Alexandra Bowie – Brooklyn Bugle

Brooklyn Bugle Book Review: “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanathi

March 18, 2016

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths . . .
I would spread the cloths under your feet

Paul Kalanathi, the son and nephew of doctors, was a double major in English lit and human biology at Stanford. When, at the age of 10, his family picked up and moved from leafy Westchester County, New York, to Arizona, his mother, worried about the local schools, acquired a college preparatory reading list and pushed her sons to read. It worked; Kalanathi says it “instilled in me a deep love of, and care for, language.” As a teenager he attempted to understand what makes human life meaningful in the face of inevitable death, searching both literature and his undergraduate neuroscience course material and experiences. Though not a materialist, he gave a great deal of thought to the difference and relationship between brain and mind, and what each contributes to the development of interpersonal relationships.

He continued to study, earning a master’s in English Lit and kept searching for a way to bring biology, morality, literature and philosophy together in his life’s work. Along the way he developed a taste for metaphysical verse. Kalanathi found the answer right in front of him, in medicine, and after medical school trained in neurosurgery and neuroscience. Kalanathi discovered he had Stage IV lung cancer just as he was finishing his training and planning the next stages of his life: a teaching position, children — he had married a fellow doctor at the end of medical school — and, eventually, time to write. Here’s Kalanathi’s description of his first transition, one of many remaining in his too-short life:

I received the plastic arm bracelet all patients wear, put on the familiar light blue hospital gown, walked past the nurses I knew by name, and was checked into a room . . .
A young nurse, one I hadn’t met, poked her head in.
“The doctor will be in soon.”
And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams

After an initial round of treatment Kalanathi was able to keep working for many months, then eventually the cancer became too much. He read, and pondered, and understood that he would not become the doctor he had hoped to be. Kalanathi went deeper than that, contemplating the possibility that the doctor he had hoped to be could never exist.

As a doctor, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced–and it was exacctly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? . . . I’d had no idea how hard it would be . . . I’d always imagine the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating

It’s as if, understanding that his life would not be long enough, Kalanathi moved through the compromises and acceptance of middle age while still in his thirties. Throughout, the writing is tender, precise, and beautiful. Each reader of this lyrical and deeply moving book, and I hope there are many, will have their own response to the questions Kalanathi faced.

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Mine was to return to Yeats. Though Kalanathi’s life was poor in years, the life he describes was rich in everything else: the love of his family, including his wife, Lucy, who brought his manuscript to publication, a questing, active mind, and the birth of a daughter, to whom the book is dedicated.

by Alexandra Bowie

Follow me on Twitter @abowie917. Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.

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Events, News

Transit Museum hosts talk on Climate Change and Transportation Infrastructure

March 15, 2016

Hurricane Sandy forced a shutdown of the New York City transit system in October 2012, and a warming climate means that superstorms are likely to recur. On Tuesday, March 22d at 6:30 pm the NY Transit Museum will host Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist and Columbia professor who will talk about climate change, extreme weather, and its effects on transportation infrastructure.

Tickets, ($10/free for museum members) are available here.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Review: “ Florence Gordon” by Brian Morton

March 11, 2016

Women of a certain age tend to become invisible, but not Florence Gordon, a writer and the title character of Brian Morton’s alternately hilarious and moving novel. “If you’re an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill,” is almost the first thought Flo Go expresses. Whip-smart and no-nonsense, Florence Gordon is long divorced, and likes it that way. She isn’t even that happy that her only child, Daniel, his wife, Janine, and their daughter, Emily, are living near her on the Upper West Side (because where else would she live?) while Janine completes a fellowship at Columbia University.

Of course there are other reasons for a prolonged stay in New York. Janine has always idealized Florence as a feminist thinker, and had read some of her work before she met and became involved with Daniel. She’d like a closer relationship. So would Emily, who is deciding whether and where to go back to college, and is under pressure to reunite with an old boyfriend, known to her parents as “Broccoli Boy.” Janine’s and Daniel’s relationship might be on the rocks. Florence’s ex-husband Saul needs a job. There’s love, and need, and they are inextricably related.

