February 2, 2012 | 5:16 pm

When the Stars Are in Alignment Above North Vermont Avenue

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Skylight Books and the entry to the Skylight Theatre

When it comes to arts and letters in Los Angeles, an exceptionally bright spot can be found on a short stretch of Vermont Avenue just a bit north of Hollywood Boulevard.

We went there on a recent Saturday night with our dear friend, Raye Birk, to see a performance of “Hermetically Sealed,” a new play by Kathryn Graf that is being presented at the Skylight Theatre by the Milton Katselas Theatre Company under the direction of Joel Polis.  The short walk from the parking lot to the theatre reminded me that a short stretch of North Vermont Avenue affords more than one pleasure for the senses as well as the mind.

First we passed the sidewalk tables at Figaro, a bustling French bistro that would not look out of place in Paris (or, for that matter, Greenwich Village).  Then we glimpsed the window displays at Skylight Books, one of the best-loved independent bookstores in Southern California and a beacon of light for readers who want to hold a book in their own two hands before buying it and, now and then, see a touring author with their own two eyes.

Tucked away behind Skylight Books is the storied performance space called the Skylight Theatre.  That’s where we once saw Raye Birk in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” directed by Milton Katselas, who passed away in 2008 but is still revered as an acting coach, author (“Dreams Into Action” and “Acting Class”) and a stage and film director.

Katselas, in fact, is the nexus for much of what is happening on that stretch of North Vermont.  He was one of the original co-owners of Skylight Books, and current co-owner and general manager Kerry Slattery credits Katselas as “the instrumental party in getting the bookstore going after Chatterton’s closed in the same location.”

Then, too, he is recalled in the name of the Katselas Theatre Company, the production company associated with the acting school at the Beverly Hills Playhouse where Katselas taught for many years. Its mission is to develop and introduce new plays, a role that Katselas himself played throughout his own career, and the Skylight Theatre is the venue where many of these plays are staged.

“Hermetically Sealed,” the company’s latest production, is a stunning evening of theatre that tells the story of a troubled family in a small American town — a story of madness, sexual scandal, and family dysfunction that is also surprising funny.  Like the rest of the audience, we were laughing out loud when our hearts were not breaking at the tender but troubled relationship between a fifteen year-old-boy named Conor (played by Nicholas Podany) and his mother (played by Gigi Bermingham).

Thanks to producing artistic director Gary Grossmann, we were able to snag front-row seats and sat six feet away from young Nicholas Podany during the performance.  The whole company is accomplished — and I was especially impressed by the set decoration, where every detail that catches the eye of the audience contributes something to the performance and the play itself —  but Podany was a stand-out. He’s an exceptionally appealing young actor, poised and sensitive, always in command of a demanding and impactful role.  I expect that we will be seeing much more of him in the years ahead.

Our evening reminded me that a bricks-and-mortar store like Skylight Books can be more than a place to buy books.  When the stars are in alignment, a bookstore can illuminate a whole block and even a whole city.

“Hermetically Sealed” runs at the Skylight Theatre through February 12.  For information, visit the website of the Katselas Theatre Company.

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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December 16, 2011 | 9:28 am

A Holocaust Scholar Denounces Pols Who Pander to Jewish Voters

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt speaks truth to power.

If there were a Congressional Medal of Honor for historians, I would bestow it upon Deborah Lipstadt.  What other historian, living or dead, has stood up in open court and defended the truth of her scholarship, as Lipstadt did when she was sued for libel by Holocaust-denier David Irving?  Lipstadt, in a real sense, was forced to put the truth of Holocaust scholarship on trial — and she won.

Now Lipstadt, whose book on the Eichmann trial I reviewed here earlier this year, has spoken truth to power in a frank interview with Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev in Haaretz.  She denounced the rhetorical excesses of certain American politicians — including Newt Gingrich — who exploit the Holocaust and the conflicts of the modern Middle East to pander to Jewish voters in America.

“When you take these terrible moments in our history, and you use it for contemporary purposes, in order to fulfill your political objectives, you mangle history, you trample on it,” she told Shalev. “It’s a distortion of what Israel is all about, what Zionism is all about.”

She singled out Newt Gingrich’s notorious denial of Palestinian peoplehood as an example: “You listen to Newt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an ‘invented people’ – it’s out-AIPACing AIPAC, it’s out-Israeling Israel,” said Lipstadt. ”It’s not healthy.”

Lipstadt was just as harsh in criticizing radical settlers in Israel who characterize the soldiers of the IDF as “Nazis.”  “[I]t’s such an abuse of history,” said Lipstadt. “The people who started it know it’s not true, but the kids, the yeshiva kids, and the high school kids —  they don’t know it’s not true. And so when real Nazism comes around — no one will recognize it.”

