Reviews of and articles about several other finalists and winners have also appeared in Tablet Magazine’s pages:

• The Jewish Book of the Year is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography. It was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by … Jonathan Rosen.

• Sam Munson reviewed Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a Fiction finalist. (We also reported on Kaniuk’s successful crusade to become the first Israeli citizen registered as having no religion.)

• Lead critic Adam Kirsch reviewed Fiction finalist Lawrence Douglas’s The Vices.

• Anthony Grafton published a rather epic meditation on Elisheva Carlebach’s Scholarship finalist Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe.

• Contributing editor Wesley Yang appreciated Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, winner for Writing Based on Archival Material.

• Vivian Gornick, whose Emma Goldman: Revolution As a Way of Life was a finalist in the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir category, discussed another radical Jewish woman, Vivian Gornick, on the Long Story Short podcast.

• David Shneer visited the Vox Tablet podcast to discuss his Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, a Holocaust finalist.

• Poetry critic David Kaufmann reviewed Adrienne Rich’s Poetry finalist, titled (perhaps ironically) Tonight No Poetry Will Serve.

• Parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall praised two children’s finalists, Lipman Pike, America’s First Home Run King and Marcel Marceau, Master of Mime.

• And I blogged about Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir winner, whose status as a biography, autobiography, or memoir is actually debatable! (And irrelevant.)

2011 National Jewish Book Award Winners [Jewish Book Council]

In Israel, every citizen has a religious classification and an ethnic classification. For the majority of Israeli citizens, “Jewish” is listed as both. It’s not a simple formality: One’s religious classification has profound effects, determining whom and how one can marry, the process of divorce, whether one can get buried in a Jewish cemetery, and whether one must serve in the army. The “state” in this case is embodied in the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a quirk of the Israeli democratic system that stretches back to the country’s founding in 1948. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave representatives of the Orthodox religious community, numbering only in the hundreds, a host of powers dramatically out of proportion to their size on the assumption that these Jews would soon turn away from the religion of the shtetl.

Ben-Gurion, needless to say, got it wrong. The ranks of the Orthodox have swelled to well over a million, yet the rabbinate still retains the sole power over deciding who is a Jew. Because of the strength of their voting bloc and the keystone role that Orthodox parties hold in Israeli coalition governments, there has never been a successful bid to challenge the rabbinate’s control.

But Kaniuk, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, may have accidentally found a loophole. And if it gets widened by the Supreme Court in an important case now pending, it could grow big enough for a large section of the country to step through.

***

Kaniuk wasn’t necessarily trying to upend 60 years of Orthodox rule when he took his case to court this past spring. At 81, he hardly seems like a revolutionary. He walks slowly with a cane, wears large glasses, and bangs his hands on the table when he’s upset. He fought in the War of Independence and ferried Holocaust survivors from Europe to Israel in the 1940s. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He says he reads a chapter of the Bible every day, but he doesn’t go to synagogue except on Yom Kippur, when he sits outside behind the building to hear the melodies he remembers from his grandfather. He never goes inside for services. “Once I tried,” he told me, “but then you have to stay the whole time.”

A year and a half ago, Kaniuk welcomed his first grandson into the world. The baby’s mother is a Christian, but because the newborn wasn’t baptized, the Ministry of the Interior decided that the infant should be labeled as “without religion.” At first, Kaniuk was furious. He did not want his grandson stigmatized and unable to marry. But as he thought it through, he realized that what he really wanted wasn’t to change the boy’s status but to change his own. Kaniuk was very proud to be a Jew, but he had never been religious, so why should he be labeled as such?

The Interior Ministry turned down his request to be labeled “without religion” in November 2010 with a Kafkaesque flourish. According to Kaniuk, the government claimed that without a certificate of conversion, his official religion could not be changed. Of course, there is no way to get a certificate signifying that you have given up religion altogether.

So, Kaniuk petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to force the ministry to act. Not only did he win his case in September 2011, but the judge wrote a remarkable opinion that provided the legal framework to defend a citizen’s right to be recognized under the law as any religion (or no religion) he or she wishes. “We face a demand for freedom from religion in the civil registry,” the verdict read. “Freedom from religion is derived from human dignity, which is protected in the basic law: human dignity and liberty. When the given law is laconic, the fundamental right shall decide, which tilts the scales in favor of the claimant and his self-definition in the registry.”

“This judge seems to have been waiting for me for 30 years,” Kaniuk said of the verdict, which was handed down on Rosh Hashanah. Kaniuk started the new Jewish year as the only Jew in the country officially “without religion.”

***

The case made national news, and it quickly ignited a public conversation. A few days after the story broke, Oded Carmeli, a 26-year-old poet, posted an event on Facebook calling for Israelis who also wanted to be labeled “without religion” to meet on the roof of an abandoned building on Rothschild Boulevard that had been used as a community center during the August tent protests. There, he planned to have everyone sign affidavits in front of lawyers asserting that they wanted to be “without religion” as well. Carmeli figured that if he could gather a big enough group, then he could take all of their papers to the Interior Ministry together and it would be harder for the government to turn them down.

“Even in the first few hours I saw the attending numbers jump up,” Carmeli told me of watching replies roll in. “I think I sort of hit a nerve.” Expecting a crowd, Carmeli called a pair of lawyers he met during the tent protests, and they offered to attend the event and witness the signatures.