Flo Go is not shrill, but she is a little cranky and is definitely no-nonsense, and wishes the others would just get on with their lives so she can work. She’s writing a memoir of her early days in the second wave feminist movement. Like any writer, she has her doubts, happily resolved in this case when her long-time editor tells her how much he loves her pages. But he couples that with the news that he must leave his job to treat his cancer which has reappeared. It’s the first of many losses, ones that will be familiar to readers struggling to cope with the needs of aging parents.

When Flo Go receives a critical valentine from Martha Nussbaum she is briefly much in demand. She needs a helper, and Emily becomes her research assistant. They argue about Emily’s need to stay in contact with her smartphone at all times, and the relationship gives Emily a glimpse of who her grandmother is, and who she herself might become. Emily, reading some of her grandmother’s early work, thinks that “none of it reminded her of her grandmother at all.” That thought in turn makes Emily think about whether writers, and people, are products of their times. She concludes that Doris Lessing, or at least “The Golden Notebook,” is dated, but when she repeats the observation to Florence, her grandmother’s response is a terse “Read it again.”

This family shares a sense of humor and a certain ironic detachment from their feelings: they just don’t want to talk about it. You know these people. You are probably related to them. Morton tells his stories in multiple very short chapters, shifting effortlessly among points of view while making each character distinctive. This technique keeps the novel moving at a fairly fast clip, while still leaving his characters time to grow. By the time the novel is done, Emily, and Florence, have a new understanding of needs, their own and each other’s, and the limits of love and the ability to help. It’s a deeply satisfying and fully credible resolution to this examination of modern life.

by Alexandra Bowie

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

This post was updated March 29, 2015.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World” by Tim Marshall

March 4, 2016

Our communications and travel technological advances of the last half century or so have made the world feel very small and suggest that rivers, mountains, and even oceans are no longer barriers. That may be true of travel, at least for Americans or Europeans (OK, Australians too) on vacation, but recent news stories describing the struggles of Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe, not to mention the massive logistical efforts involved in US interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, show that’s simply not the case. There’s a reason the prefix “geo-” often appears before the adjective “political.” Tim Marshall’s persuasive thesis in his geopolitical survey is that geography is destiny, certainly when it comes to nations.

If we are going to have nations, then they are going to have limits, and Marshall points out that the first and most important thing maps show us is borders. Oceans and mountains make good ones, deserts also. The United States, for example, protected on the east and west by vast oceans, and by a desert to the south, is very difficult to invade. Similarly, India and China, while both vast, and interested in each other, are separated by the Himalayas and likely will go on as prickly neighbors for quite a while. Plains, on the other hand, unless they’re protected by oceans or mountains, function more as an invitation. Russia has lots of plains, most of them on the eastern steppes. In the Far East, Marshall says, geography – mountains (the Urals) and vast distances – protect Russia. But Russia, Marshall reminds us, has been invaded from the west at least five times in the past 500 years.

That’s because of another plain, the North European Plain, “stretching from France to the Urals” but narrowing to a 300-mile wide wedge in Poland, from the Baltic in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. From Russia’s perspective, Marshall says,

this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing toward Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia’s borders it is more than two thousand miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941.

The historical perspective is interesting, but it’s what Marshall says about the future that makes the book so compelling. To return to the Russian example, Marshall says that despite its vast landmass, what Russia lacks – he calls it Russia’s Achilles heel – is a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans. The countries of the former USSR or that were behind the Iron Curtain fall into three camps: pro-Russia, neutral, and pro-Western. The latter group are, unsurprisingly the European countries, like Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic nations. All are in NATO, and most are members of the European Union. The neutrals are in the middle, and events of the past couple of years in Ukraine now begin to make more sense: Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula, is Russia’s only warm-water port. No wonder Putin wants it.

Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries, and then became part of Ukraine at a time when the breakup of the Soviet Union was not anticipated. But times have changed and, Marshall says,

Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of rule A, lesson one, in “Diplomacy for Beginners”: When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence.
A generous view is that the United State and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it.

Marshall suggests that, not for the first time, Western diplomats had forgotten to take account of the fact that “geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century . . .” In an inimitable and breezy style that is easy to read but masks a great deal of thought, he proceeds to outline other areas of conflict and potential conflict around the world, in places as diverse as Africa, the Middle East, the two Koreas, and the Arctic.

The Arctic is bordered by five countries, with several more close by. The region is heating up, Marshall points out, in more ways than environmental: opening the frozen sea lanes will change world shipping routes, there may be new reserves of oil and gas, and then there are the environmental consequences to the rest of the world. It’s reminiscent of the European scramble for power in Central Asia, the subject of the Great Game, in what is now India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Russians are paying attention to the Arctic, Marshall says, in ways that the US is not: the Russians are building icebreakers, and there are other disputes, about oil rights, and fishing rights, and unratified agreements. Happily, he says, there’s a possibility of doing things differently this time, because of technology, and the fact that rules, a formula, and a forum for decision-making exist. Perhaps, this time, Marshall says, we’ll “get the Great Game right for the benefit of all.” We can only hope.

There are also rivers, and their contribution. Navigable ones, like Europe’s many rivers, and the Mississippi are crucial for the development of trade. Lack of navigable rivers is one reason, Marshall says, that Africa has been slower to develop than Europe, the United States, and Asia. (If you think there were other reasons, Marshall agrees: the first book he cites in his bibliography is Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”) Rivers can serve as borders too and in fact, one does, more or less, between the two Koreas, but, Marshall says, “this was never a natural barrier between two entities, just a river within a unified geographical space all too frequently entered by foreigners.

“Prisoners of Geography” is a fascinating look at the role geography continues to play in the defense and trade calculus of modern nations. If it’s occasionally reductive, that’s because Marshall’s scope is the entire globe (even isolated and mineral-rich Australia gets a few mentions). Read this book for its useful discussion of a dimension often disregarded in modern reporting.

by Alexandra Bowie

Follow me on Twitter @abowie917. Email me at asbowie@gmail.com if you have a book you want me to know about.

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Events, News

Film “2e: Twice Exceptional” at the Transit Museum

March 1, 2016

The NY Transit Museum will be part of the 8th NY Disabilities Film Festival with a screening of “2e: Twice Exceptional,” a documentary about a group of high school students who are both gifted and have learning disabilities or differences.

The screening will take place Tuesday, March 15 at 6:30 pm. Tickets ($10, free for museum members) available here.

The Transit Museum is located at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. For information on wheelchair access, American Sign Language interpreters, Assisted Listening Devices, or other accessibility matters, please contact Meredith Gregory at 718-694-1823 or meredith.gregory@nyct.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone” by Scott Shane

February 19, 2016

When Barack Obama took office as President of the United States in January 2009, the US was still heavily engaged in ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His first year in office was marked by new terrorist attacks, including those of Nadal Hisan at Fort Hood, Texas (13 killed and many more injured), the shootings at Little Rock (one killed) and plots to blow up synagogues, federal buildings, and attack the New York City subways. Then at Christmas that year came the underwear bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane near Detroit. But Obama entered office with the substantial hope of limiting the use of US troops while continuing to strike at Al Qaeda and other terrorists overseas: in his view the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, better known as drones, might provide a better approach. The American-born cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki was behind the underwear bomber’s attack, and his story provides the New York Times reporter Scott Shane with the framework for his thoughtful examination of the evolution of US policy.

