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Category Archives: self-promotion
Cutting Across Lines: Teaching Holocaust Literature in Arkansas
Posted on November 2, 2021 by banff1972 under Holocaust, judaism, personal, self-promotion, teaching, Uncategorized
My personal essay on teaching Holocaust literature in the South has appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Oxford American.
Regular readers of this blog know how much I love Ruth Kluger's memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In the essay, I begin by describing how differently Kluger's shocked response to segregation in 1950s Texas registered for me once I started teaching her work in a classroom filled with students from Texas and across the South.
Vienna, 1938
"Cutting across Lines," as the essay is titled, is about belonging. I consider three times and places that have shaped me–the Canada of my childhood, the Eastern and Central Europe before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust, and the South today. I reflect on how each of these worlds shapes my understanding of the others. I worked hard on the essay, helped by stellar editing from the folks at the OA and my wife, who helped me see what the essay was really about.
You can read it here, but I encourage you to subscribe to support this valuable magazine.
Gordon Parks' "Department Store, Mobile, Alabama" (1956). Credit for all images must say: Photograph by Gordon Parks, Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation, Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
What I Read, April 2021
Posted on May 8, 2021 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, self-promotion, Uncategorized
April in Arkansas, azaleas in blossom, reading at the table under the trees. April in Arkansas: this is a feeling no one can reprise. Even though I'm making no progress on this book project, I wrote a lot last month, including essays on teaching the Holocaust and on a favourite book of mine that I once considered a secret. I wrote some other things that might come to anything, but I found the process useful and I also got a small piece of good news. I bumbled along, in other words. Here's what I read.
Héctor Abad, The Farm (2014) Trans. Anne McLean (2018)
Three siblings take turns telling this story, which centers on La Oculta, a farm in the mountains of Columbia that has been in their family's hands for generations. Pilar has kept the place going, even as she's also worked alongside her mother in the family bakery; she has lived the life closest to the older generations, bearing children, married to her teenage sweetheart, a woman both capable and strong, good at everything from cooking to embalming. Eva has forged her own path, building a career, surviving various marriages and love affairs, becoming a single parent later in life. Antonio has escaped to New York, where he has made his way as a musician and settled down with a good man, yet despite, or because, of that distance he is the most drawn to the farm, making annual visits and taking on the task of unraveling the family history.
In alternating chapters, the siblings tell us about their pasts, their beliefs, their relationships to others. Put together, their narratives allow us to consider the competing forces of inheritance and invention. How much of who we are comes from the people and ways of life that came before us, and how much do we generate for ourselves? The novel delights in showing continuity—but it soars when depicting rupture. Even if the farm originated in a utopian attempt to generate community, Columbia's violent past regularly interrupts daily life. This intrusion is most vividly evident in Eva's memory of narrowly escaping a rebel attack on the homestead. (Terrific set piece.) Abad is a marvelous writer, and McLean a marvelous translator. I sunk into this sprawling novel—the beauty of the Archipelago edition adding extra sensory pleasure to the experience—and was sad when it ended.
Vanessa Springora, Consent (2020) Trans. Natasha Lehrer (2021)
Powerful memoir about the abusive sexual relationship between Springora and a famous writer whom she calls G. M. but is widely known to be Gabriel Matzneff. (Apparently, he was a big deal in the French literary scene; I'd never heard of him.) His identity as a "lover" of children was widely known too, at least among French artistic and political elites. These overlap much more than I, as a North American, would have expected; Matzneff had a letter in his wallet from Mitterand, lauding his artistic daring; he seems to have thought of it as a get out of jail card, except nobody ever put him in jail.
Matzneff's career—he published several novels, all autobiographical, many overtly about pedophilia, as well as regular installments of his diaries—was built on the suffering of children and adolescents. Signora was one of many boys and girls he slept with, both in France and on sex tours in Asia; he was quite open about all of this. Springora met Matzneff in 1986, when she was 14. He seduced her intellectually, emotionally, and sexually; they were together for two years; the relationship damaged her badly, could, in some senses, have been said to have destroyed her life. This memoir proves it didn't—but shows the cost. In fact, it was not until Springora realized that the way to get justice for herself was to speak in the only language that could touch Matzneff—that of writing itself—that she found any relief from her trauma. As she puts it, in a formulation comprising the grace and irony of classic French intellectual style, "Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?"
In so doing, she has had some effect, not only on Matzneff (he remains unrepentant, but the government took away a sinecure and his publisher dropped him) but on France more generally, where the book has been a best-seller and led people to acknowledge the ills that can be cloaked the mantle of freedom. In this regard, France's so-called intellectual elite have a lot to answer for. The mantra of the 68ers, "it is forbidden to forbid," was used by Matzneff to present child abuse as liberation, care, even love. A real who's-who of the literary and philosophical scene signed open letters in support of these ideas back in the 70s. (Interesting that Foucault refused. Sad that Barthes did not.)
Consent, Springora observes, is an ambivalent term, sometimes signifying volition but often connoting something less than full agreement. After all, consent can be given on behalf of others, especially minors. Ultimately, consent is a mirage, a fig-leaf allowing those with cultural and literal capital to sweep away the reality of power imbalances. Consent is a sobering read, valuable for its indictment of the world that looked on while its writer suffered—from leering teachers to her overwhelmed and willfully blind parents. Its tone is uneven, sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes abstract, sometimes lyrical, but Springora doesn't pretend to be a literary artist. That's what she wanted to be, before Matzneff dispossessed her of her own words, not least by training her to write in a style he deemed timeless and elevated. (They sent each other hundreds of letters; he later published some of hers without permission.) To even consider Springora's style feels fraught: to critique it is to risk playing the same game as her abuser (and his enablers), who argued that artistic beauty, passion, and fearlessness mattered above all. Yet it's also important to advocate for style without thereby agreeing that its value trumps anything else.
Consent ends with a brief, illuminating afterword by translator Lehrer; I wish more books let us hear from the translator.
Flynn Berry, Under the Harrow (2016)
First of the three psychological thrillers by Berry I devoured this month. Under the Harrow is a fine debut; its tricksy narration makes it the most Highsmithian of her books. Berry's prose is plain but not flat. Here the narrator looks out the window of a train:
Land streams by the window. Sheep arranged on the stony flank of a hill. The troubling clouds surging behind it. A firehouse with a man doing exercises in its yard. He pulls himself above a bar, lowers himself, vanishes.
The disembodied man, swallowed up by movement and perspective, is a suitably unsettling touch, offering a glimpse of what's to come: the world the narrator thinks she knows is about to become similarly unmoored.
Guzel Yakhina, Zuleikha (2015) Trans. Lisa C. Hayden (2019)
My second Hayden translation in as many months; again, I read this as part of a Twitter reading group, and, again, I was glad I did. Zuleikha is a page-turner that comes at its historical events—the dekulakization of the peasantry under Stalin and the creation of the Gulag system—from what, I believe, is an unusual perspective. The heroine, who lends her name to the title, is a Tatar, a culture I knew basically nothing about; when I think of the famines of the late 1920s and early 30s, I think primarily of Ukraine, not Soviet Tatarstan. And since that culture is shown to be harshly patriarchal, Zuleikha is an even more intriguing, marginalized character. Too bad that the novel seems to find no way for Zuleikha to leave behind her status as "pitiful hen" and become as strong and independent as she does other than to abandon her Tatar identity.
Zuleikha is engrossing historical fiction that is never quite predictable. For example, it is more interested in relationships between mothers and children than between men and women. Its descriptions of the landscape are loving and evocative. Its plot is both eventful and uneventful: much of the action centers on how to survive—how to cut trees when your tools are bad; what to grow in a northern climate; how to hunt and gather on the land; even, in the days before exile, how to prepare the bathhouse for a steam session—but those everyday tasks take place against a backdrop where terrible events always threaten to intrude. In the end, I thought the "band of misfits pitches together against all odds" aspect of the story of the settlement was a bit cute. (Even though I still loved it.) And Yakhina's use of focalization didn't always work. We are mostly in close third person (present tense, natch, ugh), but that sometimes becomes implausible when Yakhina needs to tell us stuff that her heroine might not need or care to think about. Here she is in prison in Kazan, before being transported to Siberia:
The Tatar language is even constructed so you could live your whole life without once saying "I." No matter what tense you use to speak about yourself, the verb will go in the necessary form and the ending will change, making the use of that vain little word superfluous. It's not like that in Russian, where everybody goes out of their way to put in "I" and "me" and then "I" again.
There might be a point here about the role of the individual in resisting a collective system. Or maybe a critique of the project of Russianizing the Soviet Union's plurality. Mostly though this moment is clunky. But I hope Yakhina's second novel is translated soon. Hayden, who again generously offered her expertise to the Twitter group, would be the obvious choice to take on the project. Are you listening, Oneworld?
Henia Karmel and Ilona Karmel, A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond Introduction and Adaptations by Fanny Howe Trans. Arie A. Galles and Warren Niesłuchowski (2007)
More about the Karmel sisters and their poetry here.
Flynn Berry, A Double Life (2018)
Berry's take on the Lord Lucan case. Creepy and satisfying. Berry's best, IMO.
