The Ponzi Scheme of Praise

Nathan Englander is reckoned a great writer now, and it shows in the constellation of literary stars who have endorsed this book of short stories with a blurb. Jonathan Franzen calls this work a "fine-grained comedy and large scale-tragedy." Jonathan Safran Foer, Englander's friend, says the work "overflows with revelations and gems." Michael Cabon sums it all up when he calls this collection a "Certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short art." Other no less brazen blurbs are provided by Jonathan Letham and Gary Shetyngart, completing the Ponzi pyramid of admiration.

Unfortunately, this collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, does not nearly meet up to his hyperbole of acclaim. These stories as a whole are weak. It would be hoped, in a collection eight stories, there would one or two which could redeem the collection, but in this case it is not so. Englander misses the mark again and again, producing a collection that can be called embarrassing on the one end and a failure on the other.

What goes wrong? First, there is language. Englander's previous work had daring sentences, interesting syntax, and bold juxtapositions of words. These stories are flat and dry on the level of language. Englander is not doing anything real or new with his words. He is just producing them with no sense of the poetry of language. Second is character development. Almost to a story, Englander fails to provide a living, breathing portrait of a person. His characters dance around the fringes of believability, making bad jokes and common observations about life that do nothing to enliven the reader. By and large they are stereotypes, not characters. Finally, the structure of the stories fall well short of being masterpieces of short art. There is no sense, in reading them, that some great mystery is being unfolded. The stories end without great fanfare; the themes he develops in them are treated and then dismissed without any deep import. Englander wants to say profound things about the human and the Jewish condition, but these stories are terrible vehicles for doing so. The profound just becomes silly.

Nathan Englander has proven himself to be a great writer. This collection, however, gives no evidence of this.

The Long Sutra

Gene Reeves did an excellent job in translating The Lotus Sutra from the Chinese into English.  It is here, the entire work, not abridged.  The translation is clear and easy to read.  He made concessions to English speaking audiences in certain places, making the text more accessible. 

That is the both the virtue and vice of this work.  It is ALL here, and for readers simply interested in the flavor of the work, this is not the book for you. The Lotus Sutra  is structured around individual sutras, usually speeches in prose by the Buddha.  Following the prose, there same ideas are presented in verse.  This pattern is more or less replicated for over thirty sutras.

So, for a reader wanting to immerse herself in The Lotus Sutra, this is the work for you.  For those who wish to get the flavor of the book without wading into its repetitions, look elsewhere.  

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, The Afterlife

Francine Prose’s book:  Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, The Afterlife, is essential to read to gain an understanding of Anne Frank’s diary as literature.  Usually examined as a historical document, Prose makes a convincing case that Anne Frank was creating a conscious piece of art, a kind of epistolary memoir.  She offers abundant proof to support this, walking us through the book's compositional history.  

For anyone interested in the diary for the first time, or coming back after not having read it for years, Prose’s book is a great key to a new understanding of the seminal work.

Prose also gets into the broad picture of Anne Frank’s work and her image.  She explores the plays and movies, the lawsuits and controversy, as Anne Frank became in the years following her murder, as she says, Hitler’s most famous victim.

But all the time Prose is respectful.  It is obvious that the diary of Anne Frank (and her other works) are a serious issue; and that stance comes through in this book in the refreshing, kind, and strong positions Prose takes regarding Anne Frank and her written legacy.

Two Films with Fighting Jews

It is so informative to watch the Israeli film Kippur, and then the American movie Defiance.  Both show Jews fighting for their lives in very different contexts.

Kippur is a low budget Israeli film that depicts soldiers whose task it is to retrieve the wounded during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  Without the large budget and the significant expectations of making a major profit, Kippur unfolds quickly, but smartly.  We see soldiers struggling to make sense of a chaotic battle.  We see their exhausted faces, their clipped and incoherent speech, their fear, and dogged but exhausted spirit.  In one scene, the team tries in vain to carry a wounded soldier in a stretcher through a mud caked field in the Golan Heights.  They are filthy and exhausted.