Anwar Al-Awlaki was the son of a Yemeni studying in the US. His father, Nasser, later went on to high government positions in Yemen, and hoped for a similar career for his sons. But only Anwar’s brother, Ammar, has followed their father’s path. Anwar went another route, becoming more religious, and studying the Koran and Muslim scriptures. He was somewhat entrepreneurial, recording English-language sermons and translations of Islamic stories. He married and became an iman, first at a mosque in San Diego and later in Washington, DC. That’s where he was on 9/11, and Anwar Al-Awlaki was a media presence in the days immediately after, serving as what he called a bridge between Muslims and Americans, one who could show that not all Muslims advocated violence.

But not all was it seemed. Al-Awlaki had a habit of visiting prostitutes, and the FBI had proof. Further, several of the 9/11 hijackers had been in one of his mosques or the other. Shane is careful to show that it’s not clear whether they attended services among throngs or had closer contact with Al-Awlaki. What Shane makes crystal clear is that Al-Awlaki continued to move toward violence. He left the US for Yemen, most likely because of the threat of exposure or even prosecution, and spent time in London before returning to Yemen for good. His sermons, which continued in English, moved from cassette to video to YouTube to his own website, and were re-posted on social media throughout the world. They appealed to a wide range of disaffected young men and a few young women.

At the same time, the Obama administration was undertaking its own somewhat more cautious journey, attempting to repair relations with the Muslim world and preparing to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The increasing use of drones was only one part of that policy, and was immensely complicated. Drones may be better able to pinpoint a particular small target like a car than bombs launched from airplanes, but the operator has to be pretty sure of the target. Drones need less time to reach the target, but need to be launched from somewhere fairly nearby. Then there are the legal questions: can the US use deadly weapons on another country’s soil with its government’s permission? Without? What if the target is a US citizen, as Al-Awlaki was? There are moral questions, too, and political ones. Shane raises and addresses these issues in careful prose, with details that support but don’t overwhelm. Here is Shane’s description of the impact of drone strikes on operators which was,

paradoxically, far greater than on those who flew traditional fighters and bombers . . . Modern warfare had largely gotten away from the hand-to-hand combat of earlier epochs, and killing at a distance was the norm . . . the team of drone operators not only saw the target, they lingered over it. [Shane quotes an essay from a former operator, who says] ‘when you recommend that target folder for approval, you do so with the explicit knowledge that you are recommending the death of not just an enemy of our nation, but a person.’

(An interesting fictional exploration of that topic is “I Saw a Man” by Owen Sheers, which follows three families devastated by the intended and collateral damage of a drone strike. If you’ve read it, let us know in the comments what you think.)

Ultimately, Al-Awlaki climbed to the top of the administration’s kill list and, after a near-miss, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, his son, a 16-year-old who had gone in search of the father he hadn’t seen in several years, was killed in a subsequent strike targeting members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The best explanation Shane has unearthed was that the killing was accidental, that the US ‘didn’t know he was there.’

It was a damning excuse. In two weeks, the United States had killed three Americans in Yemen. By its own account, only one of the killings had been intentional. It undercut claims that the [drones] . . . allowed drone operators to examine and identify the faces of those on the ground. They were killing people whose identity they didn’t know, often on the basis of sketchy intelligence, hunches, and guesswork.

Shane concludes that such killings generated hostility in Yemen and sympathy for Al Qaeda, and hastened and supported ISIS recruiting. He argues quite persuasively that by keeping the development of the drone program secret, instead of ensuring a public debate about US policies of how and when we kill citizens who are foreign combatants, we are both endangered and lessened. The drone program has kept the US use of killing almost an abstraction, which Shane points out is in contrast to Osama bin Laden death – a difficult, dangerous operation that provided proof of death. Our government kills in our name, as part of its response to terror. We need to be aware of this policy, to discuss it, and to accept its implications. Scott Shane’s book is an important contribution to the debate.

by Alexandra Bowie

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Arcadia” a Novel by Iain Pears