Anna Goldenberg, I Belong to Vienna (2018) Trans. Alta L. Price (2020)
Another third generation Holocaust memoir. The difference here is that Goldenberg's grandparents, after a short postwar dalliance in upstate New York, returned to Vienna, where their children and grandchildren still live. When Goldenberg herself moves to New York to study for an MA, people, other Jews mostly, ask her in appalled fascination: How can you [i.e., Jews] live there [i.e., among the killers]? Which prompts Goldenberg to speculate—not as interestingly as I'd have hoped—on what it means to belong, both to family and to place.
The other noteworthy thing about the story is that the most interesting person in it isn't technically even in the family. When Goldenberg's then 17-year-old grandfather, Hansi, received his deportation papers he ripped off his star, hopped on the streetcar, and made his way to a close friend, the pediatrician Josef Feldner. (Hansi had his parents' blessing: they rightly suspected his chances were better in hiding. Indeed, he never saw them again.) Feldner, a Catholic child psychologist, was a remarkable man. He kept Hansi safe for the rest of the war, and prompted the previously mediocre student into his future medical career by taking the boy with him to see his patients, which he treated in a gentle, humane, and courteous manner that would be rare today, to say nothing of then. Pepi, as Goldenberg's grandfather came to call him, eventually adopted Hansi. For the rest of his life the two men were inseparable: even after Hansi married Goldenberg's grandmother, herself a doctor, the two ate breakfast together every morning (Pepi lived downstairs) and took vacations together. In the original German the book is called Versteckte Jahre: Der Mann, der meinen Großvater rettet (Hidden Years: The Man who Saved my Grandfather), which rightly captures its emphasis. Anyway, while I don't regret reading this book, I note that until I sat down to write this review I'd forgotten all about it.
Flynn Berry, Northern Spy (2021)
The wider political backdrop of the novel—set in Northern Ireland at an unspecified time that seems like it could be just before the Good Friday agreement, but which also can't be (technology doesn't match up, for example)—gives Berry's new novel extra heft. Impressively, she does this without any bloat. I just love how short her books are. She's such an efficient writer.
In Northern Spy—turns out this is also a kind of apple, fitting for a book which shows the domestic and the political to be so entwined—Tessa, a BBC producer just back from maternity leave, is shocked when she sees her sister in footage from the latest IRA attack (a gas station hold up). She's floored by this revelation, of course, but things prove to be even more complicated. Before long, Tessa is volunteering to infiltrate the IRA. In a tense interrogation, she is asked by the man she will report to why she wants to become an IRA informer. Tessa experiences no cognitive dissonance in the moment:
This isn't so difficult. I'm a woman, after all, so I've had a lifetime of practice guessing what a man wants me to say, or be.
Berry's smart and engrossing thrillers are among my favourite discoveries of the year.
Robin Stevens, Murder is Bad Manners (UK title: Murder Most Unladylike) (2014)
British boarding school crime fiction written for middle-grade readers but with wide appeal. I bought this for my daughter a few years ago when I read about it in the TLS (their irregular children's column is excellent; I hope the new editor won't get rid of it). Something made her pull it off the shelf last month and she immediately got stuck into it. Then she raced through the other four titles available in the US. While we waited for the others to arrive from the UK we decided to read them together, aloud. And they are a delight: suspenseful in themselves, though not too scary (even as they are thoughtful about the toll that even playacting as a detective could take) but with plenty of nods to Golden Age sleuthing that older readers are likely to enjoy. Set in the 1930s at a school called Deepdean, the books are narrated by Hazel Wong, who at the time of the first volume is newly arrived in England from her home in Hong Kong. Hazel plays Watson to Daisy Wells, the book's beautiful, brainy, incorrigible Sherlock and self-appointed President of the Wells & Wong Detective Society.
After earning their stripes in dull but useful cases like The Case of Lavinia's Missing Tie (Clementine took it in revenge for Lavinia hitting her during lacrosse practice, after Clementine said Lavinia came from a Broken Home), the girls take on a crime of a much greater magnitude when Hazel stumbles on the dead body of a teacher—a body that disappears in the time it takes her to find help. The headmistress thinks nothing is amiss because she finds a resignation letter from the teacher on her desk the next morning. But Wells & Wong know better. And things soon get pretty hairy. Will they solve the case before the killer strikes again?
Hazel is much smarter than Watson and Daisy less unerring than Sherlock. Which makes the books often funny, but also moving, especially in their depiction of a friendship between a popular girl who seems to have everything together and a shy one who seems to be a bit hopeless. Each needs the other—for me, the books are about shared vulnerability—and I'm looking forward to seeing how Stevens develops their story.
Ruth Rendell, One Across, Two Down (1971)
Someone on Twitter put this on their highlights of 2020 list—please remind me who you are—and I was intrigued enough to check out a copy from the library. At which point it sat around the bedroom for months until, at a time when I was supposed to be reading something else, I realized I absolutely could not live another minute without taking it up. And I was glad I did: it's an impressive book.
Vera lives with her layabout husband, Stanley, and nagging mother, Maud. Stanley and Maud hate each other and make poor Vera's life even worse with their endless arguments. But when Stanley learns that Maud has socked away a lot of money and plans to leave it all to Vera, he swaps her stroke medication with saccharine pills, just to see if he can hurry the process along. Pretty soon, though, events escalate, in ways he never expected. Although technically not responsible for the old woman's death—I won't give away the details here—in all the ways that count he's absolutely responsible. Most of the novel is about how he gets found out. Stanley's awful; spending time with him is not pleasant. But Vera gets a surprisingly happy ending, so the book isn't entirely grim. Along the way, Rendell asks us to think about what draws readers to crime fiction. Is it any different from the many seemingly harmless but ultimately consuming obsessions—like the crossword puzzles Stanley wants not only to solve but to set—that litter the book? Lots going on here, in unfussy but quality prose. If One Across, Two Down is anything to go by, early Rendell is the real deal.
Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate (2019)
Standalone novella in the Wayfarers series, which I have not read but definitely will, as soon as my library holds come in. Recommended to me by a brilliant former student now in graduate school who has just taken a course on science fiction. Someone online described Chambers's books as sf cozies, which makes sense to me. Some might take this as criticism, and maybe that's how it was meant, but what I liked most about To Be Taught, If Fortunate is its fundamental kindness. This is a book fascinated by otherness and worried about how vulnerable it is to even well-intentioned encounters.
In 2045, four astronauts are sent to explore the life forms—some quite minimal, all hard for us to fathom, all valuable in their own right—on the moons of a distant planet. At some point in their exploration—and because of the distances involved, time is passing much more slowly for them than it is back home: taking on the mission means that none of them will see their families again—they realize that they aren't getting messages from earth anymore. A companion mission, sent elsewhere in the galaxy, confirms that they too have lost contact. Should they try to return to what might be a destroyed home, or continue on, knowing that once they do there's no going back?
The descriptions of the alien lifeforms are fantastic. I really thought this was a wise book. The only sour note is a coda referencing the title. The phrase comes from a welcome speech made by then-UN Secretary Kurt Waldheim and placed on board the Voyager spacecraft. If you're going to mention Waldheim in a book about respecting difference, you should mention his Nazi past.
Jacqueline Winspear, The Consequences of Fear (2021)
I have to stop reading these. The circle of recurring characters has become so wide that keeping up with them means the crimes (never Winspear's strength, or, to be fair, interest) are solved much too offhandedly. For whatever reason, the thing about the series that first drew me to it—its investigation of responsibility—just irritated me this time. I could see what Winspear was doing with the concept of fear—asking whether our duty to a nation is enough to make us repress our feelings; wondering if personal responsibilities outweigh political demands—but I couldn't bring myself to care. Maybe because I saw the novel's depiction of WWII as the product of philosophical liberalism, which I was feeling frustrated by because I was just coming to end of reading…
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, revised 1958)
I spent a lot of time this month with Arendt's quasi-history, quasi-philosophy of totalitarianism. It's long and hard. I was sometimes frustrated by Arendt—she's from a different philosophical tradition than the one I was trained in; she's completely uninterested in psychology, which is baffling to me; our thinking isn't the most sympatico—but I was often amazed. In the end, this was such a rewarding reading experience.
Which I would not have had if I hadn't signed up for a course offered through the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research, taught by Samantha Rose Hill, who teaches at several schools in the New York area, runs a center for Arendt Studies at Bard, and has a book about Arendt coming out this summer. (Her recent Five Books interview on Arendt is exemplary.) The ideal teacher, in other words, and she taught us a lot. I enjoyed being in a class again, although I noted that some of the same anxieties that plagued me in college and graduate school resurfaced. I still fear the things I have to say are beside the point and unhelpful—but I'm not as shy anymore and say them anyway.
But what's important here are the ideas, not my reading experience. In nearly 500 small-font pages, Arendt unfolds a sweeping argument about the connection between antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism.
Alas, I don't fully understand Arendt's take on antisemitism. I had to miss most of the class in which we discussed this—fittingly (?) to run a Holocaust memorial program—and I haven't finished the section. But a key idea is that, counterintuitively, Jews thrived in Europe as long as nations did. (Well, thrived, I don't know about that, and the Jews Arendt talks about comprised a thin stratum of rich, Western European Jews. Of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement, i.e., almost all European Jews, she has little to say: Arendt was always what the Israelis call a Yekke.) The cosmopolitanism of Jews, so often held against them, and forced upon them by the fate of their diaspora, paradoxically enabled them to flourish as bankers to nation states. But when nations were replaced with Empires, specifically in the 19th Century, that relationship failed. Jews were then taken to have privilege tethered to neither role nor responsibility, earning them even greater enmity. They were left to become either parvenu (upstarts who try to fit in everywhere) or pariahs (those defiant rejects who don't fit in anywhere). Arendt is sympathetic but disdainful to the parvenu, and fascinated by the pariah.
