The Czechoslovakia Effect

How was I imprisoned? It’s a natural question—one that I am now asking myself—but since none of the crimes were committed by me, I don’t have the answer. I don’t believe I was framed. Yet it seems I am guilty of something—perhaps being caught off guard. I’m guilty of not seeing the prison walls being built around me. . .

The Hopkins Review, September 2023

Lamentations

This year, we experienced an unprecedented event at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, just a few days before Tisha B’Av. One of the most significant fast days of the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’Av—the ninth day of the month of Av—mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem as well as a series of other tragedies that have befallen the People of Israel. . . 

Dispatches Magazine, August 25, 2023

The Almost Unbearable
Burden of Belonging

Whether to stay or leave when one’s
country is at a frightening crossroads.

To Kill an Intellectual

On Anti-Intellectualism

I was more taken by the notion that, despite stating that the heart had no role in politics, Arendt could still express grief over the wrongdoing of her own people, including in the political realm—and its implications for life and death. . . 

The Fortnightly Review, February 23, 2023

When Antisemitism
Happens to Good People

The Jew-hate of ignorance, naivety, or even goodwill

One of the most powerful films I’ve seen about anti-Jewish hate during the Second World War isn’t a period piece depicting the ferocious brutality of Nazi death camps. It’s a picturesque French film called The Two of Us about a Jewish boy who is sent, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, to the countryside to live with the elderly parents of his parents’ French-Catholic friends. . .

The Smart Set, October 24, 2022

The Eternal Hope
of the Wandering Jew

Which came first: the wandering or the Jew?

Missing persons cases are seldom about finding someone. Too often, people who have disappeared are not missing at all. They are either hiding or long dead, possibly victims of murders waiting to be solved. Such cases, in short, are best to avoid. But when I heard that there had been recent sightings of the long-lost Wandering Jew, I knew I had to investigate. . .

The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2022

Abstract Writing

On the Visual and Literary Arts

I wanted to be a writer – and it became clear that, to do so, I would have to actively decide to pursue such a life. The only problem was that I had a degree in math and had worked as an accountant – none of which really prepared me for a master’s program in a literature department.

The Gravity of the Thing, Winter 2022

We Tell Stories
in Order to Die

Word to Death

I turned thirty-nine not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. . . 

The Smart Set, September 1, 2022

Once Upon
Another Fraught Time

The power of Yiddish children’s literature

Lacan's Mistake

The Desire of the Unconscious

The truth is that I never thought I’d get through an entire book by Jacques Lacan. But then the pandemic broke out, and I found myself at home with time to read The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. . .

The Smart Set, March 14, 2022

Remaking a Killing

On Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer
Who Inspired a Masterpiece

Long before I read Crime and Punishment, I walked the same streets Raskolnikov had walked before and after he committed murder. I went up the stairs to his attic room, stared at his door, and counted the 730 steps to the pawnbroker’s home. . .

The American Scholar, November 1, 2021

Melanie Klein Reconsidered

On the Creative Power of Lonliness

Writing in Jerusalem

On Living a
Jewish Literary Life

In December 2007, I visited Jerusalem for three weeks to collect material for Zeek: Russified, a volume of works by contemporary Russian-Jewish writers, poets, and artists. During that time, I was introduced to a wide circle of individuals. In a way, I was given access to the heart of one of the city’s cultural milieus. . .

Jerusalism, September 29, 2021

Historical Consciousness

And why it's important 
in pandemic times

Growing up, I’d always felt averse to politics and it took me years to realize that my difficulty had a lot to do with the role of Soviet history in my family’s history. The shift came while I was at the CalArts School of Critical Studies, studying writing and philosophy. . .

EastWest Literary Forum, September 2021

The Need to Talk

On Marguerite Duras’s
“The Darkroom”

I first encountered Marguerite Duras as a teenager, not on the page but on the screen. I stayed up late one night to watch on cable television the infamously graphic sex scenes in The Lover, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 film adaptation of her 1984 novel. . .

Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20, 2021

Night Train to Riga

Two stories of love,
heartbreak, and escape

Most people think of Ayn Rand as a philosopher and novelist of ideas—a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a theory she named Objectivism. But she was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish pharmacist who grew up in St. Petersburg and who might have stayed in Russia had she not been disappointed by love. . . .

The American Scholar, June 17, 2021

If Kirillov Had Drunk 
Coffee Instead of Tea

Kirillov, Hitler, the Capitol riot –
and the potential link between tea and suicide

I first encountered Fyodor Dostoevsky through Alexei Nilych Kirillov, one of his characters in Demons—not in the novel itself, but in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, much of which grapples with the philosophical reasoning behind Kirillov’s decision to shoot himself.

Liberal Currents, May 25, 2021

Russim

On Russian Culture and
Immigration in Israel

What follows is not an academic report, but rather a kind of story based on my journalist work covering a very specific niche of Russian-Israeli cultural producers, as well as my experience within a particular ex-Soviet Jewish community. . .

Jerusalism, May 23, 2021

A Search for Belonging

A Child Immigrates to America

Growing up in America with immigrant parents, you’re often on your own navigating your future, and so institutions like elementary school become more than just places of study. They become agents of social advancement. . .

ROOM: A sketchbook for Analytic Action, February 2020

The Real Reality Principle

Our actions, or inactions, have consequences
that we can never truly know

It started with a flood. In early December, my wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the faint sound of clacking on our window. We got out of bed to investigate and found ourselves in three inches of water—at which point I opened the window and saw my downstairs neighbor outside.

The American Scholar, February 27, 2021

Grilled Bananafish

On separating the sources of our pain
from the reality in which we live now

It happened to be that I reread Salinger's "Perfect Day for Bananafish" – which I remembered as being a story about a couple’s trip to a hotel on the beach at the end of which the man kills himself – on the very same day that my wife and I went to spend a weekend at a seaside hotel.

Speculative Nonfiction, December 15, 2020

The Brutality of Reality

On the Role of the Imagination
in Coping with Crisis


As covid ravaged the world outside our homes, I sat down at my desk and thought of Erich Auerbach writing his masterwork, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, while waiting out the Second World War in Istanbul. As the rest of the world tore itself apart, he sat and analyzed the Western canon.

Literary Matters, Fall 2020

Coronavirus in the
Shadow of the Holocaust

When we look at the pandemic raging around us,
do we really know what it is we’re witnessing?

A Nation Wrongs Itself

On American Pain and the Puritan Ethic

For weeks, America burned again. For some of us, who grew up in urban Los Angeles, the memory of fires down the block, or buildings on the way to school still smoking, remained exceedingly fresh. I remember that, during the L.A. Riots, people who’d lived through the Watts Riots recalling their earlier experiences and lamenting that America had not sufficiently changed. . .

Los Angeles Review of Books, August 19, 2020

"You Mean I’m Gonna
Stay this Color?!"

An Homage to My Black Mom


Black lives don’t just matter. For some of us, their influence is profound, shaping our understanding of ourselves as individuals -– and our place in American society. When I came to Los Angeles from Israel at the age of seven, reuniting with my dad after my parents separated, I also met my stepmom Pasha for the first time. . .

Forward, June 19, 2020

There's no Such Thing
as Nonfiction

A Literacy Narrative

There’s no such thing as nonfiction. This might seem like the title of yet another essay on the merits of essayistic writing as its own genre and not just a negation of another. Dinty W. Moore has explained how essayists have responded to their genre’s moniker. His bottom line is, understandably, realpolitikisch: we’re stuck with the term. But I’d like to take another tack. . .

Entropy Magazine, May 2020

A Dose of Forever Feelings

On Sex, Emotion, and Translating
What You Feel Into Reality

Being young sometimes feels like being an amateur translator. You have little life experience, but you read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies, and so you try to transfer what you see on the screen or the page to your experiences. You don’t know yet that translators don’t transfer, they reconvey. So the result is often clunky. . . 

