Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

When New Year’s rainclouds wash the tulip’s face,
get up and to red wine your will entrust.
Since this green lawn that now delights your eye
Tomorrow will be growing from your dust.

(In Mohammad ibn Bahr Jājarmī, Mo’nes al-Ahrār, dated 1340, in E. Denison Ross, “’Omar Khayyam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, 3 (1927), pp. 433-439.)

Now that the bloom is on the rose of bliss,
Don’t hesitate to raise a wine glass high.
Drink up, for your determined foe is time:
You won’t again come by a day like this.

Whinfield 71

Wine server, rise and bring shame to my name.
The old and young have often seen our like.
Musician, my physician, sing a song,
then grab a wine decanter: a chord strike!

“Kholāsat al-ash`ār fi al-Robā`īyat,” Safīneh-‘e Tabrīz.

Into the garden flew a drunken nightingale,
delighting in the cup of wine that was its rose.
It whispered with its mystic voice into my ear:
“Grab hold, for life is gone when once it goes.

Whinfield 81

Tonight, who brought you from behind the veil;
who brought you, tipsy, to me, drawing near?
–to one on fire because you had been gone–
one like an arid wind; who brought you here?

Whinfield 2

The dawn has broken: rise, you hopeless flirt,
and gently – gently -— sip some wine and strum.
For those who dwell here will not be here long.
Of those who left, not one again will come.

– Mo’nes al-Ahrar

“Now Ruz on Sunset,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ Lunapic, 2023

What’s being, then, if death is the reality?
What is the road to our impossible desires?
No layover will offer any benefit.
And when the journey’s done, what kind of rest transpires?

Whinfield 88

Wine is an essence that takes many forms:
It animates all life and waters roots.
Do not imagine that it ever dies.
Its essence lives, if not its attributes.

Whinfield 75

Since I translated the poetry into a contemporary idiom, I thought I’d try my hand at a digital image that pays homage to the Bravo show, “The Shahs of Sunset,” instead of the Victorian, pre-Raphaelite sort of painting that has typically accompanied the The Rubaiyat in Western publishing.

These poems are not in my translation of the Yerbudaki manuscript, which is available as below:

Juan Cole, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian (London: IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020). Click here.

Reviews:

“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

( Tomdispatch.com) – I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that — a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside — from the novels that are generally published.  For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.

As for myself — I’m a novelist — I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me.  So why is it always lurking there?  Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.

Going to War in the South Bronx

I come from — to use an old-fashioned phrase — a working class immigrant family. The middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the South Bronx in New York City.  In my neighborhood, war — or at least the military — was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were “soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods — multi-ethnic, diverse, low-income — it was the way things were and you never thought to question that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and, given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.

Many of the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.)  However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that surrounded us as we grew up.

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Then as now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain for relief.

When I was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued, broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I dated, worked with, or was related to men who participated in some of these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact — I must have been three — is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir.

When I was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept close at hand for the rest of his life.

My first “serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S. Warrington. I was 15. Not surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction to alcohol.

I was 18 when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of his life. And so it went.

Today, I no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth, and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense.

Rejecting War

It’s in the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War — I had, by then, made it out of my neighborhood and my world — something challenged this trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way previously unknown in our history.  With that mindset suddenly in ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war, ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers.

In those years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on campus.  (Working class women worked at paying jobs!)  As I learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job).

During those years, two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours — and come in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited, unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and, above all, about the country they were invading.

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Our storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness. Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a blessing.

The second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals. I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing.

Breathing War

In those years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that was — always — shadowed by war, in fiction.

Why doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison once wrote, “Literature is the lie that tells the truth.” Yet in a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally not among them. 

My suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is somehow not us.

My own urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels — without, that is, speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it.  When American fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the lie that denial tells.

That war shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my characters breathe it, too.

Copyright 2013 Beverly Gologorsky

Tomdispatch.com

( LA Review of Books) – DURING THE LONG summer days in Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk devotes himself to intensive writing on Büyükada, an island in the Sea of Marmara, and in the evenings, he meets with visitors. Last August, Pamuk and I had dinner there and discussed everything from politics (could Erdoğan survive the May 2023 elections?) to the author’s illustrated notebooks, selections from which were recently published in Turkish and French. (The English version, Memories of Distant Mountains, won’t appear for another year or two.) His latest novel Nights of Plague (2022) was soon to be released in the United States in English translation, but Pamuk had already started on his next novel, with the working title The Card Players — yes, he was familiar with the eponymous five-painting Cézanne series.

As we talked, Pamuk placed a sheaf of colorful manuscript pages before me. In the first illustration, words and letters were raining down from the sky in an arresting manner.

That word-storm set the volume’s tone, a series of miniature illustrations and notes serving to illuminate Pamuk’s writing process. They offer windows onto his creative method as a self-described “visual writer” who often writes through a dialectic of image and text. This might take the form of ekphrasis, as in My Name Is Red (2001), which is punctuated with descriptive prose depicting Islamic miniatures; or it might simply be the basis for developing the novels — that is, figures, scenes, or settings sketched out as he wrote. Accompanying text might appear as a separate caption, as an image itself (cobblestones, for example), or as an embellishment to an existing image. He was, more or less, painting with words. Later, we agreed to discuss Nights of Plague and some of these notebook illustrations in a public event at Duke University, where I regularly taught a Pamuk seminar.

Three months later, as we drove to the campus from the airport, Pamuk spoke quickly, in the manner of one whose mind races ahead of his words. This would be the first time he had discussed the illustrations. He was also in the midst of teaching a seminar on “The Political Novel” at Columbia University, where he taught each fall. On the reading list was his own novel Snow (2002), and he told me that situating his own books was part of his work as a writer. As he spoke, it seemed as if ideas and information were swirling around us like the words in his illustration. Occasionally, he turned toward me and widened his eyes for emphasis. “Which images are we going to discuss?” he asked.

It was a chilly November day, but he cracked the window as a precaution. As we drove, he continued to describe his writer’s life in New York and on the road. We discussed his schedule on campus, where he would be giving two talks: the first on Nights of Plague and the second on the notebooks he’d been keeping for the last 14 years. Pamuk’s creative life had proliferated, and, in addition to being a global author, he’d become a curator, a photographer, and an artist — something he’d aspired to be as a young man. Moreover, illustrations, including sketches of character types, informed his writing process as a kind of scaffolding. For Nights of Plague, for example, he’d sketched figures like a fez-clad quarantine official whose duty was to disinfect areas with a special Lysol spray pump: it was a succinct portrait of late Ottoman modernity.

When we got to the hotel, we set to work going over the draft of a collection of 30 interviews that I was co-editing with Pelin Kıvrak, covering Pamuk’s four decades as a published author. I pointed him to the last piece, an interview about interviews we had planned but not yet completed. He looked at the questions and immediately began to take notes. He described various aspects of the interview as a literary vehicle and as an alternative literary history. He had, in his youth, studied journalism. Interviews, whether investigative or ethnographic, had become a part of his writing process and sometimes entered his plots themselves. Ka, the protagonist of Snow, posed as a reporter and often asked questions of those he met in the small Anatolian border town where the novel is set. In A Strangeness in My Mind (2015), interviews of Istanbul migrants and street hawkers formed part of his quasi-ethnographic process. Pamuk talked about the place of the interview in the writerly life, about paratexts that situate the author or the book, and about a writer’s consideration of different local and international audiences. “I love to talk about my novels,” he said. “Doing interviews is a sort of a public introduction to the reception of the book and also the possibility of manipulating it.”