Both positions are responses to statelessness, an affliction that Jews especially in the 1930s but that others too throughout the 20th century experienced as the nation state came under crisis. Moreover, as Jews had been granted equality over the course of the 19th century, they proved that otherness persisted despite putative equality. (They were equal under the law but they maintained their traditions and beliefs.) Because the nation state—government by consent—is predicated on homogeneity, it responds poorly to pluralism. As pluralism increased in the 19th century, nations responded by looking beyond their borders. The result is modern imperialism, which is not the integrated pluralism of Rome but a fractious destabilized agglomeration that eventually turns on itself.
Modern imperialism mostly took place overseas (Africa, the Middle East.) It occurred as a combined political and economic crisis. After centuries of increasing economic power, the bourgeoisie finally wanted political power as well. In a brilliant reading, Arendt says that the bourgeoisie found its philosophical underpinning in the ideas of Hobbes (or, put differently, that Hobbes had prophesized the bourgeoisie). In Hobbes's "war of all against all" the only possible "philosophy" is individual growth, resulting eventually in tyranny. The bourgeois worldview is fundamentally destructive, because fundamentally acquisitive. It believes only in endless growth: more has to become more. (Sound familiar?) Overseas imperialism allowed this antihumanist thinking to flourish, at least temporarily, and at the cost of great suffering and destruction to the local or "native" people. (Which Arendt is frankly pretty uninterested in.) The imperialist encounter with non-European others led to the development of racism from what had previously been race thinking. That is, individual instances of prejudice became turned into an ideology. Race became weaponized by the state as a form of violence. (Racism is totalized race thinking.) As an ideology, racism must be understood as necessary/inevitable, not like race thinking, which was the result of individual instances of prejudice, bias, or domination.
When the domination of racism combined with the inherently metastatic avarice of imperialist capitalism, an inherently unstable contradiction arose. (We think the world is infinite, but its resources are finite—we live every day the dawning realization of that contradiction—this is the kind of instability Arendt has in mind.) Eventually the instability of racist imperialism, which had been a kind of safety valve for the European nation (now Empire), bounced back, such that the tactics of violence, oppression, and power previously used overseas were perpetrated on civilians in the homeland. (The power of police and paramilitary forces rose greatly in this period.) Unlike nations, empires are no longer organized around classes—that structure collapses, and along with it the primary way we have developed of organizing people so that individuals feel they belong and find meaning. The loss of this meaning is, Arendt warns, very bad. With it the distinction between public and private life that is the foundation of freedom vanishes. Those realms are replaced by what Arendt calls "the social," which is an atomized levelling: no more classes, only masses. The masses are desperate to regain the meaningful experience they have been cut off from. Enter totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes work on people who have no meaning. Totalitarianism—the governmental form of imperialism—is what happens when expansionism takes political form. The belief in endless growth, avarice, accumulation is turned to conquering and subordinating every subject of the regime.
As far as Arendt is concerned, from her vantage point in the 1950s, there have only ever been two totalitarian regimes: Nazi Germany (from its inception, perhaps, but certainly from 1935 – 45) and Stalinist Russia (from about 1930 to Stalin's death). Totalitarianism is not, for her, a synonym for autocracy, tyranny, or even dictatorship. Totalitarian regimes are barely regimes at all: they are movements. Neither nation nor empire is their real focus. Instead they focus on the party. Nazism and Stalinist Communism are at stake, not the Reich or the USSR. When a totalitarianism movement comes to power, they do everything they can to change reality. The ideologies animating totalitarian movements are about what will be, not what is. Totalitarian movements promise a future but they are not in fact interested in attaining it. Or, rather, their philosophy of aggression and accumulation, their inexorable drive to dominate, means that they cannot in fact countenance any final or complete end.
An important consequence of this mindset is that the enemies of the movement are never final. Strikingly, Arendt argues that the Jews, although the primary victims of the way Nazism played out, were not the Nazis' sole or even primary enemy. It's true that, historically, Jews were not the first victims: those were communists and socialists and, importantly, the mentally and physically disabled: the latter was the first group singled out for being killed tout court. The refusal of ordinary citizens to accept this state of affairs meant that the party delayed the plan, but they never shelved it. And there were definite plans to exterminate what the Nazis called "the Slavs" after they conquered Russia and finished with the Jews. (A genocide they began in Poland in 1940.) Arendt also points to memoranda and bits in Mein Kampf where bureaucrats and Hitler muse about eliminating people with various incurable illnesses, or even predilections toward them, like cancer. Arendt's point is that regardless of what the Party says publicly there will always be more victims. It is in the nature of totalitarianism to find them.
In doing so, totalitarianism relies on a belief in secret meanings. That is how it begins to change reality. What you see is not the real truth of things. (To use one of Samantha's examples—you think you see a pizza place in DC but really you see a front for child sexual exploitation; how much Arendt's diagnoses pertain to the US today exercised the class a lot, but that's a different topic.) Totalitarianism forces its adherents, and everyone who lives under it, to affirm the false. Experience, under totalitarianism, only affirms ideology. It has no meaning in itself. The result: thinking is replaced by thought (the already known, the prepackaged, the tidy explanations of ideology). For Arendt, that is one of the worst things that can happen to human beings. (Note, by the way, that those who wield thought can be smart, and they're not cynical either (which is terrifying, IMO). But they are incapable of thinking. Which, it seems to me, means that for Arendt they are barely human.
It's all fascinating, and quite compelling. For me, Arendt fails to consider how power creates as much as represses. (She is not Foucault). That is, she fails to account for the meaning people find in even hateful or oppressive thinking. She also ignores the effort totalitarian movements put into creating a community of believers. (There's nothing in her book about, say, the Hitler Youth or the Bund deutscher Mädel or the Kraft durch Freude vacations or any of the myriad ways Nazism, to take only the example I know best, created the Volksgemeinschaft (the community of the people).
Plus, Arendt's understanding of the camp system comes too much from the model of Buchenwald (and to some extent Auschwitz). No surprise, given her background and sources, and the reality of what she was able to read in the late 40s and early 50s. And her knowledge is impressively nuanced for the time. But she is led astray, in my opinion, by relying so heavily on the work of David Rousset, whose fascinating book about his time in Buchenwald I want someone to reissue in English ASAP, but whose experience as a communist prisoner in that particular camp (there was strong communist leadership, even a kind of resistance movement, in Buchenwald) is anomalous in comparison to the general KZ experience.
Anyway, as Samantha put it, Arendt asks key questions. Is there a way of thinking that's not tyrannical? How can we protect spaces of freedom? How can we live under something other than imperialism or totalitarianism? These remain resonant, indeed urgent. The Origins of Totalitarianism gave me so much to think about; I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to read it closely.
Charles Portis, True Grit (1968)
I wanted to spend my birthday with some good light reading, so I chose three possible contenders from my massive TBR pile and put up a Twitter poll to help me decide where to start. Portis's novel about a teenager avenging her father's death in Reconstruction-era Arkansas and the Indian Territory of Oklahoma won by a landslide. And the people knew what they were talking about! True Grit is a delight, often laugh-out-loud funny. I would have loved it even more had I not seen the movie (the Coen Brothers version), as some of the best jokes and the plot came back to me as I read. But the film can only approximate the novel's primary pleasure: Portis's masterful use of voice, evident in both Mattie's narration and the characters' conversations. (This is not a Western about strong, silent types: nobody ever shuts up.) An added pleasure was reading about Arkansas locations (and types) I know; I noticed that some of the bit characters even had last names I recognized from living and teaching here.
I suspect that a second reading—which the novel definitely merits—would give me a lot more to think about. But even on a relaxed first reading I recognized that much of what makes the book so interesting comes from the difference between the time of the telling and the time of the events. Mattie is fourteen when she sets out to find Frank Chaney, but an old woman when she tells us about it. In part it explains, or makes us wonder about, Mattie's engaging but puzzling mixture of naivete and pursed-lipped moral certainty. Is that the difference between the girl and the old woman, or did she always combine these contrary aspects? The disparity between past and present is especially evident in a final scene at a traveling fair in 1920s Memphis: the "wild west" of the novel's main action has become fully commodified. But was it ever any different? After all, the novel's many crimes are prompted by money, even if they hide under the veil of honour. Too many guns, too much economic inequality: in this sense, True Grit still rings painfully true.
Let me quote a couple of choice bits, just because.
Here's Rooster Cogburn, the one-eyed US Marshall Mattie hires to help her find Chaney, complaining about paperwork:
If you don't have no schooling you are up against it in this country, sis. That is the way of it. No sir, that man has no chance any more. No matter if he has got sand in his craw, others will push him aside, little thin fellows that have won spelling bees back home. [Little thin fellows! Much funnier than "thin little fellows."]
Here's Rooster, on first meeting a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is also on Chaney's trail of, learning that there's a bounty out on the man because he's also shot a Texas senator:
"Anyhow, it sounds queer. Five hundred dollars is mighty little for a man that killed a senator."
