With his newest book about to be released (The Ask), Sam Lipsyte is everywhere. 

• In conversation with Michael Kimball at The Faster Times

• An interview with Black Book

• Reviewed by the LA Times

• In New York Magazine

Shalom Auslander is also popping up all over the place, and we really can't complain about that.  He has a piece in the newest issue of GQ which sadly is not up on the net, so you will have to go and buy the magazine.  When was the last time you did that?  Over at Tablet, he talks about what we can only assume are a handful of the thousands of adoring female fans he has all over the globe. 
Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals finally makes its way to the UK this month.  Granta interviews him. 

I'm willing to bet that Michael Chabon would make a great father.  He talks about it at The Guardian.

Chabon is also mentioned along with Jonathan Lethem as Jewish writers who write "fantasy literature".

Ben Greenman on The Carpenters

Alicia Jo Rabins of the bands Girls in Trouble and Golem is guest blogging at Ploughshares.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, best known for his novels The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has a memoir called Manhood for Amateurs coming out this fall. Among other subjects, the book covers his life with wife - and fellow author - Ayelet Waldman and their four children. Today's Page Six has a blurb about Chabon and the comments he makes about circumcision in Manhood:

"Mutilation [is] the only honest name for this raw act that my wife and I have twice invited men with knives to come into our house and perform, in the presence of all our friends and family, with a nice buffet and Weekend Cake from Just Desserts... We have been through all of the standard arguments -- hygiene, cancer prevention, psychological fitness, the Zero Mostel tradition . . . and found they are all debatable at best.

First Shalom Auslander, then Sam Apple, and now this? Seems like today's male Jewish author really has issues with the covenant of circumcision. 

The Sami Rohr Prize For Jewish Literature

“There is no such thing as non-fiction,” said novelist David Peace in a recent television interview and I’m inclined to agree. So when the Jewish Book Council's annual Sami Rohr Prize – a new literary award that has instantly become the most important book prize in the loosely affiliated world of Jewish writing – chose to alternate its annual prize between “Fiction” and “Non-fiction”, I was surprised to say the least.

I was even more surprised when I found out that Lucette Lagnado was the winner of the non-fiction prize – not because of her undoubted ability but because the prize committee has implicitly agreed with my reservations about the genre distinctions by choosing, on the face of it, two extremely similar books for the fiction and non-fiction prizes.

Lucette Lagnado The two highly deserving winners of the prize so far have been Tamar Yellin and Lucette Lagnado, winners of fiction and non-fiction, respectively. The committee is at pains to note that they celebrate writers not books, but in the past two years I have not read two more similar books than the ones that preceded their receipt of the Rohr Prize – The Genizah at the House of Shepher and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.

Both books are archaeologies of their fathers’ culture told through daughter-centric biographies. Both explore the paternal family and its transformation as the father moves from a colorful Levant to the bland, English-speaking West. The crucial, if hairsplitting difference is that, although both are recounted in skillfully literary ways, one is ostensibly a fictional account of her family based on certain key historical facts whereas the other purports to be a historical account of her family based on research and family lore.

So why does the prize split these genre hairs? And, if the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is negligible, what are pertinent distinctions for literature?

Continue reading...

Michael Chabon: contemplates sarah palinMichael Chabon is an expert on a great many things, especially hummus and Alaska. He seemed like the perfect person to turn to for a conversation about Sarah Palin:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Isn't it great that Michael Palin's sister is running for vice president?

Michael Chabon: Jeffrey, I fear it might actually be kind of sad that I had exactly the same thought when I first heard her name. At least we can safely assume, at this point, that Governor Palin fully appreciates the deep wisdom contained in that old axiom: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

JG: Is Sarah Palin Jewish? Her husband was in the Yiddish Policemen's Union. Or maybe the Steelworkers, I forget.

MC: It's unlikely and, I feel, sort of weird the way this Alaskan lady's fortunes have become caught up, and so quickly, with those of the Jews. An exhaustive search of press mentions on Lexis-Nexis reveals that, until very recently, "Alaska" and "Jews" had been included in the same sentence only 18 times, ever. I know I probably deserve some of the credit for this uptick, but I decline to accept it.

JG: What's your favorite Alaskan food?

