January 28, 2010 | 11:09 am

J. D. Salinger: The End of a Life Veiled in Irony and Mystery

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010)

The death of Jerome David Salinger brings to an end one of the great lives in American letters.  For me, and for generations after me, “The Catcher in the Rye” is much more than an “evergreen” best-seller; it is truly a rite of passage, as much for my own children as it was for me.  I studied the text of “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” with the devotion of a Talmudic scholar, and I recall how the publication of a new short story by J. D. Salinger in the pages of The New Yorker in 1965 was a rare and much-anticipated event.

J. D. Salinger is all the more remarkable because he so resolutely rejected the celebrity that was his for the asking.  He was a famous recluse, and he became all the more famous because of his self-imposed isolation and his decision to simply stop writing.  Salinger even went to court to prevent the use of quotations from his work in an unauthorized biography, and he scuttled the plans to issue his last published short story in book form.

His life was always veiled in ironies and mysteries.  His father was Jewish but his mother was not – she changed her name from Marie to Miriam, and he did not learn of her Christian origins until the occasion of his bar mitzvah.  So it turns out that one of the most admired Jewish-American writers of the 20th century is not Jewish at all according to Halakha, and Salinger himself reportedly embraced the beliefs of Christian Science. Of course, it is exactly such ambiguities and conflicts that make him an archetypal American Jew no matter what he actually believed and practiced.

What remains after his passing at the age of 91 is what we have possessed all along — a small but superb body of work that has never gone out of style or out of print.  Indeed, “The Catcher in the Rye” is so thoroughly and uniquely American in its voice and its concerns that it deserves to be called one of the great American novels.  Indeed, the case can be made — and has been made — that the social and cultural turmoil that we call the Counterculture may have begun with Holden Caulfield and his contempt for all that is “phony.”

Salinger himself spent his life making war on phoniness, and it is a war that he won.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. 

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January 22, 2010 | 9:30 am

Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Emil Draitser's dark but whimsical memoir, "Shush!"

The story is told of a delegation of Communist Party cadres who are ushered into the Kremlin for a ceremonial meeting with Stalin.  After they are gone, Stalin discovers that his favorite pipe is missing, and he sends Beria, the much-feared chief of the Soviet secret police, to retrieve it.

“Never mind,” Stalin tells Beria on his return.  “I found the pipe under a pile of papers on my desk.”

“Too late,” reports Beria. “Half of them confessed to taking the pipe and were shot as wreckers, and the other half died under questioning.”

The story captures both the terror that afflicted the citizens of the Soviet Union who lived (and died) during the Stalin era and the spirit of resistance that has always manifested itself in joke-telling.  But the humor is very black when it comes to Stalin, who succeeded in destroying Jewish and Yiddish culture in Russia.  At the time of his death in 1953, Stalin was preparing a new wave of terror against the Jews in connection with the so-called “Doctor’s Plot.”

All of these ironies came to mind when I heard that Emil Draitser, author of “Shush! Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin” (University of California Press: $24.95), will be taking the stage in the ALOUD series at the Central Library at 7:00 p.m. on February 3, 2010.

Born in Odessa in 1937, Draitser was a political satirist in the Soviet Union before he was blacklisted for a piece that daringly criticized a high-ranking figure. He managed to reach L.A. in 1974, earned a Ph.D. in Russian literature at UCLA, and is today a professor of Russian at the City University of New York.

Since coming to America, Draitser has published novels, non-fiction, newspaper journalism and scholarly articles, including “Forbidden Laughter: Soviet Underground Humor” and the bittersweet memoir that gives its title to his event at ALOUD.  “Shush!” was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a painful and acutely observed memoir,” but Draitser always brings to his work the same wry sense of humor that cost him his career in the Soviet Union.
Draitser will be featured at ALOUD in conversation with Suzi Weissmann, a professor of politics at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Free reservations and additional information about Emil Draitser’s event at the Central Library, located at Fifth and Flower Streets in downtown L.A., are available by calling (213) 228-7025 or at www.aloudla.org.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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January 6, 2010 | 4:52 pm

The Tipping Point

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

The Gutenberg press.

According to an item that raced across the Internet after the holidays, we have reached a tipping point in the digital revolution — Amazon sold more e-books than “real” books on Christmas day. 

Well, not so fast. Electronic books still represent less than one percent of all books sold, and what happened on Christmas day needs to be put into perspective.  Amazon sold out its stock of Kindle e-book readers in early December, and lots of people who received one as a holiday gift tried out their new toy by ordering and downloading some e-books. By contrast, the people who still prefer “real” books were able to refrain from e-commerce on that day and spend time with one of the conventional books that they received as gifts.  Nothing more is needed to explain the spike in e-book sales on Christmas day.

