Jews of Discretion

Let me start with an expression I made up in Call Me by Your Name. It refers to Jews who live in an entirely gentile world and who, without concealing their Jewishness, are, nevertheless, reluctant to proclaim it. There is, or so they think, no real imperative to proclaim their religion; they may even live in a world where Christians and Jews are quite secular, may even intermarry, and have grown to tolerate each other. You are not ashamed or fearful to be Jewish but you know better than to stand out when it’s not exactly necessary to do so. You may not tell everyone you are Jewish; at best, you allow some to infer it. After at least 2,000 years of antisemitic persecution, your difference is something you learn instinctively not to say too much about. I called these Jews “Jews of discretion.” Not nervous, not even apprehensive—just discreet. Or to use another word, prudent. André Aciman, Tablet

dal discorso fatto dall'autore il 5 novembre scorso all'University of Virginia in occasione della Conference on Jewish Life in the Diaspora: Sephardic Lives

Days of The Jackal

How Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business. Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end? Alex Blasdel, The Guardian

 

e per continuare a esplorare il lato commerciale della letteratura, da leggere è quest'altro articolo sui premi letterari:  "What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award", Alexander Manshel & Melanie Walsh, Public Books

Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Lord Jim at Home

Born into privilege somewhere in Cornwall in the 1920s, Giles Trenchard receives a bizarre yet commonplace induction into the upper middle class life of the time. His sense of worth is depleted before he leaves the nursery, by the interlocking efforts of a drunken, bleakly dismissive and mostly absent father and a nanny determined to control his bodily processes. He is expected to struggle towards personal agency but always punished for demonstrating it. He is separated from the mother he adores. He’s forced to eat food he can’t stomach. Nevertheless, he visualises himself as “the Prince”. It’s an emotional miseducation that can be completed only by a public school – in this case Rugby, where, already fragile and floundering, he learns to survive through mediocrity, dissociation and doing as little as possible; while beneath the vague, compliant surface that so irritates his teachers, all the suppressed needs, greeds and ambitions of early childhood still writhe. Inevitably, this contradiction will shape his adult life, which Brooke unrolls across the body of her novel, exactly like one of the fouled nappies the nanny draped across Giles’s face at six months old to teach him right from wrong in the context of bowel movements. John Harrison, The Guardian

ritorna nelle librerie un inquietante libro di culto degli anni '70, Lord Jim at Home, di Dinah Brooke (Daunt Books), da noi mai tradotto, mi pare.