MC: I know you want me to say moose. You probably also want me to point out that moose (properly slaughtered of course) is kosher. Same goes for reindeer. I have eaten both, in Juneau, Sitka and Wrangell. Reindeer sausage. Mooseburger. Also fiddlehead ferns and lingonberries. But I'm going to have to go with lox.

JG: Alaska. Crazy place, or what?

MC: It's crazy beautiful, that's for sure. I found it a dark place, and not just because it was literally dark much of time, during my second visit, in late winter. Also, I found it (the place, not the people) hostile, and not just in the sense that wilderness is generally said to be hostile. I kept thinking of that bit from Twin Peaks, where the sheriff says, "There is something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence." Almost everything humans have built there is unbelievably ugly. That might have something to do with the air of resentment given off by the underlying terrain.

JG: Do you think Barack Obama has placated whatever fears elderly Jews have of him?

MC: Huh, I don't know, can elderly Jews actually be placated? The Israeli government, as you know, has squandered billions of shekels to date on one ill-starred placation program after another, with results that have been uniformly disappointing, leading it to issue the famous finding: You just can't alter a kocker.

But if anyone can do it, Obama can.

JG: Do you think McCain was a) smart, or b) stupid, to pick Palin as his running mate?

MC: I think the answer is probably both more pathetic and more chutzpadich than either a) or b) would imply.

JG: Are any of your children named Bristol, Willow or Track?

MC: I was kind of excited when I thought Willow was a Buffy shout-out. Like, how cool, she named her kid after a Jewish lesbian witch! It was part of this weird, innocent spasm of credit-extending that I experienced on first seeing the Governor in action last Friday. But the moment was very short-lived, alas. I bet she doesn't even watch Buffy. The names are kind of awesome, in my opinion. But then I have a son named Ezekiel Napoleon Waldman Chabon.

[This is cross-posted from Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic blog, which we think is great, and you should visit often]

Michael Chabon: He's trained to interpret communications from Bizarro World As Izzy noted yesterday and Michael followed up on today, Michael Chabon wrote a ringing endorsement of Obama in the Washington Post. Concerned that Commentary might lose its credentials as the most borderline-delusional magazine in the Jewish world today, Jeopardy champion John Podhoretz penned a reply to Chabon in which he referred to The Yiddish Policeman's Union as "a work of anti-Zionism so thoroughgoing that it makes Mearshimer and Walt look like Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion by contrast." Excellent piece of prose, John! It almost makes daddy's "World War IV" argument sound rational!

But with characteristic class, Chabon came back with a gentleman's knockout:

Dear Mr. Podhoretz,

Criticism from you is, as always, particularly sweet, though I am forever grateful for having been trained, by years of reading Superman comic books, to properly interpret communications from the Bizarro World.

So, thanks for the reassurance and endorsement of my views.

Sometimes I can’t not help not enjoying your writing, either!

Sincerely,

Michael Chabon

(I'm assuming it's the real Chabon who commented there, but obviously it could have been anyone.)

 

Previously, Izzy mentioned novelist Michael Chabon's emotional Barack Obama endorsement in the Washington Post.  This was the aspect of it that most piqued my ire:

Because I have come out publicly for the senator from Illinois, I am often called upon to listen as people offer up -- with wistfulness and regret, or with a pundit's show of certainty, or with a well-earned but useless skepticism -- their bad reasons for not giving Obama their support. For a long time now, I have listened to these people with forbearance and with a sense of duty -- not to some principle of open debate or of the inherent merit in the free exchange of even meritless ideas, but rather out of obligation to the candidate whose cause I champion.

Because Obama appears to be a patient, forbearing man with a gift for listening, I figured I owed it to him to play the thing his way.

Thus does Michael Chabon admit that he's only paying attention to opposing political views out of deference to the man he thinks would want him to act this way -- and that man would be president of the United States.

You can read the entire op-ed for yourself and tell me if there are any coherent explanations for why Barack Obama is the best candidate. All I come away with is a parade of nostrums and what Irving Howe once called a "dithyrambling" style founded on sheer emotion. Apparently, Ayelet Waldman, Chabon's wife, is just as over the moon about Barack, which has this useless skeptic wondering if she'd throw Michael and the kids under the bus to save the Moshiach from the South Side.

