Month: April 2026

Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, gives us the history of the Jewish Labor Bund. The Bund was a Jewish socialist party, formed in Russia in 1897, and prominent in Russia from then through the Revolution (after which, the Bolsheviks banned it), and then important in Poland from the end of World War I until the Nazi genocide against Jews during World War II.

The book gives a lively and thorough account of the Bund and of many of its members, throughout this whole historical period. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is beautifully written, and it combines an overall history with more personal testimonies, mostly written in Yiddish and available in archives, but not formally published. Crabapple has a personal stake in this story, since her maternal great-grandfather was a Bundist,until he emigrated to the United States in 1906. After that, like many other Jewish immigrants, he supported the Bund from afar, gave money, and anxiously watched the twists and turns of its history.

The Bund was a socialist and basically Marxist organization. It was centered upon the Jews of what is now Eastern Europe and European Russia, organizing with and among Jews specifically at a time of extreme anti-Semitism throughout the region. But it was anti-nationalist and anti-chauvanist, in favor of working class solidarity across lines of ethnicity and nationality. The Bund slogan which gives the book its title expresses the need to fight for a better present, not to postpone everything to a future that is distant in both space amd time. The Bund made alliances with other socialist organizations, and it was opposed to Jewish ethnonationalism (manifested at that time in the form of Zionism) as well as to other nationalisms in the region which often tended to be anti-Semitic (as was the case especially in Poland and in Ukraine). The Bund was active in the Russian Revolutions of 1917, but they were eventually shut out by Lenin’s exclusivity, and then suffered even more (like so many other revolutionists and leftists) under Stalin.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund was a major force in Poland, which after attaining independence at the end of World War I had more than 3 million Jews, something like 10% of the total population. The Bund not only made cohesive political demands but also organized all sorts of facilities from hospitals to summer youth programs in the countryside, as well as exerting pressure due to their representation in the parliament.

The Bundists quarreled with other Jewish factions, particularly with the Zionists, who sought to get the entire Jewish population of Europe to emigrate to Palestine. But the groups still joined forces when danger arose (first from Polish anti-Semitic groups, and then much worse from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. The Bund was behind the great Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, which was eventually suppressed by the Nazis with great loss of life. In wiping out 90% of the Jewish population in Poland, in other Eastern European countries, and in occupied parts of the Soviet Union like Ukraine and Belarus, the Nazis destroyed both the Bund and the world of which it was an organic part.

The Bund has often been dismissed in recent years, because it failed, whereas the Zionists succeeded (at the price of doing to other people what was done to them in Eastern Europe). But Crabapple argues, and I entirely agree, that the legacy of the Bund is worth preserving — and that, as I have argued many times, Jewish culture and tradition, including but not limited to religion, should not have its rich legacies captured by and subsumed within the State of Israel.

Indeed, a culture should never be reduced to a nation-state; the whole history of the 19th and 20th centuries, in Europe and in places reached and controlled by Europe, offers us lessons in to why such state capture is a terrible thing. Cherishing a culture, and benefiting from its historical resources, or from the many and often contradictory potentialities it offers us, should never be limited to a narrow identitarianism. Such cherishing — the generativity of any tradition — necessarily includes heretical potentialities as well as orthodox ones. (In this way, for instance, I see the two great heretical Jews of the 17th century, Spinoza and Sabbatai, as resources and exemplars to draw upon, in addition to more orthodox and ‘acceptable’ ones).

Molly Crabapple brings the history of the Jewish Labor Bund to life, and shows us how and why, despite its historical defeat (the latter chapters of her book, recounting the events of World War II, made me cry), its legacy is still very much worth knowing and drawing upon today.

Steve Aylett, THE BOOK LOVERS

I have been reading Steve Aylett for more than three decades — his first novel, THE CRIME STUDIO, was published in 1994. His latest book, THE BOOK LOVERS, was published in the UK in 2024, and has just now come out in the US from Anti-Oedipus Press.

Though I read Aylett with extreme delight and fascination, I have little idea how to write or speak about his novels. I told my friend Marleen Barr, trying to explain, that I think Aylett is the greatest prose stylist in the English language since James Joyce. While I stand by this claim, I do not know how to justify it to anyone who is skeptical about it (which is, I presume, almost everyone). Aylett doesn’t do lush and hypnotic long sentences like Marguerite Young, and he doesn’t compress the widest possible range of language into the verncular, like Thomas Pynchon. (They are the only two other post-Joyce English-language writers who, to my mind, have a similar brilliance of style). Rather, Aylett writes with such precision that every sentence in his books, whether dialogue or description, has the polished elegance and paradoxical wit of an Oscar Wilde-style epigram; only you have to imagine a Wilde who has been kidnapped by Mister Mxyzptlk and sent into the fifth dimension.

When the characters speak to one another, they seem to be referring to this style of their language as much as to anything else. To give an example — one where the prose is closer to apprehensible meaning than is the case ninety percent of the time — consider this: “This pose of yours, does it prevent your ablutions? You are so exacting in your affectations, they seem rather joyless. Are you merely following orders?” This is from Inspector Nightjar a female police officer trying to interrogate a man who never seems to conform to expectations. Nightjar is one of the heroes (or heroines) of this book. As the other heroine, Sophie Shafto, says of her at one point: “She’s a legend! Incongruously competent and honest! Her life is pure hell!”

Things do happen in the course of this novel, though it is difficult to explain exactly what they are. The book is set in what seems to be a simulacrum of late-19th-century London. Most people walk or travel by horse-and-buggy, though there also do seem to be primitive automobiles. A lot of the action seems to involve books and their ambiguities. We hear a lot about books that change their words every time they are read. There are even epic catalogues of such books: “A book of keyholes, a book of beginnings, a book illustrating ominous curse medals, a book in which every word is a reminder. A book to ruin your summer, gleaming like a scarab. A book bitten down like a sandwich, a book of thorns, a book of page thirteens” — and so on for much longer than I am able to quote here, concluding with: “It was all promise and potential”. Aylett seeks to maintain that promise and potential, rather than turning it into mere actuality.

I have already mentioned Sophie Shafto, the closest THE BOOK LOVERS comes to a protagonist. Sophie is enamored of all these books. She has spent her life struggling against the limitations to which women are confined in bourgeois society: “To ignore contradictions. To faint away whenever called upon to do so. To come bending into a room in pretend modesty”. Against these social norms and expectations, Sophie craves the sheer weirdness and otherness of the written word. She treasures texts in which “despite what I want the words to say, the words are going their own way”. In this, Sophie is different from most people; the bestsellers in the world of the novel are books whose pages consist of no words, but only of mirrors, so that in reading them people can conceitedly and complacently contemplate only themselves.

In describing THE BOOK LOVERS in this way, I risk making it seem much more schematic and orderly than it in fact is. I am only quoting the passages which, atypically, I can more or less understand. The novel is multifarious, but at the same time so compressed that I can read over sentences and feel that they make perfect sense in context, even though I have no idea what they mean.

I will cut off this review here, since the only alternative would be to quote every single sentence in the course of this contemplative recapitulation. Aylett is a writer like nobody else.