Submissions Call... Finally! Word from: Sarah

Hey There,

Now that the 7th annual journal is out and available, we are taking steps to organize the next journal publication, due out at the beginning of 2009.

I (Sarah Rindner) will be following in Dena's footsteps as Editor in Chief for the upcoming issue. As always, by maintaining a commitment to both quality writing and authentic Jewish experience (up for serious debate, we will admit), Mima'amakim strives to raise the bar of the Jewish art enterprise as a whole. We are looking for poetry, short fiction, visual art, and some finely wrought book reviews to fill the next journal - and we encourage you all to submit, and pass the word on to your creatively inclined friends. Questions, concerns, and of course, submissions, should be sent to Makim08@gmail.com by no later than June 15th, 2008. Looking forward to seeing your work!

A Few Photos From the Cornelia Gig Word from: Jake

These are courtesy of JJ Gross:

Mima'amakim #7 and the Publication Party!! Word from: Jake

The long-awaited seventh issue of Mima'amakim is here!

Come to the publication party and get yrself a copy, Sun Apr 6th 8.30 @ the Cornelia Street Cafe. The whole crew will be there performing and celebrating. Come!

If you're not around, but would like to order a copy, pls email us makim2007@gmail.com and get yrs. It's SO GOOD.

Michael Chabon and Mazel Tov Word from: Mordy

There's a mazel tov that has not yet been announced on this blog (likely because the two most frequent posters to this blog are the ones due the mazel tov), so in posting this poem, assume that this post also is wishing a public mazel tov to our fearless EIC, the Washington Heights heavyweight lifter (weighing very little for his weight class), all the way from the Ukraine, and his lovely, lovely lady.

Also, I came across a poem about the soon to be Coen'ified Michael Chabon in 3:AM Magazine that I couldn't help but love, and am posting and linking to here for the titillation of all of ya'all.

Michael Chabon
By Justin Dobbs.

the bus only takes me where michael chabon wants to go
although no one knows the title to his latest poem
not even the bus driver
the coffee made me happy at first
but then i sat back and i said fuck
and tao lin writes to tell me that
michael chabon has put him on his shit-list
some people say that michael chabon is a gangster
or a hustler, a hoodlum
that he deals opium out of a suitcase
it is rumored that i am fucked
that i sleep under bridges
and get arrested by policemen
for shit-talking michael chabon
in the university elevator
sometimes i only go to the university bookstore
to find matthew simmons
and ask him if he, too, has been
blackballed by the gangster, michael chabon
but at these times he is very quiet
and carefully points out the window
where a homeless man lies on the sidewalk
and maybe he is dead

Some Videos from the last Mima'amakim Show Word from: Jake

Hey all! Here're a few videos from our Oct 25th show. There're more in the vaults, hopefully we'll get around to releasing them one of these days. Footage courtesy of Ian Elimeliah.

Elana Bell:



Dan Sieradski:



Frantic Turtle:



Steve Dalachinsky:



More Steve:

The Disappearance Word from: Adam Shechter

You are a Jew because you are not a Jew at all. This ever-unwinding axiom is the delectable botulism of the Jewish literary experiment, the inherited permutation of the Mosaic desert in our days. As we have been instructed in the mitzvot of tearing one another to pieces in order to maintain a progressive and stable/adapting yet fragmenting collective ego, as these meta-familial teachings have stumbled down from that very large story that reads: We are no more! Still, we dutifully live this eradication and in pure joy record the altered-same event for the next generation, demonstrating how even you can be totally destroyed and remain legible in the Jewish canon.

