October 26, 2009 | 12:43 pm

Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Front Cover of Inventing L.A.

The only member of the Chandler family I knew personally was the redoubtable Dorothy Buffum (“Buffy”) Chandler.  From time to time during the 1970s, I wrote promotional copy for her charitable enterprises, and that’s why I was granted entry into the Chandler family seat in Hancock Park known as Los Tiempos.  What made the greatest impression on me, however, was the elaborate brooch that she sometimes wore when making inspections of the Times building at First and Spring — it was a grotesque version of my father’s own five-year pin, outsized and bejeweled, and she wore it like a shield.

Now we can all dig much more deeply into the saga of the Chandler family, thanks to Bill Boyarsky and Angel City Press.  Boyarsky is the author of a lavish book version of the recent PBS documentary by Peter Jones, both of which carry the same punning title: Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times (Angel City Press: $35.00, 208 pps.)

Frankly, I like the book much better.  We are given the opportunity to linger over the fascinating historical images that photo editors Mark Catalena and Brian Tessier have assembled, all of them handsomely designed by Amy Inouye.  By way of example, when you see the facsimile of the masthead that appears on the title page, you can make out the slogan that appeared on the front page of the resolutely anti-union paper throughout my youth: “Liberty Under Law – Equal Rights – True Industrial Freedom.” And the jail photograph of the two men who were convicted of bombing the Times building in 1911, which flashes on the screen only briefly in the documentary, is a work of portraiture that deserves a more leisurely view.

Boyarsky, who spent more than 30 years in the newsroom of the Times as a reporter and then as city editor, has mastered the wealth of data and gives it a perspective that is absent from the documentary.  Significantly, Boyarsky himself was a first-hand participant in some of the more dramatic moments in the history of the Times, as when Otis Chandler — then already retired—- asked him to read aloud a message of protest over an ethical scandal in the city room.

“In the tense moment before I spoke, it … occurred to me that when I read the message, I could become a small part of the rich history of the Times, maybe a footnote,” he recalls in his introduction to Inventing L.A.  “What history junkie could pass up a chance like that?”

The same can be said about Inventing L.A. Iitself. It’s a treasure trove for history junkies like me, but it is also reminds us that the Chandler family are rightly credited with the invention of a certain version of Los Angeles, if not exactly the one we live in today.

You can meet Bill Boyarsky in person at several upcoming signings for Inventing L.A. at various venues in Southern California. For details, visit the Angel City Website at angelcitypress.com

October 23, 2009 | 2:03 pm

Signal to Noise and Sex With Jon Stewart

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Kate Gale, Co-Founder of Red Hen Press

When Amy Hertz, the new book editor of the Huffington Post, cracked that “book reviews tend to be conversation enders,” she prompted a little flurry of controversy among those of us who care about books, which is exactly what she intended to do.  And here is my contribution to the conversation!

Her comment reminded me of a story that I heard from Kate Gale, the co-founder (with Mark E. Cull) of Red Hen Press, one of America’s liveliest publishers of poetry and literary fiction and non-fiction.  Kate said that she experienced a sharp spike in the readership of her own blog when she strayed from literary matters and wrote instead about her fantasies about having sex with Jon Stewart.

The point of Kate’s story is that the Internet is so vast, so crowded, and so chaotic that it is damnably hard to catch and hold anyone’s attention – the signal-to-noise ratio is overwhelming.  So bloggers are tempted to come up with something sparkly that will draw the restless eye of the web-surfers.

To be fair, Amy Hertz is not wrong in suggesting that our collective capacity for reading well-crafted and well-considered literary journalism is diminishing: “There’s a reason those sections in newspapers are dropping like flies,” she observed.  Starting with Sesame Street and radio news (“You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world”), and continuing into the 24-hour cable news cycle and now the blogosophere, the habits of mind that define American civilization have been changing drastically.

But there are still more than a few stalwarts who savor literary journalism, and none are more militant than the readers and writers of poetry.  I recall what happened years ago when Jack Miles (God: A Biography), then serving as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, announced that the section would no longer review poetry books — a clutch of outraged poets backed a dump-truck up to the main entrance of the Times and poured out a load of manure.