"Bibbs was a little senator," said LaBoeuf. "They would not have put up anything except it would look bad."
And here's Rooster telling about the time he ran an eating place called The Green Frog, but had to give it up after his wife left him:
"I tried to run it myself for a while but I couldn't keep good help and I never did learn how to buy meat. I didn't know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees."
Fighting bees. Perfect. Reading True Grit is the opposite of fighting bees. Easy, full of sweet and honey.
So that was a pretty damn good month. Arendt: titanic. Abad: deeply satisfying. Portis: such fun. Rendell and Berry: old and new masters of suspense. The Karmel sisters: what have you done to my heart?
On Alistair MacLeod's "To Everything There is a Season"
Posted on December 22, 2019 by banff1972 under book review, judaism, personal, self-promotion, Uncategorized
For the holiday edition of A Personal Anthology, I wrote what turned into a mini-personal essay sparked by a great Canadian Christmas story.
Strangers in their Own Land: Jewish Self-Awareness in Holocaust Memoirs.
Posted on December 13, 2019 by banff1972 under academic work, Holocaust, judaism, personal, self-promotion, teaching, Uncategorized
Earlier this semester, I presented for the third time at the annual Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference. In addition to giving the keynote talk ("Holocaust 101"), I also taught a session (basically, a class). The conference has an unusual format and remit. It is designed for high school students, their teachers, and interested community members. In a single busy day, participants hear two plenaries plus a presentation from a Holocaust survivor, and attend two breakout sessions from a selection of about six or seven.
I love being able to teach such a wide range of ages and experiences: a typical session will include as many retirees as 15-year-olds. The unusual format comes with its own challenges, of course: keeping the students from feeling intimidated by the adults; making sure the older participants really listen to the younger ones. By making participants work together to close read something, I seek to put everyone on the same footing and build a sense of community.
My session this year was called "Strangers in their Own Land: Jewish Self-Awareness in Holocaust Memoirs." As I'd like eventually to turn it into a more formal piece of writing, I thought I'd transcribe my lesson plan here.
Ruth Kluger
The handout that we used for our exercise was headed by two quotations; together, they offer a condensed version of what I was hoping the participants would learn:
I had found out, for myself and by myself, how things stood between us and the Nazis and had paid for knowledge with the coin of pain.
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
At first glance, Kluger—the Viennese-born survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Christianstadt, and a death march—and Du Bois—the legendary African American sociologist and writer—might seem an unusual pairing. I argued that, on the contrary, they share the same way of thinking about the vicissitudes of being a member of a persecuted minority. For persecuted minorities, to know is to hurt, to exist is to be a problem.
I began by explaining my title, which I adapted from an anecdote in Kluger's brilliant memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In 1937—Kluger was about to turn six—her family summered in Italy. They had a car, rather unusual for the time, especially in Italy. Driving through the rural South, they pass another car with Austrian plates. The tourists wave to each other. Kluger is taken by the experience. She thinks, We wouldn't have done that at home; we don't even know each other. Writing many years later, she reflects:
I was enchanted by the discovery that strangers in a strange land greet each other because they are compatriots.
But this comforting nationalism, in which strangers become acquaintances by virtue of calling the same place home, would soon prove false and alienating. Kluger learned, along with the rest of Europe's Jews, that being Jewish trumped being Austrian (or German or Polish or French or whatever). On her prewar holiday, Kluger enjoyed the experience of being a stranger in a strange land; just a year later, after the Anschluss, Kluger became a stranger in her own land.
To realize you are not at home in your home is shattering. The experience is powerfully ambivalent one, at once harmful and helpful.
To show how that might be the case, I referenced three Holocaust survivors: Kluger, Nechama Tec (born in Lublin in 1931 and hidden together with her family in a series of safe houses across Poland), and Sarah Kofman (born in Paris in 1934 to parents who had emigrated from Poland and who survived in hiding with a family friend she learned to call Mémé). Interestingly, all of these women later became academics: Kluger a professor of German, Tec of sociology, Kofman of philosophy.
(I'll skip the potted bios, but I'm happy to say more in the comments if you're interested.)
That brief orientation over, I divided the class into three and assigned each group one of the following passages, which we first read aloud together:
I found a small opening in the wall from which, unobserved, I could watch the girls at play. To me they seemed so content, so carefree, and I envied them their fun. Did they know that a war was on? At times, as I watched them, I too became engrossed in their games and almost forgot about the war. But the bell that called them back to class called me back to reality, and at such moments I became acutely aware of my loneliness. These small excursions made me feel, in the end, more miserable than ever. The girls in the boarding school were so near and yet so far. The wall that separated us was thick indeed, and eventually I could not bear to go near it.
—Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982/84)
(Before we read, I explained the context. The scene takes place in 1940 or 41. Tec and her family are living in hiding in a disused part of a factory formerly owned by Tec's father. The factory abuts on a convent school, a source of fascinated longing for Tec.)
In 1940, when I was eight or nine, the local movie theatre showed Walt Disney's Snow White. … I badly wanted to see this film, but since I was Jewish, I naturally wasn't permitted to. I groused and bitched about this unfairness until finally my mother proposed that I should leave her alone and just go and forget about what was permitted and what wasn't. … So of course I went, not only for the movie, but to prove myself. I bought the most expensive type of ticket, thinking that sitting in a loge would make me less noticeable, and thus I ended up next to the nineteen-year-old baker's daughter from next door with her little siblings, enthusiastic Nazis one and all. … When the lights came on, I wanted to wait until the house had emptied out, but my enemy stood her ground and waited, too. … She spoke firmly and with conviction, in the manner of a member of the Bund deutscher Mädchen, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, to which she surely belonged. Hadn't I seen the sign at the box office? (I nodded. What else could I do? It was a rhetorical question.) Didn't I know what it meant? I could read, couldn't I? It said "No Jews." I had broken a law … If it happened again she would call the police. I was lucky that she was letting me off this once.
The story of Snow White can be reduced to one question: who is entitled to live in the king's palace and who is the outsider. The baker's daughter and I followed this formula. She, in her own house, the magic mirror of her racial purity before her eyes, and I, also at home here, a native, but without permission and at this moment expelled and exposed. Even though I despised the law that excluded me, I still felt ashamed to have been found out. For shame doesn't arise from the shameful action, but from discovery and exposure.
—Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001)
(The passage offers its own context; but I reminded participants that by 1940 the situation for Jews in Vienna was increasingly dangerous. Kluger's father, a doctor who had already been arrested for seeing Aryan patients, had just fled for France (from where he was later deported to the Baltics and murdered); Kluger's own deportation was less than two years away.)
Knowingly or not, Mémé had brought off a tour de force: right under my mother's nose, she'd managed to detach me from her. And also from Judaism. She had saved us, but she was not without anti-Semitic prejudices. She taught me that I had a Jewish nose and made me feel the little bump that was the sign of it. She also said, "Jewish food is bad for the health; the Jews crucified our savior, Jesus Christ; they are all stingy and love only money; they are very intelligent, no other people has as many geniuses in music and philosophy." …
My mother suffered in silence: no news from my father [arrested and deported]; no means of visiting my brothers and sisters [in hiding in various places in the French countryside]; no power to prevent Mémé from transforming me, detaching me from herself and from Judaism. I had, it seemed, buried the entire past: I started loving rare steak cooked in butter and parsley. I didn't think at all any more about my father, and I couldn't pronounce a single word in Yiddish despite the fact that I could still understand the language of my childhood perfectly. Now I even dreaded the end of the war!
—Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) Translated by Ann Smock (1996)
(The passage, set in 1942 or 43, describes how Mémé, the woman who saved Kluger, also abused her.)
Each group worked together to discuss the passages and answer two questions. The first was the same for everybody: Do we see self-awareness in this passage? If so, how?
The second was particular to the excerpt. I asked the Tec group to track the passage's verbs. What can we learn about Tec's experience when we pay attention to those verbs?
I asked the Kluger group to track the word "home" and its synonyms in this passage. What can we learn about Kluger's experience when we pay attention to those words?
I asked the Kofman group to track two repeated words in the passage: "detach" and "nose." What can we learn about Kofman's experience when we pay attention to those words?
As the participants worked on their assignment, I wandered the room, eavesdropping and cajoling if the conversation seemed to falter. After seven or eight minutes, I brought the class back together and asked each group to report their findings (after reminding everyone that, since we'd all read the passages aloud, anyone could feel free to chime in at any time).
They did well! If you like, you can take a minute to think about how you'd answer the questions.
Here are some of the things we noted:
Tec shows us both the appeal of fantasy and its cost. Spying on the children lucky enough to still be living ordinary lives takes her out of her situation, allows her to remember another life, even to almost forget the war. But the school bell that rings for them but not for her recalls her to reality. And that reminder is painful: she feels even worse than before, to the point where she eventually gives up her voyeurism. I'm always struck by "these small excursions"—such striking and unusual phrasing. What does an excursion imply? A vacation, a trip, a holiday, students will say. An adventure, but a safe one. Yes, I'll add, an inconsequential one (a sense furthered by the adjective "small"). Tec is an explorer, but not, in the end, a successful one. She can't keep going back to look at the childhood she no longer has. Excursion implies choice; yet this fantasy too fails her, just as the active verbs of the beginning of the passage (to find, to watch, to envy—things Tec herself chooses to do) are replaced by the experience of states of being (become engrossed, become acutely aware—things that happen to Tec).