Hillary Clinton is the crier, but lawn-watering blubbery and histrionics are becoming all too characteristic among Obama supporters. Check out the "Yes, We Can" video below, which someone might have been good enough to edit before posting it on YouTube.

Two questions:

1. When did the kitsch title of Sammy Davis Jr.'s autobiography become the campaign slogan of the season?

2. Why is the personality cult the only alternative for liberals to the "lesser of two evils" argument?

As Super Tuesday approaches, three prominent Jewish writers get political in their personal essays. In The Washington Post, Michael Chabon and Erica Jong set out a point-counterpoint of sorts, with each one trying to out-hyperbole the other.

First, Michael Chabon chides us all on being a nation full of fear:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

 

Then Erica Jong justifies Hillary Clinton’s centrism with an appeal to baby boomer women who identify with her struggle:

As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. Since she is a woman, she has to show she's ready to be commander in chief. Hence her "triangulation" on Iraq and her signing the absurd Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which calls on our government to use "military instruments" to "combat, contain and [stop]" Iran's meddling in Iraq.

By the time it came up she must have known the Cheney-Bush war profiteers would never embrace even partial peace. She had to win over her America and theirs.

Shalom Auslander, our third prominent Jewish author, forgoes these emotional pleas for votes and instead talks about politics the way they’re lived among news-cycle junkies in the days before the primary. He admits that he’s never voted before, but now that he’s “downloaded pretty much all the pornography on the internet,” obsessing about the election has become his new favorite way to procrastinate. Also his wife found a lump in her breast, and maybe he needs distractions more that he’s willing to confront head-on. His essay won’t convince anyone to vote for Obama, his candidate of choice, or to vote at all for that matter, but it’s the most realistic evocation of the 2008 race I’ve seen so far.

It’s always struck me as odd that even history’s most odious mass-murdering dictators now and then take the time to enjoy a little American popular culture. Adolf Hitler was fond of King Kong and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as every good Trivial Pursuit player knows. Kim Jong-Il watched but did not particularly enjoy Team America: World Police. Uday Hussein, exhibiting the kind of taste you’d expect from a man-boy who used solid gold toilet seats, called Scarface his favorite.

I would wager that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is more of a books man, and not only because he likes to hang out at the school that Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren once called home. I say this because he seems to have cribbed his latest bright idea from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Once upon a time, Mr. Ahmadinejad expressed his odious mass-murdering ambitions in calls for the destruction of Israel. Now he wants to move Israel to Alaska—much the same fate, in the view of this heliotropic reporter—which is precisely what happens to the “Frozen Chosen” in Chabon’s novel.

Ahmadinejad condemned “the atrocities of the Zionist regime against the oppressed Palestinian people,” the IRNA news agency reported Friday.

According to the regime’s mouthpiece, the president suggested holding a referendum on the transfer of Israel’s Jews to Europe, Canada or Alaska.

“Let a referendum be held in Palestine. It is our clear proposal to European countries,” Ahmadinejad said during the International Quds (Jerusalem) Day rallies in Tehran.

“Let all Palestinians including Muslims, Christians and the Jews attend the referendum,” he added.

IRNA said Ahmadinejad repeated an earlier suggestion to Europe on the “settlement of Zionists in Europe or in big lands such as Canada and Alaska so they would be able to own their own land”.

Here we have a perfect example of those “views” which, however “challenging” or even “repugnant,” we must “confront” in the name of “free speech.” The hubbub surrounding Lee Bollinger’s invitation of Mr. Ahmadinejad to Columbia—and his bizarre and counterproductive dressing-down of the presumably indifferent lunatic—has mostly passed, but the issue is worth keeping on the front burner. Consider the case of Stanford, where Donald Rumsfeld’s hotly protested appointment to the Hoover Institution has been framed as a free speech issue. In fact it’s a free thought issue, since no one at Stanford will ever have to hear Rumsfeld’s opinions about anything. (The Hoover Institution, for that matter, isn’t even under the control of the university.)

