Eric Kandel, Writer and Scientist, Leads Breakthrough Study on Memory

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, is the lead researcher of a new study on memory in the brain (with new implications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease). The study is receiving widespread media coverage, and widespread attention in the neuroscience community.

The 84-year-old laureate came to the New York State Writers Institute to present his memoir, In Search of Memory, about his boyhood as a member of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany and his remarkable career at the leading edge of neuroscience.

More on the new study:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57600507/scientists-find-clue-to-reasons-for-age-related-memory-loss/

More on Kandel's visit to Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kandel_eric.html

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A Writer on the Edge-- Nathan Englander

"Author Nathan Englander says there is a thin line between the work of his craft — obsessively, compulsively tweaking and writing and rewriting — and full-on madness. For him, that line is publication. In the months since his latest collection of short stories was published, Englander has been traveling, meeting people who feel they know him because they read his book. He's comfortable with that."

Nathan Englander visits UAlbany tomorrow: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/englander_nathan13.html

Read more of Leigh Hornbeck's profile of Englander in the Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/A-writer-on-the-edge-4337366.php

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Celebrating Walter Benjamin at UAlbany

The University at Albany will host an international conference Sept. 28-29 on the work of the beloved literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German Jew who attempted to flee the Nazi regime, but committed suicide on the French-Spanish border after being apprehended by the Vichy authorities.

Wildly popular in intellectual circles after his death, Benjamin is famously uncharacterizable as a thinker and writer.

Turkish novelist Elif Shafak makes an effort to describe him (and to describe his importance to her) in an article in The Guardian last April:

"One doesn't read him to feel better. One reads him to feel. In his universe nothing is as it appears to be and there is a vital need to go beyond surfaces and connect with humanity. To live is to walk upon a pile of rubble, listening to any signs of life coming from under the ruins."

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/27/hero-walter-benjamin-elif-shafak

The opening event of the conference is free, open and designed for the general public:  a presentation by quirky novelist and electronic literary artist Paul La Farge, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.

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Dear God, I Hated This Book....

Shalom Auslander, who visits today, writes a perverse and (eventually) wholly positive introduction to Chaim Potok's The Chosen. The introduction appears in a wholly imaginary Modern Library edition of Potok's book, and begins this way:

"Dear God, I hated this book. I hated this book more than Shakespeare and I really hated Shakespeare. The only work I hated more than Shakespeare's was the Old Testament, and I hated this book even more than I hated the Old Testament...."  More.

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Shalom Auslander Rescheduled, Tuesday, April 24

Shalom Auslander, as luck would have it, was prevented from visiting Albany during the year's only snowstorm.

His events have been postponed to Tuesday, April 24th....

April 24 (Tuesday)Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown CampusReading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

Shalom Auslander, ex-Orthodox Jew, humorist, cultural renegade, and contributor to NPR’s This American Life, received both notoriety and praise for his story collection, Beware of God (2005), and the memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007). Hope: A Tragedy (2012), his first novel, tells the story of a troubled man who discovers—living in the attic of his upstate New York home—a decrepit old woman who claims to be Anne Frank. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Cultural anthropologists trying to figure out if there really is a recognizably Jewish voice and sense of humor ... should consider Auslander’s debut novel.”

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Lelyveld-- Abandoned by Over-Achieving Parents

In his 2005 memoir, Omaha Blues, Joseph Lelyveld (who visits Tuesday) recalls his charismatic Reform Rabbi father and his ambitious actress-scholar mother who abandoned him to be raised by other people so they could pursue their divergent ambitions. His father travelled the country in the 1940s drumming up American support for the State of Israel. His mother gratefully abandoned the duties of a clerical wife to pursue graduate studies in Shakespearean scholarship (and an extramarital affair) at Columbia University.

At various times, the boy Joseph was turned over to a Seventh Day Adventist farm family, the Jensens, in Tekamah, Nebraska, and to his Brooklyn grandparents.

An excerpt of the book's first chapter appears on the Barnes and Noble website (you'll need to scroll down).

Picture: Lelyveld (middle) with the Jensen boys.