A necessarily appropriate reduction of this paradoxical ecstatic nihilism is achieved by reaching out of such murky narcissistic declarations (with contorted skinny infant wrist only) and grabbing an actual book. Ilan Stavans The Disappearance reifies our everyday Judeo cataclysm in title and? But before going any farther with his so-called actual third objectness, lest the pleasure of my mutilated ego cease its conversation of orgasmic self-orchestration, I will personally tie into our textual fiction with a life experience. Though having no immediate social contact with Ilan Stavans beyond a 2AM interview watched on a nameless high numbered cable station, I will default abstractly to the apocalyptic theme at hand: No one likes to come in third place! But sometimes or really most often we must acquiesce and develop our critical gaze in the sizzling neurons of primal envy.

In the collections third and final story, Xerox Man, Stavans reports an immediate NYC subway encounter he had with Reuben Staflovitch the psychotic supermodel-esque son of a famous Hassidic Rabbi from Jerusalem, who stole and burned three hundred sacred Jewish texts from local academic libraries. Though before incinerating the irreplaceable artifact, the self-appointed cosmically clever Mr. Staflovitch would xerox the entirety, remove a single page and then add the photocopied manuscript to the illicit archival piles of his Upper West Side apartment. As I can no longer tolerate the absence of my life as primary subject of discussion, perhaps not that unlike Staflovitch, I will replace the requisite example of the actual sado-masochistic meeting between Stavans and Staflovitch with one from my own life. The yummy delicious tale of inter-Jewish destruction is as follows:

On a recent pleasingly chilly-clear afternoon, I was accosted by a gang of twelve-year-old orthodox Jewish kids. Lost and anxiously searching for a friends address on a nameless Brooklyn street, I soon noticed that I was flanked by two young yarmulke bearing boys, who were no less than mocking my determined gait. I sped up in an attempt to shake this social anomaly, yet the two Hebrew villains also increased their speed. Without consent, my heart initiated a bodily crisis alert and began to beat loud and hard. Soon, a wave of female giggles rippled up my back and neck, and cutting excited speech describing my dress swarmed my ears. Fortunately, a section of my intellectual faculty remained and calculated that my size was practically double that of my enemies, so I implemented an intuitive plan of attack and veered into the pathway of the boy on my right forcing him to retreat, along with his mindless partner. No sooner had a few seconds of my triumph elapsed, the boy on my right was back at it with his devilish mimesis, his cohort on my left again doing the same. In this moment of life changing decision-making, flight morphed into fight and I stopped abruptly. But then my heart stopped too as the two boys halted just a few steps ahead. What did the One From Above have me in for? My tongue swelled, my breathing fell erratic, my imagination blistered with unspeakable headlines from tomorrows Daily News. Coldly staring at the boy from the right, a tall olive skinned lad with crinkled broody eyes and mouth, I barked, Can I help you? With impervious adolescent defiance, he retorted, Can I help you? My teeth clenched, my eyes watered, I was dizzy with disbelief. No sooner than I could not think of a prized and winning rebuttal (the one I can never appropriately concoct except for in a day dream post-confrontation), there came clomping a horde of fifteen kids, mostly girls to join their two after-school compatriots. I was now surrounded by a pack of long-black-dressed giggling girls and frowning white-shirted boys, all eyes wildly floating about me in a googly sadistic gleeful jelly. I quietly gasped for air. Finally, one of the girls, and then a few others quickly echoing, inquired, Are you Rabbi Birnbaum?

Who was this Rabbi Birnbaum? Yiddishe sex symbol at the head of a hippest classroom in the yeshiva or a shlemeily scapegoat substitute teacher fun to stick pins in? I could not conclude.

Yes, I am Rabbi Birnbaum, I loudly announced.

I told you! I told you! The girls shrieked in masterful panic.

Gracefully peeling off my ski hat and dipping the top of my thirty-four-year-old head into their view, I mournfully corrected, No actually, I am not a Rabbi, you see? No yarmulke.

The kids went expectantly silent, though not budging from their predatorial semi-circle. I was not out of danger, but perhaps on my way. I had to act fast.

Not only am I not a Rabbi, I am a secular Jew, I calmly elaborated.

Whats a secular Jew? a short stocky boy asked immediately.

