: Wayne Karlin
: The Genizah
: Publerati
: 9798986617831
: The Genizah
: 1
: CHF 10.50
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: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 296
: kein Kopierschutz
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: ePUB
Definition: Genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial. In the novel The Genizah, Wayne Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family's lives-and fate-if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother's village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it. It is a phrase that calls upon the people at the table to feel, not just to know, what happened, as good fiction calls us to do. How can anyone who had not been through the Holocaust share even a little part of such experiences? How can anyone who has not felt some of that horror reverberate in their own bones try to understand the terrible massacres of our own days, sparked by hatred of the Other, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Israel, in Gaza, in Charleston, and in Pittsburgh-in so many other places, they overwhelm our ability to empathize. Karlin's answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to imagine what could have happened if his grandparents, and mother, and her brothers and sisters and his father and his family, had not torn themselves away from a place they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, in a town and on a continent where they had always been unwelcome guests.

Wayne Karlin has published eight novels: A Wolf by the Ears, Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners (all with Curbstone Press); Lost Armies, The Extras, Us (all with Henry Holt); Crossover (Harcourt), and a short story collection: Memorial Days (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), as well as three works of non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone Press), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). His books have also been published in England, and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Vietnam. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999 for Prisoners, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction for 2019 for A Wolf by the Ears.
The Genizah
Near dawn, I came across three elderly Hasids sitting on a bench filigreed with initials, hearts, and crosses. Standing near a caged, scraggly sapling on the other side of the street were seven equally ancient Chinese men. The three Jews rose in unison from their perch and began to pray, their bodies ticking back and forth like black metronomes. At the same moment, the Chinese started to conjure tai chi patterns, the movements of their hands and feet weaving slowly, as if the air had thickened to the consistency of water, a counterpoint to the frantic bobbing of the Jews. At that moment, as if called by this strangeminyan, the sun rose.
When I turned the corner onto Henry Street, the light strengthened and I stood and watched the street transform as if the old men’s dance had awakened not just the day, but a past that had been contained as fossilized seeds in the objects of the present. Burly men wearing black gabardine and screaming prices in Yiddish suddenly materialized in front of stalls overflowing with vegetables. What yesterday was a bodega was now a kosher butcher shop, the soft Latin letters of the Spanish on the window barbed into Hebrew, a black-bearded butcher scrapping together the blades of carving knives. The sprayed graffiti had unraveled from the walls and the ravaged hull of a burned-out car had dissolved into a horse-drawn cart. Old-clothes men poured out of a doorway, singing their wares. The same doorway birthed a ragged mob of children wearing yarmulkes or floppy, brimmed hats; they ran into the street and immediately began playing stick-ball games; though “began,” I thought, was the wrong word: they configured into what seemed a game they had already been playing for hours or years.
I stopped and tried to immerse into the fantasy. From here, once, I probably could have seen the Towers; their absence aided the illusion being created, or re-created, though I imagined it could simply be done through camera angles. I had forgotten the filming was to begin today, even though the production company had posted notices all week. The movie was one of a recent spate of independent films about the lives of the ultra-orthodox in which a Hasid, sometimes male but more often a woman, was seduced and/or liberated from the sustaining close-knit culture and/or suffocating repression of the tradition. I let myself see the technicians dragging cameras and klieg lights out from a door on the other side of the building and a row of white trucks. A man with a bullhorn yelled at the extras. In the alley, two women were draping other extras in black, Hasidic caftans, clapping fur-rimmedstreimels on their heads, attaching falsepayot, sidelocks. I walked past the crew and up the steps to the abandoned yeshiva that the couple with whom I was staying had converted to an art studio. The word “converted” was exactly right.Le mot juste. But that French phrase itself suddenly seemed nonsensical; the faith in transformative language it called for, a religion that once had wrapped me, now as remote from my heart as the morning prayers of the Hasids.
It no longer sustains, I had said to Avner and Rae when they asked me if I was writing anything new, working on a new book. I was here at their invitation, though I suspected they had offered it out of politeness and had been surprised and somewhat disturbed that I had immediately accepted. I understood their offer to be a gesture. But I had needed to get away and their own odd but lasting relationship, as well as the strange place they were playing it out, had seemed to offer a kind of refuge: Avner, an Israeli sculptor I’d once profiled for theHerald Tribune, had been a member of Peace Now who left the country rather than serve in the occupied territories; Rae, a one-time bond trader, the daughter of a Presbyterian army chaplain, was now a conceptual artist. What they had lost, what no longer sustained them, had drawn them together and now had drawn me into their orbit as well, in the way, I wanted to think, that exiles find each other and coalesce into their own nation.
It was the way I had thought of my wife, our marriage. I had met O when I was working in Israel; she was an ambassador’s daughter from an Asian country working on her Masters in Psychology, her family privileged, as her life would have been if she had gone back home. Privileged and circumspect and mapped out. She was drawn to the security, the beauty and familiarity of her culture; she hated its rigidity, its corrupt luxuries and odious oppressions more.