Once we had finished, we walked to Duke’s East Campus. While we waited for the event to begin, I skimmed the notes for my introduction describing Pamuk’s significance as a practitioner of the global novel. Most of his work is set in Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire and the city of his birth. Writing with a focus on Turkish culture, history, and politics, he mixes multiple genres, from the historical novel to the romance and detective story, from the political novel to the autobiography. Along with allusions to Turkish and world literature, common tropes in Pamuk’s work include identity, conspiracy, doubles, obsessive love, murder mystery, coups, curation, Sufism, and the power of the state.

For Pamuk, the novel is method, a multifaceted process of archival work, interviews, reading in the genre, and locating visual corollaries or memorial objects. He brings to his fiction a historian’s attention to detail. It’s not surprising that the narrator of Nights of Plague, Mina Mingher, is a historian and scholar who assembles the story from an “archive” of letters written by an Ottoman sultan’s niece. Pamuk’s fiction occupies the gray area between history and literature — or, as Mina states, between “a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel.” His work often reflects the novelist as archivist and curator, perhaps best exemplified in the Museum of Innocence project that began in 2008 with the novel of that same title and then became an actual brick-and-mortar museum in Istanbul in 2012 and later, in 2015, a documentary film. Taken all together, the project reflects Pamuk’s work with radical intertextuality of object, image, and narrative.

Nights of Plague is an outbreak narrative, set during a contagion in the late Ottoman era. What is known historically as the “third major plague pandemic,” which began in China in 1855, has already killed millions before it arrives, in 1901, to Mingheria, a half-Muslim, half-Christian island in the Ottoman Mediterranean (with evocations of Cyprus and Crete, as well as Pamuk’s summer haunt of Büyükada). Sultan Abdul Hamid II (who reigned 1876–1909) sends his most accomplished quarantine expert, Bonkowski Pasha (something of an early-20th-century Anthony Fauci), to the island. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a Sufi religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to respect the quarantine. In the context of state-backed quarantine measures, Nights of Plague also tells a story of political formation and national self-determination, tracing the rise of one Kâmil Pasha as founding president of the independent island-nation of Mingheria, soon to be freed from Ottoman rule and embark on its own quirky cultural revolution reminiscent of Turkey’s own post-Ottoman modernization.

In the novel, physical manifestations of the plague combine with allegory, as colonial modernity confronts Islamic tradition. The Ottoman state’s liminal position is captured by the fact that Abdul Hamid  is both an autocrat and a modernizer — an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes and a fan of his deductive reasoning. This depiction is based on historical fact; indeed, Yervant Odyan, an Ottoman Armenian writer, even wrote a novel about the sultan’s fondness for the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle entitled Abdülhamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911). This novel is a literary curiosity today, but at the time of its publication, it offered a denigrating portrait of the deposed sultan after the Second Constitutional Young Turk Revolution of 1908. By contrast, Nights of Plague is a nuanced take on Abdul Hamid’s end-of-empire legacy.

Pamuk has nurtured an interest in the nexus linking plagues, quarantines, religion, and state formation for almost 40 years. In Pamuk’s second novel, Silent House (1983, in Turkish), another historian, Faruk Darvınoğlu, researches the “plague state” created when a contagion ravages the Ottoman Empire and the government goes into remote quarantine. The theme reappears in Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle (1985), set in the 17th century, in which a plague epidemic becomes a metaphor for conversion for a Venetian man captured and enslaved by the Ottomans. Working with his Muslim master, he is able to predict the end of the plague by tracking the number of deaths in each neighborhood. Methodical thought uneasily confronts Muslim fatalism here, as it does in Nights of Plague, in which the epidemic becomes a catalyst for a new political formation.

Among other accomplishments, Nights of Plague places the reader at the intersection of epidemiology and nation-state formation. As such, it dramatizes a variety of biopolitics. If we can speak of the nation as an “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s formulation), then we can also consider its “imagined immunities,” Priscilla Wald argues in her 2008 book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. “While emerging infections are inextricable from global interdependence in all versions of these [outbreak] accounts,” she writes, “the threat they pose requires a national response. The community to be protected is thereby configured in cultural and political as well as biological terms: the nation as immunological ecosystem.” Readers understand, morbidly, that the modern state “inoculates” against political others who are relegated to a lethal precarity.

In Nights of Plague, Pamuk confronts us with the ironic idea that a political entity, even a nation-state, could arise in response to, or as a symptom of, an epidemic.

During the event, Pamuk further elaborated on this topic, contrasting novels in which plagues figure as documented material events, as in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), with those in which they function as allegories, such as Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). In Pamuk’s novel, it is a little of both. Of course, the plague in the novel isn’t just a plague — it’s a force of historical transformation like religion, modernity, or colonialism. The presence of the contagion turns people into others, transforms them forever; it demands, at a minimum, some degree of conversion to the rules and regulations of modern governmentality, something we’ve all experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nights of Plague speaks back to the Orientalist tropes of the European plague novel, showing how the imposition of quarantine in any context (not just Islamic) comes with potential political or epistemic violence (including disinformation). In a 2020 New York Times editorial entitled “What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us,” Pamuk summarized the basis of mob anger at quarantine regulations as a widespread but mistaken belief that “[t]he disease is foreign, it comes from outside, it is brought in with malicious intent.”

For his second talk, in the auditorium of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, Pamuk explained the writerly process that rests at the intersection of image and text. The pages of Pamuk’s notebooks contain a running commentary on the labors of writing, as well as intimacies, confessions, and symbolic or poetic codes. They not only trace his travels in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also reveal what might be called the topographies of the writer’s mind. A piece of gossip sits next to an epiphany. A statement of nostalgia shares the page with news of publications or a simple accounting of the day’s expenses. That contrast, in which the profound cohabits with the quotidian, reveals the writer in the messiness of life. Pamuk’s notebooks are the calm eye of a storm of creativity. They are itinerary and raw thought, both meditative and marginal. For anyone interested in the inner workings of a brilliant mind, the notebooks are an addicting pleasure that lay bare the wellsprings of Pamuk’s writing.

The images contained in his notebooks, which were projected on a large screen during the event, reveal ideas, visions, daily concerns, and snippets of conversation intertwined with vistas and landscapes. At times, the words actually constitute the “view.” As Pamuk writes, “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.”

The images Pamuk projected included the picture of words raining down from the sky, as well as vistas of Crete. One illustration contained the line, “Everything begins with a VIEW.” We saw drawings (based on historical photographs) of fez-wearing late-Ottoman youths fishing with nets, which uncovered Pamuk’s fascination with narrative detail and local color. And we saw an illustration that captured the Italian skyline of Urbino, which inspired the city of Arkaz in Nights of Plague, showing how the author’s travel and writing are linked. The image had a kind of aphorism at the top that read, “Me at one time in the past: fable and history; writing and picture.”

