In the summer of 1996, a struggling graduate student of Hebrew literature found Yaakov Shabtai. More specifically, he found the Israeli writer’s 1977 novel, Past Continuous, a challenging work written, quite literally, as a single paragraph. The complex, non-linear novel weaves through a series of intersecting moments with exhaustively detailed description. According to Todd Hasak-Lowy, who credits the book with the discovery of his own voice as a writer, Shabtai teaches the reader how to understand Past Continuous while in the midst of it. Its experimental form and its approach to time and space, Hasak-Lowy posited, reflect the political climate in Israel and voice a “post-Zionist view of Israeli society” while not dealing explicitly with politics.

Writing in 2008, the great Israeli novelist David Grossman echoed Hasak-Lowy’s praise of this remarkable paragraph. “I remember what I experienced when I felt I was under the rays of a vast and inspiring literary power—when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, or Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers,” he wrote. “I have no doubt that some part of me, perhaps my innermost core, seemed to be in the realm of a dream. There was a similar intrinsic logic, and a direct dialogue conducted with the deepest and most veiled contents of my soul, almost without the mediation of consciousness.”

Shabtai, born in Tel Aviv in 1934, began writing late in his life. He is perhaps best known for Uncle Peretz Takes Off, a collection of short stories that included “Zikhron Devarim,” then translated more literally as “Memory of Things,” which would become the novel Past Continuous. Shabtai died of a heart attack in 1981, at the age of 47, and the posthumously published Past Perfect was his second, and final, novel.

Read The Paragraph That Changed My Life, by Todd Hasak-Lowy

Jews played many less well-known roles in modern German popular culture. Marline Otte surveys Jews’ performances in Germany’s circuses, Yiddish-language theaters, and revue theaters in her study—soon available, as a print-on-demand paperback, for a whopping $73 off the 2006 hardcover price—titled Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, February). Otte takes farces and pratfalls seriously, “exploring the astonishing subtlety in the humor and art of the barely literate, of those German Jews who spoke in unfamiliar ways, turning their bodies into metaphors.”

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While Otte’s clowns and comedians are long forgotten, their literary counterparts earned worldwide attention. Franz Werfel, the expressionist playwright who attended school with Kafka in Prague, has now had his final untranslated novel rendered into English as Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand (David R. Godine, December). Werfel started writing this tale of a married Austrian diplomat and the Jewish girl he once loved in 1940, after anti-Semitism forced him to flee Vienna; by year’s end, he found his way to—where else?—Hollywood. Werfel’s contemporary, and fellow adoptive Californian, Thomas Mann, likewise inspires a perpetual frenzy of translations, scholarly studies, and critical reevaluations. For example, Todd Kontje’s Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Michigan, December) reconsiders Mann’s Jewish characters in the context of his engagements with German imperialism and racism and in light of some nasty remarks that have surfaced in the Nobel laureate’s letters and diaries.

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It is a tragic irony, but no surprise, that German literary postmodernism likewise takes Jewishness as a core concern—especially because that postmodernism can be understood as originating in the Nazis’ concentration camps, where, somewhat astonishingly, a few brave souls found the energy to write verse. Now available in an affordable paperback, Andrés Nader’s Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933-1945 (Camden House, December) not only offers sharp analysis of such poetry but also includes an appendix with the full text of these poems in both German and English.

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It didn’t take very long, after the war, for aesthetic experimentalism and the trauma of the Holocaust to coalesce into postmodernist fiction. What has taken longer is for American critics to accept this as a fact of literary history: As recently as 2009, a New York Times reviewer evinced surprise that H.G. Adler used “the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews” in a style that “could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one.” Improbable? In what sense is that improbable? Adler—a Prague native who unlike Werfel did not manage to escape and spent years in Theresienstadt and two weeks in Auschwitz—embraced such a literary approach not only in 1962’s The Journey (the subject of that Times review), but even earlier in Panorama (Random, January), which he began to write in 1948, though it went unpublished until 1968.

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By now, Holocaust postmodernism is ubiquitous not only in the form of novels but also in big-budget movies. William Donahue’s Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films (Palgrave, December) explores one of the most widely circulated examples, Schlink’s The Reader (1995), tracking its reception—it earned Oprah’s seal of approval, cementing its status as a massive international bestseller even before Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes signed on to star in the Hollywoodization—and contextualizing it among the author’s other works.