February 12, 2016

by Alexandra Bowie

Iain Pears’ fascinating and compelling new novel “Arcadia” opens in a landscape, “bathed in sunshine, sweet-smelling from the gentle shower that fell overnight then stopped as dawn broke.” It’s a lovely picture of a classical pastoral setting with perfect weather. From here, Pears takes us into three different places. There’s Anterwold, the idyl of the opening scene where farmers work in pleasant fields and the highest office one can hope for is Storyteller. Second is Oxford in 1960, and third is a sealed environment on the island of Mull, sometime in a distant dystopian future, where characters look out on pictures, fields with cows, which eventually changes to one of snow-topped mountains, “also imaginary as no snow had fallen anywhere in the world for at least a decade.” Typical of Pears, he doesn’t reveal the temporal relationship of these three worlds.

Oxford is home to Henry Lytten, an Oxford don who specializes in Sydney and Shakespeare, and wants to create as lively a fictional world as Tolkien or Lewis had done, only without dragons. But he hasn’t written it yet, just set out ideas in notebooks, with character sketches, landscapes, and the society’s precepts. Lytten meets with his friends in the pub in what is essentially a writing group, one of whose members, Persimmon, is writing a story about a dystopian future. Lytten may be a don but is not donnish, and his wartime work for a shadowy government intelligence agency has continued into the 1950s and requires some European travel. It’s through his travels to France that he’s met Angela Meerson.

As far as Lytten knows, his friend Angela is an eccentric artist who happens to speak a range of obscure and difficult languages. But Angela describes herself as a “psychomathematician whose speciality was time; events were mere epiphenomena which interested [her] not at all.” Lytten’s trips are also the reason he’s befriended Rosie Wilson, a 15-year-old who loves the mysteries of Agatha Christie, whose lively, curious mind annoys her parents and endears her to Lytten. Rosie looks after Lytten’s unpleasant cat while he’s away, and that leads her to Angela and a machine that she’s left in Lytten’s basement.

The machine gives Rosie, Lytten, and Angela access to Anterwold. Does Anterwold exist? When and where is it? Is Anterwold a parallel universe or another world, and what can possibly link it to dystopian Mull? If, as one character argues, in some circumstances the past must rearrange itself, though “it appeared exceptionally difficult to alter the past except through massive intervention” how does that happen? These are some of the central mysteries at the heart of this extraordinary novel. Like any good mystery, “Arcadia” also includes MacGuffins and red herrings. And Henry Lytten, Angela Meerson and Rosie Wilson aren’t the only main characters in this complex novel: there’s Henary, a Storyteller in Anterwold, and Jay, who goes on a quest, Hanslip, who runs the Mull institution, and Jack More, a policeman who goes in search of Angela when she disappears.

Three parallel worlds, mysteries, a quest and considerably more make up “Arcadia,” whose complexities also include consideration of stories and origin myths, creation and destruction. There’s some nice character doubling – the Henry/Henary pair is just one example – and it’s a measure of Pears’ success in this novel that it’s quite easy to believe that Rosie can exist in two places at once. It’s so intricately knitted together that Pears has developed an app to accompany the book. (Here’s an article in which Pears explains his reasoning.) The app is well worth buying ($3.99 via Apple) as it includes a map (that’s a screenshot)

and skeins showing where each of the ten (!) main characters is. It’s also an act of trust in the reader, as each node in the map takes the reader to the relevant text, and readers can read in the app in any order they choose. This is both distracting and enriching, as re-reading certain sections after learning what brought a second or third character to that particular point makes the resonances considerably deeper.