Continue reading: A movement grows

• The Kol Nidre service tonight at Occupy Wall Street will be across Broadway from Zuccotti Park, in an deliberate effort to expand the Occupation. (If you go, try to find me and say hi.) [Forward]

• Why Occupy Wall Street is taken most seriously in the Middle East. [NYT]

• Washington Capitals forward Jeff Halpern will Koufax tonight; Coach Bruce Boudreau won’t. [WP D.C. Sports Bog]

• Nor will the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun; the Times’ Richard Sandomir explores further. [NYT]

• It’s kind of adorable how our basic Ashkenazic break-fast foods are seen as exotic in Israel. [Ynet]

• It may be a travesty of democracy, but Russia’s Jews are pretty okay with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s imminent return to the presidency. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Calvin Trillin has a tale to tell from Toronto’s diamond district. [The New Yorker]

• Left-wing Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk set an important precedent, getting a court to allow him to register his official religious status as “without religion.” [Haaretz]

• Nukes or no nukes, Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel insists Iran will not surpass Israel’s qualitative military edge. [The Daily Beast]

• Saul Bellow on being “a Jewish writer in America.” [NYRB]

• Columbia Professor Bruce Robbins is making a movie called Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. [Kickstarter]

• For only the second time ever, centuries-old Bible manuscripts from Damascus were displayed, in Jeruslaem. [AP/WP]

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? -Isaiah

Life on Sandpaper is, unlike many efforts in this field, much more than mere recollection: punishingly alive, sinuously structured, teeming with vivid incident and precise detail, and almost incantatory in its headlong, roiling, and uninterrupted movement forward into an uncertain and endlessly seductive future. (This in itself should resonate with any American seeker after intellectual glory.) The novel fairly resounds with the still-extant sense of unlimited potential that filled America even in the 1950’s, and Yoram’s travels do not follow any apparent plan, other than an unspoken commitment to experience for its own sake. We follow him from New York to Paris to Las Vegas to the American southwest to Hollywood and thence, once more, to Manhattan, as he marries a dancer (which does not stop him from bedding countless other women) and produces paintings (by his own late-in-the-book admission, works of indifferent quality). He hobnobs with Charlie Parker and other titans of the postwar bebop scene and attempts to beat the house at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas. He works as a private tutor for Lionel Abel’s daughter. He creates spec scripts for legendary director Lewis Milestone and lunches with William Saroyan (near the end of his life when Yoram encounters him, and a Dostoevskian shipwreck of a man). He manages—through sheer chutzpah—to publish a book in English with an American house.

A life, in short, to be envied by any would-be artist, littered as it is with offhand accomplishments and the names of the famous. Yet through all his peregrinations, his civilian friends—so to speak—loom as large if not larger than the above-mentioned enduring ghosts of American culture: Avi Shoes, an eccentric business titan, with a fortune founded on patent laces; Mira, the near-sociopathic and brilliant daughter of a Russian chemist; Gandy, another painter and untethered bohemian; Oved, Yoram’s road-trip companion and would-be professional gambler. These men and women leave and enter Yoram’s life with circular unpredictability—in itself a testament either to Kaniuk’s scrupulous memory or his writerly skill in imitating so precisely the fluid dynamics of life off the page. The book’s acute prose gives ample cause to think it skill, rather than an effort of recollection. Writing of a female acquaintance’s attempted suicide, Kaniuk offers the following: “I put my head in the oven, took my head out for a moment to check if the windows were closed, and I saw light coming through the window and shining on a box of Quaker Oats cookies on the shelf over the oven. It seemed a shame not to eat the cookies, so I missed my chance of dying with dignity.” Quaker Oats and near-suicide by gas, hummus entrepreneurship and highline publishing: This is Yoram’s America. Such bleakly hilarious turbulence mirrors the larger turbulence of its temporal background. Indeed, young Yoram is as restless as the two societies he straddles: opulent-squalid New York and still-existentially-threatened Israel.

Kaniuk avoids, however, any overt attempts at sermonizing on this connection. So what, then, is Life on Sandpaper about, beyond the pleasure- and grief-rich past of a talented writer? A long, utterly corrosive speech made by his soon-to-be-ex wife may well provide a clue: “Each day is the last. Tomorrow you’re always going to die. The day after tomorrow there’ll be a funeral and I’ll be sorry I didn’t come see you sooner. … Have you ever noticed that you brag about having been a soldier, but never about your paintings?” Another comes from one of the book’s final set pieces, which takes place in a high-class whorehouse on the Upper East Side where Yoram works painting walls (not portraits, his métier) for the dementedly brilliant proprietor. And this is, in the end, what Kaniuk’s multifarious, propulsive novel is “about”: Yoram’s growing disillusion. With painting, with the lackey’s culture surrounding it (of which he, admittedly, is a part), and with, it is implied, America.

This forms the main thematic undercurrent of Life on Sandpaper; it culminates in his abandonment of art for literature and of America for Israel. Yoram, to be sure, does not abandon the work of creation—he publishes a first novel near the book’s end, and his creator has produced more than 20 books of fiction, essays, and children’s literature. But to admit, and frankly, one’s own mediocrity in one’s own first and most beloved art—this defies literary convention. (As does the reproach, implied in this disillusion, directed toward aesthetic fakery and the fetishization of youth and its sufferings.) The monstrous Saroyan, the paint job in the bordello, and Yoram’s own return to Israel—what do all these point to if not such a rejection? The book’s final sentences provide a powerful antidote to autobiographical kitsch: At a café in Tel Aviv, shortly after Yoram’s arrival in Israel, a man stands up and asks Yoram if he is, in fact, the author Yoram Kaniuk. “I said yes,” Yoram replies, “and he said in Yiddish-accented English: I’ve read your book. In English. A very bad book. I looked at him for a long moment and understood I’d come home.”

Sam Munson is author of the novel The November Criminals, which is now out in paperback.

