We so appreciate feedback about the Salon experience! Thanks to Ethan for this…
Beloved Literary Salon June 2020
By Ethan Brooks
The silver lining in a sudden need to avoid unnecessary contact with other people is that there has been a collective realization of just how much can be accomplished while sitting at home. This means many have been pushed to conduct much more of their lives online – which can frustrate to no end – but in so doing, an accessibility inherent to the internet becomes a boon to those who must now cater to a world relegated to the web. The London Literary Salon is such an experience which, in transitioning to a virtual space, became available to many more, including myself. For that, I feel lucky. And any sense of intimacy lost through the computer screen was, I thought, more than made up for by the passion and care shown for Toni Morrison’s Beloved as we were guided through it – sentiments mirrored by all as we fell further into the novel – and the enthusiasm of my peers in sharing their own thoughts and feelings on the text. These expressions evoking always a sense of respect for the work as a whole and for the painful histories out of which it has been crafted. I think there should be no other way to approach this story, for while the themes that can be drawn from it may be manifold, the subject matters of racism and of slavery demand your attention, and the brutality and hatefulness of these things are felt, whether subtlety or viscerally, on each page of Beloved. The confrontation in reading this work is difficult – although made less so when among an inclusive group such as in the literary salon and with the exploration of this literature being facilitated by one with experience – and will not end with the story of Beloved; but it is a confrontation which is necessary, now more than ever, because it has been made excruciatingly clear, over and over, that the roots of racism and of white supremacy run deep in the U.S., and are painfully felt. In Beloved, it is this pain which is exposed, and in being better understood, it is assuaged. As a final word, this understanding gained through the text is achieved to a greater degree for being part of a group wherein thoughts and feelings towards the text are allowed to flow freely.
“There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.” — Virginia Woolf
As the Salon season wraps up for August, I am celebrating the amazing discussions that I have witnessed—and, as Woolf comments above, the sap of life that renews my mind as I revisit these great writings. The current Invisible Man study, for example, continues to offer insights to a work I thought I knew inside out…and of course, this book illuminates the moment of change in awareness of systematic and daily racism that Black people and people of colour experience. We are living this now. The Hamlet study that I co-facilitated with the actor Jane Wymark—who KNOWS Ophelia from having played the role to Derek Jacoby’s Hamlet—offered participants a rare opportunity for one-on-one coaching with Jane towards a final presentation of a reading from the play. This was so appreciated that Jane and I are offering another Hamlet in September.
We have posted new studies—and there are more to come. I am thrilled to be working with such a talented group of facilitators—our styles and areas of expertise offer a diversity of approaches but the ethos of the Salon: an open, dynamic exploration of the literature—is the constant in the Salon approach. Basil Lawrence is offering a 10-week study on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He says: “Pale Fire is a great work of 20th Century literature, and a deeply humane novel. It’s a personal text borne out of Nabokov’s own suffering: a meditation on love and loss; a contemplation of his physical and linguistic exile. Although the story’s humanity is often hidden by elaborate linguistic games, its tenderness is forever present.”
Alison Cable and I are offering a Salon-Intensive study on Zora Neale Hurston’s exquisite novel, Their Eyes were Watching God. Mark continues to illuminate readers in the classical realm with a coming study on Herodotus and Women in Greek drama…Geoff Brown and I will be running a short study on Henry James (Daisy Miller, The Europeans) with an eye towards more James studies in the future—including the weekend in Rye that has one space available. We also offering Absalom, Absalom!,Hamlet and Ulysses—those studies are filling up! There are two spaces available for the Woolf retreat in St Ives studying her final work, The Years. Coming soon: Marcy Kahan will be announcing another study, and I am running a Middlemarch study starting mid-October…keep an eye on the website.
We all continue to adjust to the strangeness of this time: in the midst of a pandemic whose end is not knowable; ever-changing daily rhythms adjusting to the safety needs of ourselves and those around us—a loss of jobs, travel and the pleasures of community gatherings—and of course, the awful reality of suffering that the disease causes its victims and those who care for them. I hope the experience of the Salon continues to offer a respite from the anxiety and struggle of this time. By going global, we have opened up to folks all over the world and that has strengthened our audience in bringing diverse perspectives. If you would like to enrol in a Salon but are experiencing financial hardship, please email the facilitator—we can often offer a subsidized place. The Salon is committed to supporting its members.
Sue Fox is a Salon member who has added her good mind and passionate reading to studies on Invisible Man, Hamlet, Faulkner– just to name a few….this article first appeared in the on-line magazine JewThink. Thanks to Sue for letting us publish here as well.
I can vividly remember reading Philip Roth’s novel when it was published in 2004 and being completely gobsmacked that Charles Lindbergh was the American President. We were on holiday in Portugal in the same place we’d gone back to every year since who knows when, for a week of walking, Scrabble and reading. I can still hear myself saying to dearly beloved ‘When was Lindbergh the President? ‘He wasn’t,’ came the reply from a sun lounger…’But it says here …. blah blah blah…’ So taken was this naive reader by Roth’s imagination that for a while I was disorientated. I seriously questioned my memory/history/cognitive abilities.
