Month: December 2018

The Elephant and My Jewish Problem – Selected Stories and Journals, 1957-1987, by Hugh Nissenson – 1988 [Hugh Nissenson]

June 12, 1967

“What about Jerusalem?” I ask.

“What about it?”

“You didn’t mention giving that up.”

“No,” he says, “and we never will.
It’s our historic capital.
And then there’s the Wall.”

“What do you care about the Wall if you’re not religious?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.
When we captured it, I wept without knowing why.
Why did the early Zionists, who were atheists, insist on returning here?
Herzl, as you know, was offered Uganda as a Jewish national home,
but the Sixth Zionists Congress refused to consider it.
It has to be the land of Israel or nothing.

“It was as if they unconsciously assumed that a covenant between the Jews and God still existed.
Deep down we feel the same way.
It’s depressing.
You’d think that by now we’d be finished with Him once and for all.”

He absent-mindedly raises his forefinger and strokes his clean-shaven upper lip.

“Bus is it possible to create a human civilization without Him?” he says.
“That’s the question.”

– Hugh Nissenson

(From “Victory: A Journal”, originally published in Notes From the Frontier, 1968)

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Cover Illustration by Hugh Nissenson

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Contents

The Blessing
The Groom on Zlota Street
The Well
The Law
Israel During the Eichmann Trial: A Journal
The Prisoner
Charity
A Pile of Stones
Victory: A Journal
Going Up
The Throne of God
The Crazy Old Man
Forcing The End
The Elephant And My Jewish Problem: A Journal
In The Reign of Peace
Lamentations
Under Siege: A Journal
Exile: A Journal
The Pit: A Journal

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Hugh Nissenson (photo by Thomas Victor)

Analog – Science Fact – Fiction, December, 1960 (Featuring “The Longest Voyage” by Poul Anderson) [Frank Kelly Freas]

Yet when we came upon the Ship, toward evening, I forgot my weariness. 
And after an amazed volley of oaths,
our mariners rested silent on their pikes. 
The Hisagazi,
never talkative,
crouched low in token of awe. 
Only Guzan remained erect among them. 
I glimpsed his expression as he started at the marvel. 
It was a look of lust.

Wild was that place.
We had gone above timberline.
The land was a green sea below us, edged with silvery ocean.
Here we stood among tumbled black boulders,
cinders and spongy tufa underfoot.
The mountains rose in steeps and scarps and ravines,
on to snows and smoke,
which rose another mile into a pale chilly sky.
And here stood the Ship.
And the Ship was beauty.

I remember. 
Its length
 – height, rather, since it stood on its tail
 – it was about equal to our caravel,
in form not unlike a lance head,
in color a shining white,
unvarnished after forty years. 
That was all. 
But words are paltry, my lords. 
What can they show of clean soaring curves,
of iridescence on burnished metal,
of a thing which was proud and lovely and in its very shape aquiver to be off? 
How can I conjure back the glamour which hazed that Ship whose keel had cloven starlight?

– Poul Anderson

Illustration by Frank Kelly Freas (p. 24)

Against Joie De Vivre – Personal Essays, by Phillip Lopate – 1989 [Peter Sis]

My parents had a bookcase which held a few hardcovers
and a library of Pocket Books,
whose flimsy, browning pages would crack if you bent down the corners. 
I can still picture those cellophane-peeling covers with their kangaroo logo,
their illustrations of busty, available-looking women
or hard-bodied men
or solemn, sensitive-looking Negroes with titles like

Intruder in the Dust,
Appointment in Samara,
Tobacco Road,
Studs Lonigan,
Strange Fruit,
Good Night, Sweet Prince,
The Great Gatsby,
The Sound and the Fury.

Father brought home all the books, it was his responsibility;
though Mother chafed at everything else in the marriage,
she still permitted him at the same time to be her intellectual mentor.
I have often wondered on what basis he made his selections:
he’d had only one term of night college
(dropping out because he fell asleep in class after a day in the factory),
and I never saw him read book reviews.
He seemed all the same, to have a nose for decent literature.
He was one of those autodidacts of the Depression generation,
for whose guidance the inexpensive editions
of Everyman, Modern Library, and Pocket Books seemed intentionally designed,
out of some bygone assumption that the workingman should
 – must
 – be educated to the best in human knowledge.

(by Phillip Lopate, from “Samson and Delilah and the Kids”)

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Cover illustration by Peter Sis.  The nine (or is it eleven?) vignettes symbolize the central themes of book’s nineteen essays, the titles of which are listed below…

I

Samson and Delilah and the Kids
Against Joie de Vivre
Art of the Creep
A Nonsmoker with a Smoker
What Happened to the Personal Essay?

II

Never Live Above Your Landlord
Revisionist Nuptials
Anticipation of La Notte: The “Heroic” Age of Moviegoing
Modern Friendships
A Passion for Waiting

III

Chekhov for Children
On Shaving a Beard
Only Make Believe: Some Observations on Architectural Language
Houston Hide-and-Seek
Carlos: Evening in the City of Friends

IV

Upstairs Neighbors
Waiting for the Book to Come Out
Reflections on Subletting
Suicide of a Schoolteacher

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Phillip Lopate (photo by Sally Gall)

Dirty Work, by Larry Brown – 1989 [Glennray Tutor]

“I was in a rifle company. 
Joined the marines when I was eighteen. 
I had to go. 
The army was fixing to draft me. 
Back when they had that lottery system, my birthday was number one. 
And hell, I’d already had my physical. 
I was 1-A. 
So I knew I was gone. 
The lady who ran the draft board in town called my mama and told her I had about two weeks to join something if I wanted to, because after that the army would get me. 
So I joined the marines. 
I figured they were the toughest thing going. 
My old man, he … he really resisted me going. 
Both of them did. 
It was getting worse and worse all the time. 
I guess you were over there before I was. 
He was in World War II. 
He stayed in for four years. 
Walked all the way across Europe with the infantry, was wounded once. 
He knew what it was like to have to fight with a rifle. 
He taught me how to shoot. 
We’d hunt squirrels with a .22. 
Shoot em in the head.
“He was in prison for a while. 
A long time ago. 
Twice.

“I was over there within six months. 
Did it smell like something dead the whole time you were over there? 
Same here. 
I thought I’d never get out of there alive. 
I couldn’t sleep for a long time. 
I couldn’t sleep at all without a rifle next to me. 
I was usually always the biggest so I usually always kept the M60. 
Twenty-six pounds. 
I loved that damned gun. 
Kept it clean. 
I could by God shoot it, too.”

– Larry Brown –

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Larry Brown (Photo by Susie James)