Public Seminar, February 2020

On the Feeling of
Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

It’s a confusing year when you find the Anti-Defamation League calling out both Rashida Tlaib and Donald Trump for using the same anti-Semitic trope. In terms of political power, there is no parity between Tlaib and Trump, and while some in the press have defended Trump and his positions, others have defended Tlaib. But it’s the condemnations that stand out. . .

Public Seminar, October 2019

On Hate and Boycotts

How We Choose What We Believe

The first day I got to Grant High School, after being bussed out of Echo Park into the Valley, I met a girl named Meital. I was almost fourteen and she was the first Israeli I’d met since leaving the neighborhood of Jaffa D at the age of nine. She invited me to sit with her friends on the quad. I said I’d rather not. She asked why. . .

Public Seminar, September 2019

On Race and Repair

A Güero Reads Plato in Jerusalem

I moved to Los Angeles at the age of eight and a half and went into fourth grade, where I was asked to check off my ethnicity. I read the choices: Caucasian / Anglo-Saxon, African-American, Hispanic, Asian / Pacific-Islander. I had no idea what any of those meant, so I went over to the world map and looked for Israel, the country where I was born. . .

Public Seminar, August 2019

A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein,
and the Voices of Intuition

One of the first things I did after first buying Samuel Beckett’s so-called Trilogy—which consists of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953)—was to take a box cutter and slice the spine into three separate novels. I read the first two in New York in 2007, where I lived at the time, and brought the last part with me to Jerusalem in 2008. . . 

Public Seminar, June 2019

Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

On Rethinking Our Thoughts

As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival—it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a case for what he called the voices of silence. . .

Public Seminar, April 2019

Appelfeld’s Funeral

A Triptych

Watching the men of the Burial Society drop the compact body of Aharon Appelfeld into its grave just weeks ago, I kept thinking of the satisfaction that was denied to all the murderers who had wanted to kill this man while he was still a child. . .

Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2019

Faith in Place

Isaac Bashevis Singer in Israel

Isaac Bashevis Singer—the famed Yiddish writer and 1978 laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature—made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955. His relationship to Israel was complicated to say the least. He had been born into a strictly religious family of rabbis and rebetzins in Poland, for whom the land of Israel was the holiest of religious symbols. . .

Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2018

How We Review Translations

In Defense of an Endless Task

It is often said that the work of a translator is thankless. What is less often recalled is that the work is endless. The written word, unlike the printed one, is never finished, at no point complete. When we look at the manuscripts of literary masters, we see the degree to which they made changes until the very last moment. . .

Public Seminar, April 2018

Was Isaac Bashevis Singer Religious?

At a time of wholesale equivocation across social fronts—political, moral, religious—it is difficult to find a voice that is clear, knowledgeable, authentic, or complex. The chorus of shouts resounding from all corners of the cultural spectrum makes it hard to ground our convictions in solid perspectives not undermined by the severity of discourse rising around us. . .

Public Seminar, July 2017

Translation

The Problem of Literature and Art

In the early throes of composing The Plague—as the Second World War cut him off from his wife in Algeria and exiled him in France—Albert Camus jotted down in his notebook that "the problem of art is a problem of translation." In this way he suggested that literary composition, like translation, involves the transformation of source material into target material. . . 

Asymptote, July 2014

Translating Silence

We often hear and speak of all that is lost in translation — the turns of phrase that can't be replicated, literal meanings in one language that have no relevance in another, words that migrate from one language to another and on the way mutate or change their meaning. . .

Cardinal Points, May 2011

Bruno Schulz’s
The Street of Crocodiles

What Happens in the Seasons
the Calendar Omits?

Bruno Schulz has sustained a premier yet often unrecognized position in the mythology of twentieth-century literature, famously inspiring authors and artists from Philip Roth to the Brothers Quay despite the fact that, since his mainstream English introduction in 1977, only his first publication has been consistently available. . .

The Believer, May 2008

The Forgotten Warhol

Throwing People's Words 
Back at Them

When the exhibit "Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1980, critics asked where Warhol's sudden interest in Jews had come from, with some even suggesting that this "random" choice of subject was "exploitative". . .

Haaretz, March 2008

 
 

© Copyright David Stromberg