by Rafaël Newman My father’s mother—Annie Newman, my grandmother or Bubbi—was born Hannah Dubin in a shtetl in what is now Ukraine a few years before the Great War. One of her earliest recollections—in addition to the image of her own grandmother hiding in a baby carriage to escape marauding Cossacks—was of being able to…

by Rafaël Newman In the 1960s, when I was a boy growing up on the west side of Montreal, whenever my father needed a hit of soul food — a smoked-meat sandwich, some pickled herring, or a ball of chopped liver with grivenes—he would head east (northeast, really, in my hometown’s skewed-grid street plan) to…

by Rafaël Newman My favorite bookstore closed this month. Well, my favorite bookstore in Zurich, where I live. Also it hasn’t actually closed, it’s only changing hands. But Pile of Books, opened in 2007 by Daniel Nufer and run by him and his wife, Verena Nufer-Huber, until two weeks ago, has been such an expression…

by Rafaël Newman On two separate occasions in mid-February this year, the Swiss parliament, or Bundeshaus, and adjoining ministry buildings in Bern had to be evacuated and searched following bomb threats. During the first incident, in which a lone man in military dress attempting to clear security at the parliament was apprehended when traces of…

by Rafaël Newman It’s been 90 years since Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, on January 30, 1933, despite his party, the NSDAP, having failed to achieve a majority in the elections to the Reichstag held the previous year; so naturally I’ve been thinking about Max Liebermann. Born decades before the establishment of the German Empire,…

by Rafaël Newman When we began, our gods were junior, Their profits, and our problems, punier. The deities who drilled at dawn Paraded in a pantheon: Born out of Chaos and castration, Theirs was a piebald population. They mingled with a breed of men And women we’ll not see again, Who shared those gods’ own…

by Rafaël Newman Because I work part time developing a terminology database at a large econometric institute; and because it is important that, in this capacity, I remain abreast not only of raw vocabulary but also of the substance of recent developments in financial technology, known by its Orwellian moniker “FinTech”; and because the owl…

by Rafaël Newman Last month, after a three-year hiatus imposed by the pandemic, I was again able to participate in a once regular study-abroad junket, assisting a professor at the Swiss university where I serve as adjunct. The professor, to whom I happen to be married, was leading a group of 22 students on so-called…

by Rafaël Newman Today I am giving thanks for the life and work of John Prine, the late, great American singer-songwriter, whose date of birth is October 10, 1946, and who died, of COVID-19, on April 7, 2020. I am listening to his music and thinking about where he came from, and where he wound…

by Rafaël Newman As forced migration in the wake of war and climate change continues, and various administrations attempt to additionally restrict the movement of people while further “freeing” the flow of capital, national borders, nativism, and a sense of cultural rootedness have re-emerged as acceptable topics in a globalized order that had until recently…

by Rafaël Newman More poetry, my response to loss. John Weir It’s 1980, I’ve just had my first proper kiss, and the newspapers are announcing the death of love. Well, not quite. But that’s how it would come to feel in retrospect: amid all the rumors, the myths, the half-truths, the superstitions, the warnings. The…

by Joseph Roth (translated and adapted by Rafaël Newman) Every now and then, a nation becomes modern. Greeks and Poles and Russians were modern, for a time. Now it’s the Ukrainians’ turn. The Ukrainians, about whom we and the rest of the Western world know little more than that they reside somewhere between the Caucasus…

by Rafaël Newman I had a colleague, a great reader, whose favorite material was mid-century Japanese short-form realism. Frequently epistolary and often featuring at least one frame narrative, these novellas typically have as their narrator someone captivated, not to say obsessed, by a memory; and that memory, it seemed to me when I read the…

by Rafaël Newman The month of May begins and ends with festivals of rebirth—at least here in Zurich, where May Day, the “Revolutionary First of May,” is a statutory holiday, while Ascension, the commemoration of Jesus’s foundational transubstantiation, having been retained as a feast day by the local Protestant reformers, is routinely observed on the…

by Rafaël Newman You’ve heard the story before. The poet Orpheus, celebrated for the enchanting quality of his voice, is grieving the sudden death of his young wife Eurydice. In his despair he resolves to harrow the Underworld, where he so impresses the god Hades with his singing that he is permitted to retrieve the…

by Rafaël Newman For John Duffy (November 5, 1963—March 3, 2022) …great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep,…

by Rafaël Newman It’s the final day of February 2022, a month that began with the centenary of the publication, on February 2, 1922, of Ulysses, on what was also the 40th birthday of its author, James Joyce. Commemorations were held, among other places, in Dublin, where Joyce was born and which plays a central…

by Rafaël Newman One afternoon in the 1980s, when I was at grad school at a university in the northeastern United States, I went for coffee with a slightly senior colleague. A boisterous, opinionated, well-liked Brooklyn native, she was renowned (or notorious, depending on one’s philologico-political position) for applying the latest “French theory” to ancient…

by Rafaël Newman Beginnings are a theme for sages, For adepts of our Golden Ages: When the victuals were prodigious, And division un-litigious— Since the stores, in their abundance, Rendered striving a redundance; Why in gardens Paradisal Our ancestors scorned reprisal As they supped upon the flower That was bounty, boon, and bower; How dread…

by Rafaël Newman Leave plenty of time to stand in line at the gift shop when you visit Einsiedeln Abbey, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. The Klosterladen, in a courtyard to the right of the 18th-century complex—which is built on the site of the 9th-century hermitage where Saint Meinrad was sustained by the Waldleute,…