Forward.com

A Tree Named Jerusalem‘City of David” is a poem from “Descartes’ Loneliness,” Allen Grossman’s new collection. Born in 1932 in Minneapolis, Grossman has spent much of his life in the academy. And in professorial life, as in poetic work, he has never shrunk from Jewish themes.…Read more

Left Behind: A New Book Explores the History of Abandoned WivesWe would do well to remember that when we say “according to the rabbis,” we are historically saying “according to men.” According to the male rabbis who wrote the Talmud and who, for European generations, were the sole interpreters of the law of the Torah, only one of their own can grant a divorce: Under the laws of Judaism, women, wives, are not allowed to divorce without the explicit consent of their husbands. That consent comes only in the form of a writ of divorce, called, in Hebrew, a get. If a woman is abandoned by her husband but not given a get, and she cannot prove that her husband is dead (in which case the marriage is annulled), she is called an aguna — literally, a “bound” or “chained” woman. She cannot get remarried. If she does get remarried, any issuing children would be considered bastards, and their line would be tainted (those same rabbis tell us) for 10 generations.…Read more

Language Arts, or Lack ThereofBorn in 1929 in Budapest, Imre Kertész completed his education at the universities of Auschwitz and Buchenwald before working as a journalist and translator from the German under the censors of communist Hungary. He began publishing his own fiction late, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.…Read more

Agnon’s Recurring NightmareReader, I would like to offer a brief and abridged history of Recurrence in the arts. I want to make this survey — progressing from the Romantic rewriting of folklore through Existentialism, to the modern regressions of movies — because I want to avoid talking about S.Y. Agnon’s “To This Day.” I want to avoid talking about Agnon’s novel, his last to be translated into English, because it is terrible, and Agnon is among my favorite writers.…Read more

The Eye, And I, of the EthnographerIn 1896, a group of people from the Ashanti tribe was displayed in an ethnographic exhibit in Vienna’s Prater, huts erected amid its Tiergarten, or zoo. There, to the delight of 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day, they sang, danced the tom-tom and accomplished a host of other things not so racially typified, like eating, drinking and sleeping. These “Ashantee,” as it’s spelled on the Continent, were from the Gold Coast of Africa, the former British Colony known today as Ghana. They, but especially their chieftains, supported themselves with such European touring, setting up their villages throughout the fairgrounds and public parks of Austro-Hungary, Weimar Germany, Switzerland and France. When it was time for their Viennese village to be torn down, making way for the circus and a hot-air balloon demonstration, what remained was only this book — the posterity of Alolé, Akóshia, Tíoko, Djôjô and Na–h-Badûh, the women to whom “Ashantee” is dedicated. These Ashanti, who were illiterate, have been remembered by literature: They were loved by a balding, mustachioed writer they called Sir Peter.…Read more