Jacques Derrida’s Life as an Algerian Jew Revealed in Newly Translated Bio

The philosopher’s influential legacy is reshaped by the part of his life story that is often overlooked

 
By Scott Krane for Tablet Magazine

“Writing a biography means living through an intimate and sometimes intimidating adventure,” writes Benoît Peeters in his newly translated biography of Jacques Derrida, who would have turned 83 today. But what is the difference between the biography of a living man and a dead man? In the Introduction to Derrida, published in France in 2010 and now beautifully translated into English by Andrew Brown, French artist, critic, and author Peeters writes, “Whatever happens, Jacques Derrida will not be part of his own life, like a sort of posthumous friend. A strange one-way friendship that he would not have failed to question.” The author continues in the book’s introduction: “I am convinced of one thing: there are biographies only of the dead. So every biography is lacking its supreme reader: the one who is no longer there. If there is an ethics of biographers, it can perhaps be located here: would they dare to stand, book in hand, in front of their subject?”

Peeters is pleased that his book is now appearing in English. “My biography of Derrida, the first to be based on research work first-hand, was very well received when it was published in France,” Peeters told me in a recent interview. “And Derrida as a thinker is reflected in the world; it was logical that my book be translated. The United States played a decisive role in the reception of deconstruction. It is therefore not surprising that the English translation was the first to appear,” he said. Soon, he added, there will be translations available in German and Spanish, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Continue reading.
 

Norway, Jews, and Political Murder

Derek B. Miller‘s debut novel, Norwegian by Night, is about aging snipers. Or, it’s about parenting and loss. Or, the lingering traces of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It feels about as full as life itself, and almost as real.

Through shifting perspectives, Norwegian tells the tale of 82-year-old Sheldon Horowitz. After finding himself widowed and possibly suffering from dementia, Sheldon leaves New York to join his granddaughter in Norway. When the young boy from upstairs witnesses his mother’s politically-motivated murder while hiding in Sheldon’s closet, the 2 run away before the boy can be hurt, too.

Overlaying the dark drama of it all is Sheldon’s Jewishness. While recalling trying to take his deceased son golfing at a country club or settling into a country that finds Jews, as one character puts it, “unsettling,” Sheldon waxes philosophical on everything from the rules of kashrut to Europe’s dearth of Jews post-WWII. It remains unclear if we should trust Sheldon and his experience—his dementia and lucidity are continually up for debate—but his points are salient, his struggles are arresting, and the stakes are unforgettably high.

 

An Illustrated Kafka For Kids

Children's books, with their large glossy pages and sparse text, often follow puppies on magical adventures, and always end happily. My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents & Giant Bugs is no such book. The pages may be visually beautiful thanks to illustrator Rohan Daniel Eason, and the text may be spirited thanks to Jewniverse's own founding editor, Matthue Roth, but this funkily patterned cockroach and rodent party wll wend its way into your subconscious and creep around in there, long after lights-out.

My First Kafka revisits 3 Kafka stories, including The Metamorphosis. While they're familiar, they create and inhabit a new world, thanks to Kafka's inimitable sensibility, Roth's cheeky style, and Eason's quirky and endearing etchings. (The metamorphosed cockroach has more flair than your average hipster.)

Kafka enthusiasts will find a familiar friend in this spunky volume. Roth successfully channels Kafka's sense of
"filial shame, ineradicable guilt, and parental condemnation" that some tie to his "interest in his Jewish heritage." While My First Kafka does not revolve around explicit Jewish themes, it does evoke a world of threat and alienation—the very world in which Kafka lived and wrote in pre-WWII Prague.

 - Jessica Young 

The Plot Against England

Man Booker winner Howard Jacobson talks about English anti-Semitism, ping-pong, and the seriousness of Jewish jokes

By Howard Jacobson for Tablet Magazine

The British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel, The Finkler Question, was awarded the Man Booker Prize today. On the eve of the announcement, Jacobson spoke to Tablet Magazine about English anti-Semitism, Israel “swaggering around,” and why Jews used to be good at ping-pong. Plus: The first U.S. publication of Jacobson’s 1999 profile of table tennis champion Marty Reisman.

You described your 2007 novel Kalooki Nights as “the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody anywhere” and we agree—

It certainly uses the word “Jew” more than any other novel.

So what do you mean by that?

