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Jewcy Book Club
Welcome Authors
Brian Frazer
& Mike Edison
who are posting all week.
Coming up:
- 10/12: Rabbi Levi Brackman and Sam Jaffe
- 10/19: Jonathan Garfinkel
- 10/20: Rabbi Robert Levine
- 10/26: Danit Brown
- 10/27: Joshua Henkin
- 11/03: Craig Glazer
- 11/10: Max Gross
- 11/16: Seth Greenland
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Q & A
INTERVIEW
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A Last Interview with Norman Mailer | |
| The literary icon on Hitler, Jesus, and the sheer joy of large statements. | ||
 by Daniel Asa Rose, November 15, 2007
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For my generation of writers, Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th of renal failure, was the ultimate father figure. We measured ourselves against the sweep of his brilliance—for it must be conceded that even his lesser books had the sweep of brilliance—our whole adult lives. He was the giant who dared giant leaps and, more than occasionally, giant pratfalls. Thus my drive to his brick house on the very end of Cape Cod in Provincetown, Mass. some months ago had the excitement and dread of a pilgrimage. Beside me on the passenger seat, the author photo on his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, drilled into me with a father’s intensity—equally admonishing and exhortatory—until I finally had to cover it with my hat. But I took my hat off when I entered his house and started asking questions.
Whatever else that can be said about it, this new book is written with the vigor of someone half your age.
Good to hear. But every time I hear compliments, my feet start doing this [twitching].
Not the shy, retiring type: A first edition of Advertisements for Myself
You want to run away?
I’ve never learned to take a compliment graciously.
How come?
Damned if I know. My father, an elegant man, always took compliments very well. But I, being rough hewn, loved messing his hair. Maybe I defined myself in opposition to him.
In this book, the relationship between young Adi (Adolph) and his father is very fraught—more moving than I expected it to be.
I’ve been thinking about how many of my books have that recurring theme. My relationship with my father was very interesting. Not hostile, but never near. I couldn’t reach him. He was an exceptionally complex man. He was very proud of me after “The Naked and the Dead,” which he must have read ten times.
Did he “get” it?
Oh yeah.
So you were able to communicate on that very deep level.
Yeah, he didn’t go in for long speeches, but he would look at me and say,“This is good.”
Was it from him that you got your grit?
My father was a very bold man in his quiet way. And my mother was a remarkable woman—not only strong but also loving.
You demonize Hitler here, quite literally—the demon narrator is there at the conception. Aren’t you thereby letting mankind off the hook?
It seems to me there have been two exceptional births in human history: Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler. Hitler is the devil’s answer to Jesus Christ.
Oedipal shmedipal, as long as he loves his mother: Mailer's Hilter had some Freudian issuesYou like making large statements, don’t you?
Drives wives crazy.
I can only imagine.
I make them for the sheer joy of making them.
When you read younger novelists today, are you impatient that they don’t seek to go larger?
I don’t read them. Which I think is one of the reasons they’re not particularly in love with me.
Whom do you read for pleasure?
I find I can’t read good novels anymore—not when I’m working—because they’re too disruptive. I get excited by them, and go off in all sorts of directions. How would I do if I were writing it? And I get off my own work. I’m immensely single-minded, I’d even say dull, about sticking to my own work. For the last ten years I’ve always felt I’ve got one book left, one book left, one book left.
If there’s still one left after this one, what will it be?
A sequel to this one about Hitler. In this last, after all, I only take him to age 16. I think there’s a little more to him …
Are you impatient with some of your contemporaries for not contending with the larger questions?
Look, for better or for worse, I have that kind of mind. They have [theirs]. I used to be very competitive. By now I’m sick of it, in the sense that it has no meaning. Either one of us will last, or ten of us, who knows. History can wipe all of us out.
I wasn’t expecting to hear such mellowness from you.
It’s not mellowness, it’s shared amusement. After competing with someone who used to be a rival, in the end we have a shared conversation. I respect Roth, I respect Updike, DeLillo, Vonnegut, I could name ten of them, they’re all good writers.
One book left?: The pugilist in his last daysSalinger?
Salinger I’m pissed off at, because he had such a glimpse into America when he was young, and he didn’t use it.
Any theory as to why he went silent?
No theory worth airing.
At your age [of 83], are you more prudent not to air a theory if it’s half-baked?
I’ve gone off half-cocked so many times in my youth that yes, now I’m a little older…
So you’re still actively growing?
Better growth than decrepitude.
It’s marvelous that you have this capacity…
Well listen, we’ll see. But I can guarantee you one thing: At the moment there are 20 writers, male and female, who feel that they are the best living American writer. And I of course am one of them. But that’s as far as I’ll go.
You deal in opposites a lot, don’t you? You like the way the world is balanced.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
So how do you finally measure up on the wisdom scale?
I’d probably give myself a very good mark.
Care to offer a numerical grade?
[Chuckling] No. That would not be wise.
As a man, are you ever intimidated?
Not anymore. The best thing about old age is that you’re no longer intimidated by anybody. There’s a real cool that comes in with old age.
* * *
NEXT: Read Shvitz post From White Negro to Jewish Hipster: Jews Still Acting Black in 2007, by Eric Goldstein
ALSO IN JEWCY:
Michael Weiss wrote an obituary for Mailer, Abe Greenwald compared him to Bono, and Stefan Beck called him an example of the free pass we give literary rock stars of a certain age.
[This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.]
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INTERVIEW
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Jews and Blacks are Yesterday's News | |
| Black Jewish author Julius Lester says that in 21st century America, Hispanics will decide what it means to be a minority | ||
 by Patrice Evans, October 5, 2007
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As an assimilated Negro, I find
that black Jews just tickle my fancy. (Any Oprah/Sarah Silverman hybrids, call me!) I agree with the
writer Julius Lester when he says,
“What I find remarkable about Jews: They’re the only ethnic group that seems to
care about blacks. At least Jews want to learn.”
