April 27, 2011 At Work Yoram Kaniuk on ‘Life on Sandpaper’ By Joshua Cohen Wounded in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Yoram Kaniuk moved to Greenwich Village to become a painter. Nineteen and broke, he came to center a rarefied circle of fellow painters, musicians, writers, and actors—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Willem de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, among others. Writes Kaniuk, “I was in the lives of these people by mistake.” Though he may have played a minor role, Kaniuk’s memoir, Life on Sandpaper, is an unforgettable telling of his New York decade, the 1950s. His newest nonfiction book, 1948, not yet translated to English, recently won the 2010 Sapir Prize for Literature. Not long ago, I spoke to Kaniuk about Life on Sandpaper, which was published by Dalkey Archive Press this February. When did you begin working on this memoir? In the seventies I used to write for a paper here in Israel, and every weekend I used to publish a story. I wrote many of these stories, not exactly in this form, and when I didn’t have any more true stories, I had to invent them. And then at the start of 2000, I started to work them into Between Life and Death [the memoir’s Hebrew-language title]. I didn’t know what it would mean to people here in Israel, but it was amazing how much the young people loved this book. It opened a door for me—for my novel The Last Jew, and for other books. Today it seems that there are more Israelis outside of Israel than in Israel itself. Soldiers taking a gap year in Europe, in India, in Tibet; scuffling jazz musicians and installation artists in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn; Israelis “making the business” (in Israeli English) in Panama and Buenos Aires. There once was a stigma attached to this expatriation. When one goes to Israel, one literally “goes up,” or “ascends”—makes aliyah. When one leaves one is said to have “gone down,” or “descended”—yerida. Was there the same stigma associated with leaving Israel back in the 1950s, when you came to that other Jewish homeland, Greenwich Village? The Israelis coming to America when I came, which was in 1951, were people who had fought in the 1948 war, which was a very tough war, the worst war Israel ever had; almost an entire generation was killed. We came to New York because we were never able to find a way, in Israel, of letting out the grief, the demons. Also, you have to remember that I had been wounded, physically. My first years in America, I didn’t think about Israel at all, I didn’t think about the war, I didn’t remember anything, I was completely in a daze. And later I understood that I had to have my autonomy. But I should say that many Israelis who were there with me in New York, or even in Los Angeles, eventually came back. Still there was a feeling that Israelis at that time didn’t know what their homeland was. Read More
April 27, 2011 Look Ida Kar By Nicole Rudick Ida Kar, self-portrait with a painting by John Christoforou and an assemblage by Heinrich Heidersberger, 1962. After moving from Tambov, Russia, to Egypt with her Armenian parents in 1921, Ida Kar spent five years in Paris. She had been educated at the prestigious Lycée Français in Alexandra, but her stint on the Left Bank, at age twenty, formed the foundation of her education as an artist. André Breton had written the first Surrealist manifesto there four years earlier, and the city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. In the studio of a young German photographer named Heinrich Heidersberger, Kar made her first foray into photography. She returned to Egypt in 1933, just as that nation’s artists began developing their own iteration of surrealism (André Breton famously wrote to poet Georges Henelin, in 1936, “The imp of the perverse, as he deigns to appear to me, seems to have one wing here, the other in Egypt”), and dedicated herself to the medium. When the newly married Kar moved to London in 1945, she wasted little time in initiating her photographic career and cultivating the kind of artistic community she had known in Cairo. She began making high-contrast, tightly cropped commercial portraits of theater actors in 1947; by the end of fifties, her roster of sitters had come to include many of the era’s most significant painters, sculptors, authors, poets, playwrights, and composers, among them T. S. Eliot, Noël Coward, L. S. Lowry, and Somerset Maugham in London; Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Marie Laurencin, and Alberto Giacometti in Paris; and Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonid Leonov, Ernst Neizvestny, and Ilya Ehrenberg in the Soviet Union. In 1960, Kar mounted a groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; hers was the first retrospective show of a photographer at a London gallery. Of it, she boasted, “We are going to make this show the most exciting photographic event since ‘The Family of Man.’” The comparison with Edward Steichen’s thorough 1955 survey of documentary photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art was apt. The Whitechapel show solidified Kar’s reputation as documentarian of cultural life, while rousing critics to debate photography’s aspirations to the level of high art. “I don’t think it is an art,” insisted David Sylvester, a fan of Kar’s work, “because the essence of art is that the artist creates his forms and does not select them: photography reproduces the form.” Kar proved unmoved by the debate. Until her death in 1974, she continued her work, making sensitive portraits of the St. Ives artistic community, of Fidel Castro and Cuban writers, and of any number of intrepid, purposeful women artists. Click on the images below to open a gallery of Kar’s photography. Bertrand Russell, 1953. Bridget Riley, 1963. Dame Barbara Hepworth, 1961. Doris Lessing, 1958. Iris Murdoch, 1957. Terry Frost, 1961. Hussein Shariffe, 1960. Marc Chagall, 1954. Laura del Rivo, 1961. “Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, 1908–1974” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through June 19. All images © National Portrait Gallery, London