The story of Kluger's clandestine, dangerous trip to the movies (itself a salutary reminder for participants of how thoroughly Jews were shut out of ordinary life) centers on exposure. The "ex" prefix here, as in her use of "expelled" and Tec's "excursion," gestures to a desire, expressed at the very level of phonetics, to get out, to escape. Kluger tries to hide in plain sight, but the effort fails. Significantly, it is her next door neighbour who finds her out, showing us both how intimate persecution is, and how much, in this context at least, it functioned through an undoing of everything home should stand for. (To sell the point, Kluger uses many variations of the word home: I'm especially struck by her decision—not unidiomatic, but also not typical—to describe the theatre as a "house.") Just as persecution makes home foreign, so too does it pervert justice. The baker's daughter is right when she scolds Kluger for breaking a law: it's easy for us to forget that Nazi persecution was legal. Kluger's world has been turned upside down (her use of "naturally" is thus ironic); only she herself, her personality, her determination, offers the possibility of continuity. She is forbidden to go to the movies, so "of course" she goes. That's just who she is. But the consequences of that persistence (nearly being turned over to the police) suggest that the idea of being true to one's self is for Kluger as much a disabling fantasy as Tec's spying.
Kofman similarly struggles to understand who she is. The figurative nose in her first sentence (and I'm cheating here, since we were working with a translation, and I don't know the original) is echoed, then amplified by the literal one that Mémé so disparages. As a group we marveled, if I can put it that way, at Kofman's anguished situation: out of a complicated mixture of gratitude, internalized self-hatred, and adolescent rebellion against a difficult mother, who, to be sure, is herself in an unbearably difficult situation she falls in love with a woman who turns her against herself. Mémé teaches Kofman to hate her own body and her own identity, by making her experience herself as others do. In that sense, she turns Kofman into someone who must live in bad faith. Yet, as we noted, the repetition of "detachment" inevitably carries with it a reminder of attachment: in describing what she has lost Kofman indirectly reminds us of what she once was. And we speculated that Kofman's similarly indirect presentation of Mémé's litany of anti-Semitic canards (where even the compliments are backhanded) implies a kind of resistance on her part to the older woman's actions. It is unlikely, I suggested, that Mémé said all of these things at once, in a single sentence, as Kofman presents it. Which implies she has arranged the material: by piling the attacks on, she is inviting us to see them as ridiculous, contradictory, unhinged. But Kofman's critique is retrospective. At the time, her position is utterly confused. Witness her (classically hysterical) aphasia—able to understand her mother/father tongue, but no longer able to speak it. Years later, Kofman eventually throws Mémé over, even refusing to go to her funeral. The "good mother" in the memoir—well worth reading—turns out to be neither of the two women she is caught between but rather Frenchness itself: the language & culture Kofman becomes so adept in, able to wield rather than submit to.
Having facilitated discussion, and with time drawing short, I emphasized that resistance and rejection are intertwined in these passages. Resistance takes the form of self-knowledge.
To understand the implications of that double position, I had us turn to a thinker from a different tradition. I read aloud the last passage on the handout:
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him [sic] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Then I defined that consequential term double-consciousness: it's what results when we have to define the self through the eyes of others. (I always use the example of Canadian identity, because it's relatively low stakes and I can try to be funny with it: when Canadians think about what it means to be Canadian, as they often do, they usually begin, "Well, we're not Americans…" In my experience, Americans seldom think about what it means to be American. They certainly don't say, "Well, we're not Canadians…" Which is because in geopolitical as well as cultural terms, America is dominant; they set the terms of understanding. The tape Americans use to measure themselves has been made to measure them.)
Minorities, Du Bois argues, typically define themselves in terms set by the majority. A significant result of this claim is that there is something valuable about that position of double-consciousness, for it is by definition a critical position. As Kluger explains in her memoir, her earliest reading material was anti-Semitic slogans, which gave her "an early opportunity to practice critical discrimination."
The position of the majority or the dominant is properly speaking stupid, because it never has to translate its experience into terms given by someone else. It need never reflect. That is the definition of privilege.
But double-consciousness isn't just enabling. To be in that position, to be a minority, specifically a persecuted minority like Jews in fascist Europe or Blacks at any time in American history, including the present, is to be at risk. Critical positions are precarious, dangerous, even intolerable—not just psychologically but also bodily. Think of Du Bois's resonant, pained conclusion: to inhabit double-consciousness (to be at home in the idea of never being at home) is to feel "two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Torn asunder. How can we read that and not think of lynching, or gassing, or any of the myriad ways minority bodies have been and continue to be made to suffer?
We were out of time. So I could only end by saying that the reason I had us to read Du Bois alongside Holocaust survivors was to think intersectionally. In terms of double-consciousness, minority experiences are more similar than different. And I wanted participants to think about the lesson for us today from these (to them) very old texts. To ask these questions: If we are a member of a minority, can we harness the power of double-consciousness and not be crushed? If we are a member of a majority, can we become self-aware enough not to harm, whether knowingly or unknowingly, minorities?
Can we be at home without being smug? Can we be self-aware without being strangers?
A Personal Anthology: 12 (More) Favourite Stories
Posted on October 10, 2019 by banff1972 under review, self-promotion, teaching, Uncategorized
I recently added my thoughts on twelve favourite short stories to The Personal Anthology. I thank Jonathan Gibbs, the editor of this valuable project, for the invitation to contribute. (Do browse the archives—you'll find all kinds of things worth reading.) I made my choices based on my experience teaching short fiction. In doing so, I had to leave off many worthy candidates. So even though nobody asked for it, here's a baker's dozen more wonderful stories.
"Nervous" by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton
Walser's little prose texts, scribbled on bits of paper, published in feuilletons across German-speaking Europe, are one of the glories of 20th century literature. Amazingly, they are finally getting their due in English. But thanks especially to the efforts of poet and translator Christopher Middleton, some of his work already appeared in English in the 1980s, including one of my favourites, "Nervous." Walser's writing is characterized by what I think of as a very Swiss mixture of sweetness and snark: its coziness soon goes off the rails. Here, in a text not coincidentally written in the middle of WWI, Walser is more anguished than gentle. But the reversals, hesitations, and self-cancellations of his prose are clearly evident.
I've often taught "Nervous" together with Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" (1983) another bravura exercise in narrative voice (in her case, in the imperative). Both texts undermine the coherence of the speaker, leading us to ask whether the very idea of identity is a fantasy of writing. Because both pieces are so short, they're ideal for forcing students to linger over details. Students can even read them for the first time in class, which, in my experience, typically generates the best conversations.
First published in German in June 1916 in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Published in English in Selected Stories Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1982. You can read an excerpt here and the German (with facing Dutch translation) here.
"The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen
It hurt to cut this from my original list, just as it hurt to cut it from my syllabus a few years ago. Students never loved it the way I do, and that disparity was getting me down. To be sure, it's not straightforward. Bowen's brilliant ghost story centers on Kathleen Drover, who has returned to London during the first Blitz to check on the house she and her children have left behind for shelter in the country. She finds a letter pushed under the door, a curt missive reminding her that the writer has not forgotten the troth she plighted, the promise she made. "Today is the day we said" it says, ominously. The letter takes her back to the Great War, and the man she fell in love with, the man she promised to marry, a cruel man, a man who returned to the front from leave and never returned. (The students have a hard time distinguishing between the two wars.) The letter sends Mrs. Drover into a panic, and she collects what she came to get as quickly as she can and runs away to hail a taxi. But you can't outrun the past. This is a story of trauma, about physical and mental stains and strains. I can never shake the image of the weal on Kathleen's hand when her fiancée presses it hard against the buttons of his uniform. One thing my students and I always agreed on, though: the editors of Bowen's Collected Stories must have had a lot of fun when they made sure the story ended on p 666.
First published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945. Available in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Ecco, 1989. Read the story here.
"The Bear Came over the Mountain" by Alice Munro
Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, where we are All Munro All the Time—I remember reading "Boys and Girls" in middle school and having "the symbolism of the foxes" drilled into me—but I am lukewarm on our Nobelist. I mean, I recognize her greatness. But for me she's so cold, and not just because that's the emotional register of the largely Scottish and English WASPs that comprise a certain idea of "Old Canada," fictional versions of which populate Munro's stories. I find the stories themselves chilly, almost clinical in their attitudes to these figures. (No accident that so many of her editions have a reproduction of an Alex Colville painting on the cover.)
They do teach well, though. And this one in particular works for me. "The Bear Came over the Mountain" intertwines two couples: elegant Fiona, whose forgetfulness grows into dementia, and bien pensant Grant, who is not as nice as he thinks he is, on the one hand, and Aubrey, a former sweetheart of Fiona's who she reconnects with in the facility Grant reluctantly moves her to, and Marian, Grant's seemingly unsophisticated but in fact defiant and shrewd wife, on the other.
As the couples re-arrange, our suspicion grows that Fiona has orchestrated the events. The story asks: what is true, in the life of a couple and even in life itself? Epistemological uncertainty isn't just something faced (with terror, stoicism, even grace) by the patients who lose their memories, but by readers as well.
First published in The New Yorker, December 27, 1999. Collected in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage McClelland & Stewart, 2001. You can read the story here.
