(no subject)

[seekingferret]

An interesting thought on The Autograph Man that hadn't occurred to me originally. If someone playing the Jewish/Goyish game were to ask me about New York and London, I'd obviously say New York-Jewish and London-Goyish. No question, right? And it's not even London, it's a suburb of London, where the story is set, so you know, kal vachomer...

Yet Smith, who's spent her entire book playing the Jewish/Goyish game and surely can't have missed this, uses Kabbalistic motifs when her characters are in London and Zen motifs for New York. And before Alex heads into deep Brooklyn, the Jewish neighborhood where Kitty lives, they first visit her fanclub president in Chinatown. Smith seems to be going to a certain amount of trouble to make New York goyish and London jewish. And I think that's really worth delving deeper into.



Here's another thing I wrote for Purimgifts and didn't end up using. I'm a little frustrated with that, actually. I wrote a reasonably lengthy poem and then realized it wasn't really how I wanted to end Purimgifts, so I had to reject it. Though it inspired "Jamie and Every Shapiro in Washington Heights", which I think is a dramatically more interesting work.

With sincere apologies to The Nails, here's my song parody... As with the story I did post, its sole inspiration was me hearing "I've had Shabbos dinners on Friday night with every Shapiro in Washington Heights" and thinking "Damn, that's a lot of Shapiros." I know it's reductionist and probably therefore misogynistic- that's a significant part of why I didn't use it. But for what it is, I think it's kind of fun.



88 Lines About Every Shapiro in Washington Heights

Tirzah was the quiet type,
devoted to her kol ishah
Marnie was a modern girl
Who spent her time at the Drisha.

Gita was related to the
Famous deli owning clan
Shaindy was a Chasid,
in her view we just lived His plan.

Sorah Ruchel Chaya Leah
had another seven names
Judith kept me up at night
whispering her secret shames

Elaine was born a Catholic,
Got converted by the Gerer Rav
Hannah might've been Croatian
Or some other kind of Slav.

Lisa confessed to me
That she'd sometimes somnambulate
Yehudit nearly lost all hope,
Felt she'd turned old at twenty eight.

Miriam would only answer
If you called her Sweet Marie
Deborah clipped the coupons
Searching for the cheap and for the free.

Raizel waited for her husband
Finally to sign the get.
Sarah 2 loved Coney Island
But she hated getting wet.

Jody's father was a butcher,
She's a vegetarian.
Amy avoided temple service
Preferred it nonsectarian.

Sarah 3 hated being mistaken
For Sarah number 2
Ruthie's chicken soup was tops
When it came to fighting flu.

Erica had deep opinions
About Eastern philosophy
Shira made my Jewish mother
nudzh us to almost marry

Jessica felt compassion for
The pigeons and the brown squirrels
Janie liked to flirt a little
But she liked it more with girls.

I liked Rivka quite a lot
But she liked my roommate more
Amanda- our highest high
was goodnight kisses at her door.

Batya's greatest feature was
Her nondescript non-Jewish nose.
Sarah 4 made my heart skip
When she put on red pantyhose.

Shprintzl was a Yiddish punk
Steel pierced her lip, prayers pierced her soul.
Olga's still a communist
We met around the old May Pole.

Elana went to Brandeis but
She wished that she had gone to Stern
Joanna liked to light the candles
on Friday night and watch them burn.

Alice is so secular
She feels sometimes like she's a goy
Rina thinks that life is simple
All she does is search for joy.

Andy's from Long Island
But she's not like all those JAPs
Yocheved thinks that streimels are
superior to baseball caps

Rowena's from the Isle of Fiji
I didn't know they had Jews there.
Delilah made me feel like Samson
When she'd sneak in to cut my hair.

Cynthia lied to me when
She said her name was Shapiro
Talia's smile was small at first
I'd tell her jokes and watch it grow.

Michal's an Israeli girl
Our winters saw her sled with glee
Sarah 5 was city born
Thought Central Park the place to be.

Tova was from Jersey City
The bridge and tunnel her lifeline
Chana sought her own salvation
in schnappes and many cups of wine.

Esther had the brightest eyes
of anyone in all the land.
Anne was lovely, but something's missing
That I'll never understand.