Reliving the novel through the medium of TV in the American film adaptation currently on Sky Atlantic, Roth’s The Plot Against America is terrifying. I keep asking myself what I would have done if I was raising a young Jewish family in Newark in 1941? Would I, like Bess Levin, who is not from a Jewish ghetto like her husband, Herman, have put our names on the list to emigrate to Canada? Would I have been captivated by the oily, insincere, ridiculous but, some think charismatic, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (played by John Turturro), and seen Lindbergh as anti-war rather than antisemitic? Would I be persuaded by Bengelsdorf’s nonsense about his Just Folks programme being a fine opportunity for young Jews to assimilate with good Christian American folks in Kentucky and middle America. Assimilate in farm states where most of the natives had never seen a Jew before? Could I have bought into the Rabbi’s vision of a kind of utopian Habonim Kibbutz but with pigs? Even more worryingly, when this utopian dream turns into the ‘Homestead‘ project – basically a way of relocating Jewish families to these same redneck wilderness towns – what would I have done? Canada being less and less possible, antisemitic attacks becoming a daily news item, Ribbentrop invited to a White House dinner – do I pile the family into the car and hit the highway?
Bess is a fighter, her husband, Herman is weak, gullible and basically a good man who believes in Roosevelt. His heart is in the right place, but his brain refuses to see what is happening to the country he loves. As a father, his power gradually collapses so that the two Levin sons, Philip and Sandy, see – like we all have to do one day – that parents don’t have the answers, they can’t protect their children from everything, they are not all powerful. They are only – as Bruno Bettelheim the distinguished child psychotherapist wrote, ‘Good Enough Parents’.
The most chilling of many moments in the TV adaptation was the White House dinner when the oleaginous rabbi and his fiancée, Evelyn (Bess’s gullible sister), mingle with the great and the good, the Daughters of the American Revolution and their husbands. In their formal, swanky attire, they reminded me of the song, ‘We’re a Couple of Swells’.Of course, Bengelsdorf and Evelyn were not a couple of swells, they were two token Jews – visibly snubbed by President Lindbergh.
In 2004, Roth’s book struck me as a brilliant read and not much else. Yes, it worried me, but it didn’t ruin a holiday, keep me up at night or make me think I needed to run for the hills. Today, with the whole world going to hell in a handcart, everything is up for grabs. No, I don’t see Nazis around every corner, and I have always called out when confronted, however unintentionally, by someone saying an unpleasant and unjustified comment about Jews. And yes, I do agree when the Jew in question – usually someone prominent – does something shameful and embarrassing, etc., etc. No need to name names. We all have our own list. But and there is always a but, I get nervous around North West London Jewish bakeries on Friday mornings, when the queue is long. Which is why I tend to go on Thursday night. Yes, I’m a coward.
In 1941, my mother and sister – who was then aged seven – accepted a family decision to evacuate to America from Manchester in order to escape the bombs, shortages and horrors of the war. Like my father, who was in the Home Guard, husbands were not able to evacuate. So, my mother joined the exodus of lucky mothers who left for Canada and the US where their lives would inevitably change.
Mine went to stay with wealthy relatives in California. They were family they had never met who provided papers and sponsorship. This great act of kindness was based on another act of kindness by my maternal grandfather (he died before I was born). Grandpa had left Rostov on Don in Russia at the turn of the century because of the antisemitic attacks. The California relatives – his first cousins – left later and were stuck for months in Constantinople in one room. The jewellery sewn into blankets when they left Russia just about kept them alive. My grandfather sent them money to continue their journey to New York. Eventually, they all settled in California. The cousins, who had owned a big factory in Rostov on Don – fulfilled their American Dream and were very successful, as well as philanthropic, within the local, the Jewish and the Black community.
In 1941, when my mother and sister crossed the Atlantic in convoy from Liverpool on board The Baltrova, they spent seventeen days in life jackets which they never took off, vomiting into buckets. One convoy boat was torpedoed. My mother and sister must have been terrified. They finally arrived in Boston where the unknown cousins met them for the first time at the incredibly grand Statler Hotel.
As it turned out, my mother loved her time in the San Fernando Valley in her house with the picket fence on Pickford Street. It was a Jewish neighbourhood. She could pick oranges from the trees. At least that’s how I imagine it. She never really talked about it much – she just looked sad. I always wanted to go to the place where my mother had been happy. She had to leave eventually, return to North Manchester early in 1944 and start again in the winter, with rationing, ruin and learning that her beloved father was dead. I found immigration papers allowing my mother and sister to enter America anytime during the following year (1945). But she never went back. Neither did my sister.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve worked and had holidays in America. I also loved being in the US until one day, I stopped loving it. When the current incumbent tarnished the office with his horrible orange face. There’s no way I want to go back – not in this new New World.
Would I have had the courage to go in 1941? I honestly have no idea of my answer. In the year when we can’t go anywhere, and there’s no one left to sponsor anyone when Israel is definitely not the Promised Land, and there is no longer an American Dream, I feel blessed not to have to make a choice – yet. I may need more than my mother’s courage.
Sue Fox is a freelance journalist who has been interviewing famous people for the Sunday Times, Times Magazine, and many magazines since she was 18. She has also been associate producer on TV documentaries and a film archive.
Sue Fox is a freelance journalist who has been interviewing famous people for the Sunday Times, Times Magazine, and many magazines since she was 18. She has also been associate producer on TV documentaries and a film archive.