In response to a question from the audience, Pamuk discussed ekphrasis, the process of painting with words. An eager student asked which takes precedence, image or text? “It’s not translating that image,” he responded. “It’s putting that image in words, describing that image with words … When we think, do we use pictures or words or neither? Or is some chemistry happening? What is a thought, is it an image? Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s a word. When I call myself a visual writer, for me, a thought is closer to an image.” As he responded to questions, Pamuk frequently made the audience weigh and consider — and laugh. At one point, he produced the current notebook he carried with him as his portable studio, in which he sketched and wrote whenever time allowed. The attentive faces of the spectators revealed that he was connecting, in word and image, with a new generation of Pamuk readers.

Reprinted from The Los Angeles Review of Books with the author’s permission.

A survey commissioned in 2019 revealed the shocking result that over half of Britons did not know that at least six millions Jews had been murdered during the Holocaust.

This result was all the more surprising given the fact that the Holocaust, as a topic, has been part of the national curriculum in England and Wales since its creation in 1991. The 2014 iteration of the national curriculum has the Holocaust as a firm part of key stage 3 history – compulsory for all 11 to 14-year-olds in state schools. Additionally, many secondary school pupils may encounter the Holocaust as a topic in English or religious education lessons.

However, research into what school pupils in England know about the Holocaust shows that they lack knowledge about its context. They may know bare facts – ghettos, deportations, concentration camps – but are less clear on the ideology that led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the first place. Pupils may not be clear what exactly it is they need to take away from those lessons and how they can be relevant to their contemporary lives.

For instance, it is important to understand how politicians sought to gain popular support by blaming minorities such as Jewish people for all the ills Germany experienced after the first world war. Relentless anti-Jewish propaganda was used to indoctrinate the general population.

It is for this reason that literature can be a meaningful additional teaching tool, not only in schools but also for everybody interested in the events leading up to the Holocaust. Literature can broaden horizons and deepen knowledge. It can offer different perspectives, often in the same narrative; it teaches us empathy but it can also help us to acquire facts and additional knowledge.

However, the sheer number of books on the Holocaust – survivor accounts, biographies, novels, factual books – can be overwhelming.

Sometimes, bestselling books on the Holocaust, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) or Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), lack the factually correct underpinning that is necessary to make them a good way to learn about the history. It is consequently vital to find books that meaningfully introduce their readers to the topic and that provide carefully researched historical context.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

One example is Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) which is based on Kerr’s own childhood experience. It is the story of 9-year-old Jewish girl Anna who has a happy childhood in Germany until the day her father, wanted by the Nazis, has to leave the country.

Anna’s subsequent narrative outlines the repressions affecting Jewish life on a daily basis. She encounters public events such as the staged book burnings and the daily propaganda that perpetuated falsehoods about Jews. As such, it is an excellent – though hard-hitting – way to introduce a younger readership to the prejudices and reprisals Jews were increasingly subjected to in Nazi Germany.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) is probably the one Holocaust book most people have heard of. It charts the two years Anne and her family spent in hiding in Amsterdam.

The book is often praised for its positive and hopeful message. It is, however, vital that even young readers are made aware of the fact that the Franks were eventually discovered by the Nazis, deported to Auschwitz and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne tragically died in early 1945.

Night

Survivor accounts are generally the best way to learn about the Holocaust. Older teenagers could read Elie Wiesel’s outstanding Night (1958). It describes, in a dispassionate voice, Wiesel’s experiences of being deported from his home town of Sighet in what is now Romania, first to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald.

Wiesel lost his father, mother and youngest sister in the Holocaust and dedicated his life to Holocaust education. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. If anybody plans to read just one book on the Holocaust, it should probably be this one.

Maus

Some young readers might be reluctant to read such hard-hitting accounts by witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. They might be persuaded to engage with the topic, though, through Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus.

Spiegelman’s book recounts the story of his father Vladek and mother Anja, who both survived Nazi concentration camps. He uses the imagery of an animal fable by depicting his Jewish characters as mice who are chased by the Nazi cats. While this is potentially a distancing device to soften the impact of his illustrations, it also helps Spiegelman to pass critical comments on the Nazis’ notorious attempts to classify people into strictly segregated groups.

Maus made it back into the bestseller lists in January 2022 when a County School Board in Tennessee controversially banned it from its classrooms and libraries. Censorship is not yet a thing of the past – and it is, maybe, especially the people making decisions about education who ought to read these texts.

Using literature as a tool to augment Holocaust teaching in secondary schools might be a good way to further pupils’ learning and understanding not just of the Holocaust, but of the ideologies, populism and propaganda that lay behind it – and how to identify similar narratives that are, worryingly, on the rise again in the world around them.

Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I still remember him calling my house. He was old, his hearing was going, and he couldn’t tell that my teenage son had rushed to answer the phone, hoping it was one of his friends. Instead, finding himself on with Studs talking a mile a minute, my son would begin yelling desperately, “Dad! Dad!”

With that — and a recent publishing disaster — in mind this morning, I took my little stepladder to the back of my tiny study, put it in front of my bookcase and climbed up until I could reach the second to the top shelf, the one that still has Studs’s old volumes lined up on it. Among others, I pulled down one of his later oral histories, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. In its acknowledgments, I found this: “Were it not for Tom Engelhardt, the nonpareil of editors, who was uncanny in cutting the fat from the lean (something I found impossible to do) and who gave this work much of its form, I’d still be in the woods.”

And that still makes me so proud. But let me rush to add that, in the years of his best-known work when I was at Pantheon Books (1976 to 1990), I was never his main editor. That honor was left to the remarkable André Schiffrin who started Studs, like so many other memorable authors, on his book career; ran that publishing house in his own unique way; found me in another life; and turned me into the editor he sensed I already naturally was.

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For me, those were remarkable years. Even then, André was a genuinely rare figure in mainstream publishing — a man who wanted the world to change, a progressive who couldn’t have been a more adventurous publisher. In fact, I first met him in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a time when I was still an Asian-scholar-to-be and involved in organizing a group, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, that had produced an antiwar book, The Indochina Story, that André had decided to publish.

In my years at Pantheon, he transformed me into a book editor and gave me the leeway to find works I thought might, in some modest fashion, help alter our world (or rather the way we thought about it) for the better. Those included, among others, the rediscovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early-twentieth-century utopian masterpiece Herland; the publishing of Unforgettable Fire, Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (not long before, in the early 1980s, an antinuclear movement in need of it would arise in this country); Nathan Huggins’s monumental Black Odyssey; Eduardo Galeano’s unique three-volume Memory of Fire history of the Americas; Eva Figes’s novel Light; John Berger’s Another Way of Telling; Orville Schell’s “Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!”: China Encounters the West; and even — my mother was a cartoonist — the Beginner’s comic book series, including Freud for Beginners, Marx for Beginners, Darwin for Beginners, and, of course, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, to mention just a modest number of works I was responsible for ushering into existence here in America.

The Second Time Around

What a chance, in my own fashion and however modestly, to lend a hand in changing and improving our world. And then, in a flash, in 1990 it all came to an end. In those years, publishing was already in the process (still ongoing) of conglomerating into ever fewer monster operations. Si Newhouse, the owner of CondéNast and no fan of progressive publishing, had by that time taken over Random House, the larger operation in which Pantheon was lodged and he would, in the end, get rid of André essentially because of his politics and the kind of books we published.

We editors and most of the rest of the staff quit in protest, claiming we had been “Newhoused.” (Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Kurt Vonnegut would join us in that protest.) The next thing I knew, I was out on the street, both literally and figuratively, and my life as a scrambling freelancer began. Yes, Pantheon still existed in name, but not the place I had known and loved. It was a bitter moment indeed, both personally and politically, watching as something so meaningful, not just to me but to so many readers, was obliterated in that fashion. It seemed like a publishing version of capitalism run amok.

