11 September 2020)

20.   With Thomas Klikauer, “Is German Society Becoming Fascist?” CounterPunch (11 September 2020)

21.   Holocaust Book Review Essay of Sharon Cameron, The Light in Hidden Places in Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (28 September 2020); EEJH (29 September 2020), The Real Cosmos (29 September 2020).

22.   Holocaust Book Review Essay of Ariana Neumann, When Time Stopped in Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (14 October 2020). Reprinted as “When Time Stopped: A Story of Holocaust Historical Detection” on Arutz Sheva: Israel National News (15 November 2020)  online at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/ News/ News.aspx/29171

23.   Three Poems in “Psychohistorical Perspectives: Poetry” The Journal of Psychophistory 48:2 (2020) 167-168.

24.   With Thomas Klikauer, “The Science of Race and the Racism of Science” Counterpunch (23 October 2020); repr. In  Janata Weekly (9 November 2020).

25.   With Thomas Klikauer. “Despair, Death and Dying Workers in America” NET (25 October 2020); online at https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/despair-death-and-the-dying-workers-in-america.

26.   With Thomas Klikauer. “Bullshit Towers” Brave New Europe (26 October 2020) online at https://braveneweurope.com/thomas-klikauer-norman-simms-bullshit-towers.

27.   Review Essay of Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson, eds., Judaism and Jesus. Monograph Series, Mentalities/Mentalités 33:1 (2019) in Mentalities/Mentalités 24:1 (2020)

28.   Review Essay of Ghil'ad Zuckermann. Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) in Mentalities/Mentalités 34:1 (2020).

29.   Holocaust Book Review Essay of David G. Marwell. Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death”. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020). Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (15 November 2020)

30.   Holocaust Book Review of Eddy de Wind. Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp in Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (25 November 2020).

31.   Review of Jeffrey Rosen. Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty and Law in Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (6 December 2020).

32.   “Re-arranging Things at the Table for an Isolated and Peculiar Jewish Community at the Bottom of the World,” Chapter 22 in Kenneth Hanson, ed., Passover Haggadah (2020)

33.   Review of Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times in Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations  (25 December 2020)  and on EEJH (31 December 2020). And in  Arutz Sheva: Israel National News

34.    with Thomas  . The German New Right: AfD, Pegida and the Re-imagining of National Identity, German Politics & Society, 38:4 (2020) 97-103.

35.   with Thomas Klikauer, “What Germany Teaches Us – American Slavery and German Nazis” Review of Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans - Race and the Memory of Evil  in  German Politics and Society, 38: 4 (2020): 106-115

Four new poems for mid-March

 

 

 

Aby’s Sylph Comes and Goes

 

She glides in and out of the busy streets and stalls,

A basket on her head, her gown blown by the wind,

And here she is now hastening through halls

Of some aristocratic home, where ladies pinned

To the background, with their escorts stuck on the walls,

As all were paintings of one dimension, or skinned

To nothing, not even bones or muscles; no balls

Or banquets possible for them—until she spins

Around like a top, in between their shadows,

So little puffs of air give movement to their flounces,

And they flip and flop like paper dolls, until she goes

Out by the backdoor, and they fall flat as she bounces

Back into the hidden world we live in, our noses

Unoffended by the stench of inequality,

Thankful for the moment’s grace in our wee city.

 

 

Mourners Inside the Megalithic Tomb

 

We put together all our best tools

And weapons, gather ornaments, and things

We like to touch on long cold winter nights

When we are away on hunts, and when our souls

Feel lonely and the sky rains down its stars. The rings

We traded for and the crystal blades from fights

Against the demons in our sleep, and what

It is that makes us sick and age and disappear,

All these, too, we put in a circle, the hot

Fire within, the cold shadows without,

And stand together, women, children, tears

In our eyes and try to remember all the years

We sang our songs and danced with him now dead,

At one with ancestors and spirits. The dread

Is gone so long as we can remember what

Has never been in only one, the all-

Encompassing, compressed individual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Feathered Tribes

 

There are fantails twerking on the edge of the fountain

and spotted doves dancing a gavotte on the grass,

while black birds twitter to one another and look insane

as they bounce about, head to head, arse to arse.

