‘Patrick Leigh Fermor Among the Jews’ (New Essay)

A Jewish Appendix, A Jewish Appendix, Books, Romania

My essay, “Patrick Leigh Fermor Among the Jews” has recently been published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts. (It starts on page 58.) I hope you’ll take a few moments to read it.

The essay includes some of the same narrative elements of my book A Jewish Appendix, but it’s strongly focused on one of the book’s prominent figures, the great English travel writer (and war hero) Patrick Leigh Fermor. Throughout the legendary yearlong walk Leigh Fermor undertook, at age eighteen, all the way from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, his adventures included some memorable encounters with Jews, mostly in Romania, where my Jewish maternal ancestors came from and where the heart of A Jewish Appendix is set. Leigh Fermor’s retailing of these encounters yields some of the most vivid and impassioned writing in his three-volume memoirs of what he later became fond of calling “The Great Trudge.”

Young Paddy, as he was then known, developed an affectionate and keen curiosity about Jewish life and language. This was remarkable in itself — growing up in England, he had no background in Judaism and little previous association with Jews — and even more surprising and unusual for the period in which the Great Trudge took place: 1934, just after Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany, which was met with widespread approval on both sides of the Atlantic in a time of what’s often called the “fashionable antisemitism” that then prevailed.

Do have a look at my essay, if you’re so inclined, in these Jewish Days of Awe.

New ‘A Jewish Appendix’ Review

A Jewish Appendix, A Jewish Appendix, Books

Here is a nice recent review of A Jewish Appendix in the Shepherd Express, a venerable Milwaukee-based arts and culture magazine. Critic Dave Luhrssen, who also had nice things to say about my biography of Chrissie Hynde, writes: “A Jewish Appendix is an engaging travelog and a highly personal odyssey [that] will speak to anyone of any background trying to make sense of the nature and nurture behind who they are.”

I’ll be appearing as a sponsored speaker and reading from A Jewish Appendix at the Pittsburgh Jewish Book Festival on November 11.

‘A Jewish Appendix’ events this week

A Jewish Appendix,

This past week, I was interviewed about A Jewish Appendix by Yonat Shimron of Religion News Service. I really enjoyed this conversation, which was tied to Passover and the ideas of exodus, emigration, and self-reinvention.

If you live in the Triangle area of North Carolina, please come to my reading this Thursday, April 17 at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill! This event will include a post-reading conversation with Rabbi Hannah Bender of Durham’s Judea Reform congregation. I’m looking forward not only to talking about A Jewish Appendix with Rabbi Bender and the public, but also to a wider discussion of Jewish life, culture, and identity.

And a happy Passover to all!

‘A Jewish Appendix’ in the news & the world

A Jewish Appendix, Books, ,

My new book, A Jewish Appendix, will be published on March 15, 2025, by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. A Jewish Appendix is a memoir and travel adventure, a story of epigenetic inheritance, a search for home and belonging, and a reckoning with the power and paradox of Jewish identity. It’s an exploration of roots, and it’s for anyone who has ever explored their own. You can read more about A Jewish Appendix here, and preorder it here.

Where to find me:

Advance praise for my book:

Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, calls A Jewish Appendix “unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense.” Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, calls my memoir “unusual, understated, and brilliant […] a journey into geographic roots of [the author]’s family tree overseas and the inner evidence of his own past,” and “the most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices.”

Spilt Milk, The Rock Opera: A Synopsis.

Music

(This synopsis accompanies my Pop Matters article about Jellyfish’s 1993 album SPILT MILK.)

Act One. Our setting is San Francisco. Our time is the rock era. Our heroine is Sebrina. As the curtain opens, she’s an infant in her cradle, over which looms her father, singing her a lullaby (“Hush”)—his last act before running out on her forever. Flash forward a few years, and there she is at about seven or eight years old: approximately the age at which she appears on Spilt Milk’s cover. She’s obsessed with a certain rockstar (“Joining A Fanclub”) and collects all his albums, writes him fan letters, etc. He happens to be her father, but he dies in a car crash before she can discover this.