And then, luck struck a second time. A few years later, one of my co-editors and friends at Pantheon, Sara Bershtel, launched a new publishing house, Metropolitan Books, at Henry Holt Publishers. It seemed like a miracle to me then. Suddenly, I found myself back in the heartland of mainstream publishing, a “consulting editor” left to do my damnedest, thanks to Sara (herself an inspired and inspiring editor). I was, so to speak, back in business.

And as at Pantheon, it would prove an unforgettable experience. I mean, honestly, where else in mainstream publishing would Steve Fraser and I have been able to spend years producing a line-up of books in a series we called, graphically enough, The American Empire Project? (Hey, it even has a Wikipedia entry!) In that same period, Sara would publish memorable book after memorable book like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Thomas Frank’s What‘s the Matter with Kansas?, some of which made it onto bestseller lists, while I was putting out volumes by authors whose names will be familiar indeed to the readers of TomDispatch, including Andrew Bacevich, James Carroll, Noam Chomsky, Michael Klare, Chalmers Johnson, Alfred McCoy, Jonathan Schell, and Nick Turse. And it felt comforting somehow to be back in a situation where I could at least ensure that books I thought might make some modest (or even immodest) difference in an ever more disturbed and disturbing America would see the light of day.

I’ve written elsewhere about the strange moment when, for instance, I first decided that I had to publish what became Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable, deeply insightful, and influential book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire on the future nightmares my country was then seeding into the rest of the planet. Think, for instance, of Osama bin Laden who, Johnson assured his readers well before 9/11 happened, we had hardly heard the last of. (Not surprisingly, only after 9/11 did that book become a bestseller!) Or consider Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which I published in 2003. So many years later, its very title still sums up remarkably well the dilemma we face on a planet where what’s on the mind of top foreign policy officials in Washington these days is — god save us! — a new cold war with China. We’re talking, in other words, about a place where the two major greenhouse gas emitters on Planet Earth can’t agree on a thing or work together in any way.

The Second Time Around (Part 2)

But let me not linger on ancient history when, just the other day, it happened again. And by it I mean a new version of what happened to me at Pantheon Books. It’s true that because, in my later years, TomDispatch has become my life’s work, I hadn’t done anything for Metropolitan for a while (other, of course, than read with deep fascination the books Sara published). Still, just two weeks ago I was shocked to hear that, like Pantheon, Metropolitan, a similarly progressive publishing house in the mainstream world, was consigned to the waves; its staff laid off; and the house itself left in the publishing version of hell.

Initially, that act of Holt’s, the consigning of Metropolitan to nowhere land, was reported by the trade publication Publisher’s Weekly, but count on one thing: more is sure to come as that house’s authors learn the news and respond.

After all, like Pantheon, at the moment of its demise, it was a lively, deeply progressive operation, churning out powerful new titles — until, that is, it was essentially shut down when Sara, a miraculous publisher like André, was shown the door along with her staff. Bam! What did it matter that, thanks to her, Metropolitan still occupied a space filled by no other house in mainstream publishing? Nothing obviously, not to Holt, or assumedly Macmillan, the giant American publishing conglomerate of which it was a part, or the German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group that owns Macmillan.

How strange that we’re in a world where two such publishing houses, among the best and most politically challenging around, could find that there simply was no place for them as progressive publishers in the mainstream. André, who died in 2013, responded by launching an independent publishing house, The New Press, an admirable undertaking. In terms of the Dispatch Books I still put out from time to time, I find myself in a similar world, dealing with another adventurous independent publishing outfit, Haymarket Books.

Still, what an eerie mainstream we now inhabit, don’t we?

I mean, when it comes to what capitalism is doing on this planet of ours, book publishing is distinctly small (even if increasingly mashed) potatoes. After all, we’re talking about a world where giant fossil-fuel companies with still-soaring profits are all too willing to gaslight the public while quite literally burning the place up — or perhaps I mean flooding the place out. (Don’t you wonder sometimes what the CEOs of such companies are going to tell their grandchildren?)

So the consignment of Metropolitan Books to the trash heap of history is, you might say, a small matter indeed. Still, it’s painful to see what is and isn’t valued in this society of ours (and by whom). It’s painful to see who has the ability to cancel out so much else that should truly matter.

And believe me, just speaking personally, twice is twice too much. Imagine two publishing houses that let me essentially find, edit, and publish what I most cared about, what I thought was most needed, books at least some of which might otherwise never have made it into our world. (The proposal for MAUS, for instance, had been rejected by more or less every house in town before it even made it into my hands.)

Yes, two progressive publishing houses are a small thing indeed on this increasingly unnerving planet of ours. Still, think of this as the modern capitalist version of burning books, though as with those fossil-fuel companies, it is, in reality, more like burning the future. Think of us as increasingly damaged goods on an increasingly damaged planet.

In another world, these might be considered truly terrible acts. In ours, they simply happen, it seems, without much comment or commentary even though silence is ultimately the opposite of what any decent book or book publisher stands for.

You know, it suddenly occurs to me. Somebody should write a book about all this, don’t you think?

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

It is not a new controversy. Television journalist Megyn Kelly when she was at Fox insisted that Santa Claus is “white.” I’m not sure why that was important to her (or more likely the bosses who were constantly hitting on her), but it is not true.

Then there were the white nationalist Thor fans who did not want Idris Elba to play Heimdall, the mythic guardian of the Bifrost bridge to Asgard. I pointed out that the far-flung Viking conquests certainly made them a multi-cultural society, and that there were likely Muslim converts among them, as well as intermarriages with Africans and Mediterranean peoples.

As for Middle Earth, it is of course a fictional place with lots of types of creatures in it. It is a little mysterious how people can suspend disbelief enough to accept a story about elves and dwarves and orcs but not enough to accept a story about Black elves. Elves were a step too far for some of Tolkien’s friends. He used to read out The Lord of the Rings to his “Inklings” group at Oxford, and at one point fellow academic Hugo Dyson, lying on the couch, needled him: “Oh God, not another fucking elf!”

Speculative fiction is all about world building. Some literary theorists have noted that story is character, plot and setting, and that in speculative fiction “setting” takes center stage. So let us consider Middle Earth as a world. Black skin is an adaptive mechanism in parts of the earth with high ultraviolet rays It helps prevent embryos from being damaged by those UV rays. If Middle Earth was a whole world, then it had a tropics where there would have been black-skinned creatures, and those would have circulated. It is only the novice speculative fiction writers who speak of an “ice world” or a “wet world.” Planets are large and have many climes. Tolkien was no novice.

Then there was the character of the man. Despite living in a world of white male privilege at Oxford, a world he no doubt could not entirely escape, in some respects Tolkien was what white racialists would now call “woke.” He had been born to an English family in South Africa, and once said publicly that “I have the hatred of Apartheid in my bones.”

In 1938 when a German publisher wary of the Nazis’ racist policies wrote Tolkien to ask whether he could prove his Aryan descent, the author wrote out a couple replies, one of which said,

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.”