Of course, it’s perfectly true that we are witnessing revolutionary changes in how books are written, published and sold.  The steady decline of independent booksellers is old news, and even the chains are suffering; Borders, the second-largest bookstore chain in America, is closing another 180 stores by the end of January 2010.  And it’s also true that e-book readers are the hot new thing in the publishing industry — Barnes & Noble has launched its own e-book reader, the Nook, which also sold out during the holidays, and early-adopters are eagerly awaiting the rumored launch of a new e-book reader by Apple.

Even more fundamental changes are on the horizon.  If the Google class-action settlement is ever approved and implemented, it will be possible to access and search the entire contents of the great libraries of the world, and many millions of titles will be available for on-line ordering, whether in print, print-on-demand or digital editions. Indeed, it is Google’s ambition to put every book ever written into its vast online database, a grandiose notion that may yet become a reality.

Still, the fact remains that printed and bound books — or “dead-tree” books, as digital visionaries like to call them — are still alive and well.  Although it may be a generational issue, many of us still prefer (or need) to read books in the form of print on paper rather than a digital display, if only because the workings of the human eye seem to favor the printed page.

My own prediction is that “real” books will outsell e-books for a long, long time.  To be sure, many of us will buy those books on-line rather than in a beloved neighborhood bookstore, and many of those books will be “POD” (print on demand) books — that is, a book that is stored on a computer and printed out only when a copy is actually purchased. 

But, now and for a long time to come, the end-product will not be greatly different from the print-on-paper book that began with Gutenberg and has defined human civilization for the last six centuries.

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal and author of “The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God,” will appear with Dr. Amir Hussain and Dr. Bob Harris in a program on “The Roots of Religious Terrorism” at Antelope Valley College (Room SSV 151) on at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 12, 2010.

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December 24, 2009 | 6:07 pm

The Gift of the Magi

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Raye Birk as Scrooge

One measure of the success of R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” is the fact it makes such a lovely gift for both Chanukah and Christmas.  And therein lies a tale — a cross-cultural variant of O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”

For the last several years, ny wife, Ann, and I have spent Thanksgiving in St. Paul at the home of our cherished friends, Raye Birk and Candace Barrett Birk.  One of our favorite traditions is to bundle up and head over to Minneapolis on the night after Thanksgiving to see Raye on the boards at the Guthrie Theater, where he customarily plays Scrooge in the annual production of “A Christmas Carol.”  This year, however, Raye was featured in a powerful production of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” a play that is no less suitable for the Christmas season but one with a considerably less upbeat ending.

Raye has an impressive list of stage, movie and television credits, and one of my favorites is one of his most recent roles — he plays the physician who figures so crucially in the plot of “A Serious Man,” a wry and darkly ironic depiction of Jewish life in the Twin Cities in the 60s by Ethan and Joel Coen. I like to boast that Raye acquired his facility for Jewish roles by spending so much time at our seder table over the years, and he is surely one of the few non-Jewish actors who owns a yarmulke. 

It’s another Thanksgiving tradition for us to bring gifts for Raye and Candace to open on Christmas morning.  Now that Christmas has arrived, I can disclose that the present we left behind in St. Paul for Raye was a copy of the R. Crumb’s comic-book version of Genesis. 

And when I opened the Chanukah gift that the Birks sent to California, I discovered that they had picked the very same book for me.

Raye, I hope you will enjoy your gift as much as I will enjoy mine!  Merry Christmas!

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, participated in a discussion of R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” on a recent broadcast of The Politics of Culture on KCRW hosted by Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin, and the program is archived the KCRW website.  An exhibition of original drawings from the book is on display through February 7, 2010, at The Hammer Museum in Westwood.

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December 12, 2009 | 11:04 am

“Neurosis Is Not Being Religious!”

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

My brother Paul, of blessed memory, once told me a joke about a prominent member of a large congregation in Los Angeles who reveals to the rabbi that God has recently started manifesting himself and engaging in conversation with the congregant, “face to face,” just as the Torah tells us that Moses once did.

“There are many fine psychiatrists and psychologists in our congregation,” says the rabbi, “who can help you with your problem.”

I was reminded of my late brother’s joke when I came across “Religious Compulsions and Fears: A Guide to Treatment” by Dr. Avigdor Bonchek (Feldheim Publishers: $29.99).  The author is a clinical psychologist and an ordained rabbi who was trained in New York and now practices in Israel.  His book is offered to rabbis, therapists and Jewish families to assist them in identifying and dealing with the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as it manifests in observant Jews.