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The colossal sales of books like Schlink’s must be one of the primary reasons that translations from the German continue to appear in the United States with unusual regularity. Among the latest such publications is Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love (Norton, January), a fictionalized memoir by the granddaughter of Jews who survived the war. Like several recent books written in English, the book tells the tale of Hungarian Jews—in this case, a couple who, having survived Nazism and communism, committed suicide in 1991. “Is it typically Jewish,” the author wonders, “to kill yourself after you have survived the Holocaust—so then you determine for yourself how you want to die?” And, one could add, is it now typically Hungarian Jewish to reimagine into literary prose the lives of one’s forebears?

“16 mm Postcards,” a new exhibition produced by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yeshiva University Museum, at the Center for Jewish History, demonstrates how different things were in the early 20th century, when the ancestors of most American Jews came here from Eastern Europe. This extraordinary show consists of home movies—all silent, mostly fragmentary—taken by American Jews who visited their relatives in Poland in the 1930s. (Many of the films can be seen at the exhibition’s website.) What makes these films so powerful is their extreme rarity: It was only a small handful of Jews who had the wherewithal, and the desire, to go back to the villages they had left behind decades earlier. And the encounters they document show how drastically the fates of American and Polish Jewry had diverged by the 1930s. In many films, we see the American cousin, prosperous and dressed in a Western suit, standing next to his poor, bearded, caftanned relatives; and it is impossible not to wonder what must have been going on in their minds and hearts.

Did the American cousin, clutching his camera like a badge of modernity, give thanks that he had been rescued from ancestral poverty and anti-Semitism—or did he feel nostalgia for the Jewish world from which he was cut off? Did the Polish cousin envy his American relative, or resent his intrusion, or long for his help? The pathos is infinitely greater, of course, because the viewer knows that all these Polish Jews—old and young, men and women and children—are just a few years away from the Holocaust. Virtually none of the people we see in these home movies was alive 10 years later. Because of the Holocaust, the natural growing-apart of the Old Country and the New World became an irreparable break, and a source of permanent guilt. Jews who came to America lived and flourished, while those who remained behind suffered and died: How can such a gulf ever be crossed?

The questions that “16 mm Postcards” raises, silently and by implication, are addressed head-on in a new book that might serve as a companion to the exhibition: The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale University Press). This is the title given by the volume’s editor, Ruth Wisse, to two novellas published by the great Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein in the late 1930s, based on his own pilgrimage to the Alte Heym. Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and came to New York in 1914. After working for a time in sweatshops, he established himself as a Yiddish journalist, while writing poetry that brought the influence of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to bear on Yiddish literature. “The term experimentation,” Wisse writes in her introduction, “hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts.”

In 1934, Glatstein received word that his mother was dying in Poland and booked passage across the Atlantic to see her one last time. This journey provided the subject matter for two books that he published after his return to New York. The first, whose Yiddish title literally means “When Yash set out” (Yash is a nickname for Yankev, or Jacob), is rendered here as Homeward Bound; the second, “When Yash arrived,” is made into Homecoming at Twilight. A third volume was announced, but never written: “the ‘Yash’ scheme was conceived as filial homage to Polish Jews,” Wisse writes, “and did not survive their destruction.”

In fact, as the word “twilight” in the English title suggests, Glatstein was very conscious of writing about a Jewish community in decline. Homeward Bound opens on board the ship taking Yash and a motley group of fellow-passengers to France, and the first sentence speaks of the narrator’s sense of liberation: “No sooner did the ship pull away from the dock than I instantly felt myself subject to maritime law.” Yet it is clear that this freedom is only a temporary escape from the crises and factionalism of Jewish life: “But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotstkyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist.”

In fact, politics quickly intrudes on the floating world of the ship, when the narrator reads in “the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives.” (This infamous purge of the Nazi Party took place on June 30, 1934, allowing the story to be precisely dated.) The news reveals a fault line among the ship’s passengers, Glatstein observes. To the non-Jews, it is merely another news item, to be casually regretted or dismissed (“Hitler’s a damn fool!”). To the Jews, on the other hand, it is a terrible portent, and it drives Glatstein to seek the company of people who will understand his own sense of dread: “The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise.”