Why bring this up again? Because the Ahmadinejad affair, which says so much about American political culture, says a lot about academic culture, too. If Donald Rumsfeld is the professor everyone hates because he’s a tough grader, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a walking gut course. One could debate Mr. Rumsfeld on a million points, but Mr. Ahmadinejad is the question that has already been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. There is no possibility of moving Israel to Alaska: It’s not worth “dialoguing” about. We know there are homosexuals in Iran, just as we know there aren’t unicorns there: Why “confront” this view? Just look at the triviality of the student response to Ahmadinejad’s presence to see that none of this is really about thinking, less so about acting. It’s about the frisson of the bizarre—a real live madman!—which, sadly, is all that can be said about so much of today’s academic experience.

In his review of Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases, William Deresiewicz says of the state of American Judaism:

My own experience tells me that American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity. To the usual self-contempt of the liberal middle class is added the feeling that genuine Jewish life is always elsewhere: in Israel or the shtetl, among the immigrant generation or the ultra-Orthodox. Jewish culture as lived by the non-Orthodox tends to feel bland and thin even to its practitioners--the last, worn coins of a princely inheritance. (To those who have fled Orthodox backgrounds, like Englander and myself, that very different milieu tends to feel, for all its traditionalism, spiritually dead.) The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.

These comments come in the context of Deresiewicz's remarks on the state of Jewish American literature, namely that the work of newer, younger Jewish American writers has little to do with Jewish experience. Or, if it does explore Jewishness in some form, it is someone else's Jewishness, so to speak.

The seeming omission of Jewish authenticity from the work of these contemporary writers, Deresiewicz seems to suggest, is a casualty of Jews' successful assimilation into mainstream American culture. Jews and Jewishness are no longer exotic enough to warrant writing from one's own personal and cultural experience. And so we have this phenomenon of Jewish writers reaching back into the experiences of their grandparents or others to whom they are not even related -- searching for a use-able past because the present is . . . not useful? Wake Me Up: The Jewish American Novel

The question, however, is whether this is actually a problem -- do such novels betray a loss of Jewish identity or experience as a result of assimilation? Or, through efforts to access Jewish culture and heritage through the eyes of others, do they demonstrate that Jewishness is not lost in assimilation? Of Chabon's novel Deresiewicz writes:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is about no Jews who have ever lived, but it is one of the best novels in English about what it means to be a Jew, and how it feels.

But,

the book is so good not despite taking place in an imaginary world but because of it. Chabon has gotten into trouble before when he's tried to re-create a historical situation he hasn't experienced himself. Kavalier & Clay, which lists more than forty consulted sources in its "author's note," never succeeds in making its world seem more than secondhand. This is obviously a minority view--the book was a huge bestseller--but never for one minute did I believe its characters were fully real. The materials may all have been there, painstakingly assembled, but as with the golem who appears in its pages, the magic formula was missing that would quicken them to life.

Deresiewicz is not impressed with Englander's writing at all, though he finds numerous strengths in his new novel -- the problem is that, for Deresiewicz, there is nothing particularly "Jewish" about the novel.

I half wonder why Englander felt the need to make his characters Jewish at all, especially since, given their estrangement from both the Jewish community and Jewish tradition, there's so very little that's Jewish about them. As for Chabon, it is telling that the rich complexity of Jewish meanings he manages to develop in an invented Jewish Alaska he has not thus far shown any faith in being able to locate in contemporary Jewish America. His novel is a stunning act of imagination, but it underscores all too clearly the extent to which American Jewish experience, insofar as it possesses the kind of density necessary for it to function as a substrate for fiction, is receding, precisely, into the realm of the imaginary.

This is frighteningly bleak. But while Deresiewicz has written an amazing review essay, in his mention of numerous contemporary Jewish writers he omits authors like Pearl Abraham, Allegra Goodman, and others who do in fact write specifically about the Jewish experience, from their own experience.

I don't think Deresiewicz's gloomy predictions about the state of Jewish American literature are wrong (though they do scream Irving Howe, who, in 1976, falsely predicted the impending death of Jewish American literature) --  but if there are fewer Jewish writers penning about their own Jewish experiences, there are now also far fewer scholars and professors who are working and writing in the field of Jewish American literature.

It feels like a dying discipline, which also does not bode well for the future of Jewish American literature -- if there are no critics to critique, and overall there are far fewer people who actually read books, the future of literature by American Jews is little more than, as Deresiewicz suggests, a golem that will never be awakened to life.