Act Two: Sebrina’s now in about the sixth grade. In class, she meets Chesney Lynn, a charming class clown, incorrigible cutup, and born entertainer. She’s smitten, and so is he (“Sebrina, Paste, and Plato”). Chesney knows something Sebrina doesn’t: that she’s the daughter of his hero, the late, great rockstar in whose footsteps he wants to follow. By the end of the song, a time lapse has taken place and they’re of age, in love, and the very young parents of a baby born out of wedlock. Chesney sings a song about this happy baby-accident, called “New Mistake”. He sings it in a spotlight, backed by a rock band, because he’s already on his way to stardom: by the end of the song, Sebrina, the (unwitting) child of a rockstar, is married to one, Chesney, in a shotgun wedding. But having ascended toward rock stardom, Chesney fully embraces the high-living, hard-charging, wine-women-and-song life that comes with it, and he leaves her and the newborn bereft (“Glutton of Sympathy”). The curtain closes on a forlorn Sebrina holding her wee one close in the wee hours.

Act Three: Here’s Chesney, now a full-blown superstar, singing his hit single, “The Ghost at Number One”. The song is about Sebrina’s dead rockstar dad, but it also includes Chesney turning to address Sebrina herself during the bridge: he tells her that the child they’ve made together is going to become a rockstar—“Mrs. Lynn, the fruit of your labor / Gives us a savior”, as the songs puts it—just like Chesney, and just like Sebrina’s father. Then Sebrina herself sings “Bye, Bye, Bye”, a sort of cross between Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is”: a song about the disillusionment of love, delivered to her young son. She’s going to take the two of them back home, perhaps to live in her childhood bedroom where she worshipped a dead rockstar. But just as she has committed herself to a life of just the two of them, Chesney returns to beg her to take him back, in the thunderous “All Is Forgiven”. It’s a conflicted appeal made by a deeply flawed hero, but it’s so potent it works: Chesney spirits Sebrina away in his rockstar car, with rockstar abandon, at rockstar speed—and at the end of the song there is another car crash in which both Chesney and Sebrina perish. What follows is a dream sequence that traces their ascent to rockstar heaven, a realm reserved only for the rich and famous that is reached by way of “a bridge of gold / to landscapes of juniper” and ends in an Edenic place called “Russian Hill”—a San Franciscan metaphor for the Great Beyond.

Act Four: Their orphan takes the stage and comes of age, almost literally, in a song called “My Best Friend”: a charming ode to masturbation, but more saliently a metaphor for the progenitive/creative impulse generally. By the time the song, er, climaxes, the orphan has emerged as a fully-fledged musical force himself, just like his father and his grandfather. To both of their ghosts he sings “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late”: a song about the illusion and futility—even the curse—of rock stardom. As the song merges into the next one, which will be the finale, we become aware that this young man is both the composer and, it turns out, the late-emerging protagonist of the entire story—which is, in fact, the very rock opera we have been watching all along, Spilt Milk: the orphan’s story about his twisted rock inheritance, about all the Ghosts at Number One who run in his genes and have filled him with their vim, vinegar and insight.

Act Five: It’s just one song, but what a song. “Brighter Day” orchestrates a grand finale in which a “big parade” takes the stage: the endless and crowded march of rock stardom in which there is always another “blade, he’s a renegade, turning bullshit into marmalade,” waiting in the wings to take the spotlight and “wear that clown crown”. It’s not only a grand illusion—”the big parade” is also “the big charade”—it’s a perpetual cycle of ghosts at number one. The song starts in a high-stepping march, then winds down to a heavy, almost weary tempo that builds to a vast crescendo in which every single instrument we’ve heard on the album, from accordion to zither (well, harp), returns to take its musical bow. Finally, the ghost of Sebrina herself re-enters to take one last waltz with her son; and with a final swell of music, the opera climaxes gloriously and then abruptly yields to a single, frail pinpoint of musical light: precisely the same note—an F-sharp, that blackest of black keys, sustained on violins, arrived at via a tritone, the sinister “Devil’s Interval”—with which Spilt Milk began.