The sparrows come, dozens of them now, they have learned

To grab the bits of bread and fly back to their nests,

As clever as feathery rats on the lawn, who yearned

For each other, and there are now outliers who rest

Alone waiting their turn, then the obese thrush

Stare at one another. unsure if the season is right,

And would stay there motionless until it was almost night

Then peck a few seeds and return home all in a rush.

A few nervous visitors, indeterminate, stand in a bush

Near the door to pounce on kitchen scraps at sight.

 

 

 

 

 

Prayer Nuts

 

Thirty years in the making, the prayer nut

Can be opened to inspection, layer upon layer,

Levels of consciousness and reality, but

Nothing can be seen without a magnifier

Of some sort, the pins that hold it all together,

The windows to be pierced, each level

Finer than the previous scenario, a button

On a sleeve with microscopic letters, fetters

From loose threads of a poor woman’s shawl.

What tools they used to carve, a lathe, an awl,

A tiny saw much smaller than a hair,

A rasp too tiny to be grasped. This space

Is sacred, this place more holy than a face

Of someone staring into heaven. Share

Of the beholder to fill the mysteries, where crawl

And creep the longing souls of weeping sinners

In some abject ritual of trust,

There are the insects caught where the spinners

Never dared to come, turning into dust.

Holocaust Novel: Tania Blanchard's Letters from Berlin

Tania Blanchard, Letters from Berlin. Sydney, NSW: Simon and Schuster, 2020.  xv +       430 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

This is a novel purportedly based on the author’s own family who were caught up in the Third Reich during World War Two. The main narrative is book-ended in a semi-fictional Prologue and an Epilogue in which a middle-aged Ingrid tells her own daughter Natalie the truth, after a whole life of not knowing who her biological grandmother was. The true (that is, partly made-up) story is revealed through a cache of letters written by her mother’s mother, Susie, during the war and the years immediately following it. Ingrid, narrator of the end pieces, chose now to reveal the story of her mother’s family to her own “heavily pregnant daughter” and what had happened to them. The whole of the central narrative is supposedly a joining together of Susie the grandmother’s story based on those letters and filled out by imagination and intuition.  So we are told. I think. The relationships are complicated.

The narrative begins on the eve of the war. Because of the aunt, who was a Russian Jew, the whole family in Hitler’s Germany are almost constantly under threat and need to protect one another from arrest, deportation and death. Susie, an orphan, had been brought up in a country estate by her rich Unkle Georg and his wife Aunt Elya. Susie and Leo, Georg and Elya’s son, are in love, but not ready to go beyond flirtation. Another quasi uncle, Julius, somewhat older than Susie, was also brought up on the estate when he was orphaned. The family thus consists of a tangled web of relationships, loyalties and obligations. But due to the Nazi race laws they are all implicated as mischlinge, mixed race, mixed marriage and mixed connections.

As the Third Reich implements its racial policies and moves towards war, Julius joins the Nazi Party and claims to be protecting the family through his position in the directing of the railway system. When the screws are tightened more, he asks Susie to, first, be his nominal fiancée and then, after luring her further into the relationship, to marry him to help keep the Gestapo away from “his family.” Susie, who is not yet out of her teens, agrees and gradually grows closer and closer to this unctuous older man, appearing as his trophy wife-to-be among the glitz and glamour of Nazi highlife..  

It is hard to believe she can remain so naïve and stupid throughout his courtship. But the closer you read the novel, the more preposterous it all is. Aside from a very few scenes, characters don’t really talk to one another: they make formal speeches and barely feel the horrible things happening around them in Germany. After Susie leaves university to study to be a nurse and then finds work in a Red Cross hospital just outside of Berlin, she deals with agony, suffering and death every day, walks home through streets littered with dead and wounded from Allied bombing raids; but when her Unkle Georg is shot by an SS soldier at home, she makes a sentimental speech about how fragile life really is and that one could suddenly have to face death. Until she actually sees official documents brought to her by Leo showing that Julius, whom she is about to marry and is pregnant by, is a serial philanderer, is complicit in the sending of thousands of Jews to extermination camps, she can’t believe how evil he is. She also finally comes to see that Julius turned in his own long-time friend and thus is responsible for Unkle Georg’s death,  and has blatantly lied to her throughout their relationship, But eve n when she says “I hate you,” she doesn’t stop seeing him.