Cannily, Glatstein uses this minor episode to suggest the organizing principle of Homeward Bound. There is almost no plot, simply a series of encounters with his fellow passengers, in which he allows them to hold forth about their experiences and ideas; and in the course of these interviews (in this story, Glatstein the journalist dominates), we are given a panorama of Jewish existence at a historical turning point. We meet an assimilated Dutch Jew, who goes on and on about how he is a Dutchman first, a Jew second, and complains about the bad image of poor Jewish immigrants in Amsterdam. (“I swear, I turn red in the face whenever I see a Polish Jew. Why must they always attract attention to themselves …?”)

Then there is a hard-living Jew from Bogota, who complains about the difficulty of finding a Jewish wife there, even as he brags about his beautiful Colombian mistress. (Here, as throughout The Glatstein Chronicles, the sexual frankness is surprising: “The truth is that these gorgeous women are useless in bed, cold as icebergs. They just lie there, like royalty.”) And there is a Soviet Jewish engineer, who is embarrassed when Glatstein compliments him on his “Yevreskaya golova, a Jewish head!”: This kind of ethnocentrism is taboo in the worker’s motherland. Ironically, the Soviet Jew’s socialist universalism makes him a mirror image of the Dutchman who shuns his Jewishness. “Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth,” Glatstein writes, and he creates a wonderfully vivid gallery of eccentric portraits. Taken together, however, they show the inescapability of “the Jewish question,” the way it turns individual Jews, even against their wills, into a collective.

Homeward Bound ends with Yash’s train arriving in his hometown, as the conductor cries, “Lu-u-blin!” But when Homecoming at Twilight begins, we are surprised to find that the key event—the deathbed reunion with his mother, the whole reason for the trip—has been skipped over. Such a disorienting elision signals that, in the second novella, Glatstein the modernist will preside: The straightforward interviews of the first story give way to a collage of dreams, memories, and parables. The setting this time is a resort hotel, where sick and exhausted Jews (including a few mental patients) come to recuperate. It is, as Wisse points out, a parody of the Alpine sanitarium in The Magic Mountain (which was translated into Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer); and there are so many echoes of The Castle that it seems Glatstein must have been reading Kafka as well.

Once again, Glatstein’s subject is the state of Jewry, as seen through conversations with different types of Jews. But this time his focus is strictly on Poland, and the people he meets seem like archetypes of Polish Jewish experience. There is the dying Steinman, a charismatic Zionist who knew Herzl: “I burst into tears when I was face to face with him. I’m not ashamed to admit that I kissed his hand.” There is the brilliant young son of a Hasidic rebbe, who seems destined to become a new Nachman of Bratslav: “Some day I’ll read you some of my new ideas, and you’ll see for yourself that they are simply extraordinary,” he says.

But in a montage-like series of interviews with Polish Jews, all asking Glatstein to carry messages home to their American relatives, we are shown how the whole Jewish community is caught in an insoluble tangle of poverty, anti-Semitism, and sheer despair. And America, now mired in the Depression and closed to new immigrants, can no longer offer them hope. All the supplicants are in the same position as the unemployed rabbi who shows Glatstein a yellowed letter he once received from Herbert Hoover, which he imagines will help him get to America. In fact, Glatstein and the reader realize, it is merely a meaningless form letter; the old promise of the New World can no longer be claimed.

By the time old Steinman dies, in a moving scene at the end of the book, he seems to foreshadow the death, spiritual or even physical, of Polish Jewry itself. “It seemed to me now, in the twilight, that I had reached the autumn of my life,” Glatstein reflects. “Even my mother’s death seemed to coincide oddly with the downward movement of my own life, and all this was in step with Jewish life as a whole, maybe even with the twilight now settling down over the whole world.” The Glatstein Chronicles is a remarkable portrait of that twilight moment—not just an invaluable historical document, but a literary work of great subtlety and power.

Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.

By the time he reached the beginning of the second paragraph—“He had been waiting a long time in the street and went up with a smile to the friend he saw coming out of the gate in talk with other boys and about to go off with them”—I felt I’d been kidnapped. But not only kidnapped: kidnapped and then, like something out of a science fiction story, copied and reproduced as another, for unlike the movie characters, comic heroes, and Arthurian knights of my earlier childhood, here, suddenly, was a character who seemed like me. I was staring at myself from the outside—and yet I was also inside the other self I was staring at. This was a kind of reading unlike any I’d ever done before, but I didn’t need to learn how to suspend disbelief; I didn’t have any disbelief to suspend.