Cathy is from Ohio
I can't wait to hold her hand.

Comments

[kindness_says]

I'm pretty sure Cathy's not actually from Ohio. But this did amuse me.

[schemingreader]

Clever to have Chana actually be a drunkard--very sly.

I don't think it's so weird to have a Cathy Shapiro from Ohio. I might have known one growing up.

[seekingferret]

Cathy's not a Shapiro! The idea of The Last 5 Years is that Jamie's a Metro New York Jew who begins a relationship with a goyish girl named Cathy Hyatt. And when he first enters into the relationship, the show has him sing a song called "Shiksa Goddess" about how the fact that she's not Jewish is partly what makes her attractive to him. "If you had a tattoo that wouldn't matter... as long as you're not from Hebrew school."

Anyway, as part of his description of his exhaustion with Jewish girls he lists a bunch of Jewish girls he's dated, including the line "I've had Shabbos dinners on Friday nights with every Shapiro in Washington Heights."

And yeah, mostly the names are random but there's a few places I couldn't resist throwing in little jokes.

[schemingreader]

Oh, see, this is fan fic for canon I didn't know. That explains a lot.

[schemingreader]

Also, even though I am quite annoyed by Five Equations That Changed the World, I've just ordered a copy of The Autograph Man from paperbackswap.com.

[seekingferret]

I'm not wholly surprised you were annoyed with Five Equations. It's a kind of peculiar book and I liked it for reasons that had to do with very specific interests of mine, and also because I had context on Guillen from another book of his that I've read. But why specifically were you annoyed?

[schemingreader]

I've only read the first chapter, and I was annoyed for two reasons.

1. I thought I was going to learn some math, and these are all physics equations. Not that I understand physics either, of course...

2. This is crummy history as history. His vision of the intellectual world as a Hegelian battle between religion and science is awfully simplistic. His summaries of major trends in Western intellectual life, like the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, made me distrust other pieces about which I knew much less.

But I do want to at least try to finish the book, because I need to have a better grasp of all these history of science topics.

[seekingferret]

Oh, this isn't actually a good source for the history. It's a great source for scientist RPF, though.

I liked the way he handled the physics, but then, I don't need to learn the Bernoulli Equation from a popular science book.

[schemingreader]

Well, it's good that it's a good source for the physics, because I do need to learn physics from popular science books! I never even took high school physics, and I have this kid who keeps asking me these really hard science questions. I'm thinking I should write an article about being a right-brain person with responsibility for doing math and science enrichment to a little left-brained guy.

Though perhaps all that brain lateralization stuff has been debunked. I wouldn't know since I'm not a scientist. Etc.

[seekingferret]

If your son has questions you can't answer, feel free to pass them along to me.

I know the feeling. My mom said to me in 6th grade "You've officially gone beyond me in mathematics. I will no longer be able to help you with math homework."

I'm not in neuroscience, but my understanding is that it's not so much that it's been debunked as that it's been complicated. There are certain known right brain or left brain functions, but they'll remap in the case of a brain injury, and not everyone's brain works the exact same way to begin with.

[seekingferret]

By the way, I should warn you that The Autograph Man uses the Tetragrammaton, so if you're at all like me, this may cause a problem for ownership of the book. I read it at the library, and I think I'm going to try to talk to someone there today about proper disposal of the book when it's worn out.

If you're not like me, this may also cause a problem with reading the book. I was able to overcome my discomfort with the use of the name, because I think Smith uses it very effectively and sensitively, but you might have a different comfort level.

[schemingreader]

Thank you for letting me know that! The last thing I need is a book that I'd have to geniza (that's not a sefer, I mean.) I canceled the order at the last minute and I'm going to get a copy from the library.

[anotherusedpage]

On London - New York Goyisch/Jewish:

London's Jewish history is certainly older than New York's.

And I suspect that some of the Jewish communities here are... hah, I'm having terible difficulty putting this into words. I don't know what New York's poorer Jewish communities look like, because you don't tend to see them in sticoms. But London's Stamford Hill, near where I grew up, is... unassimilated. Third generation kids who speak Yiddish as a first language. Completely unAnglicised. Even the frum I've come accross in America are... Americanised frum. Jewish-American. Golder's Green, the middle class Jewish area, is more assimilated, more like what I imagine American Jewish culture to be like. But Stamford Hill is... I am hesitating to use the word ghetto, but... it's certainly springing to mind.

