Scum of the Earth

 

Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler is an account of Koestler’s internment in various French prisons and concentration camps prior to the outbreak of World War II.

The scum of the earth in the title refers to those extreme leftist intellectuals, Spanish Republican soldiers, communists and socialists who were incarcerated by the Free French government.  Koestler investigates that odd premise that the French government should arrest staunch anti-fascists as France begins a fight for survival with Nazi Germany.

By the books end, the scum of the earth appears to transform to certain sectors of French society who all too eagerly embraced Petain’s Vichy government and collaborated with the Germans; the latent antisemitism and fascistic tendencies of post-World War One France are revealed as the guiding force behind Koestler’s incarceration.

A Narrative Strategy: Nava Semel's "And the Rat Laughed"

As the Holocaust recedes as lived memory, both artists and historians struggle with ways to depict this event in a world where no one directly lived the memory.

And the Rat Laughed  by Nava Semel tries a variety of methods to capture the unimaginable.  There is straight out interviewing, fanciful myth, a Christian diary, even science fiction and legendary accounts.  Semel is trying to find a way to create a language about the Holocaust as it moves from living reality to shared memory.  In the process, she creates a new language of remembrance.

This novel is gripping, strange, dramatic.  Just when you think you have figured out Semel’s narrative strategy, she changes things up , giving pleasant and unpleasant surprises.

And the Rat Laughed is experimental novel writing at its best.  This is not a game played with words, but a real attempt to gain new ground in literature, while at the same time, creating a lexicon of memory that is difficult to grasp.

The Baal Shem Tov Light: Trembling With Joy

Trembling With Joy (18 Paths of Joyous Life from the Baal Shem Tov compiled by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman) is a Chabad produced book, featuring sayings and stories from the Baal Shem Tov.

Freeman searched through the two books that are supposed to contain authentic sayings of the Baal Shem Tov, as well as Chabad sources that purportedly preserve the sayings of the Besht.

This book is “light,” inspirational reading, to be picked up and put down when the inclination strikes the reader.  I suppose these books have their function.  Although the conceal much of the hard work required when practicing religious Judaism, they provide a much needed break in a realm of positive simplicity.

Viennese Romance by David Vogel

Viennese Romance is an early, unfinished novel by the poet, novelist and short story writer David Vogel.   

Vogel was born in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and was murdered in the Holocaust.   As a writer of Hebrew on European shores, he is considered both an anomaly and a harbinger of things to come; he wrote of cosmopolitan themes in a then very parochial language, mainly confined to a small, but rising number of Jews living in Palestine. 

This novel was found hidden among Vogel’s papers.  You can find the very peculiar story of its discovery here.  The published novel is very much the work of editors, who needed to take very large liberties with an unfinished and rough manuscript. 

Not surprising, this early work features one of Vogel’s Ur-concerns, the fictional portrayal of his relationship with an older woman and her daughter.  The novel can be quite graphic in its sexual content, and moves freely from character to character.

While nowhere near a fully realized or complete work, Viennese Romance gives the Vogel reader some keen insights one of the more important Hebrew writers of the twentieth century and his vanished world.