So I salute Kate Gale and her colleagues at Red Hen Press. They work tirelessly to call attention to the kind of writing that requires a bit more time and care than a blog entry and reward the reader for the effort with the enduring pleasure of a great book.  And Red Hen Press puts boots on the ground in the kulturkampf that is raging in America today.

Perhaps the best example I can give is my experience aboard a recent flight to New York City.  On the plane, I ran into novelist-biographer Judith Freeman (The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved), who was en route to the Brooklyn Book Festival.  And so was a task force from Red Hen Press, which was participating in the festival and sponsoring a cocktail party in the Village.

You can join in the celebration of the 15th anniversary of Red Hen Pen at a champagne luncheon at the Luxe Hotel Sunset on Sunday, November 1, 2009.  The featured guests include novelist Carolyn See—- a woman who leads and inspires others to lead the literary life—- as well as poet Mark Doty, journalist Naseem Rakha, and poet-critic Alicia Ostriker, among others. For tickets and more information, call (818) 831-0649 or visit the Red Hen website at www.redhen.org.

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October 21, 2009 | 1:04 pm

When Memory Comes

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Saul Friedlander

A rare opportunity to see and hear one of the world’s great historians—and a participant in the historical events that he studies—is coming up on at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 5, 2009, when Saul Friedlander appears at the UCLA Faculty Center to deliver an address on “Pius XII and the Holocaust: Some Further Reflections.”

I was first introduced to Friedlander’s work by Gene Lichtenstein, founding editor of The Jewish Journal, who urged me to read Friedlander’s memoir, When Memory Comes.  It’s a compelling and deeply challenging account of his experiences as a child in wartime France, where he was baptized and raised in a Catholic boarding-school after his parents were sent to die in the camps, and the rediscovery of his Jewish origins and identity when he arrived in Palestine aboard the ill-fated Altalena during the War of Independence.

Friedlander won a Pulitzer Prize last year for The Years of Extermination, the second title in his ground-breaking two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. His UCLA talk actually harks back to his first published work of history on the Holocaust, Pius XII and the Third Reich (1966).  But if Nazi Germany and the Jews is the crowning achievement of his work as a historian, his brief but searing memoir remains his masterpiece.

When Memory Comes is achingly intimate, and his recollection of his last encounter with his parents—- restrained in the telling, but deeply poignant nonetheless—- turns out to be one of the most shattering passages in the vast literature of the Holocaust.  Then, too, we can be grateful that a man with a genius for the study of history was himself an eyewitness to history in the making.  That’s why When Memory Comes is such an important work, one that transcends the experiences of a single Holocaust survivor and addresses the destiny of the Jewish people and, really, all people.

“Sometimes when I think back on our history, not of these past few years, but rather its entire sweep,” writes Friedlander in When Memory Comes, “I can make out a perpetual movement back and forth, a search for roots, for normality and security, forever threatened down the centuries, and I tell myself that the Jewish state may perhaps be only a step on the way of a people whose particular destiny has come to symbolize the endless quest – ever hesitant, ever begun anew – of all mankind.”

For more information on the UCLA event featuring Saul Friedlander, contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Friedlander’s address is the 1939 Club Lecture on Holocaust Studies under the co-sponsorship of UCLA/Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American & World Culture and the UCLA Department of History

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October 20, 2009 | 3:09 pm

So Many Books, So Little Time!

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

A page from the Talmud

Ironically, “the people of the book” is an honorific that was first bestowed upon us in the Koran, where the phrase is used to describe both Jews and Christians.  Still, we have come to embrace the phrase, and the fact is that books have always played a crucial role in creating, shaping, preserving and directing the destiny of the Jewish people.

“The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects,” writes Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews.  “But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession.”

Jewish civilization, in other words, is rooted in texts rather than artifacts. The Bible tells us the life story of David in abundant and shocking detail, for example, but we have only a single fragmentary inscription in stone that refers obliquely to his existence in flesh and blood.  And it is the special genius of the Jewish people that we pile text upon text — a single page of Talmud, as pictured here, consists of a fragment of Mishna framed by the interpretations offered by generation after generation of rabbis and sages.