• Influential columnist Ari Shavit calls on Bibi to make a hugely bold gesture. [Haaretz]

• No, there is another (rabba). [JTA]

• Contributing editor Josh Cohen talks to great Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk. [The Paris Review]

• In Egypt, reports Gideon Rachman, liberals are on the defensive. [FT]

• Union bigwig Bruce Raynor is out following allegations of misconduct. [Forward]

Springtime in New York.

Take the time to browse some of his work in our archives, because not only does Kaniuk write like last call on the night Moshiach shows up, but he has lived. After being wounded during the war of independence, he ended up in Greenwich Village where he knew everyone: He told Charlie Parker about the Rabbi of Ladi; Susan Sontag filmed Kaniuk for her Israel documentary Promised Lands (which Marc Tracy reviewed), and he schmoozed with Sontag at her 1977 wake (yes, she died in 2004); and, oh yeah, he made out with Billie Holiday.

… She’d take me walking and I talked and she listened or maybe she didn’t, and said she didn’t understand that crap. We kissed. She said she’d been kissed better. I was there and she wanted to kiss somebody and I was nearest and I talked like someone making a fool of himself. She was lost and looked like a bird that had been hit. They called her Lady Day because when she was a waitress she used to bend over to take the money and they saw her breasts and they’d say: Lady. She was a vanquished queen who demanded that her realm remain in the gutter. I met her years later at Tony Scott’s, the clarinet player. She sang “Mayn Yiddishe Mame” for me. Nobody has sung it like her.

Yoram Kaniuk’s War of Independence Memoir Wins Prize [JPost]
Related: Wise We Were Not
Lullaby of Birdland
On Cinematography
The Farewell Party

It’s a typical Black Sea story: In 1885, a girl named Eleonora Cohen, a native of the largest Romanian port city, stows away with her father, a carpet salesman, on his journey to the capital of the Ottoman empire. Once there, she winds up in the court of the sultan, who can appreciate the counsel of a precocious child genius like Eleonora, even if she is Jewish. Such is the premise, at least, of the debut historical novel The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, February), by Michael David Lukas, who has sojourned in Istanbul himself through means more typical of our own time: a Fulbright fellowship.

***

The city in which Eleonora’s finds herself, like most imperial capitals and most of the major cities linked by the Black Sea, had its fair share of Jewish residents. The political and cultural lives of such Turkish Jews are the subjects of two books recently reprinted by a New Jersey press, founded in 2001 and “run for scholars by scholars,” which focuses on the ancient and modern Middle East. In a study originally published in 1996—The Jewish Community of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century (Gorgias, February)—Ilan Karmi argues that reforms in 19th-cenury Ottoman policy made life easier for the Jewish community of the capital, while Gad Nassi, a dedicated advocate of the Istanbul Jewish community, includes articles by a range of scholars in his 2001 collection Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Gorgias, February).

***

If she had sailed north instead of south, Eleonora could have just as easily landed herself in Odessa, another Black Sea port where Jews made history alongside Greeks, Turks, and Romanians. Charles King memorializes this unique city in Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (Norton, February), having consulted archival sources in several languages. King highlights famed artists such as Isaac Babel and Sergei Eisenstein, who burnished the myth of the city in their fiction and film, and he ends his book with the cultural legacy of the city’s Jews as it can be glimpsed in the Little Odessa of Brighton Beach. “They send us their Jews from Odessa,” King quotes Isaac Stern on the cultural exchange programs between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., “and we send them our Jews from Odessa.”

***

The transfer of Jewish intellectuals from Nazi-controlled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s to the United States was, understandably, more one-sided: America got some of the world’s great scientists and artists, while Germany got handed its ass by the U.S. military. Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis’ collection of essays on the period’s cultural refugees, The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism (South Carolina, January), treats not only the most familiar exiles of the era—Mann, Adorno, Bartók—but also the novelist Herman Broch, philosopher Walter Kaufmann, and artist Max Reinhardt.

***

As deplatziert as German intellectuals may have felt in postwar America, Yoram Kaniuk was even more out of place there: Born in Tel Aviv in 1930, he was a wounded veteran of the 1948 War of Independence when he arrived in New York, a penniless Middle Eastern teenager eager to live the life of an artist. Fictionalizing his time in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper (Dalkey Archive, February) recounts run-ins with jazz greats Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and Hollywood stars James Dean and Marlon Brando, meanwhile demonstrating that young Kaniuk had at least one quality in common with these world-famous Americans: He could screw around just as self-destructively.

***

The young Kaniuk’s hope that through his interest in art and culture, he, as a Jew, could nonetheless find common ground with other artists, especially those from similar backgrounds of displacement, parallels the dynamics that the literary scholar George Bornstein says were at work in Jewish, Irish, and African-American culture in the century before Kaniuk arrived in New York. In The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945 (Harvard, February), Bornstein argues that these groups saw one another as inspiration, embracing “models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism”; he points, as evidence, to Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, to Abie’s Irish Rose and The Jazz Singer.

***

Like the texts Bornstein discusses, contemporary pop culture traverses ethnic and national boundaries—but it often loses its cultural specificity in the process. Dubbed into Italian, for example, The Nanny is no longer a sit-com about an annoying Jewish girl from Flushing, Queens, but rather an annoying Italian-American who hails from the Ciociaria region. In the Italian Simpsons, meanwhile, Groundskeeper Willie becomes a Sardinian rather than a Scot. Chiara Francesca Ferrari studies this phenomenon in Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish?: Dubbing Stereotypes in The Nanny, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos (Texas, January), demonstrating both the global reach of American pop culture, and the ease with which the Jewish markers of that culture can be excised or ignored, when that’s convenient.

Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.

Before we can talk about the film, though, it’s helpful to consider the filmmaker: Susan Sontag, director? She is famous for her essays, of course, and for her glamorous, engagée intellectual activism. She was also one of the first American writers to take cinema seriously, an early champion of foreign auteurs like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and particularly Jean-Luc Godard.

Promised Lands, released in 1974, was her third film, and first documentary. Both her inexperience and her influences show in the frequently tedious movie, which seems like the work of someone who is a little too obsessed with Bresson’s viscously slow films. More problematic are the film’s meandering, structureless form and its utter refusal to aid the viewer: so radical is Sontag in her cinematic purity, that the film’s interviewees are not even identified. Unsurprisingly, The New York Times panned it at the time of its release; The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann was only a little more encouraging.

Despite its flaws, however, and despite the fact that the reality Promised Lands depicts undoubtedly reflects Sontag’s deliberate and somewhat politicized choices, the film provides a valuable document of a traumatized society. Consisting largely of interviews with prominent Israelis, accompanied by regional music that is periodically juxtaposed with what sounds like artillery fire, Sontag’s camera takes its time, lingering for minutes on a ceremony at Jerusalem’s War Cemetery, empty tanks and dead bodies on the battlefield, a funeral for a fallen solider, a center for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and, always, the gorgeous hilly landscape that everyone in the region seems to be constantly fighting and dying over.

“We have this pogrom complex here,” explains Yoram Kaniuk, the leftist Israeli writer, who is Promised Lands’ conscience and main voice. He adds, “And this time, in this war, it was almost so.” Speaking into a microphone in a nondescript hotel room, smoking a pipe, Kaniuk looks worried and sad. He and others like him are the film’s greatest asset, allowing viewers an unmitigated glance at the distraught consciousness of those days.

Watching the film from a distance of three decades, viewers—especially ones vaguely familiar with Sontag’s intellectual commitments—may wonder what interest she found in the topic, especially as she had rarely, before or since, seriously explored Israel or even her own Jewish heritage. Sontag seems to have wondered as well: in a brief essay in Vogue, published around the time of the film’s release, she insisted on her subject matter’s “uncanny fit with themes in my writings and other films.” The fit isn’t immediately apparent, though, and the film’s numerous declarations of sympathy for Israel are surprising coming from the staunchly leftist Sontag.

But one element of the film that does seem to jibe with Sontag’s other preoccupations is its tragic element. “Being rather tuned into sadness, to the tears in things, I put a lot of that in Promised Lands,” she wrote in Vogue. “Alas, it’s not just in my head. It’s what Israel does seem to me, at this moment, to be about.” The film presents, in a subtly polemical fashion, a tragic trajectory for the Israeli experience, consisting of three distinct, non-overlapping epochs.

The first, spanning from Zionism’s fin de siècle beginnings to June 1967, features the pure land of Labor Zionism, during which, as Kaniuk puts it, the Jews “took a lot of beautiful things out of Judaism and merged it with Tolstoy and song and dance.” This Israel is the star of the film’s most powerful segment. Sontag, the famed analyst of campiness, films a Tel Aviv wax museum that depicts great moments in Israel’s history, from Theodor Herzl orating to David Ben-Gurion feeding milk to a lamb with a baby bottle. That the scenes, despite their kitschiness, manage to inspire suggests just how invigorating the Zionist project had been at its inception.

The final wax diorama is of a Jewish soldier weeping at the Western Wall: perhaps the iconic image of the 1967 war, it was the moment that both culminated and, as the film goes on to explain, killed that first epoch. For after Israel’s stunningly lopsided victory, it became an incredibly confident modern consumer society—“Like America in the ’50s,” Kaniuk sighs. “Socialism went out the window. In Kaniuk’s analysis (and by extension Sontag’s), post-’67 Israel made a gargantuan error in overconfidently failing to extend magnanimity to its foes, justly vanquished though they were. And what does pride come before? Kaniuk reminds us, in what could serve as the film’s epigraph: “The Jews never understood tragedy. That is why the Greeks invented tragedy, and we invented, kind of, drama. In the Bible, there is no tragedy. Because tragedy is where a right is opposed to another right. And here is two rights opposing each other. The Palestinians have a full right to Palestine, and the Jews have a full right to Palestine.” He adds, “Do you have any solution to a tragedy? Of course you don’t.”

And so Promised Lands concludes by depositing us squarely in Israel’s third epoch, where the imperative is not to reclaim and restore the land, nor to build a modern, successful state that also happens to be Jewish, but merely to keep on keepin’ on. Now, viewed 35 years later, the tragedy articulated by Sontag’s movie is not that Israel failed to survive. The tragedy, rather, is that survival remains Israel’s most ambitious goal.

In Adam Resurrected, opening today in New York City, Jeff Goldblum delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Adam Stein, a Weimar-era cabaret star who in the 1960s is relegated to an Israeli insane asylum specifically for Holocaust survivors. As we learn in flashbacks, he survived a concentration camp by submitting to the perverse whim of a Nazi commandant (Willem Dafoe): behaving like a dog at all times. In the asylum, Stein—wily, charismatic, and devilishly witty—carries on an affair with a sultry nurse (Ayelet Zurer) and falters only when he encounters a new patient, a boy who thinks he’s a dog. The film, directed by the provocateur Paul Schrader, was adapted by Noah Stollman from the 1968 novel by the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk.