Parking Spaces #89: Eviction, Conclusion, Proposal.

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Sunday, 10:00 a.m. Sunny.

Total cars in deck: 22.

In hourly spaces: 13.

No cars on Level 7:

The day after Christmas was unusually warm, and I had some time on my hands, so I went up to the roof, Level 7, with something to read. I made myself comfortable on a ledge that probably wasn’t intended for people to sit on but makes a good bench nonetheless and affords a panoramic view north from downtown. The deck wasn’t designed as a recreational space, of course, and it is almost entirely concrete, although its ostensible pure functionality is betrayed by some surprising aesthetic aspects; but because it is virtually never used for its designated purpose, parking — more on that below — it provides an openness and serenity of the sort central Durham lacks. It is a very pleasant urban retreat.

After I’d been reading for about two hours, a guard wearing an Allied Security jacket — Allied is the private company contracted by the City of Durham to patrol its parking garages — emerged from one of the elevators, walked unhurriedly over to where I was sitting, and told me I had to leave.

Continue reading Parking Spaces #89: Eviction, Conclusion, Proposal. →

Istanbul: keep moving, slowly

Albania, Food, Istanbul, Travel, Turkey, , , , ,

While planning this trip, I didn’t notice that its east-west span covered almost the same territory as the former Ottoman Empire. I didn’t notice because I didn’t know. In school, we didn’t learn much about it—some ancient realm, it seemed. But the Ottoman Empire officially dissolved only about a hundred years ago.

Once you’re in this part of the world, you can feel, you can understand. There’s the presence of Islam, of course, the food, the languages, museums, and ruins, but there’s also an absence, a sense of where you’re not: this is someplace else.

But where? A gap remains. We didn’t go to Turkey proper. We spent four days in Istanbul, and none at all in the rest of the vast country, which is bigger than Texas. I imagine that is like going to New York City and nowhere else in America, or Venice/Italy—something like that. I saw the heart and the limbs of the old empire, but not what connects them. And barely the heart. You have not seen New York City after spending four days in it, and Istanbul is bigger than New York. We saw but a sliver.

Continue reading Istanbul: keep moving, slowly →

Isi Brisi, Tbilisi, or, Thanks seems to be the hardest word

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First things first: I’ve run into all kinds of time-consuming headaches trying to upload my photos on the blog. Also, Heather’s pictures are far better than mine, and she takes far more of them than I do, so if you’d like to see as well as read about what we’re seeing, check out her Instagram feed.

If, as Ortega y Gasset wrote, “a translation is not the work itself, but a path towards the work,” then the transliteration of the Armenian for “thank you” is not the word itself, only a path toward the word, which is usually rendered shnorhakalutyun. You can use phonetics to sound that out, and after a handful of tries get close enough that an Armenian will correctly understand you rather than reply gesundheit, but you won’t quite have said thank you. That may be partly because the Armenian alphabet contains thirty-nine characters. There are a lot more sounds they can make with their mouths than we can with ours, and a handful of them seem to be required in saying shnorhakalutyun, because when we say it, we don’t sound like them when they say it.

We told our driver of our labors to say “thank you” in Armenian, and he was quick to reply: “It’s hard for us, too!” In fact, it’s so hard that Armenians will frequently say “merci” instead. Meanwhile, everybody twists their tongues around the native word, natives included.

I’ve often gone around thinking English is a difficult language: vexing inconsistencies in the grammatical rules; usage funhouses like there/their/they’re and its/it’s (which are actually really easy); silent e’s and all those other trickster letters and clusters of letters whose pronunciations are often only guessable from without; and by conventional measures the largest vocabulary among all languages—an abundance and variety that make English a wonderful language for writers, of course, but I wouldn’t want to try to learn it.

