Innholdsfortegnelse for February 8, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, and Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, which was published last year. Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Philip Clark’s Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time was published in 2020. He won the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2022. He is currently working on Sound and the City, a sonic history of New York. David Cole is the National Legal Director of…

Africa and Byzantium an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, November 19, 2023–March 3, 2024; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 14–July 21, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Andrea Myers Achi. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 351 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In 496 CE a giraffe arrived at Constantinople. It was a rare event. The exotic animal was brought by ambassadors from the distant south, possibly from Nubia (a kingdom on the Nile roughly coextensive with modern Sudan). It had lingered on its way at Gaza (then, in more fortunate times, a rich entrepôt between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean), where it impressed a professor of Greek literature. It may also have left its mark on local craftsmen. Mosaics laid…

As World War II was drawing to a close, Edmund Wilson attracted considerable attention with a pair of New Yorker articles in which he undertook to demolish any claim of crime fiction to literary merit: “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” (1944) and “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945).1 A controversy over popular reading matter must have been a welcome relief from war news, and Wilson provoked a good many rejoinders in the following months. The essays remain thoroughly entertaining performances—eviscerating mockery being a Wilson subspecialty—despite failing to answer either question satisfactorily. To the second question it is easy enough to respond: far more readers than he could have foreseen would continue to care, long after he wrote his screeds. Having been in Japan during a celebration of Agatha…

Absolution by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $28.00 For a good part of the twentieth century, the ethnicities of fiction writers served as literary labels. Grace Paley in her early career, for instance, was greeted as an addendum to Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, her fellow descendants of Eastern European Jews, and the blurbs on the back of her first book are from Philip Roth and Herbert Gold and Harvey Swados, as if no Protestant could even be asked. Her innovations in narrative—the free-ranging sentences, the primacy of voice over plot—were seen as less crucial to early critics than what was then considered a very particular content: Jews in mid-century America. Today American writers of all races and ethnicities may well complain of similar pigeonholing, but at…

Maestro a film directed by Bradley Cooper The door of his dressing room opened and I was about to say something to Leonard Bernstein, though I had no idea what. I was fourteen years old, a nervy kid from the sticks with embarrassing eyeglasses, but Bernstein’s smile, as he inched his way through the assembled crowd, radiated reassurance. Next thing I knew I was gripped inside a Lenny hug and a question began formulating in my mind, as if he was squeezing it out of me. I loved the record he’d made in 1976 of the jazz-powered ballet La Création du monde and found myself asking him about its composer: “Do you still perform Darius Milhaud?” Bernstein gazed deep into my eyes, raised his hand toward his mouth as he…

God’s Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very by Clark Davis. University of Chicago Press, 363 pp., $35.00 Ralph Waldo Emerson was endlessly seeking his ideal writer, who was “part and particle of God,” as he wrote in Nature (1836). So it comes as no surprise that in the spring of 1838 he embraced the poet Jones Very, a twenty-four-year-old Greek tutor studying at the Harvard Divinity School, and soon hailed him as “our brave saint.” “Wherever that young enthusiast goes,” Emerson confided to his journal, “he will astonish and disconcert.” Very did astonish, and he did disconcert. He astonished and disconcerted his fellow students, not to mention Harvard officials, when, that September, he claimed that the Holy Spirit communicated directly through him and that he, Jones Very, was…

Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories by Lore Segal. Melville House, 131 pp., $18.99 (paper) Lore Segal was ten years old when the Nazis occupied Vienna, in March 1938. Within weeks her father lost his job, her parents were evicted from their apartment, and her grandparents’ business was confiscated. It was quickly decided that she should be sent out of the country on the newly organized Kindertransport headed for England. They walked across the city, she and her parents, to reach the train station, crossing the Danube Canal on the way. She knew that she was leaving them and that she should be feeling sad or frightened, but halfway across the bridge, she couldn’t help it, she was thinking, “Wow! I’m going to England!” At the station everyone was crying; her…

Character References To the Editors: While warmly appreciating Nathaniel Rich’s generous and comprehensive assessment of my book, Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II [NYR, December 21, 2023], may I clarify a point about Irène Némirovksy’s Suite française? According to Rich, the near-total absence of Jewish characters in Suite française is as much an aesthetic blunder as a moral one. The story of Némirovsky’s own efforts to secure protection from Vichy France would have neatly complemented the narratives of vanity and self-delusion that define the novel. Rich then quotes the letter in which Némirovsky begged Marshal Pétain to distinguish her as a French woman of letters from ordinary Jewish immigrants: “undesirable and the honorable foreigners.” To enhance her appeal, she cites as a reference André Chaumeix, a…

I was talking to a builderof bridges and askedhow he built the structurethat brings two warring elementstogether. This was his answer.What is a bridge?A land divided, or the gapbetween? Most see a unitywrought through necessityand compromise, mutualrespect, or cohabitation.But he was interested in the spaceseparating these two landsthat perhaps are one hope.And thinking of the vacuummade him forge arare concept, one worthyof an old myth. He builta bridge that acknowledgedthe empty space.To walk that bridgeis to feel the swaying dangerof the wind and the heights,the howling drop. No onecan walk the bridge withoutrespect, holding on carefullyto the ropes on either side,aware of the beautyand the depths and rocks,the pitiless desert all around.Its strangest featureis the gap that runs throughthe center. Neither half meet.The gap is for thermal expansionof the tough…

for Paul Auster Days emptied out along the hairlinecracks where you spilled the glossy oilwhere you stopped resemblance from looking,where your thoughts, if they were thoughts,ghost things of the mind, dream things of the night,fell down and down to the last rock under the pile,the final colorless span, making no sound or onlythe sound that cannot be heard, withoutmimic, so that it spread as if made of inky moss,as if made from a tincture of fallen petals, of thin bloodsand thin wings of the tiniest insects, bodiless in flight,translucent as dusk but, even so, changeless,like the grieving of a stranger in a photograph of war.Last line intentionally left blank.…

Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. Liveright, 432 pp., $35.00 1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Hitler’s Putsch by Mark William Jones. Basic Books, 398 pp., $32.00 In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner, translated from the German by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton University Press, 378 pp., $37.00 The magnitude of the German catastrophe in the twelve years of Hitler’s rule (1933–1945) casts such a dark shadow that it is difficult to see the preceding fourteen years of Weimar democracy (1919–1933) as a historical era in its own right rather than as a prelude to the dictatorship that followed. The Weimar Republic was certainly burdened by severe…

Father and Son by Jonathan Raban. Knopf, 323 pp., $28.00 One morning in June 2011 the British writer Jonathan Raban woke with a bewildering sense of frailty and lost balance. As he climbed the stairs to the third floor of his house in Seattle, the city he’d made his home since 1990, his left shoulder “kept on bumping against the wall”; at supper that evening the knife in his right hand slid uselessly across his meal, “flatly refus[ing] to carry out the order transmitted to it from my brain.” Just shy of his sixtyninth birthday he’d suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing his right side. It was a condition from which he never fully recovered. Raban, who died in January 2023 at the age of eighty, was perhaps the most subtle…