I don't know how much of my perception is that I know New York best via media/culture. But I have a sense that there's not a London culture that's visibly Jewish because the strongest Jewish culture in London isn't London Jewish, it's just... Jewish.

And then, despite being London Jewish, and having grown up round the corner, I don't know Stamford Hill that well at all. I spend most of my time in London being the only Jew in the room; but then I'm strongly and deliberately on my parents part assimilated; I don't spend my time in Jewish communities.

Anyway. Thankyou, interesting thoughts.

Do you think someone who doesn't get on with Ulysseys would get on with Autograph Man? I've read Ulysseys, and I appreciate it, but I don't enjoy it or love it...

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I've never been to London, but my sister spent a semester there and I have a few Jewish friends from London. I know that there are Jews in the city, but that's not the same as the city being Jewish in the Lenny Bruce sense.

There are certainly a lot of unAmericanized frum Jews in Brooklyn and in a few NYC suburbs, notably New Square.

The notion I have of London as goyish and New York as Jewish is based on my perception that New York's Jewish culture has rubbed off on the rest of the city in a way it doesn't seem to me that it has at least in London's pop cultural representations. There are specifically Jewish neighborhoods in New York- Washington Heights, Borough Park, Williamsburg, etc... But there's also a generic sense that this city is Jewish, that everybody has had a little bit of Jew rub off on them. Bagels are seen sort of as a New York food instead of as a Jewish food, to give a crude example.


There are a lot of nods to Ulysses in the novel, and I think it provides a useful lens to comprehend The Autograph Man, but the book is not at all actually like Ulysses stylistically. I can't say for certain you'll like it, because I don't think I have a good sense of you as a reader, but I think there is a lot of amazing stuff in the book.

[anotherusedpage]

*grin* I was asking mostly cos your first Joycean-frothy review put me off somewhat.

Making me think about the distinction of a Jewish city, and a city where it's easy to be an unassimilated Jew, and the fact that they are not the same thing at all. A city where it's easy to feel Jewish is not the same thing as a city which feels Jewish...

[seekingferret]

Yes, absolutely. Though there's something about the way you construct 'unassimilated Jew' that kind of bothers me. I'm not sure that being a city where it's easy to be an unassimilated Jew is necessarily a virtue for a city, and I definitely think there's a big difference between a city where it's easy to be an unassimilated Jew and a city where it's easy to feel Jewish, which you seem to be conflating.

There's a temptation to understand 'unassimilated Jews' as somehow purer and more Jewish, and believe me I understand that feeling, but I think it's wrong and I think it can be very non-Jewish. It helps me to remember that Yiddish is a derivative of German and it's not a marker of nonassimilation so much as a marker of an earlier assimilatory experience.

[anotherusedpage]

*nod* it bothers me too... I'm aware that it's not necessarily a virtue either for the Jews who achieve it or the city which allows them.

Another story: I have a friend I've known since I was very little. People always assumed we were sisters when we were younger, we have matching frizzy hair. And her family are church-of-england christian athiest with a side order of scientologist, and she had a family story about being able to trace the family in London back to Cromwell's time.

And then she got interested in family history, and started looking at the records, and turned out they were Sephardi Jews. Birth and death records in London parishes going back to the 1600s. A couple of generations marrying in churches in the 1700s, and then records of adult circumcision and back to marrying in synagogues for a while, when the borders were opened again, before marrying back into Christianity a second time in the 1800s.

My college had a Jewish cemetery from the 1200s under its chapel. Not London, but... I dunno. It's very easy I think to think about Jews as being people who arrive somewhere. But her family have been Londoners for four hundred years or so.

And yeah, I'm also really aware of 'length of history' as a fallacy.

I dunno. I just... I guess I love my city. *grin*.

[seekingferret]

That makes me think of this conversation, somehow. Not really sure the connection, just I suppose 'length of history' as a fallacy. New York has a Jewish history that goes back to the 1600s, but it's very hard to feel that history because it got overwhelmed by the twin migrations of German Jews and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s and early 1900s.