"The Bad News" by Margaret Atwood
Atwood, by contrast, is another CanLit big shot whose work I do admire. (For whatever reason, her chilliness doesn't bother me as much as Munro's.) Although best known for her novels, Atwood's written plenty of stories; the ones I've read are good. For a while I taught this story regularly, highlighting, in particular, its narrative structure and use of time. Like "The Bear Came over the Mountain," "The Bad News" is about (the fear of) dementia. But I don't think memory loss explains the story's structure, which reminds me of a möbius strip. The narrator and her husband live in a dystopic near-future (if I were to read the story now, I'd probably just think it was set in the present) but part-way through the narrator remembers a trip they took to Glanum, the Roman ruins in the South of France. The memory sparks a fantasy that, at some point, becomes the present of the narrative itself. It ends with the couple, living in what to them is simply an outpost of Rome, nothing ancient at all, talking themselves out of worrying about the barbarian invasions ("They won't be here for a long time. Not in our lifetime, perhaps. Glanum is in no danger, not yet"). We're left wondering if the modern couple, similarly obsessed with but in denial about bad news, is perhaps a dream of the ancient one, rather than the other way 'round. "We don't like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it's coming our way."
First published in The Guardian, 2005. Collected in Moral Disorder and Other Stories, Nan A. Talese, 2006.
"Indian Giver" by Max Apple
Probably the least famous writer on this list, which is a damn shame. Especially as he is probably the nicest (admittedly, the only one I've met, but man what a mensch). Apple is a worthy heir to Malamud (which, if you've read my original list, you'll know is high praise). Seymour Rubin owns an automotive junkyard, but the only person who can work the baler that keeps the place going, a man named Alonso Johnson, has just converted to Islam and needs to pray on his lunch hour every Friday. Seymour, incensed at what he sputteringly calls "once a week anti-Semitism," fires Alonso, which leads to his near ruin. ("Indian Giver" is a take on Malamud's "The First Seven Years.") Everyone begs Seynour to take Alonso back, especially Seymour's son, Chuckie, who calls from the reservation in the South West where he is working with indigenous people. When a rival Jewish recycling firm offers to buy him out, Seymour has no choice but to go back to Alonso. Who, Apple's story asks, is a Jew? And what does that mean? Are the identities we live by enabling or disabling? Funny, too!
First published in Story and collected in The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories, Johns Hopkins, 2007.
"The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed" by Edward P. Jones
Now that I think of it, I briefly met Edward P. Jones at a reading from his novel The Known World. And he too was lovely, so soft-spoken and introverted, clearly a man uninterested in platitudes or bullshit. I warmed to him immediately. Though I've yet to read that book, I love his early stories, especially this one, which I use in teaching literary realism. This is a beautiful and very sad story about an angry, vulnerable teenage girl, Cassandra G. Lewis, whose best friend, the Rhonda Ferguson of the title, is about to sign with a record label. Rhonda almost never appears in the story—instead we follow Cassandra and some of her other friends as they spend a flirty, chaste, emotional, ordinary Friday evening that is upended by tragedy. By the time we learn of Rhonda's death, so much has happened we've forgotten all about it, and we're shocked despite the title. I love how one of the girls, a quiet soul Cassandra hardly knew before the fateful night, becomes the story's central focus. And its last line is heartbreaking: "She sang on into the night for herself alone, pushing back everything she did not yet understand."
Collected in Lost in the City, William Morrow, 1992.
"Tapka" by David Bezmozgis
A bittersweet, funny, but ultimately rather ominous story about a family of Latvian Jews who emigrate to Canada in the early 1980s as part of the exodus of Soviet Jews. (In this sense clearly autobiographical.) Mark Berman is in first grade at George Best Elementary School in his new home of Toronto. Together with his slightly older sister, he is tasked with walking a neighbour's dog every day at lunch. Tapka is spoiled; her owners, also Russian emigres, though of a lower social class than the Bermans, have no children. Tapka is their everything. While the adults struggle through English classes by day, the children learn through osmosis (the narrator likens his brain to a catchment basin, with rivulets of language steadily accumulating into a pool). Pride of place goes to schoolyard insults, like "shithead" and "gaylord" (how it pains me to remember that we used to say things like that). The children love Tapka. But they also hate her, for inscrutable reasons that have to do with their powerlessness and general sense of being lost in a new place. So they start calling her the names they've learned, maybe felt the lash of; Mark feels the thrill and shame at having violated something. One thing leads to another, and the kids let the dog off the leash, whereupon it dashes into traffic and is hit by a car. Everything ends okay, except nothing will ever be okay again.
I also use this story to teach my American students the correct pronunciation of Toronto and what a washroom is. I think of it as a duty.
First published in The New Yorker in 2003. Collected in Natasha and Other Stories, Harper Collins, 2004.
"The Knock at the Manor Gate" by Franz Kafka and translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
My favourite Kafka to teach is "A Hunger Artist" (though I confess I don't love to teach Kafka—he is too hard, too much about the resistance to interpretation), but my favourite Kafka altogether might be this little text, which is perfectly Kafkan, but, more importantly, for me, comes unbidden to me every time we chant the v'ahavta in synagogue. That's the prayer in which we name the ways we shall love G-d. Tell them to your children, think of them when you wake and when you sleep. And, finally, "bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." Kafka would have known this prayer (it comes just after the sh'ma, Judaism's affirmation of monotheism); every week I wonder if he had it in mind in writing this enigmatic work.
First published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer in 1931. Collected in English in The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, edited by Nahum Glatzer, Schocken, 1971. You can read the story here.
"The Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams
Although only four pages long, this story is so rich, it's easy to spend an hour talking about it and still have plenty to say. Based on Williams's own experience as a doctor in Rutherford, NJ, it tells the story of a doctor summoned by a poor, terrified couple who suspect their daughter has diphtheria. To confirm his diagnosis—which will lead only to quarantine, there being nothing else the man can do: the story is from the 1930s; there are no antibiotics—the doctor needs her to open her mouth. Which the girl refuses to do. The result is a battle not just of wits but of strength. The title doesn't just describe the doctor's actions; it also poses a question: what is the use of force? What purpose does it serve? Can we diagnose a condition without causing harm? And if we think about the similarities between diagnosis and interpretation, we might extrapolate to ask, can we read a text without doing violence to it?
First published in 1933 in Blast and collected in Life Along the Passaic River, New Directions, 1938 and The Doctor Stories, New Directions, 1984. You can read the story here.
"A Family Supper" by Kazuo Ishiguro
Rohan Maitzen tipped me on to this story, one of only a few by Ishiguro. Although it would be terrific for any lesson on unreliable narrators, I always teach "A Family Supper" on the second day of the semester to help students begin the semester-long process of learning to support claims with textual evidence. For the central question demanded by this story of a young man who returns after the death of his mother to his home in Japan from a new life in America is whether his father has poisoned their supper of fish soup. (The first thing we learn is that the mother died from eating improperly prepared fugu.) Students always have strong opinions, but they're not always sure why they think what they think. Ishiguro has a fine way with dread and unease. In addition to everything else, this is good ghost story.
First published in Firebird 2 in 1982. Collected in Malcolm's Bradbury's anthology The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, Penguin, 1989. You can read the story here.
"Drown" by Junot Díaz
The narrator's former best friend Beto is back in town, but the narrator doesn't want to see him. We learn that Beto once gave him a blow job, which the narrator both liked and hated. "Drown" is a story of repression, confused masculinity, and growing up in a society that has no expectations for you (note the imperative of the title). My students and I often linger on this early passage, where we can already see the rivalrous relationship between the boys. Along with the rest of the kids in the neighbourhood, the boys have climbed the fence at the local pool:
I sit near the sign that runs the pool during the day. No Horse-Play, No Running, No Defecating, No Urinating, No Expectorating. At the bottom someone has scrawled in No Whites, No Fat Cbiks and someone else has provided the missing c. I laugh. Beto hadn't known what expectorating meant though he was the one leaving for college. I told him, spitting a greener by the side of the pool.
At night the pool runs by other rules: the difference between no expectorating and a greener by the poolside. Nighttime pool has vitality, but what is that worth compared to the power of daytime rules?
First published in The New Yorker, January 29, 1996 and collected in Drown, Riverhead, 1996. Read the story here.
"The Marquise of O" by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by David Luke and Nigel Reeves
A crazy, long story about a woman, the Marquise of the title, who becomes pregnant after being raped during the Napoleonic wars. The scholar Mary Jacobus has a nice essay about how everyone sees the Marquise as an empty O just waiting to be filled (literally or figuratively). The story's told with Kleist's characteristic indirection, which means students have a hard time with it—it doesn't help that the central event is elided in a dash—but they often get into rousing discussions of contemporary slut-shaming that makes them see things haven't changed as much as they like to think. For me the big question is: can we read the Marquise as having any control over her circumstances? Does she have any agency?
First published in German in Phöbus in 1808. Available in English in The Marquise of O and Other Stories, Penguin 1978.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" by Herman Melville
What is there to say? A stone-cold masterpiece. "I would prefer not to" doesn't mean no. It's much more destabilizing (or insidious, depending on how much you side with the narrator). A wonderful story about men at work.
First published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in November and December 1853. Collected in The Piazza Tales, 1856. Read the story here.
