The Shtetl Myth Word from: Jake

Mordy mentioned Jewsrock.org. I saw it the other day, having googled for "Lou+Reed+Jewish." It's kitschy and tasteless but ultimately, gratifying. Look: the myth of the shtetl is making its rounds into pop-culture. And, like it or not, we here are part of that process. (Except for maybe Shlomo, whose conceptually non-iconographic gorilla doesn't fit into the pop-doors and has to hang on the avant-garde stoop.) This is not a bad time / place to be living in.

It ain't Berlin of 1930's, where Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson has escaped to as a refugee from Ukraine. There was such a thing as a "Jewish refugee" in Berlin around then. Bergelson writes in a language that's dressed like a character out of Vishniac's Vanished World, but in the inside pocket, carries volumes of Proust and Kafka. Shaken by the Revolution, pogroms, he's reflecting on it all - skeptically, but with a bit of hope that he finally landed in a safe place. Germany, 1930's. Given the context, his collection "Shadows of Berlin" is heart-wrenching from the outset, but there's so much more - clash of modernism and folk, very tight writing, and dark, dark humor. It came out last month from the legendary Beatnik publishing house City Lights. Nextbook has got a review, wonderfully informative but long-winded, and it doesn't get to the literary guts of the work. For that matter, neither does my review which is coming out in Jewish Book World one of these days. Somebody should do Bergelson justice.

P.S. I went to the Wailers concert last night. Bob Marley's old band. Absolutely cosmic. Rastas were kicking it by the river, a few blocks away from the "downtown Babylon" - Wall Street, etc. Another great reggae act, Israel Vibration will be playing at BBKings in two weeks.