It makes you want to scream at her, “Never trust a Nazi!” and throw the book on the floor and stomp on it.

Certainly, through long expository paragraphs and the speeches the various characters address to one another, as well as in their internal thoughts, the outline of the Nazi crimes and the course of the war is known. These passages might as well be collected into a brief history of Germany from 1939 to 1947.

But what they tell is made subordinate to the romance and sentimental tale of family life. From this brief history, too, we learn that Leo and his parents are part of the small German resistance movement and help smuggle a few Russian POWs out of Germany and back to the Soviet Union. Susie helps them out by passing on bits of information she overhears while dining in fancy restaurants, waiting in grand hotel lobbies, and attending the opera with Julius. Leo and Georg take a minor part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. None of that, however, registers in the way they all speak or comport themselves in the novel. Their sentence structures remain bland, the same from one end of the book to the other, calm and unemotional. Their lives in the countryside, despite ostracism and rude comments from some of the villagers the family has supported for generations, remains a peaceful idyll. Mostly, too, the baddies—lecherous SS men, viciously envious neighbours, confronting Soviet officers—are formal, polite, and, as for the action, doors are shut when violence occurs. Later, after the Red Army secures control over the region where the estate lies, though the regional committee confiscates the manor house and send what is left of the family packing, all this seems to happen with impeccable taste. I will not tell you how the family gets separated, Susie marries Leo and has a child (the daughter whom we meet in the Prologue and Epilogue), but becomes separated from them.  Eventually she comes to live in Sydney, Australia, where she marries again and has a full life with children and grandchildren.

“What is going on here?” you may well ask. Is Tanya Blanchard exploiting the suffering of other people, including the members of her own family slightly adjusted to be characters in this novel,  to create her own fictional account of the terrible war years in Germany during and after the war? After all, this is a complaint made by critics about other novels inspired by true events, such as Takis Würger’s Stella (2020), although there the criticism is that the love story (between the title character, a Berlin woman, and a Swiss art student caught in the city during the war) and a mystery set “within a developing, expanding, horrifying Holocaust” and consequently the narrator never adequately deals with any of “the many plots and horrors.”.[i]  Sometimes the book reviewer of such a fiction feels uncomfortable, misled and tricked by the author. Closely related to this mixed aesthetic and epistemological set of questions, however, is another: the feeling of discomfort and anger, when popular reviewers don’t sense anything amiss, who take the motives, actions and events as simply give having a truth that lies in precisely what is wrong, that is, when the horrors of war and the even worse moral and criminal enormities of the Holocaust are normalized into just bits of excitement, thrills of an escape tale, and insubstantial and superficial grief at the level of sentimentality.

In Letters from Berlin, has she—that is, both the author Tanya Blanchard and her narrator Susie —no real understanding about what the Nazis did and in the name of the German people, almost all of whom were complicit or tacitly so during the Holocaust? Yet Blanchard’s work is no children’s book or one explicitly meant for young adults, naïve readers who cannot face up to the ugly truth yet.  Nevertheless, Susie as a young woman and then as an older grandmother excuses, rationalizes away and trivializes the enormity of the crimes committed during the Third Reich. Is this a version of the new myth that Germany and the German people were the first victims of Hitler’s regime? And that somehow the Russian occupiers and then the East German government were worse? 

Well, someone has compiled a list of ten discussion points at the end of Letters from Berlin, and this may tell us something about how the publisher conceives of the probable audience for the novel. First of all, not one of the questions has to do with the book as a work of fiction based on supposedly true characters and events. They simply assume that the story is true as an emotional account of good people caught up in a bad situation. How is the plot line structured, chapters made to fit different stages in the development of the characters, and how are people actually seen to emerge from events? One of the fictions in the text is that everyone speaks, thinks and feels in German, so that the English used is a stand-in for another language with its own idioms, tones and rhythms. Germany had only been united since 1870, and regional dialects were still strong, and rural people spoke and saw the world quite differently from city dwellers, and especially different from Berliners, who had an accent that everyone else remarked on. Surely this has special importance when we know too that the Nazis twisted and abused the German language and made it virtually impossible think or feel in a normal way.

