David Stromberg

Ed Ruscha, 1973

A note I jotted down just a few weeks ago trying to process all of the fear and anxiety bubbling up over our constantly unraveling society. Written on a notebook left behind by my great-aunt Nadia, a Holocaust survivor. It occurred to me yesterday that there was some relief in her not being around to see what’s happening in the world today.

Sunset over Jerusalem. Another day in an unreal reality.

Sunrise over Jerusalem. Beyond these hills - massacres. But they are also close as possible: in our hearts, minds, soul.

Looking for a shower? Looking for a bed? Jerusalem homes will host you!

As MussoBibi continues his steady path toward turning Israel into a kleptoautocracy, I wanted to share some thoughts on what it means to protest and to explain the principles of democracy to our children.

Explaining Democracy to a Three-Year-Old From the blog of David Stromberg at The Times of Israel

Very excited to share a new Modern Times Publishing's anthology of NEW MASSES. Check it out!!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632924226

AN ESSAY ABOUT Yanai Segal'S AMAZING RESTORATION OF LEONARDO DA VINCI'S SALVATOR MUNDI.

The Whole World in His Hands - The American Scholar What a digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold tells us about beauty, authenticity, and the fragility of existence

Since the 2020 US election, I've been tracing the anxieties of the time using a character, Mister Investigator, in speculative essays that explore history, culture, and literature.

This is the second installment of TO KILL AN INTELLECTUAL – it deals with the history of targeted killings of the general intellectual class – which feels more pressing now than when it was first written a year ago.

Thanks to Fortnightly Review for continuing to publish the piece.

David Stromberg - To Kill an Intellectual, Pt 2 Part two of a five-part serial: 'To Kill an Intellectual' by David Stromberg.

A SHORT INQUIRY INTO THE END OF THE WORLD – a novella-length speculative essay just published by The Massachusetts Review in their Working Titles series.

https://www.massreview.org/node/9890

A SHORT INQUIRY INTO THE END OF THE WORLD introduces Mister Investigator, a literary detective probing how the world came to an end on September 11, 2021. The investigation leads him to reconsider everything from the collapse of the Twin Towers, to the death of democracy, to the series of writers who killed themselves during the rise of the N**i regime. The cast of characters is vast – W. H. Auden, Joseph Roth, Mark Rothko, Raymond Chandler, Jean Améry, Art Spiegelman, and others – as Mister Investigator plumbs the cultural meaning of cataclysmic historical changes, and the place of literature in our everyday lives.

Framed as a mystery, A SHORT INQUIRY INTO THE END OF THE WORLD unleashes an existential Quixote whose landscape is the literary imagination.

BADDIES – with a foreword by Aimee Bender – reissued!!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/163292238X

Baddies: With a Foreword by Aimee Bender Baddies: With a Foreword by Aimee Bender

Lots of Singer this week – this is a followup in the The Times of Israel Israel to the prayer published in Tablet Magazine last month. This is the time to think about the social implications of the scary times in which we live – and to take a cue from those who, one way or another, found a way to survive the madness.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/1952-prayer-by-bashevis-singer-found-scrawled-on-rent-slip-in-unpublished-trove/

1952 prayer by Bashevis Singer found scrawled on rent slip in unpublished trove Unseen collection comes out next spring; writer and scholar David Stromberg discusses the Nobel laureate's religious ambivalence, and why his liturgical Hebrew plea resonates today

It's official – with a little help from our Wikipedian friends, Isaac Bashevis Singer is "allowed" to be called Jewish. Imagine that!

https://www.jta.org/2021/06/04/united-states/the-new-york-times-called-isaac-bashevis-singer-a-polish-writer-heres-how-wikipedia-warriors-made-him-jewish-again

How Wikipedia warriors made Isaac Bashevis Singer Jewish again The fight over Singer's identity offers lessons on the pitfalls of decentralized knowledge in the era of disinformation, with some possible insights about Polish ultranationalism.

A piece about Kirillov, Hi**er, and the Capitol riots – as well as the potential link between tea and su***de. Thanks to Adam Gurri at Liberal Currents for running the piece.