Goldblum, who is 56, grew up in Pittsburgh. Over the past 35 years he has worked with directors such as Robert Altman, Philip Kaufman, David Cronenberg, and Steven Spielberg. When I met with him yesterday to talk about Adam Resurrected, he said, “This morning I was on Martha Stewart making menorahs,” and added, “She’s very Jewish.”

Paul Schrader says that the Holocaust “is a subject that in many ways has been exhausted cinematically.” How does Adam Resurrected differ from other Holocaust films?

Well, I’ve never seen anything like it. And like Paul, I was struck, in the first reading of the script—the central event of this movie that he describes as being “about a man who was once a dog who meets a dog who was once a boy”—we thought that was a knockout of a metaphor, and worth doing. And if you read Yoram Kaniuk’s book, which is just now being reissued—I love the movie, but the book of course is different and more complicated and more elaborate and spectacular. We tried to stay devoted to the sensibility and voice and spirit of the book. I met with Kaniuk in Israel. He’s like the character and like the book—snarky and unconventional and surprising and contradictory and brilliant and provocative and wonderful and kind and funny. When the book first came out in Israel there was an uproar—they were like, “Irreverent about this material? Nothing like we’ve seen before.” But since, it’s been translated and became an international treasure, and Susan Sontag compared him to Márquez.

Do you agree with Schrader that cinematically the Holocaust genre is played out?

He knows. He’s a cinematic historian, I’m not. While we were filming in Israel I asked him, “What movies shouldn’t I have missed out on by this point?” He said, “Here are the 20 movies I recommend“—many of which I hadn’t seen. I watched them all.

In preparation for the role, you visited former concentration camps and spoke at length with survivors. What did you learn from those experiences?

A greater feeling for those events. Many survivors were very generous with me, welcomed me into their homes, told me their stories, showed me their artifacts. I felt a greater empathy for, understanding of, what it must have been like. Café Europa in Los Angeles is an organization that serves survivors. One of the women who was running Café Europa—I said I’d never been to a concentration camp, and she said, “The one I recommend that’s most intact of any is Majdenek, in Poland, outside Lublin.” So I went to Germany, spent a month there, went to Sachsenhausen, and figured out a way to do this side trip to Poland, and it was an amazing experience. Amazing. Reading all about it, immersing myself in it—you can only scratch the surface in a year. But going there and seeing Germany and seeing the concentration camp and standing next to the gas chamber and seeing a room full of shoes—it was life-changing, it was very emotional, devastating.

I’ve read that you grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue and went to Hebrew school.

I did!

Did being Jewish have any connection to your choosing the role of Adam?

Yes, possibly so. Well, I had a feeling about it anyway. My dad served in World War II, volunteered in the service, and his brother—who was a pilot, went down, killed, in World War II—looked kind of exactly like me, he was my height exactly. So I always had a connection to, was intrigued by—arrested, disturbed, haunted, and was interested in those events, but not until this year did I really get more fully into it. And yes, when it came to me, I had a predisposition to be interested.

I couldn’t help thinking of your role in Independence Day, which was a fairly stereotyped Jew opposite a fairly stereotyped black guy played by Will Smith, and I wondered if in playing Jews you’re ever concerned about the impression you may make.

Yes, that occurs to me.

Have you ever refashioned a role or spoken to a director about those feelings?

I may not have mentioned Jewishness along with it, that may not have been my only or primary concern, but yes, I’ve steered and contributed and otherwise lobbied for adjustment in one aspect or another that would add negative stereotype. And I like to avoid cliché anyway—generally.

Is there anything you learned in Hebrew school that stays with you today?

I was telling somebody today I like that Passover song “Dayenu.” “It would be sufficient…” If nothing else occurred—talking about what I wish I had done, what else I could have done, what I’d like to do now. I have more appetite than ever, looking forward to whatever comes, and have strong feelings, but—having said that, if nothing else would occur from the huge abundance that I’ve been gifted with, it would certainly be more than sufficient. And I’d be eternally grateful.

An apartment on Fifth Avenue and 10th needed a painter. I went along and said I had house-painting experience from Paris. In accordance with Gandy’s instructions I said I’d painted the home of Baron de Rothschild, because in fact I’d seen, through a friend, the walls of the Rothschild palace and I’d thought about Lincoln’s words, that if the Lord had money He’d surely live there. I painted the apartment. I tried my luck with the lady of the house and she said I was insolent and although she didn’t discipline me, she rejected my advances and laughed a bitter selfish laugh when I looked at her. In the evenings Gandy and me would go to Birdland to listen to jazz. Jazz was never really popular in America. Years later George Shearing who wrote “Lullaby of Birdland” told me that he was flying to someplace or other and the pilot recognized him. They landed somewhere. The passengers got off for some fresh air. The pilot asked Shearing if he’d do something for him. The blind Shearing sat down in the cockpit and asked someone to take his guide dog for a short walk. The pilot took the dog and the passengers fled because they didn’t want to fly with a blind pilot. I tried unsuccessfully to fathom out how Gandy managed to make a living and hinted that my money was running out and he talked to somebody at Birdland and the guy, I no longer remember who he was, sent us to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. I met Charlie Parker, I heard him play. He was the world’s first black cowboy. I later saw how he collected pistols of the kind you see in westerns, Hopalong Cassidy was his hero. He made a religion out of roasting chickens, loved model railroads and dreamed of driving a gold-plated Cadillac. In the midst of the filth all around I saw a primeval shyness in him. He was a huge and intimidating sentimentalist and the first time I heard him I felt I was seeing God die. When he spoke a song and his high forehead sweated, the music looked for itself in the hands playing over the saxophone, and I heard the echo of Negro funerals from the place where jazz was born to rejoice and laugh because another black had died. I also heard how my grandfather used to pray. I told Charlie Parker about the Rabbi of Ladi. I explained that during Napoleon’s siege of Moscow there was a relentless debate among the Jews on whether Napoleon’s victory would be good or bad for the Jews. Rabbi Israel of Konitz wanted Napoleon to win while the Rabbi of Ladi did not. It was decided that they both should go to the synagogue at the same time and whichever one of them was first to blow the shofar would win. The Rabbi of Konitz arrived together with the Rabbi of Ladi but was the first to start blowing the shofar and then the Rabbi of Ladi snatched the notes from the Rabbi of Konitz’s shofar and so, from a distance of nine hundred kilometers determined Napoleon’s fate at Moscow. Bird said that any jazz musician who doesn’t make a lady out of jazz like that Dave Brubeck knows how to snatch notes from a shofar. Outside everybody was playing the numbers and losing pots of money to the black professionals all dressed up to the nines in their colored suits and magnificent neckties. Bird liked to see Jimmy Slide beating Napoleon at Moscow with his tap dancing.