It means I eat pork! I exclaimed making my eyes really big and scary. Expecting the Jewish kids to scatter in terror as if I just held up a cross to vampires, their interest only intensified, the semi-circle closing in tighter around me. All the better for them to humiliate a pork eating Jew?

I eat pork too! the tall crinkle faced one rebuffed.

I couldnt believe it. He had just seized my most powerful and final weapon, surely knocking the very blood from his parents hearts at the same time. Is it illegal to talk about pig food products with under aged Jewish kids? I internally wondered. I feared for my future and theirs.

So you enjoy some good barbecued ribs? I eked out. Crinkle face didnt say anything. The obviousness of my come back stupidly reflecting on his dark angry eyes.

I am sure a great big ham makes a lovely shabbos dinner in your house? I shouted in desperation.

All the kids laughed in unison. Well that was enough fun for the moment. I had to get the hell out of there or perhaps a thirteenth tribe of Israel would be formed. I saw myself at their helm, roving down the back streets of Brooklyn, the whole gang gobbling down large globs of salty pig meat, in the same ritualistic fashion that the Yanomamo of Brazil do in order to prepare for battle. A new gang of Gypsy-Jews, with eccentric minhags of only being able to steal an old ladies purse in the presence of a minyan while davening mincha. The fantasy soon dissipated from my internal sight, as my real eyes saw the lot of them standing before me awaiting the next joke. But I was tapped out. Thinking we were now friends, I asked the group where the address I was looking for might be. I got twelve different answers with twenty hands pointing in forty different directions. Knowing that the address was most likely just a block behind, it was confirmed that this Hebrew pack was out to get me, and I glumly walked away feeling lucky to have survived.

I am aware that the above vignette was not crafted with the same historical elegance that Stavans employs when educating us about Maarten Soetendrop in the first and title story of The Disappearance, a Belgium actor who staged his own false kidnapping by non-existent Neo-Nazis or of my favorite sub-character in the collection (from the novella Morirse esta en Hebreo), Nicholas, a now Baal Teshuvah who is in exile from Mexico in Israel for a bank robbery committed pre-repentance. Having watched far too many hours of Sesame Street and not being culturally awarded Stavans Argentinian inflected serenity, I can only offer a skewed appraisal of his hyper-poetic journalistic tyranny, fun! I will say this, his stories teach an acceptance of the true pleasure found in the destruction of the contemporary Jew. And an acceptance with the specially flavored support of an author who is not afraid to personally converse in the real time of an actual story that is factual occurrence, fiction, and Torah sized myth. I should really tell you more about Stavans and what he actually wrote in The Disappearance, but then I would be remaining untrue to my innate dialogic violence, my need to destroy him and reiterate the biased primacy of my life as a destroyed Jew.

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?)

A Few Submissions Calls Word from: Jake

Mima'amakim is nearing the publication of our seventh annual issue; we'll soon be looking for your submissions for the eighth. In the meantime, a few other submissions calls came my way.

Gerd Stern is putting together an anthology "Hag Samaiach - Poems for the Jewish Holidays". They're ok taking material which has already been published in journals etc. Send him your goods at Gerd @ intermediafoundation.org

Presentense Magazine is looking for Jewish poetry and prose. Contact our esteemed contributor and colleague Alieza Salzberg alieza @ gmail.com

Zeek is putting out a special "Russified" issue. If you have work relating to the Russian Jewish experience, give a holler to David.Stromberg @ us.penguingroup.com.

The Blue Jew Yorker is a great new online journal of Jewish Art. The deadline's running, so feel free to submit all year around to thebluejewyorker @ gmail.com

Having merged with the Workmen's Circle, the Jewish Currents have been expanding as of late, and they've published poetry since before most of us were born. Check out http://www.jewishcurrents.org.

If there're other interesting anthologies/journals/mags I'm omitting, please give a shout.