A saying of the Steipler Gaon — “Nerven is nisht frumkeit!” (Neurosis is not being religious!) — sums up the premise of Dr. Bonchek’s book.  He wholly embraces the notion that religious observance is the duty of a good Jew: “From the moment a Jew opens his eyes in the morning to the moment he closes them at night,” he writes, “his day is guided by mitzvah observance.”  But he also concedes that highly observant Jews who suffer from OCD are always at risk of going too far.

“When OCD becomes related to the performance of mitvos,” he explains, “the mitzvos take on a weighty burden of anxiety, which not only inflicts much psychological pain on the individual, it also causes him/her to distort the performance of the mitzvah.”

The book offers a fascinating glimpse into the workings of OCD among observant Jews. To ensure that he was ritually pure before engaging in prayer, one young man cleaned himself sixty or seventy times after visiting the bathroom even though he had been admonished by “such gedolim as the Divrei Chaim and the Steipler Rav [that] one need only clean oneself five times.” A married woman washed her hands so compulsively that her skin was red and raw, and so she worried that “the ‘blood’ from her cracked skin make the dishes treif.”

The dilemma for the psychotherapist is that the classic symptoms of OCD — including repetitive handwashing — are sometimes hard to discern when they are overlaid on the religious duties of an observant Jew, who is required to be ritually clean and make other preparations before engaging in prayer, to recite prayers in a specified order, and to repeat certain prayers.  Indeed, the checklist of compulsive behaviors — washing and cleaning, checking, repeating, ordering, and hoarding — can also apply to various aspects of Jewish ritual. 

“Men’s compulsion may be expressed by repetitive checking to see if their tefillin are positioned exactly in the right places,” writes Dr. Bonchek.  “The checkings become repetitive because after each check by eye or with a mirror, the doubts return.”

The laudable goal of “Religious Compulsions and Fears” is to encourage observant Jews to seek the assistance of rabbis and psychotherapists when strict religious observance crosses into psychological dysfunction: “Such behavior is not frum at all; in fact, it frequently interferes seriously with true avodas Hashem.”

Many Jewish readers are likely to see an irony at work here. From a secular point of view, all religious observance can be seen as a kind of magical thinking, and that’s the whole point of the joke that my brother told.  And so Dr. Bonchek’s self-help book may provoke a fundamental reconsideration of why we engage in prayer and ritual in the first place and what we expect to accomplish when we do.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal.

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November 25, 2009 | 2:12 pm

Naked Bodies, Raw Vegetables and a Woman in a Wimple

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Detail from Edward Weston’s “Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937”
(Copyright 1982 Center for Creative
Photography, Arizona Board of Regents)

My very first experiment in the deconstruction and interpretation of sexual imagery took place when I found my way to a book called “California and the West.” Among the scenic photographs by Edward Weston was the image of a beautiful young woman who sits against a rock and stares into the camera with a beguiling expression on her face.  Still only a child, I recognized immediately that something powerful and even disturbing was being depicted in that photograph, and I fell in love with it.  Today, framed prints of the same photograph hang on the wall of my law office and my writing room at home.

The woman in the photograph is fully clothed.  Indeed, her head is wrapped in a kind of nun-like wimple, and every inch of her torso is primly covered by shirt, pants and hiking boots.  But her knees are spread wide open — a position that is called an “offering attitude” by art historians and is understood to indicate sexual availability — and her hands are delicately crossed over her crotch in a mannered and provocative gesture.

That woman is Charis Wilson, and the photograph is titled “Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937.”  She was Weston’s lover, later his wife, and always his muse and favorite model —  he photographed her naked body many times, although her face is averted and her figure is somehow desexualized in the nude shots. Indeed, Weston had a way of photographing vegetables to look like naked women and photographing naked women to look like vegetables, and Charis was no exception.

But “Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937” is something unique in Weston’s body of work. As a child, I could not have articulated the reasons why the image is so erotic, but I did not fail to perceive it. Later, as I studied the iconography of religious art while doing research for books of my own, I came to understand that the image expresses both the sexuality and the fecundity of the female form.  But it is also an expression of a woman’s power over her own body—- the open knees and the crossed hands seem to suggest a tantalizing invitation and, at the same time, a firm refusal.

Wilson herself debunked the efforts of overheated iconographers, amateur and professional alike. At the moment when Weston snapped the shutter, her face showed exhaustion rather than sensuality, she insisted in her own memoir, “Through Another Lens,” and the curious head-covering was her improvised effort to keep away the annoying mosquitoes.  But she was powerless to change the way we perceive the photograph itself, which helps to explain why it is such an enduring and unsettling work of art. 