I vanished inside this other life that also became my life. “In the gabled streets it was wet and windy and there came in gusts a sort of soft hail,” my father read on, his voice losing its usual slight stammer. I brushed my cheek as though I felt the drizzle, more a mist blown in from the sea. The black iron railings of the school gate were silvered over with droplets, and my coat had taken on a seal-like sheen. Standing for what felt like hours, I no longer minded the wet. It strengthened and refreshed me, and, after the exhaustion and boredom of classes—a stupid stock market game meant to teach math to the children of investment bankers—I felt alive again, free. I could write a poem about it, except I didn’t know how. Poetry wasn’t in the sixth-grade curriculum. I wiped the condensation from my glasses, the rim of my black sailor’s cap, and this gave me something to do while I still waited for my friend Hans. At last, I spotted him coming through the school gates with another group of boys. “There you are, finally,” I said, trying to seem righteously indignant. “What? Oh, yeah.” He turned to the others. “Hey boys, I’m taking a walk with Kröger.”

My daydream was interrupted by my father passing me the book. This was how we’d read: He’d start and I’d take over when I became bored or he got tired. Occasionally he’d ask me if I knew what words meant or correct my pronunciation. Performance and accuracy seemed to matter most, although perhaps not more than meaning, which hovered silently between us, unacknowledged. At the time, I was too caught up to wonder what the story meant for him; it seemed natural that he’d be able to pluck this magic book off the shelf and offer me a mirror for my life. As I stopped listening and began reading, I found plenty of circumstantial evidence to back up my fantasy. Wasn’t my father, with his “thoughtful blue eyes,” like Tonio’s father, a member of an important merchant family? And hadn’t he married an outsider to his little world—a woman who, if not exactly dark and Mediterranean, at least played the piano and seemed to possess this mysterious thing called “the artistic temperament,” which meant extravagant displays of emotion and a license to spoil me with chocolates or kisses for misbehavior? Didn’t I, too, play the violin? And wasn’t I, also, bearer of an unusual name that set me apart from the many Daniels, Benjamins, and Davids of my class? Tonio’s name is “so crazy” that his friend can’t bring himself to pronounce it in public; another boy nastily—but not wrongly—observes that “they probably only called you that because it sounds so foreign and sort of something special.”

The resemblances weren’t only superficial. Although three years younger than the fictional Tonio, I understood intuitively that “he who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer,” and I could say—in the stilted diction of H.T. Lowe Porter’s standard translation—that my soul had already been instructed by life in this hard and simple fact.

It takes great strength to bear a heroic mixture of jealousy, unyielding admiration, the knowledge of resentment, and the ability to refuse that resentment. 

Yet, unlike Mann’s character, I don’t remember being “so organized as to receive such experiences consciously,” nor did I “write them down inwardly,” or “take pleasure in them without letting them mould my conduct.” The young Tonio Kröger does do so because he is already the unhappy writer and “bourgeois manqué” he will become by the story’s end, envying the well-adjusted, animal happiness of beautiful, ordinary people, knowing he can never belong to their world. More sophisticated than I could imagine or even understand, Tonio falls in love with his handsome and popular friend, and is torn between his desire to bind him closer by getting him to share his interest in literature and history and his inclination to let him go on as he is, uninfluenced, a horseback-riding, unselfconscious specimen of unbothered privilege and Aryan boyhood.

If I’d been more self-aware, or more skeptical, or maybe just older, I would have realized that I was much less capable of loving the very people I could never be if there was no hope of reciprocal affection and recognition. It takes great strength to bear, as Tonio does, a heroic mixture of jealousy, unyielding admiration, the knowledge of resentment, and the ability to refuse that resentment. Whatever resources he has, I didn’t possess them. Had the boy who makes fun of Tonio’s name come along and interrupted my walk with a friend with his chattering about horseback riding, I would have been likely to start a fight I might have lost. Then I’d have insulted my friend to punish him for keeping such bad company. Less a violinist than a vibrating string, I registered every slight, every attempt to fit my behavior to those of other boys, as an assault. I cried out. Pushed back. Threw tantrums. I became a willing instrument in my own torment. I was, in short, an easy mark. Weekday mornings the steel-gray, red-striped Liberty Lines bus pulled up to the Central Park West building that I lived in and I’d climb up the steep steps into a nest of dangers. I can’t remember if anyone waited with me at the stop; I always seemed to board the bus alone. I made for the front seats, perennial and useless refuge of persecuted children. The buses were old, decommissioned Greyhounds, exhaust-choked, raised high above the street, dirty and dark.