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The Haggadah: A Never-Ending Conversation

"It's a wonderful conversation to have, a never-ending conversation," Foer says of the Passover story. (In an AP interview).

Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander have collaborated on a new version of the Passover Haggadah-- The New American Haggadah (2012). In the days running up to Passover, the book has become a bestseller.

The haggadah features running commentaries by novelist, philosopher and atheist Rebecca Goldstein, who visited the Writers Institute in March 2010, and children's author Lemony Snicket, among others.

Englander was a guest of the Institute early in his career in March of 2000. Foer never officially visited the Institute, but he waited around in Albany "wearing" his infant son in a baby carrier while his wife, Nicole Krauss, participated in our series in May 2006 (she also visited more recently in September 2011).

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Shalom Auslander Rescheduled!

The Auslander events have been rescheduled for Tuesday, April 24.

4:15PM Seminar in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

8PM Reading in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

For a not yet updated page on Auslander, click here.

Auslander's events on 3/1 were cancelled because of snow.

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Films About the Holocaust at UAlbany

The Center for Jewish Studies and the Documentary Studies Center are collaborating on a film series about life during the Nazi Holocaust.

Films include A Film Unfinished (Yael Harsonski, 2010, b/w, 90 mins) on Tuesday, March 20; Respite (Harun Farocki, 2007, b/w, 40 mins) on Tuesday, March 27; and About a Village (John C. Swanson, 2010, color, 69 mins) on Tuesday, April 3.

Screenings are at 7:00pm
UAlbany Standish RoomScience Library 3rd Floor
Free & open to the public

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Two Soviet Jewish Grandmothers

Katha Pollitt reviews Ester and Ruzya, a dual biography of two Soviet Jewish women and their harrowing stories, told by their granddaughter, Masha Gessen (who visits Thursday) in 2005 in the New York Times:

"Reviewers sometimes call a work of nonfiction ''as exciting as a novel,'' but that would be an understatement applied to this extraordinary family memoir. Masha Gessen, a gifted Russian-American journalist, narrates the intertwined lives of her two Soviet Jewish grandmothers, best friends for over 50 years, as they confront some of the 20th century's worst ordeals: Stalin's terror, Hitler's mass murder of the Jews, World War II, the bewildering twists and turns of the post-Stalin era. If your idea of a memoir runs to family dysfunction and authorial disgruntlement, or to people going on about their houses and travels, ''Ester and Ruzya'' will remind you how much life, history and emotional and moral complexity the genre can convey in the hands of a wonderful writer. " More.

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Let Us Now Praise Satirical Jews

"Let us now praise satirical Jews. It's a noble tradition that includes such luminaries as Groucho Marx, Fran Lebowitz and Jon Stewart, outsiders who mock society with a surgical scalpel of wit to reveal the ridiculous in sharp relief. To that illustrious group some may consider adding writer Shalom Auslander. In his debut collection of short stories, Beware of God, Auslander takes his knife to the pious veneer of modern-day religious Jewish life and makes sport of exposing its underbelly. For the Gen-X and Gen-Y Jews who wear 'Moses Is My Homeboy' T-shirts and read Heeb magazine, a poet laureate may be in the making."

Ruth Andrew Ellison reviewed Shalom Auslander's debut story collection, Beware of God, in the L. A. Times in 2005. Read more.

Auslander visits the Institute tomorrow, Thursday, 3/1.

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John Hodgman: I Don't Really Have an Attic

Shalom Auslander, who visits Thursday, March 1st, asks fellow humorist John Hodgman to hide him in the event of a second Holocaust in a book trailer for his new novel, Hope: A Tragedy.

Hodgman explains that he doesn't have an attic in his New York City apartment but that he does have three small storage units. Regarding the logistics, he wonders whether Auslander is fond of both his children. See the YouTube video.

Hodgman, who played the uncool PC in Apple's long-running "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, visited the Institute in 2005.

Picture: Hodgman and Justin Long in a "Get a Mac" ad.

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Will You Hide Me?

Anticipating a second Holocaust, Shalom Auslander, who visits on March 1st, asks fellow humorist Sarah Vowell whether she will shelter him and his family in her New York City apartment.