I’ve certainly tried to learn a
Jewish girl a thing or two on blacks, so I figured Julius Lester might have
some words of wisdom for me. I first discovered Lester when I stumbled upon his
must-read 1984 New York Times interview
with James Baldwin (during which Baldwin exclaimed “Fuck Norman Mailer!”
when Lester mentioned the author of “The White Negro”—sadly, the Times struck it from the record.) Besides being an academic and literary
star—he's author of over 45 books and a decorated professor emeritus at
the University of Massachusetts—Lester also happens to be that most
intriguing of exotic birds, a black Jew.
He made a name for himself as a writer, radio commentator, and avowed
atheist during the civil rights era, but converted to Judaism in 1982 after
years of religious searching (Lovesong, his spiritual memoir, details this journey.)
At 68, Lester is still writing; next spring HarperCollins will publish his novel about lynching, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old white boy. I took to asking him some questions over e-mail.
THE BLACKER THE BERRY, THE JEWER THE JEW
I think the average black
person is suspicious when the average Jewish guy distinguishes himself from the
average white guy—at least in America. What do minorities like
blacks or Hispanics have in common with American Jews, and what are their
differences?
Not a huge fan of Normal Mailer: BaldwinIdentity has many faces, and
one’s social identity may not correspond to one’s personal identity. There
are Jews whose personal and/or religious identity is so forceful that they
resent being identified as white, even though they look like “the average white
guy.” Someone who identifies first as a Jew sees him or herself as living
by a value structure that believes in justice and equality as opposed to a
white guy whose value system is different. Perhaps blacks should not be so
quick to dismiss a Jew who insists that he is not white, regardless of what he
looks like.
Growing up in the forties and fifties, I always thought Jews were different from whites. Jews were people who empathized with blacks, who understood what it was like to be discriminated against. When I was doing radio on WBAI from 1968 to 1975, people would call me on the air and identify themselves as being “white and Jewish,” and that always confused me because, in my mind, Jews were different from white people.
None of this is to say that Jewish racism does not exist, because it does. And black racism exists, despite those who maintain that blacks cannot be racists because they are victims of racism.
It is increasingly difficult to generalize about blacks, Hispanics, and Jews because of increasing class differences within each group as well as generational differences. For example, blacks and Jews of my generation and older worked together in the labor movement and the civil rights movement. As fraught with tensions as black-Jewish relations became, that coalition meant something. The present generation of blacks and Jews do not see why it is expected that blacks and Jews will work together. The black-Jewish coalition means nothing to them, and I would not argue with that. The events of their lifetimes—Farrakhan, Israel, Arabs—mean very different things to each group.
Different from the rest of the country: Unique New York
However, having said that, black-Jewish tensions have been more pronounced in New York than, for
example, in the Midwest, where I found blacks and Jews working together
on many issues with none of the suspicion and antagonism that can exist
in New York. People too often think that the experiences of blacks
and Jews in New York reflect the state of affairs between blacks
and Jews across the country, but that is not the case.
I know it’s difficult for New Yorkers to believe that their
experiences do not represent the truth for everyone in America, but
New York is unique.
Politically I think blacks and Jews made a huge mistake in the 1980s and 1990s by not reaching out to start working with Hispanic groups. Even twenty years ago, demographic projections suggested that Hispanics were going to become the largest minority group early in the 21st century. That has happened earlier than anyone predicted. As Hispanics become an increasingly strong political group, the public discourse on whom and what constitutes a minority will change, and neither blacks nor Jews are prepared to deal with the shift. Blacks are in the process of losing their golden status as the largest minority group, and this loss is going to have an impact on black identity, which has been too focused for too long on being victims.
SLAVERY: OVER
FOR 142 YEARS. THE HOLOCAUST: OVER
FOR 62 YEARS. BEING A VICTIM:
TIMELESS.
Is there a statute of
limitations on historical tragedies?
For how long is Auschwitz or Jim Crow Mississippi relevant to a young
Jew or Negro in New York City?
Compassion fatigue: Remember the Maine?
A very interesting question. I
suppose one needs to ask if there is a statute of
limitations on memory. There was the recent article in the
Sunday Times about people who are
tired of memorial services for the victims
of 9/11—about “compassion fatigue”. The article referred to
the numerous events that were once remembered by public
ceremonies and are scarcely remembered now: the sinking of the
USS Maine, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
One of the real problems facing
America today is that since the 1960s, Americans no
longer share the same historical memories, or we do
not share those memories in the same ways.
In the summer of 1973 I taught
summer school at a small college in Macon, Georgia. In one of my classes
was a very beautiful blonde girl who invited me to drive up to someplace in
north Georgia with her. I declined. I knew that
northern Georgia was prime KKK territory and as much as I wanted to
sleep with her, driving into Klan country was a price I was not willing to
pay. When she asked me why I told her about the Klan’s prominence in
northern Georgia, about segregation and the backs of buses, etc. She
looked at me with her wide blue eyes like I was crazy said in her honeyed
southern accent “None of that ever happened down here.”
Echoes of the past: Jim Crow Mississippi can't be forgotten
Even though she was blonde,
she was not dumb. She had come of age after the changes wrought by the civil
rights movement and had grown up at a time when blacks sat anywhere on buses,
when there were no white and colored water fountains in stores, when
blacks and whites went to school together. I was floored by her
response. I had no idea that history could be wiped out so completely in so
short a time. This was 1973. The summer
nine years before, I had been in Mississippi waking up every morning
half-surprised that I hadn’t been killed during the night. After that day
I didn’t know how to talk to her, (which was sad because she was
really a beautiful girl) because her experience negated the history I
had endured.
It is not enough that
we remember only what happened to us. We should make the effort to
remember that which happened to others, even others before
we were born. So many U.S. states and cities have Native
American names. The people are gone; all that remains is a word from
their language, which is really a kind of tombstone. Massachusetts is
a Native American word meaning “High Mountain Place.” Connecticut means
“Long River Place.” It is my obligation to remember. The act of
remembering connects us to each other. The life of the young black in New York
grows from the lives and deaths of blacks in Mississippi who
endured and struggled so that he would not have to endure and struggle in
quite the same ways. The same goes for the young Jew.
Still relevant?: Building the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Our lives do not begin
with our births. Our lives exist on a continuum. Part of that
continuum is that our lives today will become someone
else’s past, and how we live our lives will, to some degree, give
texture and context to the lives of people not yet born.