One night some time later we were walking down Fifth Avenue. By the Olivetti store, on a concrete pedestal, was a typewriter. Opposite we could see big buildings and the lights burning and the asses of women bent over polishing the floors in the neon light. The avenue was empty. We put some paper into the machine and Bird dictated a letter to me. A cop came and complained that there were no crimes being committed there. That’s how it had been every night for a year now, and his wife was laughing at him because every bastard at the station house had a few crooks hanging on him like medals on his chest and their wives were making fun of his wife whose husband had no crooks. Minton’s Playhouse was on 118th Street, not far from the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo. Late at night they let musicians play there whose licenses had been revoked because of drugs. Many, many people loved to hear them. Ordinary people from off the street. Whites. Blacks. Hookers. Pimps. And police officers. I got a job washing dishes and waiting tables under the baton of a Negro called Andy. They liked having a white boy washing dishes for them. I was young and they dressed me in black clothes so I’d look white in black. They bought the clothes at the pawnshop on the corner and for two months I lived in a room over the club. I had a half-Japanese half-black girlfriend who lived opposite and worked at dressing voodoo dolls. She’d lay me down on my stomach and walk barefoot over my back, bending her toes, and I felt ashamed at seeing her become a kind of slave. She was beautiful, but like Flora she waited for me to command her. Billie Holiday sang “Yo” for me—that’s what they called me—”Yo’s Blues”. But I’m not telling about myself. Jazz flowed into me. The sad humor of the musicians. Billie Holiday took notes that sang as if they were weaving a sad carpet and she’d take me walking and I talked and she listened or maybe she didn’t, and said she didn’t understand that crap. We kissed. She said she’d been kissed better. I was there and she wanted to kiss somebody and I was nearest and I talked like someone making a fool of himself. She was lost and looked like a bird that had been hit. They called her Lady Day because when she was a waitress she used to bend over to take the money and they saw her breasts and they’d say: Lady. She was a vanquished queen who demanded that her realm remain in the gutter. I met her years later at Tony Scott’s, the clarinet player. She sang “Mayn Yiddishe Mame” for me. Nobody has sung it like her. She published her autobiography that opened with the words: ‘When I was born my mother was thirteen, my father was eighteen and I was four.’

Bird liked me and there was Max Roach and they tap danced, and there was Ben Webster who pawned his sax every week and Bird and I made him redeem it and then they’d play together. Crazy Bud Powell would join them. His head was screwed up from the beatings he’d gotten because of the color of his skin. He’d get up onto the piano and crow “Cock-a-doodle-doo” and then play and everybody would cry over how his notes hit you in the gut. Bertrand Tavernier’s movie, Round Midnight, with Dexter Gordon, who also joined in, was made after Bud Powell. He went to Europe, climbed trees, came back, went again, and wanted love but there wasn’t any. I remember dragging him home, but I can’t remember where.

Lady Day came to kiss me and hate me because I wasn’t cruel and didn’t hit her or shout or take her money, I was too innocent for her, too clean, not a pimp, I talked to her about Milton’s poems and poets I liked and painting, she liked it but it didn’t really interest her. She sang, a flower doesn’t explain itself, fire doesn’t explain itself and love doesn’t explain itself. She loved like she talked, she thought I was buttering her up and she wasn’t interested in what I said about Rembrandt or Vermeer, who back then I was trying to figure out where the light in his paintings came from, what was the magic of that man’s trickery, and didn’t really want to respond. She thought she was unworthy of words like that. For her I was a phony from a world she wanted to live in but she’d missed the boat. And sometimes at four or five in the morning we’d go to a small club, where a fat black man called Slim Gaillard played. Slim would wait for Bird and Lady and told me that I was white trash, but sweet. He played with his huge hands crossed; he had fingers like frankfurters and his fingernails touched the keys and for a whole hour he sang one song that nobody has ever deciphered – Cement Mixer, Put-i Put-i – and I fell into the joy of three or four months of snatched painting, new colors, I started mixing oil and enamel paints, I learnt to paint jazz, think jazz, feel the beat, the bebop. I’d think of a contrabass and feel the rhythm coursing through me.