The video is part of a series of book trailers for Auslander's novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012). The trailers feature a number of Auslander's co-contributors to NPR's This American Life.

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Two Jews Lost in a Holocaust Museum

Alexander Nazaryan of the Daily News gets a first-hand experience of the dark, angry humor of Shalom Auslander (who visits 3/1):

"We were somewhere near the Warsaw Ghetto when Shalom Auslander’s anger started to kick in. He was angry because he had wanted to see pictures of female Israeli soldiers, but there were none on display that day at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. He was angry because he had not been able to find cigarettes in Battery Park City before coming to meet me there on a cold Wednesday afternoon. He was angry because I kept waving my voice recorder in his face. I pointed out the dangers of misquotation. His small eyes glowed." More.

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A Capricious God

"[Shalom Auslander] is scabrously funny, especially on faith and meaning, but his stories have a habit of breaking down. This is partly because his great subject, God's capriciousness, is a closed loop and as such can be difficult to frame as narrative. 'Pascal's last words were: May God never abandon me,' he observes early in the novel. 'A moment later, God did.' In such a universe, it's not that bad things happen to good people, but that everything that happens is ultimately defined by its own meaninglessness, by the futility of being alive."

Read more of David Ulin's review in the L. A. Times.

Shalom Auslander visits the Writers Institute on March 1st.

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Writing in the Attic

Here's Janet Maslin on Shalom Auslander (who visits March 1st) in Wednesday's New York Times:

"He brings to mind Woody Allen, Joseph Heller and — oxymoron here — a libido-free version of Philip Roth."

More.

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Jewish Author Builds Mosque in Cambodia

Together with his family, author and theoretical physicist Alan Lightman (who visits February 2nd) has created a charitable foundation to improve the lives of women and children in the third world.

From the Associated Press, May 2008: "American Jewish family builds mosque in Cambodian village"

When residents of this poor Cambodian village need something built, they call on the Lightmans.

The Jewish-American family's latest gift: A mosque.

"We never had such a beautiful mosque in our village," said 81-year-old Leb Sen, a toothless, village elder with a wrinkled face. "The young people said to me that I am very lucky to live long enough to see one now."

Flashing a broad grin, Leb Sen brought his palms together and bowed repeatedly in gratitude toward his American donors - Alan Lightman, his wife, Jean Greenblatt Lightman and their daughter, Elyse.

Alan Lightman, a 59-year-old humanities professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said building the mosque was not part of his family's original plan to improve education in the village, about 70 kilometres northwest of the capital, Phnom Penh.

"It's too much to comprehend. We never imagined that we would build a mosque in a remote village in Cambodia," said Lightman, author of the bestselling novel "Einstein's Dreams." More.

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The Civil War, and His Yiddish Great-Grandfather

Tony Horwitz (who visits Thursday 11/17) was introduced to the Civil War, a lifelong obsession, by his Yiddish great-grandfather, who shared that obsession. He talks about this in the first chapter of Confederates in the Attic:

"In 1965, a century after Appomattox, the Civil War began for me at a musty apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. My great-grandfather held a magnifying glass to his spectacles and studied an enormous book spread open on the rug. Peering over his shoulder, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets. I was six, Poppa Isaac 101. Egg-bald, barely five feet tall, Poppa Isaac lived so frugally that he sliced cigarettes in half before smoking them. An elderly relative later told me that Poppa Isaac bought the book of Civil War sketches soon after emigrating to America in 1882. He often shared it with his children and grandchildren before I came along. Years later, I realized what was odd about this one vivid memory of my great-grandfather. Isaac Moses Perski fled Czarist Russia as a teenaged draft dodger--in Yiddish, a shirker--and arrived at Ellis Island without money or English or family. He worked at a Lower East Side sweatshop and lived literally on peanuts, which were cheap, filling and nutritious. Why, I wondered, had this thrifty refugee chosen as one of his first purchases in America a book written in a language he could barely understand, about a war in a land he barely knew, a book that he kept poring over until his death at 102?" More.

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