The high-backed seats and narrow aisles didn’t prevent the constant bustle of the younger and more dangerous kids. The high-schoolers owned the back and did a better job policing themselves. I’ve no idea if there were teachers on board, though if there were, they never prevented my scarf or coat from being stolen and passed back, or my bag. I made the mistake of using my French schoolboy satchel, the kind that was just coming into New York fashion—among girls. “Are you a girl?” I heard at least once a day. “Why do you have that girly bag?” It’s a boyish blue, I thought. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that “girl” stuck to me. Innocently, someone might ask to see it. At the end of the ride, I’d be left to search for it among the far-back seats, pushing my way back against the current of students filing off the bus. My glasses, too, often disappeared. “He’s blind!” “He’s blind!” If I was reduced to tears, an older boy would sometimes step in and return them. There was an unacknowledged system, masters of bullies who determined when enough was enough. These boys I came to love after a fashion.

I learned to say nothing, protect my face, stare out the windows as the bus wound its way through the Upper West Side, crossing Central Park at the 96th Street transverse, and heading up the truck route into Harlem, over the Willis Avenue bridge until it reached the suburban-like corner of the Bronx known as Riverdale. I grew familiar with the glass-strewn vacant lots of 116th Street, the burnt-out shells of brownstones with men hanging around the stoops, a sudden flicker and glow of cigarette lighters but not cigarettes, oil-can fires on winter mornings, garbage piled high, the squeegee men who’d linger by the bridge entry, Brown’s Lounge, an “exotic” dance club on 121st Street and 2nd Avenue, and the Iglesia Pentecostal across the street. I relied on these landmarks to tick time off the journey and tried to make sense of the skinny women in high heels and puffy Polo jackets, the shouts and shoves and cries of the gangs and their clients. Some of these men were my father’s patients at the sickle cell clinic at Mt. Sinai hospital, and he’d tell stories about a certain Mr. D., a crack addict who shoveled snow to afford his next fix, despite a leg ulcer and his growing sickle crisis. When the bus bogged down in the morning rush hour, I often wondered if I’d be able to escape and find my way home through this charred and ruined landscape. What would happen out there, and could it be worse than what was happening to me as I rode the Liberty Line to prep school?

Decidedly, New York in the mid-1980s was not the trim, gabled Lübeck of the 1880s. I didn’t love my tormentors as Tonio did, but there were some who I wished would like me a little. My Hans Hansen was elsewhere, a friend from my old school who’d gone to Dalton and yet kept his affection for me. We’d still meet occasionally, and when we did, he told me that there were things I’d have to learn. He took me to my first Rangers game, showed me my first Madonna video, taught me to curse, introduced me to sex magazines and the vocabulary needed to talk about them. My father seemed to dislike him immensely. In calmer moments, he’d ask, “Is your loud friend coming over?” And once, perhaps not long after he’d received confirmation of the blood tests I wasn’t to learn about for another two years, he banned him from our apartment altogether, a ban lifted on the condition that he could only come around when my father was sure to be absent. There’s always something tragicomic (or is it comitragic?) when those famous bad readers of novels—Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina—decide their lives should resemble the novels they read. But it’s also too simple to fault such readers for failing to recognize their proper identities in the world—or to blame them for narcissism. Narcissus, after all, falls in love with his own reflection. The reflection of ourselves that we find in novels is always distorted. Better to say that we identify with another who may not be us at all. We choose to become entangled, possessed. At most, and at our most superstitious, our reading encounters are with a potential future self, a prophecy. Reading becomes a “sortes virgiliniae”—the ancient Roman divinatory practice of opening the Aeniad at random, reading the first sentence your eyes fall upon, and applying it as a kind of “fortune cookie” utterance to your own life. The leap from mere resemblance to full identification with characters and novels can only happen among those least sure of themselves and who they might be. Our submission to narrative promises to resolve a crisis, a failure of self.

Tonio Kröger falls into a long tradition of novels that question the use and abuse of fiction and identification for life. Unlike Don Quixote, Tonio romanticizes “Life” and despises books. But the image of normal, healthy, banal life Tonio falls in love with is less important than his manner of loving it: without hope for himself. The story’s pathos derives from his refusal to reject those bright and shining characters who will never acknowledge him. He prefers to think of himself as a sick man, nursing both a passion for health and an illness he can never get rid of. For Tonio, the idea that he might try to win the affections of those he loves, or become more like them, would be to make himself as ridiculous as Don Quixote wearing a barber’s bowl and calling it the helm of Mambrino.

