The Pauline Prophecy: Jewish-Christian Relations in Bernard Malamud’s A NEW LIFE

-- By Tom Phillips

Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020

A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.

Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.

In short, the Sixties.

The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                    
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting.

Between the Ice Sheets: June in January

Laura Peterson rehearses "Interglacial" 

-- By Tom Phillips

"Interglacial" refers to the period between geological Ice Ages -- the current period, about eleven thousand years old, the age when humankind established its dominance over the earth. That age may well be extended by the effects of humankind and its technology, pumping an ever-increasing volume of carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and raising temperatures, melting ice.  

It was 69 degrees on  January 11 in New York --  a record high -- when huge icebergs cracked on Canal Street in New York before an small audience in a storefront.  The ice was simulated but the sights and sounds were familiar.  It was just like the videos from Greenland and Antarctica of ice sheets "calving"-- sending  mammoth chunks of melting ice roaring and plunging into the sea.  

Laura Peterson's choreography is always an interaction with space and materials -- wood, grass, plastic, etc. -- the stuff that makes up our world.  About two years ago she started experimenting with paper, and at some point it became clear that its properties have much in common with ice.  It's smooth and slippery, it lies flat, it crackles, under pressure it stands up and forms shapes, and under enough pressure it breaks up in unpredictable ways.  

"Interglacial" was conceived to bring home the global meltdown of ice. Peterson and her dancers performed the work-in-progress today, each hour from noon to eight, free for anyone curious enough to drop in to the storefront at 323 Canal.  

Inside, huge sheets and balls of white paper played the part of the world's natural ice, and three dancers played the role of global warming.  They smoothed out the paper and used it as a dancing surface -- displaying the cool mechanics of ballet steps, civilization at its most elegant and highly-developed. Then these lovely humans proceeded to sabotage the scenery, crawling under the paper floor, standing it up into crazy conical shapes, then sending it rolling and tumbling down in broken heaps. The sound track roared and crackled, with the keening of whales in the deep background.  

The humans -- advanced as they are -- seemed utterly unconcerned with the destruction they had wreaked.  Meanwhile on the street, the June-in-January revelers paraded in shorts and tank tops, snacked on hamburgers and ice cream, drank water from innumerable plastic bottles, and filled the trash cans to overflowing.

"Interglacial" isn't done. Watch for it near you.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips