"How Jewish Were We?"

Thoughts on Leopoldstadt and other assorted wanderings.

It’s been almost four months since I self-deported from Twitter, and the disconnection has been most salutary, my FOMO addiction feels broken. At first, I was frantically following every new service that came online - Mastodon! Hive! Post! - but I got burned out quickly, forever shuttling from one service to another, with no single destination a repository of everyone I liked to read. So I just stopped visiting them all. And for a few days, I felt that phantom limb itch to check what the world was talking about but it receded with surprising swiftness. And though I do still miss certain Twitter voices, I’ve felt my attention span strengthen a bit and I feel less anxious and angry. So maybe I actually owe Elon a big mental health thank you …

However, there’s still lots of work for me to do: We rang in the New Year with a three-day power outage. Everything went dark around 3 pm on the 31st and didn’t come back online until the afternoon of the 2nd. During that time, we burned many candles and I had to cook furiously, having just filled the fridge with groceries for the weekend. Jennifer loved the outage; the darkness, the quiet, the disconnect. It was rainy and dark and wet; our heater has an electric thermostat so we had to keep the gas fireplace going for heat. But I found myself getting angrier and more agitated with each passing day, especially once it got dark and I had to stumble around by iPhone light (while it lasted). My partner suggested, in the most loving way possible, that my foul temper was perhaps just maybe a symptom of a little entitlement. I was defensive and snappish but days later, I realized she was right. I’ve become so conditioned by ease, by convenience, that the slightest bump in the road undoes me more than I care to admit. There is, I’m quite sure, a novel in all this somewhere. Stay tuned.

On Leopoldstadt:

Back in my blog days, I did an extended interview with John Banville and one of the things we touched on was his now-notorious review of Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY in the New York Review of Books. In short, he hated the book; but what moved him to write about it was the need for a response to the adulation for what he believed to be inferior McEwan. As he said to me at the time:

… that's one of the reasons I wrote about it because I was shocked by the notion that the more transparently silly … this is one of the more transparently silly of his books … and it's having huge success. … I feel bad about attacking a colleague's book. It's not a good thing to do, and I don't like doing it. But in truth I was not really attacking his book, and certainly not him. What I was tackling, I hoped, was the phenomenon of this strange – as I said, in the final paragraph, are we so shaken in our sense of ourselves that we go to books like this? Because that's no fault of McEwan's.

For months, I have harbored similar feelings about Tom Stoppard’s new play, LEOPOLDSTADT, which I caught up with on a trip to New York last year. I’ve been shocked and dismayed by the near universal praise, much of it from folks I respect, for a work which I found to be derivative and anxious to please. I haven’t written anything about it because Stoppard is a hero of mine - ARCADIA looms large in my pantheon of all-time greats, and there’s even a letter I wrote to Sir Tom in the official archives at the Harry Ransom Center. He is late in life, and it’s hard to know how many more plays we will get from him. So I step gently here with a respectful dissent.

In a recent NY Times profile, Stoppard offered the following:

Stoppard suggests, that the historical resonances of his play, scheduled to run through March, have only grown deeper and darker. “In a scene that takes place in 1955,” says the great playwright, perhaps our greatest, now 85 years old, “the young Englishman says to the Jewish man, ‘It can’t happen again.’ It’s almost a foolish remark now. Whereas when the play was being written, I didn’t think of it as being a foolish remark.”

Which is, in and of itself, a dismayingly foolish remark. (The notion that anti-Semitism retreats for periods of time is a beloved Gentile trope.) This, I think, speaks to Stoppard’s peculiarly British discomfort with his Jewishness, a kind of fastidious arm’s length thing - in short, the playwright doth protest too much. It’s a fastidiousness that is on display in Stoppard’s own notes for the play, in which he shares this exchange with a cousin: (Stoppard is asking the questions.)

“Sarka, were we Jewish?”
“What do you mean?”
I adjusted.
“I mean, how Jewish were we?”
“You were Jewish.”
“Yes, I know we were Jewish, my father’s family…”
“You were completely Jewish.”

There’s more to unpack in that anxious “How Jewish were we?” than is presented in all of LEOPOLDSTADT.

Stoppard has always been the smartest person in the room, opening new and challenging doors; it’s why I love him. This is first time he has felt like the overeager student pulling up the rear, late to the party, wanting to show off all he has learned: “Look! A scene in which an assimilated Jew is shocked to be treated with prejudice! Look! A scene set against Kristallnacht!”

LEOPOLDSTADT felt to me like a Rise of Nazism Greatest Hits montage, which I found to be both naïve and obvious — certainly the first time Stoppard can be accused of that. It’s not quite Holocaust Kitsch but it veers close. It is, in short, a play anyone could have written, replete with circumcision jokes. Whereas I would have loved to have seen the play that only Stoppard could have written, one that grappled with just “how Jewish” his family was in a meaningful way, ideas that are merely gestured toward in the play’s final section. (I suspect that the NY Times drama critic Jesse Green registered some of these shortcomings; if you read his review carefully, you can feel him holding something back, perhaps out of respect.)

In the end, Stoppard remains a touchstone for me, a source of near endless pleasure; and perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the literature of the Holocaust so that these kind of survey courses feel reductive to me. (To be fair, my girlfriend, who is not Jewish, found the play moving and illuminating.) Or perhaps I just have this weird, broken thing that causes me to be the perennial outlier in matters of taste. Either way, I think you’ll learn more that matters from Michael Frank’s ONE HUNDRED SATURDAYS or Omer Bartov’s THE BUTTERFLY AND THE AXE, both of which are more richly specific and personal than LEOPOLDSTADT.

What I’m Reading:

I had a pleasant time with Stephen Marche’s brief but bracing On Writing and Failure.

I’ve been enjoying Jeff Tweedy’s memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), which is not my usual fare but is useful research for my new novel in progress.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Wendy Richmond’s Art Without Compromise*, finding some useful nuggets.

I’ve been doing some re-reading as well. Spent several happy hours re-reading The English Patient; and I’m also re-reading my favorite Philip Roth novel Sabbath’s Theater in anticipation of Garth Greenwell’s forthcoming appreciation in the Yale Review.

And I’ve finally laid hands on a copy of Love and Let Die, John Higgs’s UK-centric look at the Beatles and James Bond, both of which entered the world on October 5, 1962. It’s rare I think “That’s a book I should have written,” but anyone who knows me will surely agree.

What I’m Working On:

I’m very excited to offer my second four day Writing Retreat at Asilomar, in partnership with To The Lighthouse.

If you’re looking for four days of quiet focused writing time with craft talks and meals delivered along a beautiful, windswept beach, jump in while you can. Registration closes March 5 and there are still a couple of spots left.

I’ll also be teaching my UCLA Extension Novel Master Class this year - it’s a 30 week intensive that is as close to the rigor of an MFA that you’re likely to come without taking out a student loan.

What Has My Attention:

To The Lighthouse is going to be hosting HOPE AND JOY: A Conversation with Douglas Abrams. Abrams has written with Jane Goodall, the Dalai Lama, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A much-needed corrective for these dark times, this live event will be simulcast via Zoom.

With all the time I’ve gotten back being off Twitter, I’ve been watching more movies and series of late, so I share a few capsule takes for those who care:

GLASS ONION: WAY too long, oh gosh. Two hours twenty for this kind of romp? I don't love the Knives Out conceit of the massive flashback in the middle unwinding all the withheld details of the first pass; I get a bit antsy and bored as I wait for the narrative to rejoin the present. Some lumbering moments, some genuine laughs. Leslie Odom is criminally wasted and the whodunnit aspect was wholly unsurprising. Mostly, I was left wondering how much they had to pay Apple Records to use the Beatles for the closing song ... Still, somehow, I found it more fun than THE MENU.

THE MENU: Sleekly mounted, brisk, occasionally witty yet vanishing from memory within 48 hours. Fiennes is terrific, as usual, and the whole thing trots along but there are gaping logic holes and the diners are caricatures of bad behavior, which makes the whole thing matter less. For some reason, it made me think back to THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER, a superior entertainment. TL;DR - We laughed, we forgot.

SLOW HORSES Season Two verdict: Lacked the taut narrative drive of season one. The "scheme" felt a bit fragmented and convoluted. But Oldman is absolutely wonderful - try watching Smiley after this! - you cannot take your eyes off him; and I appreciate the show's (and author's) willingness to kill major characters. The moments when things get personal are the best. (I should note that this series was based on a book I picked up after that glowing New Yorker profile and set aside after about seventy-five pages; Herron seems another writer more suited to the screen than the page. Like the Potter films, these skillful adaptations whack out the chaff of these bloated and tedious novels.)

JACK RYAN Season Three verdict: Lazy, incoherent; but worst all, takes the one interesting element of the Ryan series - Jack as regular guy and analyst with a life - and flattens it out of him, leaving a dull super puppet in his place.

Finally, I've watched the trailer for the STRAIGHT MAN adaptation and I admit I don't share everyone's delirious excitement over it. It's a book I really love, have read a bunch of times, and thought about deeply. And one of the most winning features of the book is how frankly likeable the narrator, Hank Deveraux, is throughout the whole thing. He's a smart ass, yes; and doesn't seem to take anything too seriously. The lightness of touch is one of the book's real pleasures. But he's not the miserable grumpus portrayed in the trailer. I don't know what it is about the current moment in Hollywood but there seems to be this feeling that angst and darkness have to be dialed all the way up to eleven or you're Just Not Serious. I find that kind of thing exhausting and easily turned away from. I will, of course, give it a try. But I'm not expecting a revelation.

That’s all for February; I do intend to get more disciplined and focused with these, so please bear with me as I keep finding my footing. Until next time, some wonderful words from Wendell Berry to see you on your way …

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.