The People of the Book vs. The People of the Kindle

What happens when our libraries are purged from our homes, replacing spines with screens?

By Ann Marlowe for Tablet Magazine

The other day, my friend John said he was getting rid of almost all his books. By the time I visited his apartment, he’d already pruned his library by a quarter, dumping most of it in the garbage. “I read everything on Kindle now,” he explained, a trifle defensively. The immediate cause of his decision was his impending move to a starkly minimalist apartment with spectacular river views—and room for bookshelves, had he wanted them.

What led to John’s decision was a disgust at the accumulation of things that I partly understood. I had even recently told a non-Kindle-owning friend that I didn’t understand why one-fifth of my house was taken up by a library I rarely entered. And I find myself very impatient with people who say they refuse to get a Kindle because they love the physicality of books. These are people who don’t produce culture, I thought. It’s just a consumer preference. They’re the same people who go compulsively to the theater and see rubbish because it’s “theater.”

Of course, minimalism dates at least to Le Corbusier, and it was possible to purge one’s library before Kindle, but then it meant relying on public libraries. Now, if you have the money to re-purchase on Kindle everything you want to own, you can have those bare white walls and still read. My editor has suggested to me that book-purging is an essentially Protestant impulse, which solves a particularly Protestant problem, in which personal reading of the Bible must be reconciled with a ban on the worship of objects. There’s something to this, particularly when you think of the interiority of the Kindle, which is a personal space much as one’s Bible was for, say, a Puritan in Boston circa 1640. Jews and Muslims, meanwhile, both venerate the physical version of their holy books: We all know what an outcry Quran-burning causes, while Jews actually bury Torahs that are deemed to be too damaged to use.

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My Crazy Century: A Memoir

Review by Annette Gendler for the Jewish Book Council 

The 500 pages covering internment in the Nazi concentration camp Terezín and persecution under the Communist regime of Czech writer Ivan Klíma’s memoir My Crazy Century could be intimidating, but it isn’t. Klíma guides the reader steadily, hurtling through events from the 1930s to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It is his story, and the story of Czechoslovakia and its writers.

Mainly, My Crazy Century is the story of a writer: discovering the power of storytelling at Terezin; getting the idea for his first allegorical play, The Castl; editing a literary magazine; publishing his work only abroad and in a clandestine magazine typed up with friends during the twenty years they are banned from publishing at home. While Klíma details the harassment and persecution his friends and family suffer, he neither rages nor dwells. Oddly, for a Holocaust survivor, he is unperturbed when, in the late 1940s, a neighbor in Prague disappears. “He was a bougie,” his father, an ardent Communist, explains. When his beloved father is later imprisoned for “sabotage,” Klíma displays remarkable nonchalance. He worries about his first love, being a good member of the Communist Party, and providing for his family, rather than about his father’s fate. Disappearances are not seen as the alarming hallmark of a totalitarian regime but rather as the way things are. Perhaps, sadly, that is a survival skill learned in Terezín.

Being classified as Jewish by the Nazis comes as a surprise; Klíma had been raised entirely secular. He remains so, exhibiting bemused indifference toward all things Jewish, despite his Jewish wife’s interest in Judaism. She initiates, for example, their visit to an Israeli kibbutz in the early 1960s. There he is more interested in the Kibbutzniks’ successful experiment in communal living than in the realization of the Jewish state.

Klíma finds himself in London and later at the University of Michigan as a guest lecturer when the Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring. Nevertheless, Klíma decides to return. Thankfully, he addresses why: “For me, the only meaningful work was writing, telling stories that were somehow connected to my life, and this was interwoven with my homeland. The thought of writing in a foreign country about things that deeply touched me but with which I had cut off all ties seemed foolish.” Thus, My Crazy Country is an illuminating account of what it meant to be a Czech writer in the twentieth century.

A Great Jewish Novel, Out of South Africa

 Jews spend a lot of time thinking about "what if?" What if you fall and break your neck, God forbid? What if God had brought us out of Egypt but never given us the temple, huh? What if every great American immigration novel was set in Africa instead?

Johannesburg-born writer Kenneth Bonert's debut novel, The Lion Seeker, borrows from American Jewish masters of the novel to create a story of Jewish immigration and assimilation that's uniquely South African. His hero, Isaac Helger, together with his mother and sister, joins the family patriarch in Joburg from Dusat, Lithuania, to grow up against a backdrop of pre-WWII politics, changing technologies, and ugly race relations.

Recalling in equal parts David Schearl from Henry Roth's classic and Augie March, Isaac vows to be a success for the sake of his mother, who aches for family left behind in Lithuania. Amid doomed business ventures and girl-chasing, though, Isaac realizes that what he loves is fixing cars. This pursuit becomes a metaphor for Isaac's exploration of his family's troubled past. After all, he learns in this absorbing tale, it only takes a second to smash something to bits, but lots of careful work to make it new again.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

How The Hobbit Learned Yiddish

Your grandparents might have read Yiddish translations of Shakespeare or Jules Verne (which were always "fartaytsht un farbesert," of course). But they couldn't have read The Hobbit—until now. As we say farewell to 2013 we salute an author who made waves: Computer programmer-turned translator Barry Goldstein (aka Berish Goldsteyn), for taking on the fan-friendly task of translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic into Yiddish.

This translation marks the book’s 61st language. Yiddish seems fitting for a work by Tolkien, who was a philologist as well as a writer who worked on the "W" (for "wizard"?) section of the Oxford English Dictionary. He was also a proud opponent of the Nazis.

Tolkien was enamored of mythology (he disdained Esperanto precisely because it lacked legends), and so it is perhaps fitting that a language so rich in stories should spin the tale of The Hobbit.

The translation wasn’t easy, said Goldstein, but, "after years of obsessing about complicated computer programs, I found reproducing the Trolls' grobe diburim, or rhyming poems, to be…much less stressful than wrestling with a recalcitrant computer."

- Sarah Zarrow for Jewniverse