|
|
 |
|
Listening to Silence
by Uri Cohen
Visiting the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, one is struck by the
silence. It is not real silence, after all the birds go about their
business and so do the cars, most likely it is the kind of silence
emulated by the knowledge that in this place, so and so years ago a
"thousand suns" burned the image of man into the stone. Perhaps the
skeletal remains of the iconic A-Bomb Dome in the distance create this
silence, perhaps it is the garden itself, an art distinctly Japanese of
containing the proximity of life to death as the essential nature of
being. It is in a sense much like visiting a concentration camp, you
lend your ear, but the silence is overwhelming and all that can be
heard is the sound and fury piled on by the living over the silence of
the dead. Hearing silence is always already slightly shameful, always
on cue, always at the right place at a time that if never quite wrong,
then never really useful.
Primo Levi did not write much about the atom bomb, surely the daughter of Rokhele in If Not Now When
is born on the day of Hirsoshima's bombing, and certainly there is
meaning to that. And yes he did discuss Oppenheimer with Tulio Regge,
but it doesn't seem to have troubled Levi as much as the "slow systemic
oppression" of the "conventional" murders in Vietnam and in Cambodia. A
short time before the end of his life, Levi wrote the following in the
introduction to The Drowned and the Saved:
"I
have almost exclusively confined myself to the National Socialist
Lagers because I had direct experience only of these; I also have had
copious indirect experience of them, through books read, stories
listened to, and encounters with the readers of my first two books.
Besides up to the moment of writing, and not withstanding the horror of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shame of the Gulags, the useless and bloody
Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide, the desparecidos of
Argentina, and the many atrocious and stupid wars we have seen since,
the Nazi concentration camp still remain a unicum, both in its extent
and its quality." (The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 21) Read
|
From Trieste to New York.
Annie Cohen Solal's Leo & His Circle
By Alessandro Cassin Chances
are even those outside the contemporary art world are familiar with Leo
Castelli's name. This slight man, cutting a dapper figure in
exquisitely tailored suits, a brilliant conversationalist in at least
five languages, has come to be considered the most influential
"gallerist" of the 20th Century. Yet for
most of the public, Leo (as he was called by all) remained largely a
person whose past was enveloped in an aura of mystery, with shadowy
areas deliberately left unknown. As
the art world's center of gravity shifted from Paris to New York,
Castelli, identified by many with the emergence of Pop Art and
Minimalism, became the first celebrity gallerist. Yet Castelli the man,
as is often the case with larger than life figures, ran the risk of
being lost behind a self-invented image. Annie Cohen Solal, in her recently translated Leo & His Circle (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), attempts to rectify this. On
one hand she credits Castelli with being the catalyst in a major
paradigm shift that turned American visual artists into cultural icons,
a completely new phenomenon at the time. On the other hand, she goes
beyond the smooth old world charm image he had done his best to
disseminate and uncovers a wealth of personal and genealogic
background. Her extensive research into both paternal and maternal
families, the Krauszes and the Castellis, traces a century old "genetic
predisposition" toward global commerce, which becomes the skeleton of
his psychological portrait. Leo & his Circle,
which reads more like cultural history than biography in a narrow
sense, is also an emblematic tale of the complex and unpredictable ways
in which the specific set of values, sensibility, and business acumen
of this Italian Jewish �migr� shaped American culture and post war
European perception and connection to it. Along the way, the book
becomes a case study in contrast between what is precarious and what
has true staying power. Names and nationalities can be lost overnight
but ideas and culture cannot be taken away. Read |
Fall Programs
The Annual Symposium on Primo Levi will be co-hosted by the Asia Society in collaboration with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Program overview
Purely Italian | Centro Primo Levi and the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan co-sponsor with New York University, the Center for Jewish History, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Italian Cultural Institute, and PEN America a series of programs taking a new look at Fascist racial policies. Read
"Conversations on Conversion" feature historians Kenneth Stow and John Davis.
Viterbi Family Program in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA
announces Fall lectures and symposia. Read
|
|
|