As an expert in historical linguistics, Tolkien obviously took some pleasure in pointing out to the Nazis that their ideal of racial purity, Aryanism, encompassed Iranians and Indians, and included brown-skinned and Black people along with whites. Sir William Jones in the late 18th century had been flabbergasted to discover that Sanskrit and Persian were clearly related to Greek and Latin.

In the early 1940s, Tolkien wrote to his son, “I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” Tolkien admired what he called “the northern spirit,” but he thought of it as broadminded and Hitler was ruining it for him.

I think we know exactly what Tolkien would have thought of Trump’s blatant racism and of the values of the American white nationalists who secretly idolize Hitler.

Tolkien’s high fantasy owes some important debts to the pre-Raphaelite William Morris. The pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and poets in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was in important ways a rebellion against Establishment whiteness, privileging Dante over Hobbes, Giotti over Raphael, and brunettes over blondes. Morris did go to Iceland and was influenced by the Elder Edda, but he was also deeply influenced by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Persian poetry from Iran, from the FitzGerald translation of which he created four illustrated and calligraphed manuscripts.

By the way, Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, was also in love with the Rubaiyat, and he made Conan an Iranian.

As for medieval Britain, it was also multicultural. My late colleague Sylvia Thrupp was one of the first historians to look at London demographic data in the medieval period, and discovered large numbers of foreigners living there.

British historian Onyeka Nubia writes for the BBC:

“The medieval English writer Richard Devizes describes London as being populated by ‘Garamantes’ (Moorish Africans), and ‘men from all nations’ that ‘fill all the houses.’ These Africans were described by various terms such as: ‘Black’, ‘Ethiopian’ (a word used at the time to describe all Africans), ‘Moor,’ and ‘Blackamoore.’ Other terms such as ‘Saracen’ were also used to refer to Africans, as well as people from elsewhere, such as Western Asia. Some of these terms are now considered derogatory.

Bartholomew was an African on the run in Nottingham in the 13th century. He is mentioned in the Pipe Roll (21 June, 1259), where he was called an ‘Ethiopian’ and a ‘Saracen.’ The Pipe Roll says, Bartholomew was brought to England by ‘Roger de Lyntin.’ The roll also gives ‘a mandate to arrest’ Bartholomew, for ‘running away from his said lord Roger de Lyntin.’ Bartholomew may have been on his way to the city of Nottingham to escape his lord’s authority.”

I think it is highly likely that some among this gaggle of brown and black-skinned people in medieval London were Muslims, though likely they kept that to themselves given the Inquisition.

So, no, the actual medieval world on which the high fantasy is often based wasn’t mono-cultural or mono-racial. So why should the fictional knock-offs be? And, no, Tolkien was not a racist and indeed he hated anti-Black racial segregation projects like Apartheid and the racial hierarchies erected by the Nazis. He said he only wished he had some Jewish ancestry, and used “ruddy,” which is associated with whiteness, as a negative epithet for Hitler.

The Republic of Letters has suffered a horrifying assault, an assault on all thinking people. I wish him the fullest possible recovery, and extend to him and his loved ones my deepest sympathies.

Midnight’s Other Children: Reading Rushdie in the Middle East

Talk Delivered at a Panel in Honor of the Premiere of Midnight’s Children The Play in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan’s Power Center for the Performing Arts

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Juan Cole

When I refer to reading Rushdie in the Middle East in my title, I do not, of course, mean to suggest that his novels are actually much read there. Ironically, the early 1980s translations of Midnight’s Children and Shame into Persian caused Rushdie to be admired in Iran for his anti-imperialism. After the infamous fatwa, the further translations into Persian showed on their title pages as place of publication exotic Estockaholm in the fabled land of Swed. A few Arabic translations in small print runs are rumored. Almost no one in the Middle East has actually read the novel, The Satanic Verses, and most of those who condemn it would be surprised to know that it does not call the wives of the Prophet Muhammad prostitutes, and does not suggest that the Koran was inspired by Satan. What I mean by “reading Rushdie” in the area is rather akin to the psychiatric idea of projection, defined as “a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else.”

I do not come to this subject as a cold stranger, but by way of autobiography. Midnight’s Children informs us that people seep into one another. Of no people is this more true than of us area specialists, into whom seep whole civilizations. Some of the Prophet Muhammad seeped into me when I studied Islam in Cairo, and I came to admire him. Then when I was researching Indian history in Lucknow in 1982 I read Midnight’s Children, and Rushdie began seeping into me, and I came to admire him. If I sometimes seem grouchy or disoriented, remember that like Walt Whitman I contain multitudes. Only some of my multitudes do not get on very well.

Like the impressive nose of Aadam Aziz, which contained dynasties, Rushdie’s Himalayan anathema contained clones. “The Rushdie of” this nation or that has virtually become a dead metaphor, like riverbed, so tired that one forgets it is figure of speech. Hamid Nasr Abu Zaid is the Rushdie of Egypt and historian Hashem Aghajari is the Rushdie of Iran (which has more Rushdies than most countries, having itself invented the idea of a Rushdie). This rushdification of religious dissent or free thought has elicited protests from the original Rushdie, who minds being “sloganized;” and from some of the Rushdies themselves or their supporters. When Aghajari called for independent religious thinking in Iran last summer, a provincial court summarily sentenced him to death. When he was arrested, Ayatollah Nuri-Hamedani thundered, “I believe that the remarks . . . are worse than Salman Rushdie’s words. This is because Salman Rushdie only insulted one of the Islamic principles. However, he, Aghajari has insulted all religions and world Muslims.”

A stalwart defender of Aghajari from among the hardliners, Muhammad Javad Akbarayn, replied with alarm, “A comparison between Hashem Aghajari [and] Salman Rushdie most regrettably gives credibility to Salman Rushdie, as well as false impressions to a younger generation unfamiliar with The Satanic Verses. They might overlook the fact that the author of the book “A critique of Satanic Verses Plot” . . . reprinted several times to meet the demand for it — is an academic who resigned from his post in protest at the Aghajari sentence.” The hardest of hardliners seemed to be saying that that Rushdie fellow wasn’t so bad after all, now that we have Iranian thinkers calling for freedom of religious thought among the masses. In the prevailing school of Shiite Islam in Iran, the laity is required blindly to obey the rulings of clerics on Islamic law. Aghajari called instead for each Muslim to be his own interpreter of the law.

Ironically, Akbarayn is clearly distressed by the possibility that the many ardent defenders of Aghajari among Iran’s youth will hear that he is a Rusdhie and will transfer their affections to the Bombay-born heresiarch himself. In short, the danger for his opponents in the area is that Rushdie will become an Aghajari, a symbol of the young reformers’ impatience with heresy trials of any sort.

This odd sort of reading, which the cynical might even call simply using Rushdie’s name to advance one’s own agenda, has killed people, and has produced the new phenomenon in history of the “Rushdie riot.” The old leftist warhorse of Turkey, Aziz Nesin, expropriated some passages from The Satanic Verses for his newspaper, under the sympathetic title: “Salman Rushdie: Thinker or Charlatan?” Although international copyright laws are generally respected in Turkey, Nesin declined to seek either Rushdie’s or his publisher’s permission. He simply wanted to bait the Islamists. Nesin very nearly paid for his piracy with his life. In July of 1993, a convention was held in Sivas of the esoteric Shiite Alawite sect in honor of one of their poets, to which Nesin was invited. Local Sunni activists have long persecuted and sometimes killed Alawites. Further inflamed by news of Nesin’s appearance on the roster, they formed rampaging mobs and set fire to the convention hotel and killed nearly 40 persons. Although Rushdie’s name was invoked in the incident, in fact, Sunni-Alawite riots have been common in modern Turkish history, as has a tendency for Alawites to align with or produce leftist intellectuals that enrage the Sunni fundamentalists. Once again, primordial rivalries and the nagging questions of secularism and Islamism in Turkey were projected onto Salman Rushdie’s balding pate.