Now you tell me: what would be on your list?
Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall
Posted on June 5, 2019 by banff1972 under book review, self-promotion, Uncategorized
I wrote about Sarah Moss's excellent short novel Ghost Wall at The Mookse and the Gripse.
Here's a short bit from near the beginning that gives you a sense of what the book's about:
That story is told by seventeen-year-old Silvie, who, together with her parents and an anthropology professor and three of his students, spends two weeks in the summer of 1991 reenacting the lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Northumberland. Britons, her father calls them; Celts, the professor demurs, citing the current preferred terminology. In making this distinction, the professor ineffectually pushes back against Silvie's father's desire to imagine a purely British origin story. Silvie's own name is short for Sulevia, a local goddess of springs and pools, or, as Silvie, quoting her father, half-reluctantly, half-defensively puts it, "A proper British native name." As that "proper" suggests, her father's idea of authenticity is moralizing at best, overtly racist at worst: describing the Picts' resistance to the Romans ("the Romans are the end of what he likes"), he says "there weren't dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there?" (he's already rejected Indian food as "Paki muck"). Her father, Silvie concludes, "wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night." What he has instead is a job as a bus-driver that supports his amateur archaeology and survivalist escapades, and a wife and daughter whom he terrorizes.
It's a terrific book, a riposte to today's rise in nativism.
My thanks to Trevor Barrett, the original Mookse, for the opportunity!
On Holocaust Diaries
Posted on November 18, 2018 by banff1972 under academic work, judaism, self-promotion, Uncategorized
I gave this paper as a talk the other day at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The next day I taught three hour-long sessions using passages from three of the diaries I reference in the talk to middle- and high-school students and their teachers. Both events were part of the 27th annual Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference. My thanks go to the conference organizer and Chair of the Arkansas Holocaust Education Committee, Grace Donoho, and, especially, Dr. Jennifer Hoyer of the German Department and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Fayetteville.
I want to focus today on our fascination with Holocaust diaries, and I want to suggest that the reasons they typically fascinate us are not actually the reasons why they are so important.
We tend to privilege diaries, and especially Holocaust diaries, for their seemingly immediate access to experience. We are getting events as they happened and so are placed directly in the midst of a historical event to which we might otherwise not have access. So the thinking goes, anyway. Holocaust diaries can be considered Exhibit A in the category of testimonial literature that Elie Wiesel, writing in the late 1970s, deemed the genre of his generation, and that critics writing in the wake of Wiesel have described as the kind of writing most commensurate to the traumas of the 20th century.
In this context, let's consider the following statement by survivor Primo Levi, who incidentally did not write a diary [other than the "retrospective" diary at the end of Survival in Auschwitz]:
We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. … We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are… the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.
Survivors, he adds, "speak in their stead, by proxy."
The Final Solution was designed to be just that—final; there weren't supposed to be any survivors. Survivors can thus be considered as a kind of noise or static, or, to change the metaphor, as the flaw that inheres in any system or machine. Exceptional, and interesting as such, but hardly representative. And because it is the case that many diarists did not survive the war—to use Levi's language, those who did are the exception rather than the rule—these writers could be said to be what he calls "the complete witnesses" and therefore to offer us something even more valuable than survivor memoirs. But what interests me about Levi's claim extends beyond the distinction between who lived and who died. To my mind, what Levi is really pointing to is something more fundamental about the very nature of experience, namely, that there is an inescapable surrogacy at the heart of experience.
I'm arguing, on the basis of reading Holocaust diaries, that all experience is characterized by indirection, by proxy-ness. To rephrase this in terms given to us by literary criticism, there is always a distinction between the "I" that narrates and the "I" that experiences.
Here, for example, is Hélène Berr, a 20-year-old student of literature at the Sorbonne, writing on June 24, 1942 about the traumatic events of the previous day, when her father, a prominent industrialist, had been arrested:
The first time I awoke and saw the morning light through the blinds, it occurred to me that this morning Papa would not have his usual breakfast, that he would not be coming to the breakfast table to get his toast and pour his cup of coffee. The thought was immensely painful.
That was only my first awakening, and gradually (I often drifted back to sleep) other thoughts came to me, making me realize what had happened. I am still waiting for the sound of keys jangling in his pocket, of him opening the shutters in his bedroom; I am still waiting for them [her parents] to get up, because he's the one who turns on the gas. At those moments I can grasp it. At this moment of writing, I am not managing very well.
In her description of how she feels when expecting her father, she can grasp the fact of his arrest—via absence, via what's not happening, and who isn't there—but in the actual act of writing, she cannot grasp the situation at all. In other words, what the narrating I grasps is that it cannot really grasp what has happened to it.
Later, on October 10, 1943, taking up her diary after a year-long hiatus, Berr describes this split even more clearly:
Then there is the considerable repugnance I feel at thinking of myself as "someone who writes", because for me, perhaps mistakenly, writing implies a split personality, probably a loss of spontaneity and abdication. [Not mistakenly!]
The split between narrating I and experiencing I allows us to see that even the testimony of direct witnesses to the Holocaust is indirect. The record of experience is at a remove from experience itself. That doesn't mean these records are fictional or biased or untrustworthy. But it does mean that no one, not even the person doing the experiencing, has unmediated access to direct experience.
[Riff on James Young: the things diarists say are said from within the frame of their world-view: contrast Frank with Flinker—I absolutely agree but my point is more about experience itself.]
Moreover, even the very diaries themselves, irrespective of what is in them, are themselves examples of mediation, documents that stand in for the life of the person who wrote them, a person that is often no longer present, even alive once we are reading their entries.
Published Holocaust diaries usually begin with an introduction explaining how the diary came down to us. Some of these stories are almost as well-known as the diaries themselves.
For example, many people know that Miep Gies, Otto Frank's secretary, searched through the secret annex after the Gestapo raided it and retrieved Anne's diary, which she kept in case any of the family returned from deportation.
Anne Frank had no way of knowing her writing would be preserved. Others were more deliberate about attempting to enact that preservation. Often, they relied on non-Jewish friends to keep their pages safe. Hélène Berr passed hers on to the family cook with instructions that she get them to Berr's lover, who was fighting with the Free French. Victor Klemperer similarly gave his to a sympathetic friend.
Other stories are more haphazard, even dramatic. Dawid Serakowiak's notebooks were found stacked on a stove, ready to be burned, when the Lodz ghetto was liberated. And consider the case of the diaries of Petr Ginz—a Czech teenager who wrote and illustrated adventure stories in the mode of Jules Verne, and whose entries are usually laconic descriptions of which of his friends are no longer at school, but who also wrote a heartbreakingly detailed description of the day he received his deportation notice, a description that focused on the delicate task of disassembling typewriters to clean their keys (this was his after-school job) (it's a remarkable example of disassociation or of preserving one's dignity, depending on how you look at it). Ginz's diaries resurfaced when a man remembered some papers and drawings he had inexplicably kept after he bought an old house in Prague. He was reminded of the documents because of a news story about the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Among the crew was an Israeli astronaut who had taken with him a drawing of the moon by a teenager deported from Prague to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz—the same Petr Ginz.
There's something avid in the way these stories are described by editors and readers alike. (I confess I share this sentiment.) I think that hunger, that fascination is worth thinking about, because it allows us to consider more fully the relationship between the diarist and the diary.
Diaries often seem to be direct replacements for the writers themselves. Perhaps even to be more important than the writer.
Think of Anne Frank naming her diary Kitty—turning it into an other, and, even more importantly, into an authority that legitimates her writing by being not only confidante but also judge.
Think of Chaim Kaplan, writing on August 2, 1942, amidst liquidation of Warsaw ghetto, in the last line of his last entry: "If my life ends—what will become of my diary?"
Think of Hélène Berr, writing in October 1943: "It makes me happy to think that if I am taken, Andrée [the family's cook] will have kept these pages, which are a piece of me, the most precious part, because no other material thing matters to me anymore."
Think of Molly Appelbaum, writing from near Tarnów, Poland, on March 1, 1942: "I look at each written page [of my diary] with respect. Why, these are the pages of my existence, my life." (Even though her emphasis is on herself, the proof of the value of that life lies only in the diary.)
Think too of Artie Spiegelman, in the autobiographical comic Maus, listening to his father tell him about his separation from his wife, Artie's mother, upon their arrival at Aushwitz-Biurkenau after months in hiding. Artie exclaims, "This is where Mom's diaries will come in especially useful. They'll give me some idea of what she went through when you were apart." (But he finds out his father burned them, at which point he bursts out, accusingly, "God damn you, you murderer!", as if the diary was in fact a person.) (It might be worth noting that these dairies were themselves reconstructions: they were lost in the war and she re-wrote them once settled in America.)
These are all instances in which the person seems subordinate to the diary.
Holocaust diarists are often convinced—usually rightly—that they will not survive. (The last line of Sierakowiak's diary" "There is really no way out for this for us.") But they want their diaries to survive. We might say that the narrating I triumphs over the experiencing I.
What does that mean, then, about the status of diaries as witnesses if the experience contained within them is never as direct as we assume? Have we fetishized diaries at the expense of the actual lives involved?
The diarists themselves offer a response:
Klemperer famously writes, on May 27, 1942, "I shall go on writing. That is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness!"
Berr says something similar on October 10, 1943: "I have a duty to write because other people must know. Every hour of every day there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill."