After many years of reading and writing about history, I came to realize that scholars are not afraid of a fight; indeed, there is nothing quite as nasty as a squabble between rival historians over some abstruse point in a journal article or monograph.  The spectacle of Holocaust historians ganging up on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen over “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” — or Raul Hilberg’s snipes at Lucy Dawidowicz — are both good examples. But most of their tummeling is confined to the academy. 

To her credit, Lipstadt is one historian who knows from first-hand experience that it is the moral duty of the scholar to come out and fight for what she knows to be true.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com. His next book is “The Exterminating Angel,” a biography of an early figure in the Jewish armed resistance to Nazi Germany.

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December 15, 2011 | 9:34 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 | 9:41 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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November 29, 2011 | 5:44 pm

Ray Bradbury Enters a Brave New World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

"Fahrenheit 451": Does it smell like burning fuel?

A certain irony attaches to the fact that Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian classic about book-burning, “Fahrenheit 451,” is now available as an electronic book.  Bradbury himself had long vowed that his work would never be issued in the form of e-books, which he characterized as “smell[ing] like burned fuel,” but not even a futurist as famouos and accomplished as Bradbury cannot escape what is happened to the publishing industry nowadays.

“It’s meaningless; it’s not real,” Bradbury said of the Internet in an interview with the New York Times a couple of years ago. “It’s in the air somewhere.”

Indeed, at metatextual level, there’s something eerie about reducing a book that celebrates the civilizing function of the printed page to a bunch of binary digits in a black box. But, after all, “Fahrenheit 451” ends with a memorable scene in which books are preserved through the act of memorizing and reciting their contents, which is just another way of converting a book from one medium to another.

The e-book version of “Fahrenheit 451” was released today by Simon & Schuster with a suggested retail price of $9.99, a price point that is to the ebook what 99 cents is to the music download. For best-selling authors like Bradbury, that’s a much greater threat than digital conversion since it is less than half of the price of a newly-published hardcover.

Now that’s something to fear about the future, at least if you’re a writer who is waiting for the next royalty check.

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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November 17, 2011 | 9:57 am

God Has His Critics, and So Does Harold Bloom

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Harold Bloom as depicted in TNR.

Harold Bloom’s recent musings on Mormonism in the New York Times caught the attention of my colleague, Mark Paredes, who blogged about Bloom in The Jewish Journal.

I’ve been reading Harold Bloom with interest and admiration, and quoting him often in my own work, ever since I picked up “The Book of J” many years ago. I have often found him to be impenetrable and sometimes wrongheaded, however, as when he credits Shakespeare rather than the author of the Book of Samuel for “the invention of the human.” But Bloom’s ability to rub people the wrong way was brought home to me when a distinguished Bible scholar complained to me that Bloom had extracted an idea about biblical authorship from the scholar’s writings without acknowledging the source.

“I think he’s a big fat idiot,” the scholar told me, thus destroying one of my illusions about the elevated nature of academic discourse.

Another recent example of Bloom-bashing can be found in The New Republic, where William Deresiewicz reviews Bloom’s latest book, “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life” (Yale University Press: 357).  “With ‘The Anatomy of Influence,’ Harold Bloom has promised us his ‘swan song’ as a critic,” writes Deresiewicz. “Fat chance.”

“[A]fter some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes,” he goes on, “after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his ‘final reflection upon the influence process.’ …  ‘The Anatomy of Influence’ is not only not his last book, it’s not even his last one this year. Already in September came an appreciation of the King James Bible, billed, inevitably, as the book that Bloom had been writing ‘all my long life’… ‘The culmination of a life’s work’: is that the last one or the latest one? Neither: it’s the one he published thirteen years ago. The Harold Bloom Show, we can rest assured, is good many seasons yet.”

The Harold Bloom Show is still a ratings winner in American letters, of course, but there are plenty of naysayers.  Deresiewicz is one of them.

“Bloom must surely be the most solipsistic critic on record. Harold is, indeed, a world unto himself,” he writes. “Reading him reminds me of the scene in Being John Malkovich where the title character enters the portal that leads to his own brain to find himself in a world where everybody looks like him, and all they can say is “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.” In the world of Bloom, every author looks like Bloom, and all they can say is “Bloom, Bloom, Bloom.”

His remarks reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, where Singer likens the world to a novel whose author is God.  Bloom expressed a similar idea in “The Book of J.” (“I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God,” writes Bloom, “than are Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ or Tolstoy’s novels, al works of comparable literary sublimity.”) But Singer acknowledges that even the Divine Author has his critics.

“We know that the angels have nothing but praise,” writes Singer. “Three times a day they sing: Sublime! Perfect! Great! Excellent! But there must be some angry critics, too. They complain: Your novel, God, is too long, too cruel: Too little love. Too much sex. They advise cutting.”

If God has his angry critics, I suppose, then Harold Bloom, the critic par excellence, cannot be surprised to find that he has a few of them, too.

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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November 15, 2011 | 10:18 am

The Mystery of the Missing Index

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Another kind of index entirely: The Roman Catholic Church's index of banned books.

