Opening Acts
By: Matthew J. Reisz
Sunday 25 February, the first full day of Jewish Book Week, got the event off to a typically exciting start with lively and challenging discussions on everything from Islamic fundamentalism to the Jewish white slave trade in Argentina and the complexities of the strange marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
I heard great things about the 11.00 sessions on archaeology and the war in Iraq, but I was busy preparing for my own discussion with the best-selling novelist (and former Algerian army officer) Yasmina Khadra. He proved to be a man of great charm and charisma, happily describing the many generations of literary figures in his family – with the sole exception of his soldier father – and the encouraging teacher who had led him to turn from Arabic poetry to French prose. He defended the role of the Algerian army which, with little support from Western liberals, had prevented Algeria turning into something like the terrifying Afghanistan he revealed in his powerful novel The Swallows of Kabul.
He was equally severe about Westerners who live in total safety but criticize Arab intellectuals failing to speak out about the abuses in their own countries when they would face real dangers in doing so. And he cheerfully admitted that his thriller The Attack, about a suicide bombing in Israel, was not based on detailed on-the-ground research (although he has Israeli contacts and knew many Palestinian militants in Algeria) but on a desire to find a personal human story which goes beyond the headlines and the slogans.
I missed the session on Taboos but, as always at Book Week, was soon confronted by a tough choice – between a tour of Jewish Bloomsbury and a conversation with the extraordinary Argentinian writer Edgardo Cozarinsky. A total one-off who claimed his major influences as Chekhov, Borges and Robert Louis Stevenson, he eloquently explored with Julia Pascal the themes which underlie his books, The Bride from Odessa and The Moldavian Pimp: the hidden, often tragic history of Buenos Aires; the great population upheavals which took so many people from Europe to the New World in the late nineteenth century and again in the 1940s; and the people so haunted by these events that their own lives seem strangely pallid and unreal
There was another tough choice at 5.30. The session Graphic and Novel featured the French cartoonist Joann Sfar, whose series of books about The Rabbi’s Cat offer an astonishing fantasy evocation of Algerian Jewish life. I have interviewed Sfar and found him one of the most compelling people I’ve ever met. Those who attended the session were similarly impressed.
At the same time, however, I was attending the session sponsored by the magazine I edit, the Jewish Quarterly, where Anne Sebba was quizzing Victoria Glendinning about Leonard Woolf. The Woolfs’ marriage turned out to be full of paradoxes, intense, loving but virtually sexless. On Virginia’s side, it seems to have been virtually an arranged marriage, with her family desperate to find someone who could take her off their hands and look after her during her frequent periods of mental instability. Leonard proved an extraordinarily devoted husband, setting up the Hogarth Press as a distraction for his overwrought wife, although it then went on to publish some of the major works of the twentieth century. But the real puzzle was how a man who claimed to have been little affected by his Jewishness and seldom troubled by antisemitism could have failed to notice his wife’s vicious visceral antipathy to Jews . . . In exploring these themes and the wider issues of Englishness and Jewishness, Glendinning offered a master class in the art of the biographer.
By this time, I was emotionally exhausted by the sheer quality of the debates and went home as the crowds were streaming in to hear George Alagiah and Andrew Miller discuss Self-Made Englishmen with Joanna Newman . . .
Matthew J. Reisz is the Editor of the Jewish Quarterly.
Sunday 25 February, the first full day of Jewish Book Week, got the event off to a typically exciting start with lively and challenging discussions on everything from Islamic fundamentalism to the Jewish white slave trade in Argentina and the complexities of the strange marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
I heard great things about the 11.00 sessions on archaeology and the war in Iraq, but I was busy preparing for my own discussion with the best-selling novelist (and former Algerian army officer) Yasmina Khadra. He proved to be a man of great charm and charisma, happily describing the many generations of literary figures in his family – with the sole exception of his soldier father – and the encouraging teacher who had led him to turn from Arabic poetry to French prose. He defended the role of the Algerian army which, with little support from Western liberals, had prevented Algeria turning into something like the terrifying Afghanistan he revealed in his powerful novel The Swallows of Kabul.
He was equally severe about Westerners who live in total safety but criticize Arab intellectuals failing to speak out about the abuses in their own countries when they would face real dangers in doing so. And he cheerfully admitted that his thriller The Attack, about a suicide bombing in Israel, was not based on detailed on-the-ground research (although he has Israeli contacts and knew many Palestinian militants in Algeria) but on a desire to find a personal human story which goes beyond the headlines and the slogans.
I missed the session on Taboos but, as always at Book Week, was soon confronted by a tough choice – between a tour of Jewish Bloomsbury and a conversation with the extraordinary Argentinian writer Edgardo Cozarinsky. A total one-off who claimed his major influences as Chekhov, Borges and Robert Louis Stevenson, he eloquently explored with Julia Pascal the themes which underlie his books, The Bride from Odessa and The Moldavian Pimp: the hidden, often tragic history of Buenos Aires; the great population upheavals which took so many people from Europe to the New World in the late nineteenth century and again in the 1940s; and the people so haunted by these events that their own lives seem strangely pallid and unreal
There was another tough choice at 5.30. The session Graphic and Novel featured the French cartoonist Joann Sfar, whose series of books about The Rabbi’s Cat offer an astonishing fantasy evocation of Algerian Jewish life. I have interviewed Sfar and found him one of the most compelling people I’ve ever met. Those who attended the session were similarly impressed.
At the same time, however, I was attending the session sponsored by the magazine I edit, the Jewish Quarterly, where Anne Sebba was quizzing Victoria Glendinning about Leonard Woolf. The Woolfs’ marriage turned out to be full of paradoxes, intense, loving but virtually sexless. On Virginia’s side, it seems to have been virtually an arranged marriage, with her family desperate to find someone who could take her off their hands and look after her during her frequent periods of mental instability. Leonard proved an extraordinarily devoted husband, setting up the Hogarth Press as a distraction for his overwrought wife, although it then went on to publish some of the major works of the twentieth century. But the real puzzle was how a man who claimed to have been little affected by his Jewishness and seldom troubled by antisemitism could have failed to notice his wife’s vicious visceral antipathy to Jews . . . In exploring these themes and the wider issues of Englishness and Jewishness, Glendinning offered a master class in the art of the biographer.
By this time, I was emotionally exhausted by the sheer quality of the debates and went home as the crowds were streaming in to hear George Alagiah and Andrew Miller discuss Self-Made Englishmen with Joanna Newman . . .
Matthew J. Reisz is the Editor of the Jewish Quarterly.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home