Minton’s was one long party. People hardly ate there. They liked to laugh, cry and drink. My dishwashing consisted mainly of glasses. They wanted me to circulate around the tables so that the patrons could see a white waiter from Jerusalem, because Tel Aviv didn’t mean anything to them. The hookers sat with their arms around each other and ordered Bacardi or Scotch and milk and flirted with me. They said I was what was left for Bird between the notes. The cops were mainly drunk. The musicians went wild competing with one another. The whites in the audience sat mesmerized and everybody looked at them as if they were earls doing them the honor of visiting a Harlem whorehouse. I served them and when they remembered they even paid. Luckily an ancient black woman across the street made me a meal a day in return for me telling her about Jerusalem and the Jordan River and there was a kind of lusterless gold in this deceit. The musicians called themselves by noble titles, they loved monarchy, pomp, dressing elegantly: Lady, Lester Young was Prez, Ellington was Duke, Basie was Count and Nat Cole was King. They greeted each other the way they’d seen in movies about English royalty. A message was sent to the world through me: here, in the asshole of the world, the real flowers bloom, and a white sack of manure from the Holy Land with Jesus, Moses and Abraham in his pocket. And they are his personal friends and he makes them beautiful. They complimented me. Their kindness was unconditional except for the fact that they decided that I devotedly serve them with drinks. They appreciated that more than I realized since I thought they were doing me a great honor. They didn’t want to see my paintings and drawings, except for Bird who came up to look at them. Gandy would appear, the hookers asked me to be their lover, but the music and atmosphere were riveting but the women weren’t even though they were sad. The Japanese found somebody else and left. After the girls stopped laughing in the club and were dragged outside by husky pimps, they crawled back inside bruised and then they were called “queens” and had drinks bought for them and only the cops and the tough detectives would mess with them. I used to eat with the musicians at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack where we had chicken and cabbage salad or a steak that they held in tongs and seared over a flamethrower and one day I said I was going to write because I thought painting was contemptible and Ben Webster asked me what I’d write and I said a book that would be entitled “The Future of God” but I wasn’t at all sure that He had a future.

First off, the title. Who is The Last Jew?

The name started with my neighbor. He survived Auschwitz by being a carpenter, making beautiful boxes. He was one of the longest residents of Auschwitz and thought he was the last Jew because everyone that he knew and saw there went to the gas. Because there was no radio, no nothing, he thought maybe all the Jews are finished and he will be the last. I added the rest of the story, but he always used to speak about the fact that he thought he would be the last Jew.

Kaniuk in Manhattan in the 1950s, and more recently in Tel Aviv

But the book goes beyond one man after the war. It weaves in other characters, other eras.

I’m in love with Jewish culture. I read the Bible and the Mishneh and the Talmud and the kabbalah, but without belief, I don’t believe any of these things. I don’t believe in anything so I cannot be religious. I don’t have faith—not in human beings, not in democracy, not in God, not in anything. I like Hasidic stories. In The Last Jew there are many things that I took from the Hasidic background of my father’s family. I have all kinds of meshichim, all kinds of messiahs.

It’s about history. The settlement that I was writing about is the place that I knew as a child.

Tell me about your childhood and your family.

It’s very small and not religious at all—except for my grandfather. He was a Hebrew teacher and at the time there were no books. He had to write his own textbooks to teach history. My mother was a teacher. They were reviving a language, and they were talking the language. They had beautiful Hebrew this generation, they were pioneers. My mother lived through the First World War here, which was terrible because the Turks were tough, and then the war with the Arabs and then the Second World War.

My mother came here at the age of six or seven from Odessa in 1909. It was the year Tel Aviv was founded. They lived in Neve Tzedek, which was part of Tel Aviv, but before Tel Aviv really was. They were one of the first families, but they didn’t get the honor of being one of the families.

My father on the other hand was from a very different background. He came from Galicia, which was Austria at the time. His languages were Yiddish and German. He fought in the First World War in the German army and then he was living in Berlin. He wanted so much to be German, you can’t imagine. He was an encyclopedia of German poetry, writers. He helped the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Dizengoff, create the museum. He was the first curator and made the museum into something. He loved it. That was his life.

They were hard people, my parents. I don’t think they liked each other and they didn’t have a great life together, but each one created a great world on their own. My father helped a lot of German Jews who started to come in ’33. My childhood is mixed up with the pioneer friends of my mother and the German friends of my father. They both did wonderful things, but they didn’t get enough recognition for it, because both were not pushy enough and not connected enough, and they didn’t have each other for comfort.

The Last Jew took 25 years to come out in the United States. Was the writing of it any quicker?

It took 10 years to write. It’s a summation of Jewish fate, and I’m very pessimistic about the Jewish fate. I don’t think Israel can survive more than 50 or 60 years and I don’t think the Jews can survive. But there will always be the last Jew. Two centuries from now there will be some Jews who talk in New York about how there used to be Jews in America and now there are not.

I could argue, though stretching’s involved, you’re not all that pessimistic. If there’s always a last Jew, that means somebody endures.

Yes, but it’s slowly becoming less and less. The world without Jews will not be the same. We produced Christianity and Judaism and philosophy and music, Mahler and Schoenberg, the theater, we enriched the world in so many ways for centuries. So why do they hate us so much? Sholem Aleichem said, “Why didn’t you choose someone else once? What harm did we do?”

In 1939, Adolf Eichmann was sitting in Vienna, the head of an office to sell the Jews. No one wanted to buy them. The British didn’t allow them into Palestine, the Arabs fought against it, didn’t want it. Do you know how many years the Jews were not allowed in Britain? The British exiled the Jews in the 11th century and they came back only in the end of the 17th. Somehow, yes, we survived as a small minority because most of the Jews who could escaped. But one or two or three generations, that’s the end of it.

In the 1940s, the Americans didn’t help at all in saving the Jews, and yet they all come to America, admire America, love America. I like America too, I lived in America for 10 years, but we never really understand how much they don’t like us.