One of the things I love about
being Jewish is that remembering is an integral part of
being Jewish. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we sing melodies and say
prayers that date back a thousand years and more. On Tisha B’Av we still
mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem more than 2000 years ago. At
Passover we remember the exodus from Egypt, which may or may not have
happened, but something happened that was transformative.
It is my wish that the young
black New Yorker will remember Auschwitz as well as Jim Crow Mississippi,
and that the young Jewish New Yorker will remember Jim Crow Mississippi
as well as Auschwitz. Remembering the sufferings of others makes
us come closer to each other.
Seems to be being a black Jew
might have some perks. For example you can’t be “out-victimized” by
anyone, right? It also seems the particular black-Jew blend should have a
nickname. Any suggestions?
If
there are perks to being a black Jew, I missed out. And
I must be dumber than I realized because it never occurred
to me that no one could out-victimize me. I never thought of being
black or Jewish as being a victim, which just goes to demonstrate
how much out of touch I am with the times I live in.
As for nicknames, oy vey! Virginia Hamilton wrote a novel called Bluish about a kid who was black and Jewish, but “bluish” sounds more like an alien in a bad Sci-Fi movie. The police chief (or maybe he’s former police chief now) of Charleston, South Carolina is (was) a black man named Reuben Greenberg, and he is Jewish. He said he was working on a recipe for fried chicken soup. That’s as close to black-Jewish humor as I’ve seen.
THE JULIUS LESTER GUIDE TO BLOGGING WHILE BLACK,
JEWISH, AND 68 YEARS OLD
You’re a blogger at 68, when
many people your age are still trying to get on to the Internet. Do you
think it's important to stay engaged with the youth generation? Do you think
blogs are a good medium for bridging generational gaps?
The non-linear world: Can you blog and walk at the same time?
There are probably more people my
age online than is recognized. I think it is important to stay
engaged with the youth generation to the degree that
is possible. I taught at the University of
Massachusetts for 32 years, retiring at the end of
2003. I retired in part because I couldn’t continue to bridge
the generational difference between my students and me.
Yes, I blog but Facebook, YouTube, and other such
enterprises are beyond me. At age 68, I keep having to decide: Given however
much time I have left, how do I want to use it? One of my
children is on Facebook and I enjoy logging in and
seeing what she’s up to, but I don’t have the time or energy to
create a Facebook site for myself.
One difference that my
daughter and I talk about is that I grew up in a
“linear world,” i.e. the world of print, and also a world in
which you did one thing at a time. She has grown
up in a world of simultaneity, a world in which one
does several things simultaneously. It took me a while
to understand that I can be talking to a friend in France on Skype
and at the same time being sending that friend an attachment relating to
what we’re talking about. And there’re probably four other things I could
be doing at the same time. I grew up taking piano
lessons; my daughter grew up with Garageband. A big difference.
I want to stay
engaged with younger generations but recognize that I
can only do so to a limited extent. Aging has its
own interesting challenges and rewards. One is relief that I won’t
be young again; another is the ability to look back to when
I was young and what my dreams were and being able to say
that I have achieved what I set out to achieve and more, that I
didn’t sell out, that I made my
dreams become reality. I would not trade being 68 for anything.
Are there any classic writers
that would have thrived in this new media environment?
The Perez Hilton of Dublin: Joyce (drawn in text)
This is a very interesting question.
The writer who first comes to mind is Malcolm Lowery. I don’t
remember the name of the novel, but one of his novels has a
separate text running in the margin next to the main text. I
wrote a short story (“The Child,” published in Join
In: Multiethnic Short Stories) and a
novella (“Catskill Morning,” published in Two
Love Stories) in which I attempted to
tell two stories—one in the margin, the other the
main text. And I think James Joyce would have
excelled in this new environment. To be able to add visuals
to stream of consciousness feels like a natural for him. Although he’s not
a writer, certainly Picasso would have thrived on the kind
of art that is possible now, which can combine text, visuals, and
sound.
I went with
Baldwin one day to help him buy an electric typewriter. It
frightened him so, I don’t think he ever used it.
What blogs do you read?
You mentioned seeing me on Gawker.
I read Gawker, Jezebel, The Assimilated Negro, and several blogs devoted to women’s fashions. I love women’s fashions and subscribe to Vogue, Paris Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, and a couple of others. Both Gawker and Jezebel are funny as hell. The contributors on both have raised cynicism to a height that has its own peculiar beauty. However, Gawker needs to lighten up on the cracks about old people.
INTERVIEW
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From Brat Packer to Jewish Cowgirl | |
| Mare Winningham talks about her search for God and her new album of country music | ||
 by Peter Bebergal, August 22, 2007
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It’s rare that you hear about a celebrity’s foray into Judaism that doesn’t involve Philip Berg and the Kabbalah Centre. Madonna changed her name to Esther, but we haven’t yet seen an album bearing that nom de plume. Like Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher, many celebrities dabble in Judaism for a few months, get a Hebrew tattoo, and then move on to the next big thing. (It would be an interesting study to see how many Scientologists once tried davening.)
When I first heard that the actress and musician Mare Winningham recently recorded a CD of Jewish country music following her recent conversion, I looked to see if Berg was thanked in the liner notes. Not only was his name missing, but it was obvious that Winningham’s conversion didn’t begin with a course on Jewish numerology. Unlike many other Hollywood searchers who find Judaism as a way of making sense of the world, she isn’t a dilettante—she’s a ger tzedek.
On her album Refuge Rock Sublime, released this year, Winningham transposes traditional Jewish songs such as “Etz Chaim” and “Al Kol Ele” onto a country template. The result is an almost uncomfortably passionate expression of being a Jew. Winningham says she has a hard time talking about religion, but she lays herself bare on these songs, investing them with something that you don’t ordinarily hear in Jewish music: raw emotionalism.
Winningham is often remembered for her role in the quintessential ‘80s film St. Elmo’s Fire. But this was the least of her long and prolific acting career, which has spanned the last twenty years and includes her Oscar-nominated performance in the 1995 film Georgia, in which she played a country star. Recently, Winningham has been performing in a Broadway musical based on the songs of Patty Griffin called Ten Million Miles. I spoke with her a few days before the show closed.