Everything turns on an early twenty-first century bourgeois family loyalty and the buzz word identity. According to the questions, readers are asked to compare their own experiences with those of the people in the novel, as if those were generic, global and ahistorical values (“human nature”). But there are no questions about how European attitudes might have differed in the nineteenth century when most of the fictional family, aside from children, were born, and certainly from contemporary Australia, where Susie raises her own new family.

Then the question perhaps should have been asked about whether you yourself (dear reader) would have the courage, the stamina and the skill to oppose your own government if it was manifestly going against civilization and civil morals. Would you have risked your life and that of your loved ones in order to bring about the death of Adolf Hitler and the downfall of the Nazi regime? Since there were very few people during the period of 1932-1945 who actually did join the German resistance and almost all of them were sent to concentration camps or hanged, do you (reader) accept this idea that most Germans were good, passive or indifferent and unaware of what was happening? Why was there no large-scale movement to sabotage the German armed forces or railway and other supply systems, as happened in France and Italy? Again, we have to ask about this novel: What is it all about and who is responsible?

What is the nature of evil, and is fighting against it—giving up your life, taking the lives of others—a moral imperative? Was Hannah Arendt correct when she spoke of “the banality of evil” in reference to Adolf Eichmann? Or is there nothing banal at all about orchestrating the cruel murder of six million human beings? Were the perpetrators of the Holocaust and its facilitators only obeying orders and doing their duty to the laws of the land? Were ordinary people who profited from the wholesale expropriation of food, clothing, furniture, machinery and other wealth from Nazi conquered countries so unaware of what was happening that they don’t share in the responsibility for the things done in their name? Can we accept their cry-babying plea that they too were as much victims as the Poles, the Gypsies and the Jews?

Or to go further: Is there a special undertaking that non-Jewish writers assume when they deal with events and victims of the Holocaust, even if it is only at some fictional distance from the main action? Do readers have a share in this responsibility; to agree tacitly not to read passively and superficially, but to take a critical stance and, having decided to inform themselves of the context of such stories, to examine their own backgrounds, life experiences and historical knowledge of what really happened in the world? Though it is probably unrealistic to ask many ordinary readers to do any such thing, nevertheless if one is to ensure that such a monstrous breakdown in humanity as the Holocaust never happens again, I cannot help posing the questions above rather than accepting those listed in the back of this book.

 

---

[i]. Takis Würger, Stella, trans. Liesl Schillinger (London: Grove, 2020). 

Travels through Siberia in Search of Pianos

 

Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia. London: Transworld Publishers/ Penguin/Random House, 2020.  433 pp. profusely illustrated with maps and photographs.

Presented as a book similar to Edmund De Waal’s Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010) and The White Road (2015), family reminiscences and meditations on the makers and materials of art in a sensitive, if not often sensuous language, Sophy Roberts’ The Lost Pianos of Siberia (2020) is a wonder. She sets out to do something crazy: to travel across Siberia to locate the pianos that were sent there ever since the Russians decided to use it as a place of exile. Thereafter, with changes in government, wars, occupations and the building of railways and roads, the people of this vast territory—and some of it is or has been Chinese, Japanese and American—endure and love to play and hear the piano.

There is no real plot line to this book. The author moves from one end of Siberia to the other, meeting people, hearing their stories, looking for lost or hidden pianos, and retelling the history of the region and the people who live there. She tells many fascinating anecdotes, describes wonderful places, report the ordeals and sorrows of exiles, and fills up the vast supposedly empty stretches of Siberia with humanity and culture. She seems to read nearly every traveller’s book from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and gleaned many strange facts about the Decembrists, the Bolshevik and Soviet prisoners, the families that followed their condemned members and those who decided to stay rather than return to one type of tyranny or another, trusting that distance, freezing temperatures and lack of transport would keep them safe.

From the outside many towns and cities look drab and soul-less, but from the inside they vibrate like pianos to the generations-old enthusiasms and desperate memories of the inhabitants. She is a charming person for whom, sometimes after a little hesitation, the informants open up and tell their own and their family histories show her pianos they have taken care of and which are still playable, and let her use family photographs. Occasionally she meets indigenous natives and families that have come there of their own free will, and Sophy Roberts weaves their stories too in the fabric of her anatomy of Siberia. She also lists many interesting sources in notes at the back and these books, fictional and personal, point the way towards following up on the anecdotes she tells about in this most readable of books.