There’s always something new in publishing in the digital era.

Gilad Sharon’s biography of his father, Ariel, which I reviewed here not long ago, bulks up to 626 pages, but the U.S. publisher of “Sharon: The Life of a Leader” apparently decided to save a few dollars on the printing bill by leaving out the index.

For those of who us need, use and value an index, it is necessary to go to the HarperCollins website, where the index is displayed online.

Some bloggers have complained about the missing index, and it struck me as an odd way to cut down the size of the book.  I found the on-line index awkward to use since it requires those of who still read printed books to look back and forth between the bound volume and the computer screen. 

The inclusion of an index is still a benchmark of a certain degree of seriousness in general publishing, and it is recognized as such by discerning readers. Indeed, I learned a practical lesson about the value of an index when, some years ago, I appeared on an author interview show that was taped in advance of the official publication date of my book, “God Against the Gods,” a book about the history of religion.

After the taping, one of the camera operators approached me with a complaint: “I was looking at your book, and when I saw that it didn’t have an index, I realized that I couldn’t take it seriously.”

I hastily picked up the copy that my publisher had provided to the producer. All of my books include an index, and I was alarmed and concerned about the omission. I shared the cameraman’s assumption that an index was an essential element of a non-fiction book.

What I discovered is that my publisher had resorted to sleight of hand to solve a scheduling problem.  Finished copies of the book were not yet available on the day of the taping, and so the publisher put the dustjacket of my book on another volume of approximately the same size — a novel, as it turns out.  I quickly pointed this out to the skeptical cameraman and assured him that the book as published would include an index, too.

If the same question is asked of Gilad Sharon, of course, the answer to the question will be: “Look for it on-online.”

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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October 29, 2011 | 4:29 pm

Why the Germans fought to the bitter end

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Before the end: Hitler, Goebbels and one of his doomed children

My next book is a biography of an early Jewish resistance fighter who has been mostly overlooked in history, and so I am thinking a lot nowadays about Hitler’s “war against the Jews” and how, when and why the Jews fought back.  That’s why I read with special interest Timothy Snyder’s recent review of “The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945” by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, $35) in The New Republic (November 3, 2011).

Snyder is the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” which I reviewed earlier this year in The Jewish Journal.  His book has been criticized (although not by me) for pointing out that Poland and Eastern Europe were the killing grounds for millions of non-Jews — the casualties of what Isaac Bashevis Singer once called “Hitler’s hell and Stalin’s hell” — as well as the six million victims of the Holocaust.  The death toll is undeniable, of course, but some Jewish readers complain that Snyder blurs the distinction between the Shoah and the other crimes against humanity that took place during the Second World War.

In “The End,” Kershaw, a distinguished British historian of Nazi Germany, addresses the question of why Nazi Germany fought to the bitter end — and, not incidentally, continued to murder Jewish men, women, children and babies — even though, starting as early as 1943, its eventual defeat by the Allies already seemed inevitable.

Ironically, it was the blood-stained Heinrich Himmler, executor of the Final Solution, who tried to open peace negotiations with the Allies in the last days of the Third Reich, but Hitler himself shrilly insisted on fighting to the last German and only put a pistol in his mouth when the Red Army was about to take him prisoner.  His single most fanatical follower, Joseph Goebbels, also arranged to die in the Führerbunker along with his wife after they had performed one last marital act by murdering their six young children.

Snyder, always provocative, points out that there is a certain tragic linkage between the Holocaust and Hitler’s refusal to consolidate his early victories and sue for peace before it was too late.

For example, Snyder argues that German civilians were aware, subliminally if not always literally, of the crimes that were being committed by Germans in uniform. “German boys and girls in 1944 and 1945 were wearing clothing taken from murdered Jewish boys and girls in Belarus, but this did not mean that they saw or thought about those murders,” muses Snyder. “Yet in some sense those murders were present in German life.”

Second, and crucially, Snyder points out that the moral complicity of the German population at large helps to explain why the Germans continued to fight in 1944 and 1945; indeed, Snyder suggests that one of Hitler’s goals in conceiving and carrying out the Holocaust was to make sure that they did.

“Germans in 1944 were considering the world not so much from the point of view of the uncertain future of 1945, but rather in the certain knowledge of what Germans had done to others in the previous months and years,” explains Snyder. “Might this have had something to do with their willingness to fight on, as Kershaw suggests here and there? Peter Longerich has argued that one of the political purposes of the Holocaust was to bind Germans to the regime, precisely because they knew that the world could not forgive them.”

Historians continue to debate what deserves to be called an act of resistance under the dire circumstances of the Holocaust, and it can be argued that there was much more Jewish resistance than was conceded by an earlier generation of scholars. But the fact remains, as TK obliquely reminds us, that no amount of resistance would have deterred Hitler from carrying out the Final Solution and, in fact, may have encouraged to the Germans to kill Jews at an even more frantic pace.

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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