December 15, 2011 | 10:34 am

Books and Pastrami Sandwiches

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

George Whitman at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, c. 1980.

Today I pulled down a copy of John Keegan’s “Six Armies in Normandy” from my bookshelf and opened it to the title page, all in tribute to the late George Whitman, whose obituary appears in the New York Times.

I bought the book at the famous Left Bank bookstore in Paris that Whitman operated since 1951 and where he died at the age of 98 in an apartment over the store.  On the title page is a rubber stamp: “SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. — Kilometer Zero Paris.”

Bringing home a souvenir from Shakespeare and Company is a fine old literary tradition.  American tourists in the 1920s favored James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” was a bestseller in the 1930s. Both of these books were banned back in America, but they could bought off the shelf at Shakespeare and Company, which was then owned and operated by its original founder, Sylvia Beach.

Sometimes a visit to Shakespeare and Company was an opportunity for an even more exotic purchase. On one occasion, I found and bought a two-volume paperback edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago,” as published in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris. The story is told that Solzhenitsyn, still prevented from publishing his work in his homeland in the 1970s, consented to the publication of his new book outside the U.S.S.R. to secure a copyright in the West. Such acts of culture war were reputedly funded by the CIA, but they bestowed upon us a literary treasure and an important historical document.

Actually, I read two obituaries today.  The New York Times noted the passing of George Whitman, and the Los Angeles Times paid tribute to Marvin Saul, founder of Junior’s Deli at Pico and Westwood in West Los Angeles.  Each man figured importantly in the cultural life of the place where he lived, and each one sated the appetites of his customers in different but equally primal ways. I know for a fact that a great many working writers in Los Angeles sustained their efforts on Marvin’s chicken soup, pastrami sandwiches, and seven-layer cake over the years because I was one of them.

I salute them both.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. His next book is “The Exterminating Angel,” a biography of a Jewish resistance fighter set in Paris in the 1930s. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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December 13, 2011 | 10:41 am

A Rude Beast in the West Bank

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

The headlines are reporting another sighting of the rude beast that is slouching toward Bethlehem, to borrow yet again the often-borrowed words of Yeats.

When Ehud Barak, foreign minister of Israel, issued a public denouncement of “a string of violent attacks by criminal groups of extremists,” he was referring to the radical settlers who attacked an IDF base in the West Bank, occupied an abandoned army post on the border with Jordan, and injured an IDF commander by throwing a brick at him. 

These outrages against the IDF will not be surprising to readers of Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative but important new book, “The Unmaking of Israel,” which I reviewed here not long ago.  Indeed, the latest incidents validate his warning about the danger that the settler movement poses to the survival of Israel’s democracy and perhaps even to Israel itself.

Gorenberg points out that any peace agreement based on a withdrawal to the security fence that is now in place, which he calls “the unrealistic minimum” for making peace with the Palestinian Arabs, would require at least 65,000 settlers to leave the West Bank. “Any more realistic map of Israel’s borders with a Palestinian state would mean a larger evocation,” he writes.  Based on Israel’s experience during the withdrawal from Gaza under Ariel Sharon, however, at least some of the West Bank settlers — and perhaps a great many of them — will refuse to go.

“The army would have to confront a young generation of settlers determined not to repeat the ‘shame’ of Gaza,” writes Gorenberg. And he wonders out loud whether the IDF, whose ranks now include a great many more officers and soldiers who were trained in yeshivot “aligned with the theological right,” will carry out an order to dismantle the outposts and remove their occupants.

“As men whose belief in the inviolable sanctity of the Whole Land of Israel climb the ladder of command,” writes Gorenberg, “possibilities loom that are worse than refusal: outright mutiny, even decisions by senior officers to deploy their units to prevent withdrawal.”

The irony of the recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Jewish soldiers is profound. After all, the most problematic settlements are the ones that require the protection of the IDF for their very existence.  But Gorenberg reveals an even deeper irony. If he is right, the soldiers who came under attack included men whose sympathies lay with the attackers. 

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

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