The Egyptian short story writer and novelist Soleiman Fayyad, author of Voices, spoke for many Middle Eastern intellectuals when he wrote, “We Arab and Muslim writers are surely overwhelmingly with Salman Rushdie in spirit, then, even if we are not necessarily in favor of his novel, which the majority of us have probably not read . . . Nevertheless, there does exist among us an almost unanimous attitude of solidarity with Salman Rushdie as well as one of support for freedom of thought, whether religious or profane, and of artistic creation.” Fayyad’s comments point once more to projection as the main theme evoked by Rushdie in the Middle East. Even Fayyad has a reproach for Rushdie, however, of cosmopolitanism. He should have stayed in India and published the book in Urdu, which would have gained him even greater and more enthusiastic backing from writers “in this part of the world.” And, publishing in the West opened his work to exploitation by anti-Muslim Westerners, “an important supplementary grief this author did not need to be saddled with.” Fayyad is suggesting that his use of English and the publication of his book in the West allowed his Middle Eastern enemies to accuse him of seeking literary success among foreigners by putting down his own people. He thinks the positive impact of the Rushdie affair was unfortunately muted because it could be portrayed in the Middle Eastern press as yet another instance of neo-colonial hegemony. The courage of Fayyad’s statement should not be underestimated. In speaking out, he put his own life in danger. But his binary Arab nationalism makes him regret that Rushdie could not be claimed and defended unambiguously as one of “us.”

Just as Fayyad feared, Rushdie’s name has been exploited by Islamophobes. September 11 accelerated this process. Journalist Les Kinsolving is clearly annoyed that President Bush has defended Islam as a religion of peace. He pressed Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer at a press conference last year asking, “Are you and is the president prepared to contend that in the Koran, there are no passages calling for death to infidels such as Christians and Jews and no jihads (sic) as well for people like Salman Rushdie?” Kinsolving is apparently unaware that the Koran praises Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity, and only urges fighting against those who allied with the Meccans to attack Muslims. And there is not a single verse requiring novelists to be executed, even ones named Salman. Recently Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad a terrorist, and other televangelists have monstrously called him a pedophile. Momentarily mishearing a few verses looks increasingly like a rather mild charge against him.

This use of Rushdie as a bat with which to beat all Muslims and Islam predates September 11, of course. One of the first books about the Khomeini fatwa was written by far rightwing commentator and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, who is linked to the most militant sections of the Likud Party and to the pro-settler Gamla group. Pipes clearly had to hold his nose in defending Rushdie, a leftist anti-imperialist who thought well of the Sandinistas’ social programs for the poor in Nicaragua. Yet, he found the opportunity to lambaste Muslims too good to pass up.

Pipes’s book is shot through with essentialism and questionable generalizations. “Not only,” he solemnly tells us, “ are Muslims very touchy about perceived disparagements of their religion, but they tend to look at fictional works in a singularly literal way.” (107). Really? Muslims alone among human beings are touchy about their sacred cows, so to speak? Over a billion persons, crippled with a fiction deficit disorder that would stump even Oliver Sacks? But then, pray tell, how did such a community produce a Rushdie in the first place? Not to mention A Thousand and One Nights or Nobel prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz?

But Pipes has not finished characterizing the Muslims. He had already begun worrying about the immigration of these congenital, unrelenting realists to Europe and the United States. He complained (and remember he does so ostensibly in defense of Rushdie): “Unfortunately, the presence of Muslims in the West encourages the worst in each camp: ugly nativistic reactions from those who resent the growing numbers of dark-skinned, poor foreigners with strange eating habits and less-developed notions of hygiene; and arrogant fundamentalist Islamic ambitions among emigrants culturally unprepared for immersion in an alien civilization and therefore prone to insist on the most dogmatic version of their faith.” (245). Even if we allow that Pipes was in these characterizations adopting the “voice” of each of the two rival bands of extremists, his diction can only be seen as racist in its effect. All the blame for ugly nativism is put on the presumptuous presence of Muslims in the West. His diction is a recipe for the expulsion from the West of anyone who makes white racists upset. And, one would never know from such a passage that South Asian Muslim immigrants to the US are among the wealthiest and best educated groups in the country; or that pious Muslims wash five times a day and if anything are too worried about hygiene; or that large numbers of urban Britishers would starve to death were all those Indian restaurants serving what he calls “strange” food suddenly to close their doors.

Pipes’s are thus precisely the sort of anti-Muslim sentiments that The Satanic Verses was written to protest. In the subsequent decade he began taking an anti-immigration line redolent of French racist Jean Marie Le Pen. Not only should they be carefully caged in Africa and Asia, but, Pipes has now told the Jerusalem Post, Muslims must be kept under constant surveillance when not in their natural habitat. He writes, “There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children… “ (JP 1/22/03). From defending Rushdie’s right to freedom of speech, Pipes has gone to implicitly calling for him, like others of Muslim background, to be watched by the FBI for signs he might be a terrorist.

I should declare my interest and reveal that Pipes, in a bizarre twist, has even issued a fatwa of his own against me, calling for Juan Cole to be placed under constant surveillance by the people of Ann Arbor, who should report to him on me so that he can keep a file. (I hope you are all taking good notes). This tactic recalls Khomeini’s boast that he had 37 million spies in Iran. Apparently even studying Muslims as I do can cause you to contract from Islamophobes the new disease of surveillance-itis. I told you it was autobiographical. Way too much seeping.

Many have drawn the lesson from September 11 that Rushdie was a canary in a mine, that his ordeal presaged that of all who stood against a new wave of religious fanaticism. But there is an additional lesson, which is that whenever you give governments or other organizations the right to tell people what they can say, they will use it. When Disney’s ABC network fired comedian Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect for mouthing off about US military tactics, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer announced, “These are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say and what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.” Khomeini would have said the same thing about The Satanic Verses. Having now been guilty of it myself, let me end by sympathizing with Salman Rushdie about the ways he has been used so extensively to further the agendas of others, and to congratulate him on having become such a powerful symbol of liberty to so many in the Middle East and elsewhere, whether he likes it or not, and even whether they like it or not.

Wherever you spend your summer, allow yourself to be transported to Syria and immerse yourself in the world of Shahla Ujayli’s sweeping historical novel Summer with the Enemy.

The ongoing devastation of the war that began in 2011 has brought Syria to the world’s attention. Reading a Syrian novel is a way to experience its deep and rich culture, history and literature beyond the headlines.

Summer with the Enemy was a finalist for the prestigious the International Prize for Arab Fiction, sometimes known as the “Arab Booker Prize.” It was written in Arabic by Ujayli, one of the country’s most prominent women writers; I translated it into English one year later.

City of Raqqa

Ujayli’s evocative storytelling conjures up the city of Raqqa, from its past as a dusty provincial town beginning in the 1920s, through the 20th century, and its subsequent occupation and 2017 siege by Islamic State militants (ISIS). In Summer with the Enemy, the main characters eventually must leave Raqqa behind for a new life in Germany.