Defiance depicts the life of Jewish partisan fighters in Belorussia.   A trio of brothers leads the band, who in the process of fighting the Germans, also save a significant number of women and children from the Nazi death machine.  The film is based on a true story.  There are scenes depicting suffering, hunger, brutality, but it is all within a rather safe range.  Hope and despair needed to be handed out unevenly, with a heavy lean toward hope, the film makers seem to say.  We can never handle seeing war from the flat, exhausting angle of Kippur.   Could an American audience sit through ten minutes of men struggling to get out of waist deep mud?

The film they make implies we can’t.  So we get speeches, heroics, pain that can be overcome, and most of all, we are not allowed to despair too much.  The rather clumsy allusions to the partisan leader as Moses (he leads the band across a Sea of Reeds to escape the Germans!) shows us that there is no need to fall into despair.  We can climb through any muck and mire to redemption.  When watching a movie, Defiance tells us, it is important for us to not feel too bad.

Re-Reading Anne Frank

After being baptized by certain misguided Mormons for, I believe, the ninth time, I decided to re-read Anne Frank’s diary.  I read it last in my late teens.

When I read it as a teen, I had no problem believing a teenager could write material that contains such perspicuity.  As an adult, I find it difficult to believe.   And hence, we see the gulf between children’s self-understanding, and the adult’s perception of that understanding.  In the 25 plus years since I have read the diary, I have assumed the rigid attitude and stultifying thought patterns of an adult.  One of these side products is to believe that a girl at fourteen can’t write anything substantial about herself and her world.  What a sad commentary on the maturation of the human mind.  

On a technical level, I find it fascinating to learn that the diaries were a very conscious effort on Anne Frank’s part to create a published book.  The conception that the diary was found, complete from beginning to end, is wrong.  She wrote the diaries almost as an epistolary memoir.  She went back and revised passages.  The work we have in our hands when we read it is a composite of sorts.  An original diary, its revision, and a combination of the two, edited by her father, Otto Frank.   This is all expressed in fascinating detail in Francine Prose’s  Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.  I highly recommend this book as a companion piece to any re-reading of Anne Frank’s work.

The Making of the Kotzker Rebbe

 

A Passion For Truth is A.J. Heschel’s exploration of Kierkegaard and the Kotzker Rebbe, two individuals known of their anti-social tendencies, and their extreme disregard for accepted religious norms.  Heschel pays far more attention to Kierkegaard, especially in the beginning of this book.  This is an accident of history.  Kierkegaard left behind many books and a massive journal, while the Kotzker burned his works.  All we have in the way of his teaching are the recollections of his students.  So, as comparisons go, we don’t have much at all.  

There is Kierkegaard, who has had a major influence on modern Christianity, and the Kotzker, who has almost no impact on contemporary Judaism.  Often, as Heschel writes about the Kotzker, we wonder where he gets his sources.  They are not cited, or something cited in book about the Kotzker Heschel himself was writing, which appears to have never been published (part of a larger Yiddish work).  The reader is left wondering where this material comes from.

Heschel is prone to repetition in his all books, repeating the same idea in the various ways in the same paragraph.  His range also tends to be narrow, focusing on some element that interests him, to the determent of the rest of the material.  This is found in abundance in A Passion for Truth.  Heschel runs rings around himself, covering the same ground.  He lets rhetoric win, and in the process, makes a sluggish book that is difficult to read or care about.

Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery

Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa’ Taher has the array of expected elements in a novel that takes places in Upper Egypt in the early to mid-twentieth century. There is the narrator, telling the story as an adult with the required air of nostalgia for a lost way of village life. The narrator’s father is the village elder, preaches at the mosque, and is held in high esteem by all.  The Coptic monks at the nearby monastery are revered by everyone, including Muslims.  Everything is in delicate, even loving harmony.

When a blood feud threatens to destroy the village’s sense of order, the murderer takes refuge in the Coptic monastery, which is considered a sanctuary by all.  And around these minute actions, the fate of modern Egypt is being decided, and a way of life is dying forever. 

Taher’s novel makes the expected moves, but with his fresh voice and delicate eye for detail, there is still a remarkable amount of the unexpected in what could have been a very expected novel.