Rafaël Newman studied classical philology at the University of Toronto and comparative literature at Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate. He has published essays on literature and contemporary culture in German and English in Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland and the United States. He is the author of The Visible God: Staging the History of Money (UPA, 1999) and the editor of Zweifache Eigenheit: Neuere jüdische Literatur in der Schweiz (Limmat Verlag, 2001) and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Switzerland: An Anthology (UNP, 2002). His poetry has appeared in journals and collections, most recently in Live Long Enough (Paekakariki, 2017), and on two CDs: We Are The NewMen (EyeMix, 2008) and Everything Is Good (EyeMix, 2010). He lives and works in Zurich as a translator, companion to addicts in recovery, and moderator. Email: rnewman [at] gmx.net
by Rafaël Newman If she hadn’t died in July 1987, at the age of 81, my maternal grandmother would be celebrating her 120th birthday this week. One-hundred-and-twenty is a proverbial age among Ashkenazi Jews, who recite the Yiddish formula Biz hundert un tsvantsik, or “[You should live] to 120,” on the anniversary of a birth.…
by Rafaël Newman One hundred and sixty years ago this month, in a national referendum held on January 14, 1866, Jews were given the official right to reside throughout Switzerland. Jewish people, whether of foreign provenance or Swiss-born and already living on Swiss territory, had been explicitly forbidden to establish residency in Switzerland in its…
by Rafaël Newman At the end of each of the past twelve years I have written a long rhyming ballad, reviewing the period coming to a close, giving thanks for some events and lamenting others. I began in December 2013, while I was recovering from a lengthy illness; and I recited what would be the…
by Rafaël Newman Some of the best new music is 100 years old. On October 21, 1925, the Anglo-American composer and violist Rebecca Clarke presented a program of her own compositions at London’s Wigmore Hall: Sonata for Viola and Pianoforte Trio for Pianoforte, Violin and Violoncello “Midsummer Moon” and “Chinese Puzzle” for Violin and Pianoforte…
by Rafaël Newman In June 1932, half a year before Adolf Hitler was sworn in as German Chancellor, Victor Klemperer watched Nazis on a newsreel marching through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, whose area of specialization was the 18th century and the French Enlightenment,…
by Rafaël Newman On Yom Kippur this year, I went to church. I hadn’t intended to go; or rather, I hadn’t noticed that the Jewish Day of Atonement would coincide with the date of the performance I had been planning to attend, and which was to be held in a church. I had realized just…
by Rafaël Newman At the University of Toronto one winter term in the mid-1980s I took an undergraduate course on classical philology. The instructor was Hugh Mason, a British-born Marxist who once reproved me for wearing a white dress shirt to give a presentation, something he maintained “only a fascist” would have done in his…
by Rafaël Newman Language changes. And I’m fine with that, particularly since it wouldn’t make any difference if I weren’t. I have made my peace with the attrition of the oblique case of the interrogative pronoun—“Who to follow”1 instead of whom; with the replacement of the subjunctive by the indicative in result clauses—“Yet the exorbitant…
by Rafaël Newman On a sunny Saturday towards the end of last month we took a train to Moutier in the west of Switzerland, half an hour from the French border, to attend an opera in a shooting range. We had tickets to hear my friend Annina Haug sing the role of Fenena in Giuseppe…
by Rafaël Newman Zurich was James Joyce’s home on several occasions. The writer’s first sojourn there, in 1904, was brief: when the prospect of a job teaching English in Switzerland didn’t pan out, he and his partner, Nora Barnacle, freshly arrived from Dublin, soon moved on to Trieste, then still the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s only seaport.…
by Rafaël Newman On September 29, 1978, Albino Luciani, who had been elected Pope John Paul I just 33 days earlier, on August 26, 1978, was found dead in his bed, his death likely due to a heart attack. Luciani had succeeded Paul VI, who was himself preceded by John XXIII—the two Popes were commemorated…
by Rafaël Newman If I were asked to name the creed in which I was raised, the ideology that presented itself to me in the garb of nature, I would proceed by elimination. It wasn’t Judaism, although my father’s parents were orthodox Jewish immigrants from the Czarist Pale, and we celebrated Passover with them as…
by Rafaël Newman This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Third Reich, and thus of the industrialized mass murder known as the Holocaust, or Shoah—although 1945 was not the end, according to Timothy Snyder, of World War Two. That conflict, the historian maintains, was pursued by the otherwise victorious imperial powers…
by Rafaël Newman The National Library of Kosovo is perched above downtown Prishtina. Built in the early 1980s and now with holdings of some two million, the complex resembles a mashup of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat with a flying squadron of geodesic domes, the whole unaccountably draped in chainmail. During the war in Kosovo in the…
by Rafaël Newman January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intellectual history in Germany, organized a performance of lyrical…
by Rafaël Newman An empire, threatened on its flank, vents spleen Upon the would-be sovereign state between Its borders and a surly host beyond— Which wavers not with weapons to respond; The fray’s then joined by nations treaty bound To emperors (one more, one less self-crowned): And thus the world comes closer to a war…
by Rafaël Newman Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to…
by Rafaël Newman Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the aims of TETI Group, an “interdisciplinary research platform to investigate…
by Rafaël Newman I have always been tall. Or rather, I have been aware of my above-average height since puberty, when freakish physical change kicks in, mischievously, in concert with enhanced self-consciousness. At age 14 I moved with my mother and siblings from the Vancouver suburbs to midtown Toronto, where the students at my new…
by Rafaël Newman Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes. As he approached his…