In Commander of the Exodus, you wrote about the ships that brought survivors to Israel in the late 1940s. You worked on a similar boat.

For eight or nine months in 1949. We used to bring 3,000 people on every ship. The ship had conditions for maybe 40 or 50. They were like sardines, they couldn’t move. People had to stand in line for six hours to go to the toilet on the deck. It was hell. Women were lying there in the depths of the ship in terrible condition. They liked to look beautiful. I used to bring mirrors to these girls. They were so happy because of what they went through before.

They used to tell me stories. They walked for days in the snow in Europe, finding some harbor and the ships would come and take them. I looked at these people, each one the greatest survivor of the war. How? A boy of 15, that at age 8 was taken, how did he survive?

Did you stay in touch with any of them?

No. I was just a young Israeli they met. We thought at the time, not me but most of my friends, thought of ourselves as great heroes of the 20th century because we won over the Arabs. We didn’t understand that to the survivors, we were nothing. They looked at us with a disdain. They saw us as arrogant and healthy, people who didn’t have to make a choice to live or not. The only reason they spoke with me was because I was very keen listening to them. I felt the pain, I associated myself with the pain of others. So they did talk to me, and the stories of many of them I used in the Exodus. I don’t think there was much interest in meeting me later. They had to live in tents, and to collect their lives and start all over, like my neighbor. He lost two children and a wife, and his wife now was also married and had two children.

The prose in The Last Jew is challenging—it conjures scenes that are sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes grotesque—but it’s also compelling. One phrase stuck in my head: “you’ve all got the fried smell of God in your pocket.” It made me think of “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”

I love that painting. This period of Bosch, of Gruenwald, was very influential in my life. I like them better than the Italian Renaissance. All my twenties I spent in America, I was a painter at the time. New York was much smaller, much more like Tel Aviv. Today, when I come to New York it’s like being in something so large that I don’t know how will I meet myself.

Why did you come to New York?

I was fighting in the Independence War, in the underground. I was 18. I was distressed from the war and had nightmares from being wounded. Someone on Mount Zion, near the Old City—later, I found out he was an Englishman in a kaffiyeh—shot at my legs and I fell backward. I was a few meters away, but he didn’t shoot again. And this man, he saw me and thought I was maybe good-looking and I was young and I was wearing a good uniform that we had taken from the British camp, a white uniform from the sailors, so this man realized that he tried to kill me and then he saved me. I had seen so much death. I had treatment for my leg at Mount Sinai Hospital. I was the first Israeli soldier they ever met.

What kind of paintings did you make?

I was influenced by German Expressionists who at the time people in America didn’t know much about, people like Nolde and Schmidt-Rottluff. I was continuing that tradition, they were modern paintings but not abstract. At the time, everyone was painting Abstract Expressionism. I fought against Abstract Expressionists. I sold a lot and had exhibitions. I was successful. I still have some matchboxes that I paint—thousands of matchboxes, I can send you pictures of them. You can hang it in your toilet.

The painter I loved the most is this one who paints only subways and cafes, what’s his name—

Edward Hopper?

Yes. They all used to laugh at Hopper. They used to say, “He’s terrible, nothing, sentimental.” I loved it. All my life I was involved in fights. And still am.

What about favorite writers?

I like the younger generation—Etgar Keret, Orly Castel-Bloom, Alex Epstein, and others—I love them. They write with humor and they write free and they’re not speaking in the name of the nation. The generation before, it’s not always meaningful to me because they write in the name of the nation. Some of them are very good; I might not always be in love with Amos Oz but he writes well, and Appelfeld writes good books. The people who really influenced me are Conrad and Jack London. I loved Moby Dick, Under the Volcano, and Dostoevsky, of course, Saroyan, and Faulkner. I loved Faulkner.

The Last Jew took a couple of decades to appear in the States. Why the lag?

It was finished a long time ago. But no publisher wanted to publish it because they felt, as you said, it’s a hard read. I didn’t look for audience, I didn’t look for love. I looked for telling whatever I felt should be told. I collected all these materials all my life. I was about 50 when the book was published, it was a whole life experience that I put in.

This week, in England, there’s a conference about your work. One session focuses on the connection between you and Charlie Parker.

I knew him well. We were close friends. He influenced me in the rhythm of my writing. I painted him. And I knew Billie Holiday. At the time, everyone lived in the Village: Charlie Parker, Marlon Brando, everyone. You couldn’t not know the people, you couldn’t not meet them. There were not that many people, there were not that many bars.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a book about my sickness. A year ago, they found cancer in my colon and they had to operate. They call it “friendly cancer.” They took it out and then the stitches broke. They had to operate again, and again the stitches broke. Very evil bacteria got into my system. I was in fact dead for two weeks. All my muscles were dead, my chest. I couldn’t move. My ability to breathe was stopped. They had to put gas into the lungs. It was a horrible experience but most of it I didn’t feel or know about. No one believed that I would come back. My wife held my hand, she talked to me. She didn’t sleep, she didn’t eat, and the doctors say that she saved me. They were talking about the only thing that could save me would be prayer. Somehow, I survived. Then it took another two weeks before I became aware of things. So, what I’m writing about is the two weeks after. Slowly I was back into the world, and I realized that everything I dreamed about and thought about didn’t happen. I lived in an illusion in the intensive-care area. I went to see it a couple of months ago and it’s not what I remember at all. I invented the whole place.

I’m trying to understand what it is to come back from death. I was as near to it as possible. Since then, I lost many of my dreads and fears, anxieties about dying, not dying, dangerous, not dangerous. I used to be driven by fears and anticipation, and now I’m not afraid anymore of anything.