“Arcadia” is a substantial achievement by a novelist very much in control of his considerable powers. It’s well thought-through, vivid, and one of the best novels to come this way in a very long time. Don’t be put off by the complexity and do take advantage the app, because this engrossing and deeply satisfying novel will repay the reader many times over.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Rally for Safer Streets February 13

February 11, 2016

Transportation Alternatives will hold a rally and press conference on Saturday, February 13 at 11 AM to call attention to one of the most dangerous intersections in Brooklyn: Times Plaza in front of the Barclay Center, where Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth Avenues meet. DOT has recently announced plans to make it more pedestrian-friendly, and that’s where the rally will be. #safetyfirst

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern” by Francine Prose

February 5, 2016

Peggy Guggenheim was a niece of Solomon Guggenheim (whose art collection is housed in the eponymous museum) and a devoted and knowledgeable collector of 20th century European and American art in her own right. Over the course of her life she ran a bookstore, opened and operated art galleries in New York and London, and introduced Americans to surrealist and abstract artists. The works she acquired can still be seen at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Guggenheim was born in 1898, one of three daughters of Benjamin Guggenheim and his wife Florette. Benjamin Guggenheim died on the Titanic, too early to amass a sizable fortune like his siblings. Peggy and her sisters were poorly educated, largely at home, and the lives of all three were chaotic. One sister died in childbirth. The other may have killed one or both of her children. Peggy herself was married twice, first to the writer and painter Laurence Vail, with whom she had two children, and later to Max Ernst. She had many lovers, Samuel Beckett among them. Her children were not always the first thing on her mind. She was a thinly veiled character in various works of fiction, and makes appearances in the biographies and autobiographies of many 20th century artists and writers. It makes for a fascinating life story, and Francine Prose has a good time telling it in this volume, part of Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series.

Prose organizes the story less chronologically than thematically, though the themes — men, husbands, sex, art — overlap and commingle. Here’s one example: In the fall of 1939 Peggy (as Prose refers to her subject throughout) left London for France and delivered Peggy’s son Sindbad to his father and stepmother, the latter of whose “hatred for Peggy appeared to be outliving her passions for Peggy’s former husband.” Despite the looming war and Hitler’s animosity to Jews Laurence Vail persuaded Peggy to stay in France, rather than returning with their children to London. She went to Paris, and spent her time buying art, leaving just three days before the Germans arrived. Instead of going south, she drove east, to her former husband and their children on the Swiss border. She had an affair with a hairdresser — “her efforts to keep her romance a secret necessitated spending a great deal of time in the salon, where she had her hair dyed a different color every few weeks. . .” By the end of the summer of 1940 Peggy moved on to Grenoble, where she became involved with – and funded – the efforts of the journalist Varian Fry to help Jewish artists, including Andre Breton, escape from Europe. It was during this period that she became involved with Max Ernst.

Throughout, the writing is engaging, and Prose keeps her many strands clear yet woven together (my only quibble is with the enormous number of typos the text contains). Peggy’s escape from Europe was not easy, involving as it did threatening visits from the police, crossing borders (France to Spain, Spain to Portugal) and seven people (Laurence Vail, and his wife, Peggy and Max Ernst, Vail’s and Peggy’s two teenaged children, and Ernst’s former lover). The group, Prose writes, reunited in Lisbon, where Kay Boyle (Laurence’s wife)

checked into a hospital, claiming a sinus infection in order to be spared the theatrics generated by her soon-to-be ex-husband, his ex-wife, the ex-wife’s lover, and Leonora, the lover of the ex-wife’s lover, who had inconveniently–and dramatically–re-entered their lives.

Peggy shouldn’t be likable, but she is; outside of her personal life she was a generous and interested patron, spontaneous and genuine. Her larger-than-life life story was shaped by denial and by money. The latter allowed her to do what she liked; the former allowed her to forget the consequences and repeat mistakes. She left one of the best collections of mid-century art, and she left it as a gift to the city of Venice where, Prose tells us, her memory is celebrated. Prose’s life of Peggy Guggenheim is entertaining while not overlooking the tragedy and the pain, and should be required reading for anyone interested in feminism or the art of the 20th century.