Except that it must not be that hard to learn, at least not the basics; otherwise, it wouldn’t be the international language. (I have no educated objection to the argument that it’s actually the international language of capital, not convenience, and that its spread owes to colonization, homogenization, etc.; but it would weary me to sit through this argument expounded on at length, as it will likely weary you to read all 4,000+ words of this post.) During our travels, Heather and I were told—by someone, I no longer remember whom; or maybe it was my Korean hiking pal, Lee—that English is actually comparatively easy. Nouns and verbs, we were reminded, are stable, and if you have the ones you need in your corral, you can pretty much get across what you mean in at least some rudimentary way. And for all that some elements of English can be slippery, it doesn’t generally, for example, change a word depending on its context or on who’s saying it, as other languages do; nor do we cram words and senses together to make more, really big words like shnorhakalutyun, thankyouverymuch. Despite its big vocabulary, English tends toward simplification. “They are” shrinks to “they’re,” that sort of thing.

Which takes me back to “thank you,” or even just “thanks.” Continue reading Isi Brisi, Tbilisi, or, Thanks seems to be the hardest word →

Northern Greece: what you don’t know can hurt you

Albania, Durham, Food, Greece, Travel, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Paxos

We were in Ioannina, in northwestern Greece. This was after four nights on Paxos, one of those Greek islands you see in photos that make you roll your eyes: surely nowhere is that beautiful, and if anywhere is, surely no one you know has been there. But Paxos is, and you do.

James Salter is reported to have said that “one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader—envy of the life that the writer is living.” I happen not to agree with that at all, although I do see where he’s coming from at the level of descriptive prose: it should give the reader the feeling of a vicariousness so voluptuous that the reader experiences that delicious expansion of awareness, familiar to anyone who has been captivated by a book, of being here, reading, while also there, where the book is unfolding. Perhaps the reader’s envy, in Salter’s sense, lies in the space perceived between these two worlds, one real and one conjured.

Continue reading Northern Greece: what you don’t know can hurt you →

Georgia, or George

Azerbaijan, Food, Georgia, Travel, , , , , , , ,

Heather and I were observing that we have reached a point in life when we no longer try not to act like tourists. We cheerfully announce it when the circumstances call for disclosure: “Tourist!” It used to be that I’d try to fit in, or simply not to be noticed. Whether this was because I thought it was “cooler” to seem like a “local” or because I was afraid of being ripped off or of missing out on “authentic” experience, or because I just didn’t want to be bothered by touts, I can’t quite say. Probably some of all of the above.

I don’t find any trouble in fending off most touts anymore—they tend to be even more obviously touts than I am a tourist; I can’t keep up with what’s cool and don’t have the energy to try to fake it; I have no illusions about being taken for a local (not even with my fit-in-anywhere complexion); and authentic experience is whatever experience you have, as long as you’re having it with all your senses engaged, whether it’s riding on the funicular in Baku, which is a sort of souvenir-in-motion, or riding a bus that breaks down in 105-degree heat on the road into the Azerbaijani hinterlands two days later.

For the last two days, Heather and I have been in K(Q)azbegi, Georgia, taking hikes of various distances up into the heights that reach toward the eponymous 17,000-foot mountain. We’ve seen hundreds, possibly actual thousands, of other hikers on the trails. Kazbegi might be the most touristy place in Georgia. But that doesn’t detract one bit from the authenticity of the beauty of the mountain, which is rising up spectacularly outside our hotel window as I write this, the Mount Rainier of the Caucasus (I just made that up, don’t Google it) and showing yet another of its personalities in this post-rain, half-clearing, cloud-wisped, late-afternoon light.

Equally authentic is the rashly overbuilt and rather cantankerous, grubby, oddly inhospitable town of Kazbegi, which has found a way to smash one identity into another and find a third; authentic, too, the strange swamp-gassy smell one gets occasional whiffs of, coming from somewhere down on the hotel’s lawn; and, to get us here from Tbilisi, the fraught minibus ride—actually two-minibus ride, because the first minibus broke down and had to be replaced by another (an hourlong roadside delay, our second in our last three bus rides). Authentic tourism is whatever you fully observe and sense. Like George.

Continue reading Georgia, or George →