“No one would be foolish enough to try to grow grapes by the light of the word ‘day’,” writes the literary critic Paul de Man, “but it is hard to deny that we structure our lives according to schemes found in fictional narratives.” De Man wants us to think that this need for fictional structures is a flaw in human design. He implies that while most of us are not credulous enough to believe words have magic powers to change nature, we too easily grant them a power to shape our destinies, usually for the worse. “Scheme” is a more disreputable word for “plot,” but “plot” also has the negative connotation of conspiracy. We either hide the truth from ourselves or unmask the plots that threaten to take over our lives. When I copied that line from de Man’s “The Resistance to Theory” as a college junior, I did it out of some half-sense that I must demystify the strange power novels and stories had had in my own life. And yet I could not give up the urge to go through fiction to escape from fiction. If the structure is undeniable, no matter how foolish, why not simply embrace our narrative self-deceptions rather than struggle to break free of narrative altogether? The only question that remains for us is how to find and choose the right stories, which we do by testing how well they suit our happiness. There are no “true” stories, only good stories and stories that are good for you, and these are not same thing. My father’s sister subscribed to such a belief. A novelist and memoirist, she often wrote about our family, particularly our women, and how they found, or failed to find, the narratives they needed for happy lives. One bright June weekend in my late teens, I sat with her in the kitchen of her Amagansett summer house, digesting my breakfast before a morning swim, and listened as she told me that she’d been furious with my father for reading those first 15 or so pages of Tonio Kröger to me when I was 11. I hadn’t known they’d discussed it. They were often angry with each other, but this meant that they seldom spoke at all, let alone candidly. She believed that I’d taken the book’s narrative scheme too much to heart, that I felt it as a recommendation from my father, almost a command: “Behold! This is life!” My aunt explained that the idea of the artist as an “unhappy consciousness,” alienated and at odds with both himself and the world, was an anachronism and a harmful cliché. There was no reason that writers couldn’t be as well-adjusted and content as the bankers and lawyers they might write about, if not even happier. Her remarks at the time astonished me. I’d assumed that if I ever, by some miracle, found happiness, I’d have to give up art. Could one really have both? It seemed dishonest, or at least unfair to unhappy people like me and my father. If we had to share literature and the pursuit of truth with a bunch of well-adjusted people, we’d be left with nothing truly our own except our sense of failure. I’d be faithful to our particular tribe, much as I loved my aunt’s swimming pool.

Even though I didn’t want to believe her, because her promise was so tempting, I also had to acknowledge a certain justice in what she said. My first acquaintance with Tonio Kröger established “the artist” as an existential category of utmost importance in my life…. I didn’t need to be a loser, nerd, or freak; my particular unhappiness could be explained by a more dignified name.

I’d assumed that if I ever, by some miracle, found happiness, I’d have to give up art. 

And so I adopted this word to describe myself before it was even clear if I had any particular talents. Certainly by the end of my years at Riverdale I had discovered only my capacity for suffering.

My aunt was too nice to say she thought that I’d actually been harmed by the story, that I seemed, to her, a poseur. But she implied that she felt my father had risked too much by introducing the story to me as he did. When she went upstairs for her morning’s work, I wandered out to the pool. For some reason, although no one was around, and my aunt’s back garden was well-fenced off from the neighbors by a line of dense, tall fir trees, I felt watched, and discovered I couldn’t take my shirt off and dive in.

I sat down by the edge of the pool, waiting for the feeling to pass. It didn’t. I remained paralyzed, looking down at my reflection. And then it came back to me, the culminating incident of my Riverdale career, my first sally into the world: One morning, almost at the end of semester, the fire bells went off and we all poured outside, with the usual relief of children let off school unexpectedly. As we lined up in our designated areas and waited, rumors began to make their way through the crowd of students. Someone’s brother in the high school said that the fire drill was not a drill. A bomb threat was mentioned. Maybe we’d get the whole day off. The prospect was almost unbelievable, and then I remembered that my violin was inside the building. I needed to go back for it. I had to save it—it belonged to my grandmother and I thought it the most beautiful thing I’d ever owned. I told a boy I ought not to have trusted that I was going to sneak back in and get it. Caught, I was dragged back to the line, kicking and pleading, while my schoolmates jeered and laughed at a phrase I’d hear thrown back at me over my last remaining months at the school, “Don’t you understand? I need my violin. I am an artist.”