A detailed and intricate portrait of three generations of one family in this northern Syrian town, Summer with the Enemy combines historical fiction with a romance and a coming-of-age story complete with an tale of first love. The characters challenge western stereotypes about Arab Muslim women — that they need to be “saved” from oppressive realities — through depictions of their active, diverse and complex lives.

The town of Raqqa is so important to the story that one critic claims it is actually a character in the novel.

Family drama, first love

It’s hard not to feel compelled by the Raqqa of the past, with its tightly knit, multi-ethnic community, full of local conflicts and family drama.

Each story the grandmother tells has the younger generations on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear about a scandal, an illicit affair, a failed love match or an exotic trip abroad. She always leaves her audience wanting more when she rises mid-sentence to stir the coffee on the stove, tension building.

During the summer of the title, some time in the ‘80s, the protagonist, Lamees, rides horses along the Euphrates, an expansive desert surrounding her, and dreams of an equestrian future.

Horses means she can avoid her mother. Their relationship had become tense, after Lamees’s father left Syria, never to return. Lamees resents her mother’s incipient love affair with a visiting German professor, Nicolas, the enemy of the book’s title. The daughter acts as a local guide to Nicolas, who leaves when his research is done. The women call upon Nicolas later to find passage to Germany after the fall of their beloved city.

Revisiting memories of Raqqa

About 10 years after the fictional Lamees was living in Raqqa, experiencing the Assad government’s belt-tightening policies, I embarked upon the long trip there from Damascus with a university friend. In summer 1995, my visit revealed a Raqqa much like the one Lamees showed to her German enemy.

But when I was in Raqqa in the ’90s, I had no idea that more than 20 years later I would be video-chatting with a famous Syrian author from the town. Ujayli was giving me a sort of interview before I translated her novel. Among other questions, she asked me: “Have you ever been to Raqqa?”

I was pleased to be able to answer yes — I had visited long before most people outside of Syria had ever heard of Raqqa. I prepared to translate this novel by revisiting that journey through talking to Ujayli and by looking back over old photographs, revisiting memories of the place.

Translating Arabic into English

In an interview about my translation process, an interviewer asked me the same question.

Translating Arab women writers from Arabic into English has a difficult history: Many translations have been so changed as to be unrecognizable.

As scholars have shown, the entire thrust of a book can change with translations creating new titles, sections edited and censored, narrative voices voices altered and entire characterizations changed.

I worked with Ujayli to convey the details of the text accurately, while also finding words to give the new English text as much life as the Arabic original.

In the summer of 2019, I translated the novel in a Lebanese mountain village. Just across the border, Syria was visible on a clear day. That summer we could hear the echoes of bombs being dropped across the valley.

Focused on conveying the details and complexities of of the book, I felt the tension between the book’s beautiful depiction of the past and Ujayli’s searing depiction of life under ISIS occupation, fierce battles in Raqqa and Lamees’s subsequent escape to Germany.

Lessons in empathy

The utter destruction of Raqqa between 2013 and 2017 and any semblance of the previous lives lived there felt so real.

Lebanon is a country still bearing the scars of its own long civil war (1975-90). The reverberations of the bombs we heard that summer in Lebanon had an unmistakable impact on the translation. The words a translator chooses to translate are always impacted by their surroundings.

Ujayli’s novels offer “lessons in empathy,” as noted by Marcia Lynx Qualey, founding editor of the website ArabLit.

Packed with humour, drama, romance and 100 years of history, Summer with the Enemy puts women centre stage, will take readers to the heart of one woman’s coming of age in Syria — and offer insights into its past and present.

Michelle Hartman, Professor and Director, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: h/t Pixabay

Worse yet, in 2022, it’s emblematic of a far larger picture of life on earth: the stupidity of trying to stay cool while burning carbon; the stupidity of the Supreme Court tying the collective hands of the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to regulating the emissions of coal-fired power plants; the stupidity of blaming mental illness rather than assault rifles for massacres; the stupidity of a pro-life movement that seems to care about nothing but fetuses. And, of course, the list only goes on and on… and on.

And now, I think I’m breaking into a sweat even though I’m sitting still. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver posted this on Facebook recently:

“There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.”

So, in these hazy, humid days laced with commercial patriotism and an upbeat jingoism shaken loose from the daily struggles of most people, I’m trying to take her words to heart. I am a citizen of the trees, particularly the two plum trees I planted this spring. I am a citizen of the rainy day. (May it come soon!) I am a citizen of my family of five, of eight, of 16, of 150 (the number of people anthropologist Robin Dunbar says we can meaningfully connect with). Yes, it really does seem like that’s what it takes to go on these days — committing yourself to what matters, to what you still do love in this ever more disturbed America of ours.

Above all, I am a citizen of what I love! I resolve to be a citizen of goodness and generosity, competence and kindness. I pledge allegiance, above all, to libraries, used bookstores, community gardens, and the mutual-aid network of my local “Buy Nothing” group. This, sadly enough, is as much of my country, America, that I seem capable of loving in the age of Donald Trump and an all-too-extreme Supreme Court.

So, in an America in which Roe has gone down and gun sales only continue to rise (thank you so much, Supremes!), let me tell you a little about the things I still truly do love in America.

Used Books Stores

I recently ruined a library book! I spilled coffee all over it and there was no way to fix it. When I contacted the library, I was told that there would be a $30 fine to replace it. There was, however, another option: I could find a new copy and bring it in instead. Well, I have more time than money, so I set off to replace the State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny (a propulsive guilty pleasure of a summer read) that I had caffeinated to the hilt.

After checking out three brick-and-mortar used bookstores in my area I found that novel in no time at all for $1.50 (plus $4.00 shipping) at Alibris, an online used bookstore. But don’t feel bad for the stores that didn’t have a copy of State of Terror. I still spent at least $30 in them, picking up a couple of survival guides, an Octavia Butler novel (another kind of survival guide), graphic novels for my kids, and a few other books that caught my eye — but hopefully won’t catch my next cup of coffee.

Buy the Book

There’s something so wholesome about used bookstores. If the $25 billion-plus publishing industry is a slick, cutthroat insider’s game riven with racism and inequity, then used bookstores are its antithesis. They’re all about the pleasure of knowledge, craft, and the word! Nearest to us here in New London, Connecticut, is the Book Barn in Niantic, a network of three stores loosely organized by theme and covered in cat hair. Their haphazard nature rewards curiosity and perseverance. The mismatched chairs and overturned milk crates invite you to pause, peruse, and dive in. When I go there with my family, we chant “five books are enough” before we get out of the car. Then we revise it to five books each (for a total of twenty-five) and, in the end, are likely to buy as many as we can carry. Given such frenzies, we can only afford to go once every few months even though many of the books are only a dollar each and most are less than five dollars. Honestly, how could you not love it?

Libraries

Excuse me for being so book focused, but that’s who I am, I guess. In between trips to used bookstores, we can always go to the library, where you can borrow 50 titles per card at a time! My kids, 8, 10, and 15, are so well known there that the librarian calls us when they leave behind a favorite stuffed animal or jacket (which is like every week).