Even in biblical antiquity, the sheer accumulation of words was seen as a problem to be solved. The Dead Scrolls, for example, contain portions of every book of the Bible except Esther, but they also include a fantastic assortment of writings that were wholly excluded from the Tanakh when it was canonized in the first century. And the world-weary ironist who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes despaired of the Jewish habit of mind that has always compelled us to put our words into writing.

“And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Eccl. 12:12) Or, to borrow a thoroughly modern restatement of the same sentiment: “So many books, so little time!”

Yet the Jewish compulsion to write and read books simply cannot be denied. Even as we worry that the printed book may be an endangered species, the publishers of America are issuing hundreds of thousands of new titles every year.  And it is an article of conventional wisdom in the publishing business that “the people of the book” are an especially appreciative audience, a fact that sends touring authors to synagogues, Jewish libraries, and assorted Jewish communal organizations across America.

Books, as it turns out, are the stock-in-trade of the Kirsch family business. My father, Robert, was the daily book columnist of the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years before his death in 1980.  I have been contributing book reviews to the Times since 1968, and my son, Adam, is a book critic on the staff of The New Republic and Tablet.com and a contributor to many other distinguished journals, including The New Yorker and the New York Times.

Today, I am embarking on a new and exciting phase of my life’s work as a reader, writer and reviewer of books.  As the book editor of The Jewish Journal, I will be contributing weekly book reviews to the print and online editions, and I will be posting news and comments to the blog you are reading now on a daily basis — God willing! Mindful of the admonitions of Eccl. 12:12, my task is to single out the books that are worthy of your attention, and it’s a calling that I undertake with both pleasure and honor.

Visit Jonathan Kirsch’s Website: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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October 19, 2009 | 3:39 pm

The People of the Book

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Ironically, “the people of the book” is an honorific that was first bestowed upon us in the Koran, where the phrase is used to describe both Jews and Christians.  Still, we have come to embrace the phrase, and the fact is that books have always played a crucial role in creating, shaping, preserving and directing the destiny of the Jewish people.

“The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects,” writes Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews.  “But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession.”

Jewish civilization, in other words, is rooted in texts rather than artifacts. The Bible tells us the life story of David in abundant and shocking detail, for example, but we have only a single fragmentary inscription in stone that refers obliquely to his existence in flesh and blood.  And it is the special genius of the Jewish people that we pile text upon text — a single page of Talmud, as pictured here, consists of a fragment of Mishna framed by the interpretations offered by generation after generation of rabbis and sages.

Even in biblical antiquity, the sheer accumulation of words was seen as a problem to be solved. The Dead Scrolls, for example, contain portions of every book of the Bible except Esther, but they also include a fantastic assortment of writings that were wholly excluded from the Tanakh when it was canonized in the first century. And the world-weary ironist who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes despaired of the Jewish habit of mind that has always compelled us to put our words into writing.

“And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Eccl. 12:12) Or, to borrow a thoroughly modern restatement of the same sentiment: “So many books, so little time!”

Yet the Jewish compulsion to write and read books simply cannot be denied. Even as we worry that the printed book may be an endangered species, the publishers of America are issuing hundreds of thousands of new titles every year.  And it is an article of conventional wisdom in the publishing business that “the people of the book” are an especially appreciative audience, a fact that sends touring authors to synagogues, Jewish libraries, and assorted Jewish communal organizations across America.

Books, as it turns out, are the stock-in-trade of the Kirsch family business. My father, Robert, was the daily book columnist of the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years before his death in 1980.  I have been contributing book reviews to the Times since 1968, and my son, Adam, is a book critic on the staff of The New Republic and Tablet.com and a contributor to many other distinguished journals, including The New Yorker and the New York Times.

Today, I am embarking on a new and exciting phase of my life’s work as a reader, writer and reviewer of books.  I will be contributing weekly book reviews to the print and online editions of The Jewish Journal, and I will be posting news and comments to the blog you are reading now on a daily basis — God willing! Mindful of the admonitions of Eccl. 12:12, my task is to single out the books that are worthy of your attention, and it’s a calling that I undertake with both pleasure and honor.

16 Comments — Leave your comment