by Rafaël Newman History is the one true fatality: you can re-read it as much as you like, but you can’t re-write it. —Laurent Binet One of my oldest friends, an economic historian who serves as the Academic Director of a museum of Jewish life in northern Germany, is, like me, a child of May;…

by Rafaël Newman It’s been 40 years this past month since the election of François Mitterrand as President of France. Today, June 21, is the day chosen by his first Minister of Culture for the Fête de la Musique: what has come to be known as “World Music Day” in the English-speaking countries that have…

by Jurczok 1001 The article below was published in German on Mother’s Day in Republik, in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of Swiss women’s right to vote. The text appears here in English translation by Rafaël Newman.  I had heard many of the stories before, but today, on Mother’s Day, they took on…

by Rafaël Newman Love is as strong as death, but no stronger. The NewMen, “Uncle Leo” On Saturday, April 10, 2021, in Fribourg in the west of Switzerland, Besuch der Lieder, the troupe of musicians with whom I serve as a dramaturge, staged its first performance after a hiatus of more than a year: for…

by Rafaël Newman By a quirk of the calendars, Passover, the annual commemoration of the flight from bondage, is precisely coterminous this year with Academic Travel. This latter, a twice-yearly feature of the university in Switzerland at which I am guest teaching this semester, is that institution’s “signature program”: a week-and-a-half course, typically offered in…

by Rafaël Newman Mourning is in season. Newspapers of record these days publish interactive mass obituaries, images of “ordinary” people fallen to “the opioid crisis” or to Covid-19 (the front page of the Sunday New York Times was recently riven down the middle by a monolith composed of thousands of dots, growing denser towards the…

by Rafaël Newman In the summer of 1977 my father invited me to tea at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. I had turned 13 that spring, and instead of a bar mitzvah, prohibited by matrilineal descent and an antipathy to organized religion, my father and I were en route to Israel, to visit the…

by Rafaël Newman Arma virusque cano: Sing, O Muse, through me, the wandering Of something lowly, microscopic, But found at both Poles, and each Tropic. An opportunist virus, which Is banished by mere soap (or bleach), And yet has billions, masked, in arma, Awaiting backup from Big Pharma! Now, whether to the Orient The creature…

by Rafaël Newman All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors… —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2019 When I was quite…

by Rafaël Newman It’s November 9 – what Europeans, with their rational, smallest-to-greatest date format, might call “9/11”, if that particular shorthand hadn’t already been otherwise coopted for the 21st-century world’s symbology. At the same time, Europeans, particularly Germans, would be hard pressed to say which of the several events to have taken place on…

by Rafaël Newman A system update recently downloaded to my cellphone included artificial intelligence capable of facial recognition. I know this because, when I subsequently opened the “Gallery” function to send a photograph, I discovered that the refurbished app had taken it upon itself to create a new “album” (alongside “Camera”, “Downloads” and “Screenshots”) called…

by Rafaël Newman For the staff of Flussbad Oberer Letten On a warm evening in late August I was basking by the Limmat, the river that runs through downtown Zurich, alongside substantially fewer than the 400 permitted in the public bathing area in the past several weeks: school holidays had just ended and work had…

by Rafaël Newman On the first day of August in Year One AC (anno coronae), I boarded an Intercity train in Zurich bound for Singen, in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. In Singen I transferred to the Intercity headed to Stuttgart but left the train a few stops shy of the state capital, at…

by Rafaël Newman I may rise in the morning and notice that a long overdue spring rainfall has revived the flagging vegetation in my kitchen garden. I may give thanks to an unseen, benevolent power for this respite from a protracted and wasting drought. And I may record in my journal: “The heavens cannot horde…

by Rafaël Newman A friend of mine, a retired Swiss high school teacher and an aficionado of American culture, has been compiling a list of “Pseudo Anglicisms”, words of evident English origin used in contemporary colloquial German (especially in Switzerland) which often have no actual correspondence in English as commonly employed by native speakers. His…

by Rafaël Newman Morgan Meis, The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (Slant Books, 2020) Reviewing a new translation of the Iliad, the military historian Edward Luttwak speculates about the enduring popularity of the ancient epic: Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of…

by Rafaël Newman For C.J. Newman My father is no longer at home. He returned to Montreal, the city of his birth, on retirement from the University of British Columbia, and has been living in the bottom half of a duplex in the Mile End district since. Some time ago he decided to sell the…

by Rafaël Newman Some years ago, a friend told me about his dilettantish taste for nicotine, indulgence in which, however, he noted ruefully, was often thwarted by his young daughter. He supposed the vehemence of her protests derived, simply, from a concern for his health – to which I responded, perhaps: but that there might…

by Rafaël Newman Notwithstanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca, translation continues to be a vital component of international relations, whether political, commercial, or cultural. In certain cases, translation is also necessary nationally, for instance in countries comprising more than one significant linguistic group. This is so in Switzerland, which voted by…

by Rafaël Newman For Eva, mère & fille; and for Tom Yesterday was James Joyce’s birthday. His one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh. Or would have been, if he hadn’t died, in Zurich, in January 1941, but were instead swelling the ranks of the current generation of supercentenarians, their increasing longevity bedeviling the demographics departments of local life insurers. Joyce…