The New London library is within walking distance of our house. In addition to books, it has a job-search support center, a recently redesigned teen center, and meeting rooms for local groups and events. Patrons can check out free museum passes, use the free services of a notary, and pose any question under the sun to members of its calm, helpful staff. In addition, our library has a couple of surprising offerings, including Memory Kits for people developing dementia and quite a variety of cake pans shaped like cartoon characters, animals, or castles that can be borrowed like any book.

In this way, our library is very trendy. Like ever more libraries, it’s no longer just focused on lending out books. It’s a multi-use facility that hosts community events, serves as a free or low-priced Staples or a WeWork suite with computers, printers, and study carrels. It lends out Roku devices and laptops, while maintaining catalogs of diverse offerings. My sister-in-law, for instance, borrowed catering equipment like chafing trays and large casserole dishes for her son’s graduation party. At some libraries, you can even borrow lawn mowers, weed whackers, and pruning equipment for your garden and lawn. During prom season, some of them are opening dress-lending libraries to help cash-strapped families get strapless!

It’s all so wholesome and delightful that it’s easy to forget just how underfunded and under attack our libraries are. This in a country where, if you love books, you’ve instantly got financial problems, but if you love the military-industrial complex you’re guaranteed to have more money than you know what to do with. In a nearby town, a first selectman demanded that the library remove a copy of Who Is RuPaul? from its collection in response to a parental complaint.

The book, part of a popular series of biographies, tells the story of the performer, producer, personality, and queer icon whose groundbreaking talent has turned drag-queening into mainstream magic. In Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, members of the right-wing armed hate group Proud Boys have tried to interrupt children’s story hours with vitriol and threats of violence. And yet, despite all the hate, librarians just carry on! The library, a bright, functional, welcoming space meant to exist outside of commerce and to be open to all, is one of the last true public spaces in this country, an enduring part of a shrinking commons!

“Buy Nothing” Facebook Groups

I know. I know. Facebook (now Meta) is big, bad tech. Our every cursor move is tracked, our every “like” logged. I should go on a total social-media fast, but I’m not on Instagram or TikTok and I do love to “like” my friends’ cat pictures! Above all, though, I love “Buy Nothing.” That site-specific network — there are groups everywhere — is built around asking, gifting, and gratitude. It’s online neighborliness personified, demonstrating, in the words of its founders, that “true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.”

The New London Buy Nothing Group on Facebook has more than 1,500 people. It’s administered by a handful of souls who moderate the page to make sure, among other things, that no one feels badgered into choosing certain people for gifts. In the last few days, some members have offered up cats, organic plant fertilizer, and a toilet seat, while others have asked for vintage drinking glasses, a dog crate, and an old cellphone so a nephew can access the Internet.

People respond to all these queries by asking to be chosen, sometimes sharing why they want whatever’s been asked for and how they’ll use it. The gifters get to choose who to give items to and then they make arrangements to pass them on. When I see someone asking for something that I have in excess, I’ll post a picture of it and invite them to reach out and make a plan to pick it up. Things move pretty quickly then. The only time I had no takers, I was offering used school backpacks the same week that the local Rotary Club was giving out brand new ones filled with school supplies. We’re a friendly, dynamic group that stretches from the nicest homes in New London to the Red Roof Inn, a place people stay when they’re experiencing homelessness.

I love thinking about my front porch as a place where people can come to have their needs and wants met. In the last few months, I’ve shared a women’s history puzzle, a pair of kids’ boxing gloves, a mini-pool full of hostas, jars of sourdough starter, and vegetable stock, while collecting yoga mats, chicken wire, rosary beads, an aquarium, and small jam jars from porches and front steps all over town.

When I refer to “the city” of New London, Connecticut, which was founded in the 1600s and burned down by American traitor turned British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in 1781, it sounds grand indeed. As it happens, though, we’re now actually a small community of about 28,000 people living in a six-square-mile area. In other words, we’re the size of a town.

New London has been known for lots of things, including its arts scene, bar scene, sugar-sand beach, and being the childhood home of playwright Eugene O’Neill. It’s long and thin like a jalapeño pepper and so small that sometimes it feels like I know everyone. Then I find myself driving down a street I’ve never noticed before, searching for the address of the nice person who’s left me a copy of Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) on their porch in a brown paper bag.

Only 2,882 people voted in our last election, but it seems as if twice that many were actively searching for infant formula during the recent shortage. There’s a level of engagement, gratitude, and celebration on New London’s Buy Nothing Facebook page that I always find moving and delightful, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

Community Gardens

A little head of organic lettuce costs almost $3 these days at my local grocery store. A pound of organic strawberries, imported from Mexico, is about $8. Inflation is the word of the day, week, and year. And nowhere is it more obvious than at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. Like so much in this interconnected, fragile, unequal world of ours, we can blame the soaring cost of food on war and the greed of the corporations that call the tune in the global economy.

But far away from such overwhelming disasters is a modest set of raised garden boxes just up the block from my house. They burst with lettuce, strawberries, and a dozen other easy to harvest “snack” crops. And they’re free for the picking! Hand-painted signs in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic encourage passersby to harvest there and eat the food. The “snack boxes” were built and are maintained by a local food justice and youth empowerment organization called FRESH New London. Passersby can harvest the lettuce and strawberries and bring them home to wash and enjoy. They can pick snap peas, okra pods, and a little later in the summer sweet peppers and blackberries, too.

There are also boxes at the community garden where people can grow their own lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and whatever else they want after accessing water and tools. While they’re at it, they can ask staff members and other gardeners for advice and help.

There are community gardens like ours all over the country, organized by groups of neighbors, non-profit organizations, or even towns and cities. Community gardens are places where we can get our fingernails dirty and our bellies filled with veggies and fruit, while connecting with neighbors, celebrating the beauty of nature, and even providing food for bees and other pollinators.

Of course, people like me can’t grow all our food this way, especially in places like urban Connecticut. Still, producing some of it in such a communal way reminds us that we have the power to feed ourselves and one another. And in these dispiriting times, that should be a strong message of hope!

A (Small) World Free of Nationalism?

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine,” we sometimes sing when our Unitarian Universalist congregation meets. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote the music more than 100 years ago, while American poet Lloyd Stone provided the words in 1934 to what became the hymn “This Is My Song.” It continues, “But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” It’s a beautiful piece of music, poignant and full of a love of home that’s somehow radically and beautifully free of nationalism.

The sunlight beams down on used bookstores, libraries, community gardens, and even, however metaphorically, into the dark universe of Meta where there are still people who reject our click-and-buy culture, opting for mutual aid instead. “Buy Nothing!” is the thought lurking there, even if all of this can’t quite stave off the despair that circulates whenever I tune into the wider world of Supreme Court rulings and House January 6th hearings or contemplate why the heat and humidity and stupidity is rising all at once in this forlorn world of ours.

In my own small version of the world, “This Is My Song” is so beloved that my husband and I made it the entrance march at our wedding. It always reminds me that this planet is bigger and more beautiful than nationalism and militarism allow us to see. It reminds me that curiosity and connection form a web that can be stronger than border walls and xenophobia. It reminds me that the small bits of joy and hope that gardens and the gift economy give me is a seed that, with time, nurturing, and hard work, could grow into a more just and equitable future for us all.

So, that’s what I need to remind myself of with each new Supreme Court decision, each crazed statement from Donald Trump or so many other Republicans, each new Cold War moment in our embattled world. It’s good to know that there’s still something I truly do love about this country.

Copyright 2022 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com