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/if-kirillov-had-drunk-coffee-instead-of-tea

If Kirillov Had Drunk Coffee Instead of Tea What Dostoevsky can teach us about the January 6 insurrection.

Spent some time talking to a Muslim shopkeeper with whom I often converse in passing. We talked about our shared fear for our children. His kids were praying at Al-Aqsa – and he was worried. I asked what we as parents are supposed to do when we feel we can't keep our kids safe. He looked upward and said – that's why we have God.

This wasn't intended to be published during a war. It was meant for the holiday of Shavuot. But it's the prayer we need – a personal petition by Isaac Bashevis Singer reminding us that we are all God's creatures and that our only comfort is bringing joy into the world.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-prayer-isaac-bashevis-singer

Issac Bashevis Singer’s Petition to God A searingly personal, deeply moving prayer is discovered in the Nobel Laureate’s papers

A new piece taken from a work-in-progress titled "Goodbye, America: A Personal Reckoning" – about immigrating to the United States as a child and emigrating twenty years later.

http://www.analytic-room.com/essays/a-search-for-belonging-by-david-stromberg/

A SEARCH FOR BELONGING by David Stromberg Growing up in America with immigrant parents, you’re often on your own navigating your future, and so institutions like elementary...

"THE REAL REALITY PRINCIPLE," an essay
The American Scholar
(link below)

"BEHEADED" – religious extremism, sexual exploitation, unethical journalism – ALL IN ONE STORY
Call Me Brackets
(link below)

Two previously unpublished Chelm stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer – translated from the Yiddish and introduced by yours truly.

Thanks to Daniel Kennedy, translation editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Enjoy!!

https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/chelm1

https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/chelm2

https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/chelmintro

Two Chelm Stories: Translator's Introduction | In geveb Introductory essay to Isaac Bashevis Singer's Chelm Stories.

An oldie but a goodie – this story was written nearly twenty years ago, and has haunted a lot of what I've produced since. It found a home in Eurolitkrant, a new literary journal out of Brussels.

https://eurolitkrant.com/OneBook.aspx?Id=59

Eurolitkrant Eurolitkrant is an interdisciplinary and European literary journal, combining distinctive voices in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as works in translation.

Anyone in the mood for some GRILLED BANANAFISH? This piece – just published in Speculative Nonfiction – combines fiction and nonfiction to talk about pain, abuse, and the need to talk about the darker elements in our culture and literature.

https://www.speculativenonfiction.org/contributions/2020/12/15/grilled-bananafish

Grilled Bananafish — Speculative Nonfiction by David Stromberg How do we read reality in light of the stories that shaped us before we knew how to read them critically? 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 bea

Twenty years ago, almost exactly, I published my first cartoon collection – SADDIES – thanks to an arts commission from the UCLA Student Union. Today that book, along with the two other collections published in the same format – CONFUSIES and DESPERADDIES – are all available in digital format!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N9NGTGS/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=stromberg+saddies&qid=1605191848&sr=8-1

Saddies: You Never Know Who Might Give You a Black Eye Saddies: You Never Know Who Might Give You a Black Eye

Our greatest resource for coping with crisis is our imagination.

We are in for the long haul, both politically and health-wise, so check out this essay, "The Brutality of Reality," which reflects on the concept of MIMESIS and how reality is the gift – and curse – that keeps on giving – and cursing.

http://www.literarymatters.org/13-1-the-brutality-of-reality/

The Brutality of Reality An Excerpt from David, the Scribbler: A Diary of Death Drive I spent the first weeks of the covid lockdown at home working on several article revisions, including one on “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and when I was done, I looked up from my work and saw that the world was still stopped. When I thou...

This is an excerpt from a novella-length piece of nonfiction, "David, the Scribbler: A Diary of Death Drive," which is part-essay, part-memoir, and part-investigation into the present moment. Started before the COVID crisis as a meditation on the links between storytelling and death, the work grew into a series of reflections the reality that quickly unfolded as the pandemic spread. This piece recalls Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel during the Coronavirus lockdown.