Teen idols: The cast of St. Elmo's fireEven today, in 2007, you still represent for so many an icon of the '80s. What was that like?
Truthfully, I don't feel a part of that at all, and I didn't feel a part of it then.
Did that cause tension, or did you not care because you already had this life for yourself in television?
Well, I was probably a little bit of a snoot. At the time, I remember kind of thinking that I wasn't really a big fan of those movies, so I was pretty snobby about it.
So you didn't feel a part of some cultural force that was going on?
I didn't at all. When people say that era defines a generation, I am shocked. For me those were years of bad music and bad hair.
Well, I've been spending a lot of time with your new CD and I’m curious about your religious life, even before your conversion. Did you always feel like you had a religious sensibility or was there something particular about Judaism that led you to be religious?
The second. I've been secular my whole adult life. At some points I guess I would call myself anti-religious.
You grew up Roman Catholic, though.
No. My mother is Catholic and churchgoing, and we were all catechized. We went through our First Communion when we were little and then we went to catechism school on Saturdays, but all of this is before you're a young adult. When it was up to me I stopped going, which was right after Confirmation, around 16 years old.
Did you have support from your father or other family members?
My father was never involved because my mother married a non-Catholic, which was probably an unusual move for her, having gone to Catholic school all her life and being very religious. My mother is just a really unusual religious person in that she's just so comfortable with her own faith. She doesn't feel a need to talk about it or pass it off on other people.
So she wasn't disappointed?
I'm sure she must have been very disappointed. I think she was disappointed when each of her kids stopped going.
Preaching the gospel: Winningham's new albumBut was she worried about your mortal soul?
No, no, that's what I mean. I think she must be an unusual Catholic in that while religion is a beautiful thing for her, she doesn't turn it into a reason to worry or condemn or judge anybody else.
So then not going to church for you wasn't some kind of spiritual crisis.
Well, I really wanted to be honest about it. I could not continue to participate in something that just didn't seem true to me. It just wasn't right.
In my adolescence I explored Buddhism and alternative religions and wanted to learn about them. Did you have that kind of search?
The best class I ever took in high school, which was the extent of my formal education, was this comparative religions class. It convinced me that all religions were structures for an idea of God, and I didn't think I needed structure. The idea of a God was implanted in me and I was fine with that.
So you believed in God?
I did, for a long time. And then I started to wonder if I believed in God. I felt like an extremist all of a sudden. And then, as soon as I was on the precipice and I didn’t really think I believed in God, I got hit by a powerful wave—it's okay to reject something, but you better be real clear about what it is.
That's the great religious moment, staring into the abyss.
Yes. It was a big moment. And I was forty or so. And it came with the requisite powerful dream. So I signed up for school right away at the University of Judaism.
Why Judaism, though?
Well, my reasoning was they were the first monotheistic religion.
You weren't signing up because you wanted to become Jewish.
No, I feel like I wanted to confirm my atheism. Also, though, I really think that the Jewish people that I've been close with throughout my life have had a profound effect on me. I had a lot of close Jewish friends in the San Fernando Valley, where I grew up, so I attended some Shabbat dinners when I was younger and I went to many Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs of friends.
The birth of Israel: Jacob wrestling with GodWhat happened to you at UJ?
Well, it was a slow, gradual sort of love affair with all things Jewish. It started on a beautiful note. I think maybe the first class or the second class, my teacher, Rabbi Weinberg, said that Judaism is concerned with our behavior here and how we treat one another. And I was like, “Yeah, I'm good with that.” A lot of my problem with religion was the focus on salvation and resurrection. And I just really loved the emphasis on how you treat your fellow man.
But finding a sense of a connection to a moral idea is still different from saying you believe in God.
Well, I was telling you where it started. In that first class the rabbi mentioned Israel. His name was Jacob and became Israel.
It was a fight. A wrestling match.
Yes. You can define Israel as a struggle with God. In this tremendous struggle checking out the Jews, I came upon that definition and it just made me laugh. But I hadn't really read the Torah. My Catholic education emphasized the New Testament. I honestly do not remember if I got those stories when I was young, and I definitely didn't get them when I was older. I couldn't tell you the story of Sarah and Abraham. I couldn't tell you the story of Hagar and Ishmael. I couldn't tell you about Jacob and Leah and Rachael.
And if you got them at all, they were probably conceptualized within a Christian view.
I'm not sure about that. But I didn't have anything. This was a revelation to me, no pun intended. These narratives and these stories really just swept me, and I got so excited and I kept reading. I did all the homework that they assigned, and then some. I was a very good student. And I began having a really strong desire to build a relationship with God.
At what point did I accept that there was a God? Early on, I felt pretty strongly that this book was not written by man. Perhaps it was written by man physically, but I felt the narrator—well, I felt there was too much going on. I would rather not make that simple a statement, but having made it, I would say that of course it's more important to elaborate about what I mean by that, but it would take up the whole interview.
It's all in the interpretation: No Hagar and Ishmael in hereOf course. We're talking about a tradition that is about interpretation. It's about wrestling with the text as much as it's about wrestling with a God.
Well, as I started to look at the Hebrew and be aware of the number of writings that accompanied the text, like the Talmud and Midrash, and when I started to see what was going on and what was available to mankind, why this was given, I really felt that it was the hand of God. And I felt sorry for myself and for everyone who is just running around like chickens with our heads cut off wondering why there's not a manual for life. But it was a slow, gradual, ever-blooming thing. I didn’t develop a relationship with God overnight. It took a leap of understanding, and then it took a lot of prayer and time spent studying.
Why did you stop there? Why convert to Judaism instead going straight ahead and saying, I've done this, I understand the foundation, now I can be a Christian? What was it about Judaism that you said, no, there's nowhere else to go?
I really don't understand the question. I feel like I have gone in a straight line. I feel like I am continuing to go in a straight line. I am plunging forward. It feels to me like you're asking me why then I didn't go to the natural progression towards Catholicism, and that makes no sense to me because that is not a progression to me.
That's an answer—a Jewish answer.