April 26, 2011 Arts & Culture Put Up This Wall! By David Zax A screenshot of Salty slapping Dan Safer. Last Saturday evening, before a small audience gathered in the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, a man named Salty repeatedly slapped a man named Dan. “Less on the chin, more on the cheek!” cried Dan Safer, a choreographer, standing inside the masking-taped square that had been marked off as the stage and steeling himself for yet another blow. With a red bandanna tied around his neck, Safer sported muttonchops, a handlebar mustache, and tattoos that ran the length of his arms. The fellow named Salty obliged, smacking Safer again and again until Safer’s face turned bright red and he grew dizzy, widening his stance to stable himself. “I love you!” blurted Salty, a slight blond figure in maroon corduroys and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie, after landing a particularly fierce slap. “How we doing on time there, Rob?” Safer now asked of Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and the emcee of the night’s event, programmed by the French cultural institute Villa Gillet for an ongoing series called Walls and Bridges. Spillman had been conscripted as timekeeper for the current “piece.” He stood off to the side, a reluctant accomplice in this sustained act of public sadomasochism. Read More
April 25, 2011 At Work Meghan O’Rourke on ‘The Long Goodbye’ By Thessaly La Force Photograph by Sarah Shatz. In 2008, on Christmas Day, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother, Barbara, died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with advanced colorectal cancer. O’Rourke was lost in her grief, which she found overwhelming and unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her book, The Long Goodbye, is her attempt to understand her grief, documenting the years before and after her mother’s passing. In reading The Long Goodbye, I braced myself for the tears (which, yes, did come) but, by its end, discovered that O’Rourke had written a beautiful memoir about a daughter’s love for her mother. We spoke recently about her book; an edited version of our conversation appears below. How did this book come about? I started writing things down, for myself, before my mother died. It was a private recording of what was happening. Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. My mother was going through this really intense experience: she had been sick, she had been diagnosed with advanced cancer two years before she died, and she went into a remission that was unusual. Then the cancer came back—it went to her brain, which again was not common for the cancer that she had. It was bizarre to see someone change so radically and so quickly; I had to write it down in order to not go crazy with the strangeness of it all. After my mother died, I was supposed to be writing my column at Slate, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought of grief as being sad, but instead it was like being suddenly aware of all the luminous, fragile elements of existence. It was also lonely in its way. My editor at Slate said, “Why don’t you write about what you are going through.” I didn’t think what happened to me was extraordinary. But it was what I was obsessed with, and so I started to shape what I was experiencing into a piece. I was very unprepared for grief. It was isolating. There was no language for it, and no language around it—but I felt that I was in contact with all of these deeper realities; even the sky seemed strangely bluer. But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. I came across a quote of Iris Murdoch’s: “The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.” I thought, What if you could find a language that would describe the experience, with all its mysteries? Read More
April 22, 2011 Look The Speed of Motion By Harold Edgerton Moving Skip Rope, 1952, black-and-white photograph, 6 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches. Credit: Harold Edgerton: The Anatomy of Movement, by Gus Kayafas and José Gómez Isla.
April 22, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Nathan Zuckerman; Soon-to-be Shiksa By Lorin Stein My girlfriend insisted that I read some Philip Roth and gave me a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint. I can’t decide if I should keel over laughing because of its impeccable comedic timing or froth at the mouth because of its meticulous rendering of nearly every stereotype I’ve ever seen of neurotic sixties Jews. But perhaps more importantly: do I need to read something different by Roth, or do I need to tell this wonderful woman that our relationship is simply not going to work? —A neurotic twenty-first-century schlemiel Your wonderful girlfriend gave you Portnoy’s Complaint, you almost plotzed laughing … so you want to end it? Something tells me I’ve missed a step—but that Philip Roth would understand. So, perhaps, would Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist pilloried for his handling of Jewish stereotypes in his comic masterpiece Carnovsky—and the hero of some of Roth’s best books. Start with The Ghost Writer, in which Zuckerman goes to visit an elder statesman of Jewish letters named Lonoff and finds himself powerfully attracted to Lonoff’s amanuensis, who bears a striking resemblance to … well, I won’t spoil it. You might also consider analysis, if you haven’t already. I think of myself as a semi-Jew: I celebrate holy holidays when I want to, I’m victim to eating bacon regularly, and I wear dresses so short that all my babushka can do is mutter words under her breath at me in Yiddish. I want to get more in touch with my roots. Not in the let’s-all-go-to-synagogue kind of way, but in a contemporary, fun, reading-of-the-Jewish-writer kind of way. Can you recommend anything for this soon-to-be shiksa? —Anna Kogan Now just a second. Thessaly, are you making the goyisch interns impersonate Jews for Pesach? Have you got them downloading The Jazz Singer on Torrent? Reading Howard Jacobsen on their iPhones? In the age of Google, anyone can spell schlemiel. Go read Lee Siegel for your sins, and don’t let this happen again! Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.