Have a favorite moment? Share it in the comments. Email me at asbowie@gmail.com if you have a book you want me to know about. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “All Who Go Do Not Return” by Shulem Deen

January 29, 2016

The Hasidic rabbis who decide what behavior is acceptable for their followers use the Hebrew acronym BYKL – in the Bible a warning to those who visit women of loose morals – to describe heretical ideas. In English translation, it is the source of the title Shulem Deen has given to his fascinating and deeply moving memoir.

Deen was brought up in a Hasidic household; his parents, former hippies, were Hasidic by choice. They were Satmars, followers of one dynasty; when it came time for Deen to choose a yeshiva he entered one run by Skvers, viewing it as a less demanding alternative. Deen followed the rabbis’ precepts, studied the Torah and the Talmud, and lived a life insulated from many modern influences. When the time came – he was almost 19 – Deen married, and soon he and his wife Gitty had five children, a family small only by Hasidic standards.

But at some point Deen began to ask questions, and questions were discouraged. Deen himself remarks that there was “no moment, no solid line across time to which I could point and say: ‘That’s when I became a non-believer.’” Perhaps it was when he found that he couldn’t support a family of seven without a job, and that when he found a job he was paid in scrip, under the table, so he and his wife could continue receiving food stamps. Or perhaps it was earlier, when a teacher found him reading an English book. It was a life of Rabbi Akiva, one of the great sages, but Deen knew, or intuited, that the teacher who scolded him couldn’t read English. After all, as the Chasam Sofer had said, “All that is new is forbidden by the Torah.”

Deen continued seeking, and reading, going his way first to the local public library, where he found, in the children’s section, the World Book encyclopedia.

For the next three hours, I sat on a tiny orange chair at a low green-and-yellow table as the pile of volumes grew beside me. Alongside a little boy paging furiously through The Berenstain Bears, I read about Archimedes and Einstein, about Elvis Presley and Egyptian hieroglyphics, about electromagnetism and the history of the printing press and the production of avocados in central Mexico. . . the experience at the time was intoxicating. Suddenly, it seemed as if all my curiosity about the world could be satisfied in that little children’s section of the library.

Later, he bought a computer and installed the AOL disk that came with it. Logging on to the Internet, he found his way to chat rooms where he met other, similar seekers, and kept asking questions. He listened to the (forbidden) radio, and finally added the most intrusive instrument of all, a television.

But it was books and the knowledge he found in them that proved most troubling to Deen. He learned that the “truths” he had been taught, the teachings of the rabbis, were “dubious,” the sages of the Talmud “demonstrably wrong in their understanding of the natural world.” Deen writes:

Nothing, however, had a more shattering impact on my faith than the realization that, stripped of religious exegesis, our primary religious text, the Hebrew Bible, had the markings of human rather than divine authorship; it was beautiful, intricate, layered in poetry and metaphor and heart-stopping drama, but human nonetheless.

Eventually, he was expelled from the community as a heretic.

Deen’s journey out was a lonely one; his wife, Gitty could not or would not join him, though she stuck with him through the first expulsion, from the Skverer community of New Square to the faintly more open community of Monsey. Deen and his wife divorced, amicably, with an agreement that he would share custody of the children without disrupting their religious lives. He tried, with some failures, enough for the community to intervene. Relations turned hostile, and Deen’s children were discouraged from contact. (Deen begins his afterward acknowledging that he’s told his version of his family’s story and his ex-wife’s story is likely to be as compelling, and perhaps very different. It’s a generous sentiment.) After a year of floundering Deen found a community with other OTD (off the Derekh) men and women, through the group Footsteps.

“All Who Go Do Not Return” is a beautifully written memoir of a spiritual journey out of a faith and into a full and humanistic understanding of the world, insightful and worth reading for anyone interested in community or spirituality, as well as readers interested in Judaism or the curious continuing existence of 18th century religious traditions.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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