It is? Oh, good.
You were a musician before your conversion, so it makes sense that you would use music to express some of this stuff.
Exactly. Meeting people in the Jewish community that were involved in Jewish music, I was being given records from Israeli folk records to Theodore Bikel records to traditional cantorial stuff. I thought right away that I've got to write some songs.
But you still have a very unique sound. How did you come to that? If you took it out of context or you didn't have the lyrics, it sounds like American music that is traditionally Christian.
That was what I wanted to address. I love country music and I wanted to stop the presumption that country religious music has to be gospel. It's not gospel Jewish, but I wanted to be a Jewish cowgirl and do traditional country Jewish content songs.
He also played Worf's father on Star Trek: An album by Theodore BikelPart of what makes the song so powerful is you can feel that tension inside of it.
In Judaism, there's tension in everything, right?
Jewish music certainly has moments of great passion, there are musical extremes of joy and melancholy, but I don't think about Judaism as an emotional religion in the way Christianity can be. In Christian church services you have people falling to their knees, weeping. Judaism often tends to be more stoic, even in its passionate moments. And yet your music is painfully emotional at times. It's an incredibly candid expression of your spiritual life, which is not common, I don't think, in Jewish music or even in Jewish religious expression. Did you intend it to be this open and this personal?
As much as I think about intent, well, I suppose, yes. I'm an emotional creature on anyone's scale, Jewish or not. From the time I was a little girl my family has always joked that Mare loves a good cry. And I know that's true. I don't like speaking in public very much because I usually end up crying, sometimes for no reason. I'm not very proud of that. I wouldn't fly that flag, but I'm not surprised that you noted it because it's true.
You are a convert to Judaism. That makes you a special kind of Jew. Do you think that you brought some of that to your music?
Well, they always say the convert is very enthusiastic, and that's got to be true. But I was also dealing with Judaism's approach to relations with our fellow man, and those include grief and obligation and responsibility and love—all very emotional issues. I like Judaism's approach to emotional issues, even though I understand what you're saying, that it may not be an emotional approach.
It's impossible not to think, “I'm sitting here speaking to Mare Winningham who is a celebrity and who is an actress.” You’re providing a different example for people of what Judaism can mean for a celebrity. It's not just coming out of some fashionable moment.
It’s a little tricky talking about religion. It feels so private. It's hard to look at interviews and read them and see what I said. If there's something to promote, that's different; I've been doing that my whole life. I can talk about a project, but I have a hard time talking about myself. And I think a Jewish person's most beautiful gift is the ability to transform, like Jacob into Israel. I just have to realize I made the CD, I put it out there, I'm being asked to talk about it, and I better stand up.
You didn't have to be as explicit as you were in your lyrics.
Yeah. I made my bed. I've got to lie in it.
INTERVIEW
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From Israel With Love | |
| Nadav Schirman discusses his new documentary, The Champagne Spy | ||
 by Tahl Raz, June 18, 2007
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When John Le Carré admitted several years ago he was a longtime agent of Britain's intelligence services, the bestselling spy-thriller writer explained his involvement in the sort of terms you’d expect from someone who had for decades brilliantly captured boys’ spirits with a romanticized vision of espionage. "I really believed at last that I had found a cause I could serve," Le Carré, then 69, said in a TV documentary, The Secret Centre. "I also longed for the dignity which great secrecy confers upon you."
If great secrecy can confer dignity, it can also reap a personal harvest of great emotional wreckage. Such is the lesson of The Champagne Spy, a new documentary about one of the Mossad’s most infamous operations.
Mossad better blues: The posterThe setting is the Middle East in the early 1960s. Egypt’s ambitious leader Gamal Abdel Nasser is luring Nazi scientists to Cairo to facilitate the tyrant’s desire to build a nuclear weapon’s program. At around the same time, a dashing millionaire playboy named Wolfgang Lotz (rumored to be an ex-SS officer) arrives in Egypt and sets up a riding school and horse farm that quickly becomes the social nexus of both Egypt’s elite and their new Nazi imports.
Lotz’s real name is Major Ze'ev Gur Arie. He's a Mossad recruit who was commander of an Israeli infantry company in the 1956 Sinai campaign. Arie’s covert identity – which gives him access to a tantalizing mix of women, wealth and intrigue – proves intoxicating, and ultimately, tragic for the Israeli wife and child he left behind.
That child, Oded Arie, finally chose to share his story (and never-before-seen family footage) with filmmaker Nadav Schirman, whose documentary is winning awards and impressing audiences on the film festival circuit.
I interviewed Nadav (a friend I met years ago during my stint at the Jerusalem Post) as he was getting ready to fly to California for the Los Angeles International Film Festival.
Did you grow up in a family with secrets?
If there were secrets they were well-kept.
I ask because for all the dramatic exceptionalism of the story, all the elements that might appeal to a spy fanboy’s doofus wonderment, Wolfgang Lutz seems emblematic of a certain segment of the post-holocaust generation, particularly those from Israel - the dysfunction borne out of a festering underbelly of familial secrets and suppressed memories, men of great resource simultaneously crippled by their unaddressed emotions, women forced into great sacrifices in the name of country and children, and so on.
For Lotz, it was even worse than what you describe. He was born in Germany in 1921. His father was a gentile, a theatre director, his mother a Jewish actress. As Hitler seized power in 1933, Lotz's father killed himself and the desperate mother emigrated to Palestine with her son.
She dumped her son in a boarding school (Ben Shemen, with Peres and such) and tried her luck on the Habima stages. An utter narcissist obsessed with her interrupted acting career, she rarely visited him. That's when he started to love horses.
Lotz, a German immigrant, was never quite totally a Sabra (native Israeli). His friends in the Hagana didn't trust him completely—he seemed like an outsider with his Aryan looks, European demeanor and German-tinged accent. That's maybe why his military career stalled and he left the army at 40, frustrated and of course ripe for the Mossad boys to snatch him up.
Speaking of the damage secrets can wreak, you screened this in front of a group of Mossad agents. Describe to me what happened. It must've been fascinating to see their reactions.