And Samuel Golfard, in hiding in Eastern Galicia, begins his diary on January 23, 1943:
I am not composing these words for myself. They are intended for those who will survive and who might quickly forget what they had lived through not so long ago. Let these words refresh in their memory the moments of horror, the bloody scenes that took place before their eyes, the black night of savagery.
These statements are directed outwards, beyond the self. There's even a sense that the writers don't want to keep writing any more, or do so only at great cost or against all odds. Berr says as much: "I'm not even keeping this diary anymore, I've no willpower left, I'm just putting down the salient facts so as to remember them" (September 10, 1942). Sierakowiak doesn't say it in so many words, but the terseness of his entries, coupled with his laments over his weakening concentration, failing health, and ebbing vitality, indirectly indicate to us how much the writing takes out of him.
On this way of thinking, the diary is an instrument, a tool of survival. Moreover, it is the often the only means of survival, and the only way it survives is by becoming separated and distanced from its writer. It is the very distinction between the writer's experience and the diaries' representation (their being a form of representation) that allows us to have access to these historical events at all.
Diaries, then, substitute for people who aren't there any longer. [Even prey upon them? Cf Berr: I'm not even writing this diary anymore, but I have to.]
This is a melancholy, even dismal state of affairs. And inasmuch as we replace the reality of loss, suffering, and death—starvation, terror, dehumanization, typhus, tuberculosis, all the terrible traumas suffered by Frank and Berr and Sierakowiak and Klemperer, to name only a few—with the survival of the diaries themselves then it's worse than that. To do so is to emphasize triumph where there is in reality only loss, a loss we're literally papering over by fetishizing the miracle that the documents have come to us at all.
But this doesn't have to be the only way to think about diaries as proxies for their authors. We can take the distance between diary and diarist not as a replacement of the latter by the former, but as a tribute the former pays to the latter.
Because if it weren't for the mediated-ness of representation we wouldn't have witnessing at all. The distance between person and diary is necessary. Sometimes that distance is physical (the two get separated: think of Frank's pages scattered on the floor of the secret annex; think of Sierakowiak's stacked on the stove, that narrow escape from the funeral pyre) but it is always structural (as I've been arguing, it's constitutive of the form).
The separation of the diary from the diarist—sometimes a contingent fact of the vicissitudes of history but always an inescapable fact that is constitutive of the very act of writing—does two things at the same time: it keeps us from accessing direct experience but that very separation allows us to have any access to experience at all.
For Elie Wiesel, the legitimacy of the literature of testimony lies in its urgency:
We have all been witnesses and we all feel we have to bear testimony for the future. And that became an obsession, the single most powerful obsession that permeated all the lives, all the dreams, all the work of those people. One minute before they died they thought that was what they had to do.
The "we" in Wiesel's first sentence refers to Holocaust survivors. But, like Levi, although less consciously, he distinguishes between those who survived and those who were murdered. Beginning with "we" Wiesel moves to "they" and "those people." Holocaust diaries, I have hoped to show, show us in action what Wiesel can only unconsciously recognize, the fundamentally mediated quality of supposedly immediate or direct testimony.
Kapka Kassabova's Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
Posted on June 8, 2018 by banff1972 under self-promotion, Uncategorized
For #BulgarianLiteratureMonth (hosted by the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative) I reviewed Kapka Kassabova's travelogue Border. A fascinating and moving book, well worth your time.
Thanks to Thomas Huebner of Mytwostotinki for organizing Bulgarian Literature Month.
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau is 4!
Posted on February 7, 2018 by banff1972 under personal, self-promotion, Uncategorized
WordPress sent me a message last week telling me it's been four years since I started Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau. Blog years being, I suspect, like dog years, this puts the blog well into its adult years. And these days, when some of the book blogs I love best (though thankfully not all of them) have gone away or fallen into, one hopes, temporary dormancy, I think there's value in my still being here. Not that I'm especially persistent. My number one regret is that I don't blog nearly as much as I'd liked to. (My number two regret is that my blog causes me so many regrets.) Unfortunately, barring an unexpected change in career or life fortune I don't think that's going to change in the coming year.
But I have a few ideas in the works. Last year I inveigled a couple of friends into guest posting—see here, here, and here—and I enjoyed that dialogue. I'll be continuing that experiment this year, starting with a smart post from a smart friend on Émile Zola any day now. (If you'd like to contribute a guest post, drop me a line in the comments.) In the past I've had fun co-organizing reading groups (I seem to do better with those than with ones I blithely agree to participate in on Twitter: those invariably defeat me), and I'm always up for more of those.
As well as adding other contributors to the blog, I'd also like to broaden the kinds of things I write for it. I recently learned I've been awarded a three-year grant from my institution to design experiential learning projects for students on the topic of Holocaust Literature and Education. I plan to incorporate the blog into that process, starting in the fall.
And looking even further ahead, I want to organize a series of events (readalongs, online reference posts, reviews, who knows what else) to celebrate the centenary in 2019 of the chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Levi is one of my intellectual heroes; I'd love to organize something analogous to Heavenali's Muriel Spark centenary. (In fact, her celebration seems so well organized, I may just have to steal her format).
Along the way, I'll keep writing reviews as I'm able. I'll keep melding memoir and analysis when it seems relevant. And I'll keep writing the occasional post about a writer's work more generally. (I have something in mind about Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series and why I love it so.)
I can't say I'll write to order— I'm so slow, I wouldn't last a day as a proper working writer—but I would certainly like to know what you want to read. More of the same? Something new? Please share your thoughts.
Most importantly, I want to thank everyone who's visited, nosed around a little, read a post or two, maybe even left a comment. (And apologies again to everyone who lands here because they want to hike the Swiss Alps.) I'm especially grateful to those who follow me and/or are regular readers. Becoming part of the online community of readers and writers has been one of the best things that's happened to me in the last few years. Your interest and support means a lot. I promise I'll keep plugging away as best I can.
Back to climbing the book mountain…

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Scientific Sourcing to Win
The benefits of a new, more strategic outsourcing model
"I've just had five projects added to my plate, but my budget got cut 10%. How am I supposed to get this done?"
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. In every industry, companies realize that they've got to do more with less. More programs are moving forward at the same time (new drugs only have a 1 in 10 chance of making it to market).¹ They're moving faster (regulatory bottlenecks are putting pressure on medical device R&D to speed up).² And budgets and headcounts are shrinking (when Kraft Foods was purchased in 2015, the new owners immediately began cutting $1.5 billion in costs).³
Outsourcing is an option, but most companies don't have a real strategy for how to get the most value from outsourcing and reduce its growing number of risks. However, support is growing for a more comprehensive strategy: Scientific Sourcing.
SCIENTIFIC SOURCING vs. TYPICAL OUTSOURCING
In traditional outsourcing, companies contract with several vendors to staff their scientific needs: support, testing, compliance, tech, and more. They think in terms of tactics like "I need people" or "I need this method." Performance often turns out to be uneven, functions are siloed, turnover is a constant issue and knowledge walks out the door at the end of every project.
Scientific Sourcing is more strategic than staffing, more consistent than contract testing. Companies who adopt this model think more holistically, more strategically, about how to deliver the science to make business decisions. Vendors can not only generate data, but also find opportunities to add expertise and capabilities, such as developing pilot programs, designing studies, or making recommendations based on the learning.
It's data generation, but it's also expertise – it's consulting on formulations, problems, processes and technical methodologies. With a cohesive scientific sourcing strategy across multiple budgets, the vendor learns about processes and challenges to deliver more scientific value than an initial testing request.
BUSINESS BENEFITS OF SCIENTIFIC SOURCING
Vendors are used to asking "What do you want us to do?" Scientific Sourcing asks "What are you trying to accomplish?"
The full value of the strategy can show up in many ways: higher productivity, faster processes, more throughput, more agility to flow resources, more efficiency. Many companies are able to reallocate some of their internal scientists to other projects and keep multiple innovation programs going at the same time. They elevate their existing capabilities and resources, while protecting the critical continuity of knowledge and talent.
With a comprehensive perspective, Scientific Sourcing may create new lines of sight to work processes. If functions were more siloed – like with traditional staffing and contract testing – these solutions and opportunities may never be visible.
SCIENTIFIC SOURCING IN ACTION
A multinational pharmaceutical firm, recently struggling with R&D inefficiency and redundancy, demonstrates these benefits. The company fully partnered with a Scientific Sourcing vendor, who helped them optimize lab space, equipment, consumables and personnel. The result: $1.3 million in immediate cost savings and a 30% increase in equipment validation speed – without sacrificing service and production standards.
Traditional consultants are thinkers. Traditional contractors are doers. Scientific Sourcing is both. It can help companies envision and vet ideas, and still supply the resources and manpower to bring them to life.
If your science is under pressure to perform, this new strategy may hold the answer.
At ATL, we're experts in the field of scientific sourcing. From contingent labor or contract testing to full operation of an entire scientific function, we transform a cost-saving measure into a strategic asset.
¹Clinical Development Success Rates 2006-2015, report from Biomedtracker, Biotechnology Innovation Organization and Amplion.
²Thinking Globally During Medical Device Development: Accelerating Products to International Markets, NAMSA presentation.
³2017 Consumer Packaged Goods Trends, PwC report, 2017.
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