Andrea Scrima’s first book, the novel A Lesser Day, was rereleased in a second edition in 2018 (Spuyten Duyvil Press) to accompany the publication of a German translation (Wie viele Tage, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz). A German edition of her second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins (Kreisläufe) was published by Literaturverlag Droschl in the fall of 2021. Scrima’s essays and criticism can be read in journals including The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, The Millions, Music & Literature, The Scofield, Schreibheft, and Manuskripte. She was the recipient of a literature fellowship and several research grants from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in Berlin, Germany and took part in writing residencies at Schloß Salem, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, and Ledig House, New York. She is editor-in-chief at the Berlin- and Brooklyn-based online literary magazine StatORec and co-edited the recently published anthology Writing the Virus (Outpost19 Books), a New York Times Sunday Book Review “New & Noteworthy” title of 2021. Email: a.scrima [at] t-online.de
by Andrea Scrima Sometimes it’s a single detail that hits home: a little girl’s pink shoe, for instance, with remnants of the delicate fabric still intact, unearthed among the hundreds of worn-down shoe soles and other objects found in the course of an archaeological excavation on the grounds of the former Liebenau camp in Graz,…
by Andrea Scrima Part I of this is here. #4: OWWW Pain is a private experience that happens within an individual body; it is internal and essentially invisible. As much as we might commiserate, we cannot “share” another’s pain; we can merely witness the behavior it induces, inquire into the nature of the pain, and…
by Andrea Scrima #1: SAYING NO In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben…
by Andrea Scrima Americans are often smiled upon for their need to identify with their ancestors’ heritage; there’s something naïve and childlike about it, as though we were hoping to find a family somewhere, waiting with open arms for the long-lost child who has finally come home. We describe ourselves with the usual hyphenated ethnic…
by Andrea Scrima In November 2023, in an essay for the German national newspaper die taz, I wrote that Germany’s Jews were once again afraid for their lives. It was—and is—a shameful state of affairs, considering that the country has invested heavily in coming to terms with its fascist past and has made anti-antisemitism and…
by Andrea Scrima Twenty years ago, John Reed made an unexpected discovery: “If Orwell esoterica wasn’t my foremost interest, I eventually realized that, in part, it was my calling.” In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, ideas that had been germinating suddenly coalesced, and in three weeks’ time Reed penned a parody of George Orwell’s…
by Andrea Scrima 1. What is power? The answer is relative, contingent on context. We speak of the power of sexual allure, the power of persuasion, of charisma, but these only rarely translate into sustainable structures of actual dominance. In a capitalist democracy, power is generally economic and political; it’s less frequently defined as intellectual…
by Andrea Scrima Sequel to the essay “Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue.” It’s disorienting when cities lose their gray zones—the undefined plots of fallow land that used to line the banks on the Brooklyn side of the East River, for instance, the nineteenth-century warehouses, docks, and quietly deteriorating,…
by Andrea Scrima (excerpt from a work-in-progress) When they arrived in the U.S., Southern Italians brought with them the sense that they’d been branded as underdogs, that they belonged and would forever belong to a lower class, but the birth of the Italian-American gangster was rooted in attitudes toward the Mezzogiorno that dated back far…
by Andrea Scrima (excerpt from a work-in-progress) My father, the son of Italian immigrants, was a member of the working class. There were things within reach, and things that were not in reach, and he accepted this. He never pushed his children to broaden their horizons, and would have been satisfied to see them in…
by Andrea Scrima I moved to Berlin in 1984, but have rarely written about my experiences living in a foreign country; now that I think about it, it occurs to me that I lived here as though in exile those first few years, or rather as though I’d been banished, as though it hadn’t been…
By Andrea Scrima It’s said that European societies are always about assimilation, and that’s almost true, but not entirely. Minority cultures alter the dominant culture in subtle ways. My twenty-one-year-old son speaks with a Turkish-inflected accent he shares with most boys his age who have grown up in Berlin. It’s a mark of masculinity, of…
by Andrea Scrima This past spring, I found myself sitting, masked, at a wooden desk among a scattering of scientific researchers at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Next to me was a thick reference book on the history of astronomical instruments and a smaller work on the sundials and other measuring devices built into the…
A Conversation between Andrea Scrima and Anike Joyce Sadiq The following conversation took place from November 2021 to February 2022 via e-mail in reaction to a general meeting of the Villa Romana Association that took place on October 28, 2021 in Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. The authors participated in this meeting in their function as members, having…
by Andrea Scrima March 1, 2022 I left Florence exactly two years ago, a week after the first Corona lockdowns went into effect on February 22, 2020; I returned to the city for the first time yesterday, just as Russian attacks on Ukraine shifted into full gear. Back in Berlin, the war felt suddenly very…
by Andrea Scrima In her second novel Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl, 2021) Andrea Scrima unpacks a family story of strong emotional ties. When the first-person narrator Felice finds her deceased father’s diaries, she combs them for clues to a past riddled with blind spots. She abandons a drawing series because…
Like Lips, Like Skins, Andrea Scrima’s second novel (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl 2021), is a diptych; the first half of the book is dedicated to the first-person narrator’s mother, the second half to her late father. We meet Felice in the early eighties as a young art student in New York and as a…
by Andrea Scrima Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky’s long-awaited biography of the Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser, is erudite, painstakingly thorough, and sensitively written. Readers of Walser finally have a volume that connects the development of the writer’s work and its publishing history to the various episodes of his peripatetic adult life in the…
by Andrea Scrima Oh patria mia, mai più ti rivedrò! Mai più! Mai più ti rivedrò! O cieli azzurri o dolci aure native Dove sereno il mio mattin brillò O verdi colli o profumate rive O patria mia, mai più ti rivedrò! (Oh my homeland, I will never see you again! No more! Never see…
by Andrea Scrima “If the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is accursed.” 1. In his 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which postulates two quintessential moral dispositions at the heart of history’s main opposing ideologies, Isaiah Berlin divides the world’s influential writers into two categories of thought. Elaborating…