No secrets: SchirmanWe screened the film, and afterwards I sat on a panel with the former Mossad psychologist whose job was to evaluate candidates and also treat all psychological hardships that come with the job—the loneliness, the shock of alternating identities and returning home after a mission.
Imagine, you’ve been 5 years undercover, with an unlimited expense account, living high on adrenaline and adventure. Then, suddenly, you’re in a small Tel Aviv apartment and your wife is screaming at you to change the diapers. It's a tough transition. In the movie, you see how Lotz did not handle the transition well and suffered a tragic end.
It’s hard to fathom the lives these people lead. On the panel, there was also a former agent who was captured in Iraq, tortured and imprisoned for 10 years. He talked about how it’s really true that everyone talks in the end. He said that the decisive moment during his interrogation and torture was when the Iraqis staged his hanging. They forced him to stand on a stool with a noose around his neck for 20 minutes. He thought he was going to die; he had already made his peace. That's just a crazy situation.
At the premiere screenings in March at the DocAviFilm Festival in Tel Aviv, about a quarter of the audience was Mossad or former "Office" (that's how they call it, "the Office"). After the panel, on my way out, I was accosted by dozens of former agents who all wanted to thank me for the film. They were open and talkative, going against everything that governs their professional life. The agents’ responses to the film were touching. It gives them a chance to talk about their bottled up emotions, discuss the personal price they paid for their service.
Jews developed a mythology about the "elite" status of certain Israeli institutions. After being herded en masse to our extermination like helpless kittens, it was a comforting, even necessary, delusion to think of, say, the IDF as invincible or the Mossad as an almost-supernatural gang of Jewish James Bonds. I, personally, reveled in the aggrandizement as a child, reading every military book, listening to every magnificent tale of heroism told by my father and his friends. And I believe it made me stronger, prouder, more confident than my American Jewish peers raised on the nebbishness of Woody Allen.
The deconstruction of those mythologies at the hands of post-Zionist literature, the latest Lebanese war, and movies like yours is a difficult phenomenon to assess. On a nostalgic, personal level I fear what it means for Israel. I'm not suggesting these stories not be told, that agitprop and myth win out over truth. It is healthy, a sign of maturation. What I'm curious about is how it affected you personally. Was it emotional knowing you were part of this effort at deconstruction? Do you think the mythology is indeed dead, and is that a good thing?
Go down, Wolfgang: Arie posing as Lotz in EgyptGood question! I approached the whole spy thing impregnated with James Bond impressions, too. I mean I always dreamt of being a spy. I grew up all over the world. My dad was a diplomat, and as a kid, we went to all these cocktail parties and embassy functions, which where fertile ground for my fantasies.
What I discovered through the making of the film is two things. One, as you can see from Lotz's story, being an agent is a lonely and confusing job at best. The excitement, adrenaline and glamorous lifestyle seem now to be a thin veil for the grey and lonely work of information gathering. The second thing, which even took me by surprise, is that the Mossad people—all those around Lotz's operational unit who I’ve met—are like a family. They were once a bunch of idealistic, kind, good hearted Zionists who’ve slowly and sadly become realists. I wish they ran the country.
These are the people who built the myth with their own hands and laid the foundation for Israel. I discovered that what they had and my generation lacks: blind faith and real heartfelt patriotism. Everything has changed. Patriotism has morphed into individualism and opportunism. We have always wanted to be, after all, a Western country. Today you can apply to "the Office" via the web. Just send in your resume. That's says a lot about what changed. But so should it ? No? Who knows?
Sounds like you’re not terribly optimistic about the changes that have taken place.
Real love for your country is hard to replace. Sitting in his olive grove near Rishon Le’Tzion, I talked to Jacob Nachmias, Lotz's former Paris operative. We were under the olive trees that his father had planted in the 1920s when it was just fields all around. Jacob fought in every single Israeli war since 1948, climbing in rank, then specializing in intelligence, and eventually dedicating his life to the country he had helped build. For a moment, talking to him, I really felt close to him, to the land, and to a history that part of my lineage as an Israeli.
And then I left Nachmias's grove, and where there were once fields, there are now highways, industrial parks, shopping malls, noise, pollution.
There is a wrenching moment in the film when Oded passes summary judgment on his father's life with the chilling words, “He hurt everyone close to him.” In the movie Munich, Steven Spielberg used the emotional price paid by the Israeli agents as a way to deliver a political message about violence’s ceaseless cycle. Is there a message you’re trying to deliver?
No message except for the one that each person takes home with him. I hope never to be as didactic in my filmmaking as you suggest. A film is more of an exploration, a window onto another world.
How did you find the project?
The project found me. As always, no?
A friend gave me an old book, The Champagne Spy, which we're actually now adapting into a feature screenplay. Anyway, it was Lotz's exploits in Cairo written by himself. Just the name of the author turned me on: Wolfgang Lotz! What a name! After reading it, I said "This can't be true. The man was a real life James Bond: Cairo, horses, parties, women, missiles in the desert…”
Spy kid: Oded Arie and his dadI tried to get the rights but all the publishers told me the same thing: “Rights reverted to author; author dead; your problem."
Then one day, I’m sitting next to the pool where my son is taking swimming lessons. Next to me, there’s an older man and he asks me what I do. I tell him I’m trying to make a film about Wolfgang Lotz.
"Oh yeah?" The old man perks up. "How's it going?"
Not good, I said. The man is dead and I can't find any family he may have left.
"Maybe I can help you," he says. I give him my number, not really thinking much of it.
Then, two weeks later I get a phone call from the man. He said: "The man you’re trying to find is Oded Gur Arie. He’s Lotz's son. He's coming to Israel next week. His number is so and so." Beeeep. He hangs up.
Then I met Oded, and he tells me his father told him he was a spy when Oded was only 12 and that he never told anyone that, or anything else about his experience, until today. And then! Then, Oded shows me the old 8 millimeter videos he had shot of his dad's secret visits to Paris. That’s when I knew the film had chosen me.
Were there any negative reactions to the film in Israel?
Not yet. People love it here. The film is nominated for "Best Feature Documentary" in the Israeli Academy Awards and in the Israeli Documentary Forum.
Israeli film seems to be experiencing a golden moment. Any explanation?