Best of 2007 Word from: shoshana

What better way to welcome the New Year (albeit belatedly), than with a list of best Jewish books of 2007? Here are Jewish-themed books that made it to best of 2007 lists in a variety of publications from the New York Times to the Economist, Slate, Salon and beyond. I've only read three (I starred them and commented briefly below) so for those of you out there who've read others, please share your thoughts and opinions about these books. I focused mainly on literary fiction but included some poetry and nonfiction titles that garnered significant attention (like Living Biblically, for example), and others that caught my eye (like Peter Ginz). It's possible I've included books here that aren't overtly Jewish, but then, the question of what is Jewish literature is up for debate so chime in, if you will.

And here's the list, in no particular order, except that Chabon's appeared most frequently on best of 2007 lists, and, according to my count, Aciman's came in second.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon)
Call Me By Your Name (Andre Aciman) *

(One of my favorite books of the year, Aciman's first novel s a beautifully written story about young love. Set against the backdrop of the Italian countryside, the story captures the angst, longing and desire of a young man in his encounter with another man, as he recalls it many years later. The story speaks to the temporality of passion and the memories that continue to haunt and inspire us, long after the moment is gone.)

Foreskin's Lament (Shalom Auslander)
How To Read The Bible (James Kugel)
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (Diane Ackerman)
The September of Shiraz (Dalia Sofer)
The Ministry of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)
Exit Ghost (Phillip Roth)
House Lights (Leah Hagar Cohen)
A Year of Living Biblically (A.J. Jacobs)
Collected Stories (Leonard Michaels) *

(I came across Michaels at the suggestion of a Columbia professor, and spent jobless days at my local Barnes and Noble reading through this collection of brilliant short stories. Michaels writing is sharp, witty, often funny and always poignant. Somehow, he slipped out of the American literary canon, but this collection will surely change that.)

Fire in the Blood (Irene Nemirovsky)
The Diary of Peter Ginz (Trans: Chava Pressburger)
Paul Celan: Threadsuns (Trans: Pierre Joris)*

(After recently reading John Felstiner's critically acclaimed literary biography of Paul Celan (Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew), and reading his poetry in translation by Felstiner and Hamburger I'm convinced that Celan was one of the greatest Jewish literary geniuses of the last century. I'm writing a review of this translation so I won't go on about it here, but anything by Celan is worth reading.)

Instinct or Intelligence? Word from: shoshana

There's a new biography out from Oxford on Bernard Malamud--that lesser-known Jewish American writer (or is it American Jewish?)--by Philip Davis (professor at the School of English, University of Liverpool). The book is reviewed here by Lee Siegel for The NYT Book Review.

In her review, Siegel points to Malamud's inferior status when compared to his peers--(Phillip) Roth, Mailer, and Bellow--, which, the reviewer interestingly suggests, comes down to the difference between intelligence and instinct. Malamud, she goes on to write, seems to have been blessed with better--that is more honest, more real--instinct than other writers, but not the same degree of uber-intelligence that informs the writing, and indeed the persona of such literary luminaries as Roth. Of course, this raises important questions about what it takes to be a great writer and the extent to which IQ and creativity are interrelated, or not--that is, the role of intelligence in the creative artistic process. According to Siegel, Roth and Mailer were dismissive of Malamud because he was, to quote Siegel quoting Alfred Kazin "too good to be true," because he focused too much on "rachmones" as a Jewish trait, at the expense of the "ego driven assertiveness and aggression"that defined other writers' portrayal of the new American Jew. Malamud also distinguished himself as, according to many who remember him, a genuinely amicable human being (something few would dare accuse Mailer of). It does often seem that the more reckless one is in life the bolder one can be in pursuing one's art. . . I should mention that this bio comes on the heels of another book about the same author written by Janna Malmud Smith, Malamud's daughter (My Father is a Book, Mariner Books 2007). And on the topic of lesser-known Jewish American writers, W.W. Norton put out a biography of the other Roth (Henry), by Steven G. Kellman, in 2005. Anyone read it?