I suppose I meant that its preoccupations are unrelievedly Jew talking to Jew thinking about Jew. This was deliberate. That’s what I wanted to write. Jew, Jew, Jew, joke, joke, joke, the world as seen entirely through the eyes of Jews for Jews. There are some Jews who live like that. To a degree, there’s a possibility in every Jew I ever met, for them to live like that. That you ask the question “Why?” and then back you go to the Holocaust and back to the pogroms before that, and everyone wants to know what it is that’s made this particular kind of Jewish morbidity into a positive feature now of the Jewish imagination. So, the book was really about that. Jews thinking about Jews talking about Jews to Jews written by somebody who is a Jew, who is obsessed by the subject, has some crazy obsession, who wants to get to the bottom of this obsession and wonders where this obsession comes from. And will deploy every kind of act of the mind to think about it, including, primarily, what Jews do best, which is make jokes. No one makes jokes like Jews.

So, it’s not only the most Jewish book ever written, it’s got more Jewish jokes in it, good or bad, than any book ever written. Certainly more about Jews and more jokes in it than the Old Testament.

That leads us directly to Shylock. What do you make of him?

Continue reading. 

‘What If The Messiah Is A Woman?’

by Susan Reimer-Torn, Special To The Jewish Week

Not long ago, a woman rabbi raised a provocative question: Might we dare imagine Judaism as it would be if the tradition had been shaped and transmitted by feminists? Or to put it differently, how is Judaism experienced through the mind/body of a spiritually attuned woman?

Tova Reich’s “One Hundred Philistine Foreskins” (Counterpoint) explores this essential question through the lifelong travails of its central character, Ima Temima, a prophetic guru and iconoclast teacher of our times. The novel moves between Temima’s life as a charismatic spiritual leader in Israel and her brutally isolating girlhood in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn. At age 11, already a voracious reader and original thinker, Temima is shattered by the death of her mother and left to the brutish cruelty of her father. Her school principal, whom she encounters lurking among the reeking garbage in the building’s basement, subjects her to sexual abuse. She withdraws into study and deep contemplation, seeking sanctuary at her mother’s grave. A few years later, Temima uses a marriage of convenience to a Zionist zealot who works at the neighborhood deli as a ticket to Israel, where she eventually makes her name as a visionary leader.

The book opens with a tumultuous, end-of-days scene in which Temima and her mob of followers — “a mixed multitude of hanger-ons and groupies, assorted fans and freaks and misfits” — are winding their way through the streets of Jerusalem, with the aged, veiled Temima, hidden like the divine presence in a portable arc, transported by four hefty bodyguards. The raucous scene, like those vividly rendered throughout the book, is set in cinematic detail. The throngs are “dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra.” 

Continue reading.

 

Ten Great Books to Read This Summer

 By Jordana Horn

Welcome to the Second Annual Jordana Horn Summer Reading List, in which I recommend books for your summer reading pleasure. Some are new releases; some you may have missed because you were “working” or “taking care of children” or some other time-consuming endeavor. If you do get a few peaceful moments this summer, though, any one of these reads would be worth your while. My list last year was deemed “too intellectual,” so I’ve thrown in a few suggestions of lighter fare as well. Please feel free to add recommendations in the comments as I am always reading and always excited to find new books!

Karen Joy Fowler we are all completely beside ourselves1. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

I read a review before reading this book. While I wouldn’t say the review “ruined” the book for me, it was definitely a spoiler. This book hinges on one key fact which I would think would work better as a surprise, so I will leave you in suspense. Suffice it to say that this book rocked my world: my perception of family interactions, and what a fiction book can accomplish were changed by it. I am so glad I read it, and think you will be, too.

2. Schroder, by Amity Gaige

Beautifully written story of what happens when an East German-born man who has appropriated a new American, Kennedy-esque identity decides to make a post-separation run for the Canadian border with his young daughter.

Continue reading.

Kafka's Hasidic Sidekick

 In 1894, boys like Jiří Langer were a dime a dozen: Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Prague, there was nothing notable about him until, at 19, he bought "a railway ticket to a little place in eastern Galicia," where he met the Hasidic rebbe of the town of Belz. He returned to Prague wearing traditional dress and observing Hasidic customs.

This was in an era when being a baal teshuva was unheard of. Years later, in the introduction to Nine Gates, Jiří’s collection of Hasidic tales, his brother František reflected: "Jiří resembled Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis, in which a family finds its way of life completely upset when the son is suddenly changed into an enormous cockroach."

The allusion was not to a distant literary figure but to a real person in the young man's life. Though his parents tried to talk Jiří out of his new religiosity, the famous surrealist author took an interest in just that. Jiří, who was anything but a "normal" Hasid, started studying Jewish mysticism with Kafka, and circulating among Prague's avant-garde artists. He even published several books, including a volume of poetry called The Eroticism of Kabbalah. Probably not who you'd have expected to find in Kafka's inner circle.

- Matthue Roth