Israeli films are winning major awards in every single festival this year (Berlin, Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes). I think the work of the Israeli Film Fund, the work of the three or four film schools and of the L.A.-Tel Aviv partnership programs are paying off. We’ve got a new generation of talent and it’s going to be exciting to see what will be produced in the next few years.
INTERVIEW
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Disappearing Act | |
| Nathan Englander on his new novel about Argentina's Dirty War | ||
 by Robert Birnbaum, June 4, 2007
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Nathan Englander disappeared for nearly a decade. In 1999, he was a promising young ex-Orthodox author with a widely-praised short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Then he dropped off the radar to write a book about Argentina and didn't resurface again in the literary world until last month, when Knopf published the novel he'd been obsessively writing and rewriting for most of the new millenium.
His hard work paid off: The novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, has garnered glowing reviews. It's about Kaddish Posnan, the only Jewish prostitute’s son left in Buenos Aires who’s willing to admit his provenance. With the help of his college-student son Pato, he makes a living sneaking into the whores’ cemetery at night, paid by the other children of the brothel to remove their family names from the shameful gravestones. Then the junta—which would ultimately be responsible for killing some 30,000 people—comes to power. Suddenly, college students like Pato begin to go missing.
Robert Birnbaum spoke to Englander about the aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War, his intense writing process, and the 75 pages of questions he felt he had to answer before his epic was finally done. -- Izzy Grinspan
Englander's own Buenos: The Ministry of Special CasesBesides getting a haircut, what else have you been doing for the last nine years?
[Laughs] I knew that might come up. Not much else. Oh, there's the novel. There's that.
When we spoke in '99, you mentioned a novel set in Argentina. At that time you were planning to go back there.
I went to Argentina in 1991 for friend's wedding and fell in love with the place, but it wasn't any sort of Michener love. When it was time to write this book, I had all these ideas about community, identity and government—really, governments gone awry—and as that all coalesced, Argentina seemed like an excellent setting. But I actually hadn't been back until last month.
You hadn't gone back since we spoke?
I think sometimes knowledge is a dangerous thing for me. It’s limiting in a sense. I really wanted to build my own Buenos Aires. I had these nice vague memories—a feel of wide avenues, or a memory of eating in this restaurant, or seeing this old man—and that really was enough for me. I didn't want to go back until I was done. I do an extreme amount of research after the fact.
You check your composition against facts.
Yeah. There are certain things that I stand by, and one is that anything that book demands becomes true by virtue of its necessity to the fictional world. So the Ministry of Special Cases, the building itself, it is. It exists in my world and hopefully in others’.
Is there actually a part of the bureaucracy named the Ministry of Special Cases?
No. If I needed to put Argentina north of the equator I would have. But then I go back and I want it all exactly right. If a character goes fishing off the pier, I want to know what they fish with. It's really an insane process. The book is basically done and then I am changing details. If the fiction does not demand it, then I want to be exacting.
First of all, why did you write this book?
[Laughs] That's a good first-of-all question.
It's not an easy question.
It’s a gigantic question. If I step back, I can see the bigger ideas: my Argentine friends, or having been to Buenos Aires, or how we are shaped by politics or identity. But it can also be as simple as living in Israel and seeing the obsession with bones, with crossed-border stuff, where soldiers disappear and Israel is fighting to get them back or Hezbollah wants their own soldiers back. There’s this Jewish idea of having something to bury that goes back to the Holocaust. It’s these very primal things for me.
The Ministry of Special Cases starts with something ostensibly funny, though it devolves into the harrowing world of the Dirty War. There’s a split in the Jewish community between the seamier tawdry element and the middle class strivers who are now interested in repudiating their pasts. How much of that was historically true?
One element that fascinated me about the setting was that South America is so rich but so poor. Then again, come to Manhattan; it’s turning in to the same thing. But that's what drew me to Argentina: Part of its strength, what has held it all together through all this stuff, is that it is a country of the middle class. What do middle class people do? They want to hold on or move up. And at the turn of the century when all the Jewish tailors were coming over to New York and Buenos Aires, they had a little problem with white slavery and Jewish whorehouses. The community was deeply, deeply ashamed of them, and what interested me was the idea of what’s sacred and what’s profane and who points a finger. Newt Gingrich just admitted he was a having an affair during the Clinton impeachment—that idea of deep hypocrisy.
A living memorial: Madres de la Plaza de MayoThat was a later admission. During the impeachment a high-ranking congressman from Illinois had to resign because of an affair.
Those kinds of stories move me deeply in terms of how we relate to each other. Women who were either tricked or sold into white slavery—this idea that they were Jewish and wanted to be buried as Jews. That’s how the novel starts: The other Jews wouldn't have the children of prostitutes in their cemetery. I’m interested in this idea that somebody could stand in judgment of somebody else and say you can’t be buried among us. When I heard these graveyards exist and they are indeed locked off or in disrepair, I became obsessed with this idea of eternal punishment.
By reputation, the Dirty War is a matter of great shame. People actively deny it, and they don’t talk about it out of guilt or for fear of some kind of reprisal.
I have a theory. Here’s the best way to ruin a novel: Put in all these theories that you are so proud of. But I’ve lived in Israel, where every ten feet there is a wall, there are names. I heard there’s a memorial in New Jersey of September 11, and some families didn’t want their names on it, and there’s fighting about the one downtown. In the US and Israel, we memorialize. And then in Buenos Aires you have the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have marched every Thursday for twenty-five years against a government that’s long gone.
You do see this in Latin America—in Nicaragua, curbstones have memorials to fallen heroes of the revolution, car accidents and so forth.
Yeah, yeah, there will be a basketball where there was a car accident because the kid liked basketball. In a city that so loves its dead, that has built its whole social life around this cemetery, that has these giant statues everywhere, it is interesting to me that the mothers are absolutely the biggest living sign of the Dirty War.
Did you go see them when you went back? Was there an audience?
Yeah. It wasn’t big, but there were people there every week. What must it be like to pass these same ladies every week for 25 years?