Charis Wilson died in Santa Cruz, California, on November 20, 2009, at the age of 95.  She told her own story in “Through Another Lens:  My Years With Edward Weston” (co-written with Wendy Madar), and she figures importantly in various biographies of Edward Weston, including Ben Maddow’s “Edward Weston: His Life.”  But the book that remains my favorite is “California and the West,” which features Weston’s photographs and Wilson’s prose, and not only because it includes the enchanting photo that he took at Lake Ediza.  The dog-eared copy that I scrutinized in childhood is still on my bookshelf, a relic of childhood and a source of pleasure and inspiration to this day. In that sense, Charis herself has survived her mortal death and survives as that enchanting young woman whose image was fixed on film more than 70 years ago.

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal and author of “King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel,” will give a talk on the scandalous life story of King David as preserved in the Book of Samuel at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, on Wednesday, December 2, 2009.  The program opens at 7:00 p.m. with an historical overview by Rabbi Ed Feinstein, and Kirsch’s talk begins at 8:00 p.m.  Go to http://www.vbs.org/flyers/VBSCollegeJewish09-10.pdf for more information about the lecture series, “Cover to Cover…Opening Up the Hebrew Bible,” a presentation of the VBS College of Jewish Studies.

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November 2, 2009 | 8:56 am

The Adventures of Michael Chabon

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Michael Chabon

History and fantasy are the stock-in-trade of Michael Chabon.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won a Pulitzer, is set in the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II and focuses a pair of Jewish cousins who team up to create a comic-book superhero.  Last year’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, yet another of Chabon’s many best-sellers, imagines an alternate world in which the Jewish homeland is established in Alaska rather than Palestine.

Now we have an opportunity to explore the mundane side of Michael Chabon’s life in the newly-published Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son (Harper: $25.99, 306 pps.).  These short pieces, previously published in Details, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications, represent the kind of journalism once practiced in the pages of the Los Angeles Times by Jack Smith and Al Martinez and by their fellow columnists in other newspapers across America.

Still, now and then, Chabon brings a certain sly humor to his musings about the life of a modern American male in Manhood for Amateurs.  Where else, after all, will you read the theological rant of a young father on the occasion of his son’s bris?

“The stated reason for this minutely savage custom is that God – the God of Abraham – commanded it,” Chabon writes in an essay titled “The Cut.” “That is not an argument that ought to hold a lot of water with me. I have confused ideas of deity, heavily influenced by mind-altering years of reading science fiction, that do not often trouble me, but one thing I know for certain, and I have known since the age of five or six, is that I really can’t stand the God of Abraham. In fact, I consider Him to constitute the pattern to which every true asshole I have ever known in my life has pretty well conformed.”

Such revelations, as it turns out, are rare in Manhood for Amateurs. More often, Chabon explores the awkward and embarrassing moments in family life —- how he answered his young daughter’s uncomfortable question about what it feels like to get stoned, why he objects in principle to pink Lego blocks, why he carries a purse (or, as he puts it, a “murse”), and the unsettling experience of witnessing his adolescent daughter’s coming of age.

“I don’t care to give sex any more credit than it deserves, nor do I necessarily prefer it at any given moment of the day to drugs, rock and roll, watching The Wire, or the sight of a paper packet filled with well-salted pommes frites still hissing with oil from the fryer,” he declares in “A Textbook Father.” “I don’t begrudge sex or its indisputable pleasures to anyone in any variation that consenting partners can safely attempt or devise – not even to my children, when the times come and they are of age, well informed, and emotionally ready.”

Not every reader of Chabon’s best-sellers will be charmed by these essays, but it’s one of the perks of solild literary success to take a break from the heavy lifting and put together a book like this one.  Aside from the occasional flashes of insight and humor, however, it struck me as an item of nostalgia precisely because the newspapers where these kinds of stories once flourished are dead or dying. In that sense, of course, it’s exactly the kind of exercise that we ought to expect from a master of nostalgia like Michael Chabon.

Remembrance of Things Past:  Not long ago, I blogged about a demonstration at the offices of the Los Angeles Times that featured the dumping of a load of manure.  As I recalled it, the demonstrators were aggrieved poets who objected to the newly-announced policy of not reviewing poetry books in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.  Jack Miles, who was serving as Times book editor at the time of the poet’s demo, remembers it differently: “You have conflated two demonstrations on First Street,” he writes. “The poets did demonstrate, and one sign said ‘Miles to Go.’ But the manure was in response to something else.”  Neither of us, however, can recall what prompted the manure-dumping even after I spent some time online in search of the answer.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal.

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