As the nation continues to nosedive into hate and racism, and as these realities dovetail with the covid crisis, old wounds are quickly reopened, and more pain leads to ever-greater anger – and new shows of resistance. All this has led me to reflect on my own childhood, especially the LA riots and the weeks and years that followed in the neighborhoods where I grew up.

What has emerged is an essay appearing in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) titled "A Nation Wrongs Itself: On American Pain and the Puritan Ethic."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-nation-wrongs-itself-on-american-pain-and-the-puritan-ethic/

The essay's goal is to instigate dialogue about the pain that I believe is at the root of America's repeated fall into harming its own body politic. It tries to forge ahead toward reconciliation and reparation based on tolerance and inclusion.

Please, have a read, and share it with anyone you think may be open to talking about these issues.

Let's keep the conversation going.

A Nation Wrongs Itself: On American Pain and the Puritan Ethic - Los Angeles Review of Books David Stromberg gets to the root of the puritan ethic.

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. . .

https://forward.com/scribe/449074/you-mean-im-gonna-stay-this-color-an-homage-to-my-black-mom/

Scribe | ‘You mean I’m gonna stay this color?!’ An homage to my Black mom When I returned to the US I gained a stepmom. She wasn’t sure how it would be for a white kid to suddenly have a Black mom.

Gail Hareven's "Hiroshima," which I had the chance to translate, is all about putting personal difficulties into perspective, without judging how we – or others – cope with hard times.

http://www.literarymatters.org/12-3-hiroshima/

Mark Honigsbaum discusses the Spanish Flu and Cultural Amnesia:

https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W7TfGRAAAP5F0eKS

Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination The Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are part of our collective cultural memory, but the Spanish flu outbreak has not been.

The cover for "IDIOT LOVE and the Elements of Intimacy" forthcoming from
Palgrave Macmillan.

Isaac Bashevis Singer looks at the implications of the Holocaust on Yiddish culture in real-time: a piece from 1944.

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism: When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

Disconcerting to be reposting this article so soon.

The essay below is a companion piece to this translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's unpublished essay, "Who Needs Literature?" (1963).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-needs-literature/

Who Needs Literature? - Los Angeles Review of Books LARB presents an essay by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by David Stromberg.

An essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer as a writer and critic – published by Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/isaac-bashevis-singer-writer-and-critic/

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writer and Critic David Stromberg considers the long-neglected critical writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The third in a series of personal essays on race and society in America – focused on when being Jewish feels like a liability – suggesting that appears in all kinds of forms. Special thanks to Val Vinokur for editing this entire series.

http://www.publicseminar.org/essays/on-the-feeling-of-anti-semitism/

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism - Public Seminar Editors Note: Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind. ––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The...Read More

The second of three articles in a series on race in America – making a case for tolerance and dialogue.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/09/on-hate-and-boycotts/

On Hate and Boycotts 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 sa

A piece on growing up in America – one of the planet's most heterogeneous nations – which is what actually makes it so great.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/08/on-race-and-repair/

On Race and Repair In discussing race in America, I sometimes like to tell this story: I moved to Los Angeles at the age of eight and a half and went into fourth grade, where I was asked to do something on a school form that I’d never done before -- check off my ethnicity. I read the choices: Caucasian / Anglo-Saxon...

A recently published piece in the Journal of Narrative Theory on J D Salinger, abuse, and pain – topics that aren't easy to talk about, but that could use a little more discussion.

https://journalofnarrativetheory.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/jnt-49-2-featured-author-david-stromberg/

A piece on reading SAMUEL BECKETT though the lens of Melanie Klein – and how emotional dynamics can affect both perception and understanding of texts.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/06/a-different-way-of-reading/

A Different Way of Reading 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

Waking up to the morning news – only to find that an old friend and colleague, Binyavanga Wainaina, has passed away. Tears and pain – but much more. Admiration for his vision. Truly heartbreaking to realize he's not out there to do what he liked to do most: discover.

In this picture, from December 2004, he's giving visiting writers a "tour" of the artwork of Joga (pictured next to him), whom he mentions in this 2003 editorial:
https://www.nathanielturner.com/binyavangawainaina.htm
I'm also including some photos of Joga's work – I think it's what would have mattered most to Binya.