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 I recently came across a certain Grimms’ fairy tale for the first time, one I had overlooked in the past: Die Boten des Todes, or “Death’s Messengers.” Here it is, in a slightly abbreviated English translation: Once, a long time ago, a giant was traveling down a country road when suddenly a…
by Rafaël Newman My paternal grandfather—my Zaideh—was born in 1912 in Biała, north of Łódź in what was then Congress Poland, the Russian third of the partitioned Polish territory. At the time of his birth, Biała was a “private” town, a shtetl on lands ceded by a local nobleman within the Czar’s Pale of Settlement.…
by Rafaël Newman Not quite 25 years ago, on September 15, 2001, I took my six-year-old daughter to the opera. Her mother had arranged the outing, in part because it was clear how much Hella was beginning to enjoy musical theater—a pleasure I had learned from my own parents—and in part because, in the final…
by Rafaël Newman We went to the movies the other day, a rare occurrence. It wasn’t easy to find a film, since in Zurich at the moment most cinemas seem to be showing The Odyssey, which I don’t particularly want to see. This is for idiosyncratic reasons, some private red flags that were unfurled when…
by Rafaël Newman On June 27, 2026, the hottest day recorded to date in Berlin, I emerged from the meagre shade of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral to make a run for it across Bebelplatz, on Unter den Linden in the city’s Baroque center. I had resolved to brave the punishing late-afternoon sun for a souvenir photograph…
by Rafaël Newman About ten years ago, I received an invitation to coffee from a fellow I hadn’t seen in a while. At the time, Rolf Kuhn was teaching English at a middle school in the nearby town of Baden; our acquaintance was the result of our frequenting the same English-language bookstore—Pile of Books, still…
by Rafaël Newman Amid the present surfeit of geopolitical obscenities, one incident is distinguished—by the absurdity of its moral aesthetics. On April 20 this year, the New York Times reported that the Israeli military was investigating an IDF soldier who had allegedly sledgehammered a statue of the crucified Jesus in a village in southern Lebanon.…
by Rafaël Newman On Thursday this week I will join two of my colleagues—the mezzo Annina Haug and the pianist Edward Rushton—to present a program of poems by French authors to a private audience. We are staging our concert in Zurich, at the home of a descendant of one of those authors, the renowned Swiss-French…
by Rafaël Newman Zurich’s electorate went to the polls earlier this month on an Abstimmungstag, or “voting day”, to choose its new city parliament, the Gemeinderat; its new city council, the Stadtrat; and its new mayor, known in Zurich as the Stadtpräsident*in, or Stapi. The Gemeinderat, with 125 seats, is the largest municipal legislature in…
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…