Ticket to Trochenbrod
Word from: Jake
Nothing wrong with life imitating art - but what about fetishizing it? Bloomsday celebrations for Joyceancs, Tolkien's lingo circles etc - is that too much? Apparently after publication of "Everything is Illuminated", a whole big obsession about Trochenbrod came about:
this spring, a few dozen descendants of people from Trochenbrod, which was located in the northwest of what is now Ukraine, plan to meet in Washington for an unusual reunion: one at which many of the people attending have never met, although their grandparents may have been neighbors.
Read more about it here.
Perhaps fetishizing is too strong of a word here. I guess it is the issue of carrying the fictional structures into real life that really bothers me. When imaginary novelistic spaces are transferred into reality, they're inevitably bastardized, reduced - oftentimes, to commercial causes. Anybody's who's been to Prague has surely shelled out a few korunas for the "Kafka Trails". All that Beatnik writing about the Greenwich Village turned it into a highly commercialized, over-priced tourist attraction. Etc.
And the fact that these Trachenbrodians are mythologizing Foer - who's he? Mythologize the classics! (Do I sound like an old man?)
posted by Jake @ 9:08 AM
3 Comments:
At 12:39 PM,
David said…
I wish had saved this article I saw in an Israeli student newspaper that more or less said thing about Safran Foer...There is an actual center called Beit Tal for Jews from Trochenbrod and Lozisht in the suburbs of Tel Aviv...as for the issue of constructing a past the likes of Safran Foer, as much I dislike him and his works, I can understanding, having done the same thing for the Bronx with other writers...
At 10:45 AM,
Jake said…
I'll take your Bronx / Wash Heights writings over Foer's any day. Only seen sketches as yet - still waiting for the great Druce novel.
If I understand correctly, what you're trying to do is not so much to "construct" the past but to lay down a well-written imaginative description, based on historical findings, personal accounts, etc. If someone wants to use that as inspiration for personal diggin of the roots etc., kol hakavod.
Foer was brewing some old-country IB Singer / Bruno Schultz based imagery with pure kitch & half-assed philosophizing. It was entertaining, but it was fiction. To use that as personal mythology seems kinda crass.
Though maybe i'm spewin for no good reason. There's obviously no harm in this - a few dozen pple gettin together and feelin communal in the context inspired by the novel. Just struck me as kinda ridiculous, that's all.
At 4:34 AM,
David said…
Crass is indeed the word I would use when dealing with Foer's writing. Or smug. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he genuinely wanted to get in touch with his past. (And maybe write something on the side. I wrote a 90-something year old Rabbi who knew relatives of mine in the Bronx for the same reason-to hopefully meet and talk with him, but to give me a good character for an essay about an old Jewish neighborhood and how it changed. Instead he wrote back a rather cranky letter about how he was angry at my late great-uncle for various petty things that had occurred decades before. That put me in my place.) Anyhow, imagine Foer saying 'I'm tired of all this kitsch and nostalgia, let me write about my experience, and throw in my style of writing, because Jews love this shtetl stuff. Can't knock the hustle. I have issues with Foer's promotion and popularity and am curious why it struck such a chord. Though Foer represents more Jews than you or me-unaffiliated, kinda of sterile and awkward, with some notions of trendy European nostalgia (he named a charachter of his Oskar, for god's sake) purged of all the ethnic pungency.
For a fifth-generation American like me, Europe is seen through black and white and is either completely forgotten or venerated by the odd genealogist. (And the Russians I met looked at me very strangely when I told them where my great-greatparents lived, they were like, why do you care, you're American? Why do you has this chip on your shoulder and have to make fun of Ukraine in the Eurovision because of pogroms and Feievel Goes West?
I would love to meet other Galician gangstas, or people whose grandparents lived in the same corner of Inwood as my grandmother. The connections have to be there but no one makes them. Facebook has a group called Rep your Shtetl-you should see how it connects the African-American pop culture paradigm of 'representing an urban area' with places in Europe...
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