I asked my Argentine friend Jessica, “Is it hidden here?” She said without pause, “It’s alive for us. We know it exists.” It’s not prominent in the way it would be here, but Argentina is such a polite society. That part was taken advantage of by the junta, and when you are hyper-polite a lot of stuff doesn’t get said.
Everybody I asked responded that way: “We know and we have not forgotten.” And it’s a living thing. That was the other point Jessica made that I thought was excellent. She sent me the YouTube for this commercial they had on the air last year. It shows a kid on the beach. In Argentina, when a kid is lost on the beach, you pick up the kid and everyone claps until the parents are found. [The junta] stole a lot of children and gave them away for adoption. This ad used the beach as a metaphor: If you don’t know who your parents are, we are looking for you.
Don't cry for her: Isabel Peron was recently arrestedMy impression was that Argentines as a society have not owned up to these terrible crimes, but it sounds like that’s wrong.
There is nobody who doesn’t know. I am wondering how they are going to deal in the future, since the mothers are old.
There are trials now, yes?
I had this metaphor in my novel about habeas corpus. Now that the reviews are coming out, suddenly I learn that I have a political book because we have actually suspended habeas corpus in America. When you start taking away rights, the citizenry doesn’t notice. It’s not even a slippery slope; it’s a crossing of the line. People mark the start of the junta from the start of the coup—say March 24, if that’s when the coup was successful. Well, it was still happening the 23rd. It started long before it made history. Isabel Peron was arrested in Spain in January and that was unbelievably moving to me—she needed to be arrested.
I am fascinated by the stories, factual and fictional that are based on victims meeting their torturers.
Yes, there are all kinds of stories like that—being on a bus and just looking over.
That’s such a loaded moment. Nothing needs to be said. This tactic of disappearing people is very cruel, perhaps the cruelest thing to visit on a family. I think the Guatamalan military were the first to employ this. I wonder if we can trace these things back to the US Army’s School for the Americas at Fort Benning, where many senior military officials from around South America were taught so-called “counter-insurgency tactics.”
Them’s fighting words.
Okay. Who decided how to disappear people?
I can’t even touch that. There are things that I can’t even touch for my own ignorance. With the School of the Americas, I’m interested in the Kissinger years, America’s connection with Chile and stuff like that. But how much of America was I going to put in the book? At the end of the research stage, one of my Argentine friends said, “You’re not damning enough about the United States.” Which was interesting, but it was not of this world that I was creating.
I am not suggesting that the book was obliged to deal with any of these hot-button topics.
That’s why this ended up being a ten-year book. At different times I have been obsessed with every one of these threads.
INTERVIEW
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Disappearing Act: Part Two | |
| Nathan Englander on his new novel about Argentina's Dirty War | ||
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by Robert Birnbaum, June 1, 2007
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What was the size of the manuscript before you cut the book down?
The finished book is 350 pages. I probably handed in 600 pages to my agent, but really, with the footnotes and my annotated raw notes, it was around 1100 pages.
You expected to do radical excision?
That’s how I work. I really love to work with negative space. Otherwise I would lose my mind. It took a decade; if it was the wrong direction I would really go insane. I really believe I had to draw Lillian a thousand different ways for her to become Lillian, even if it means drawing these scenes and dropping them out.
It was really a giant test for me as a writer to not fall prey to sensationalism, too. How much fun is it for Mr. Naughty Ex-Religious Boy to do the Jewish pimps and whores? I wrote tons of chapters on those whorehouses, but that was not the story I was telling. And the same with torture. I gave it this tiny little section that was the hardest and most dangerous part to write.
Risk-taker: YehoshuaIt was powerfully effective to have this little girl being incarcerated in this tube-like cell awaiting her —
Thank you. That was scary. Just after finishing my book I interviewed A.B. Yehoshua on stage about his novel Woman in Jerusalem which has a Greek chorus that comes in at the end. I asked him, “Did you really need to take that chance? Are you aware of how dangerous that was? You were home free.” I love fiction and it’s holy to me; I feel like if I make one mistake, I'm bumped and its over.
What do you mean, you're bumped?
Bumped out of line. “This was a perfect book but that comma is in the wrong place and it doesn't read right for me anymore.”
Is Kaddish a common Jewish surname?
No, no.
So if I'm not Jewish, and I’m reading this book, do I get the portentous nature of the name?
Even better if you don’t. His name is explained in the book, and how he received it. It’s a Jewish tradition. If somebody, say, has a terrible heart attack and survives it, they will take on a new name. If the angel of death was coming for Steve Cohen, he might not be looking for Marc Cohen. Sometimes people take on these wonderfully loaded, portentous names. In this case, the rabbi gives Kaddish his name—which is the prayer for the dead—because he is a sickly child. He says he should be the mourner instead of the mourned.
This book will not be pegged as a Jewish book, will it? A Jewish novel?
I like the way the question is formed because I get really defensive about that. It really comes from the Jewish community. I'm happy to be anything. You can call me whatever you want. Last time people said, "He is a long haired hippie writer," so now I am a short haired —
[RB laughs]
Now am I actually different? I got a haircut. Well, so do we switch shelves? But for me, I believe that if fiction is functioning, it better be universal. If this book makes me a Jewish writer, it should also make me an Argentine writer. I spent ten years of my life on this book. I'm obsessed with this country. I lived this book for a decade. I can't feel any closer.
Historically, it feels like I have been given the Holocaust because I am a Jew, even though I am an American Jew—you are bequeathed these things. But sometimes you just adopt them. Argentina is so close to my heart now. I am just doing my work and they are my people. I should at least be one quarter Argentine writer now. But apparently that doesn't change either.
The changes a decade brings: Englander pre-haircutHow Jewish is the Posnan family?
After the last book, I just I felt so much pressure to be like, “These are not regular people, they are Jewish people.” It’s just insane. I write fiction. And again I think of fiction as universal. My world in my head is often very Jewish when I imagine these things, but for the Posnans I actively resisted that. Once I decided the book starts off, “Jews bury themselves, the way they live,” that was one of the most freeing days, like “I’m just going to start this book with the word ‘Jews.’”
I was trying to stay away from Jewishness, but I recognized there is nothing to stay away from, that this is the world of my imagination. And it’s enough to me that i