Saturday night was the annual Long Night of the Synagogues, part of the Jewish Cultural Days that came to an end on Sunday evening. I wasn’t really planning on attending, but news of a concert by the Berlin Synagogue Choir (yeh - who knew?) a mere three blocks from my house roused me from my computer. I sped over to the Fraenkelufer Synagogue, a traditional congregation by the Landwehrkanal, a tree-lined tributary of the Spree that runs between Kreuzberg and its southern neighbor Neukölln. I was a few minutes late and had to make my way up to the ezrat nashim, or Women’s Gallery. Entering the sanctuary, I was stunned to discover how pack it was, and stared down from the gallery at the sea of black nylon yarmulkes bending in the direction of the choir loft, where the aforementioned “Berlin Synagogue Choir” (Berliner Synagogalchor)- five women and one of the synagogue’s chazzanim (cantors), Jochen Fahlenkamp, performed under the direction of Monika Almekias-Siegl, who accompanied on the electric organ.

The hour-long program consisted mostly of liturgical pieces, the majority plucked from Kabalat Shabbat, the tuneful Friday night service that welcomes in the sabbath day. The one exception was a lovely rendition of “Eli, Eli,” the well-known song based on the poem Halikha LeKesariya by the Hungarian-Jewish poet Hannah Szenes, who died as a partisan during the Second World War.

Here are some musical selections from that evening. Enjoy!

Benjamin Moser

Oxford University Press

July 2009

A.J. Goldmann

The French writer Hélène Cixous likened her to a female Kafka and the Elizabeth Bishop claimed she was “better than Borges.” In Brazil today, her books are sold in vending machines in subway stations and her image adorns postage stamps. But the Portuguese-language author Clarice Lispector has yet to secure a place of widespread literary recognition in this country.

Now, we have the first English-language biography of the writer from Benjamin Moser, New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine.

The unfortunate dearth of translations of her works has meant the sensual and utterly unique prose of this “radical mystic author” is not as widely known as it should be. In the English-speaking work, her reputation mostly rests on the collection of short stories Family Ties and her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasonva on December 10, 1920 in Checkelnik, part of the western Ukrainian province of Podolia. Her parent fled the pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, and arrived in Brazil when Clarice was not a year and a half old. The family settled in Recife, where the first synagogue of the New World, Kahal zur Israel had been founded in 1637.

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” the mysterious and beautiful author once responded to a journalist’s question about similarities between her and one of her fictional creations. Throughout this unique biography, Moser uses her novels as a key to unlock the mysteries of her life, which he often examines through the prism of Jewish mysticism.

“I am a mystic,” she once professed in an interview. Moser argues that Lispector struck out in search of the God who abandoned her and recorded that search through her writings as bound up in questions of language and its utility in understanding God. Moser claims that Lispector partook in the mystical experience by “removing language to discover an ultimate and necessarily nameless, truth.”

The connections the Moser makes between Lispector’s spiritual atheism and the Jewish mystical tradition is the most interesting part of his analysis, although he doesn’t give himself the space necessary to make a thoroughly convincing argument. For instance, Moser uses mysticism to fuse Lispector’s preoccupations with God and language as represented by “the great holy name of God, which for the Jews is simultaneously unknowable and the ultimate mystical goal.”

Following Gershom Scholem, Moser claims that “mysticism as a historical phenomenon is a product of crises.” Moser contends that the “tragic consistency” of the Jewish experience allowed Lispector to recreate ”the entire ethical and spiritual structure of Judaism” in her fiction. Jewish motifs are, he claims are, “reworked, disguised, but undeniably present,” he claims. But were they deliberate? In a footnote, Moser tells us that the Jewish ideas in her fiction “seem to have developed from her own insights, not from any prolonged study of other writers.”

The exception here is Spinoza. Moser mentions the recent discovery of a French anthology of Spinoza in Lispector’s library that explains the Spinozian echoes in her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. There she wrote: “Nothing else can be created, only revealed.” Like Spinoza, she rejected the idea of a conscious God as “horribly unsatisfying.” In essence, part of the vision of the novel is of the world as a constant flow, “an infinite chain of cause and effect.”

Lispector was often accused of being obscure and avant-garde, but she herself claimed to never be playing games. Moser makes a convincing argument for seeing her unique writing style as part of her lifelong quest for an “authentic language in which meaning and expression are finally united.”

In Near to the Wild Heart, Lispector wrote that “vision consists of capturing the symbol of the thing in the thing itself,” which Moser links to the mystical quest of “the word that has its own light”: “Just as God, in Clarice’s writing, is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses,” he argues.

Moser uses the cabalistic notion of striving for nothingness as a way of encountering the divine to describe Lispector’s agenda. Moser most successfully integrates his discussion of mysticism, Spinoza and language in discussing The Passion According to G.H. It is here, Moser contends, that she describes her encounter with God, whom she approaches only passing through “the opposite of the thing being approached,” until she reaches the conclusion that “beyond mankind, there is nothing else at all.”

As Moser shows, Lispector was not always a critical darling. Critics wrote of “the writer tangled in her own web of precious images” and prose that “succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.”

Even after we’ve been being guided through “one of the most extraordinary careers in twentieth-century literature,” Lispector remains as cryptic as much of her fiction, since Moser serves us generous helpings of mysticism and literary criticism. It is equally puzzling when her reputation was made. At various points in the book, Moser tells us “by now, she was a household name,” or “she enjoyed a great reputation throughout Latin America.” The book leaves off with the author’s death in 1977 and does not discuss her posthumous reception and influence.

While the book is thoroughly researched and well written, Moser’s analysis of Lispector’s output is somewhat uneven (he hardly discusses Family Ties except to say that it “cemented her reputation”) and the book suffers in places from frequent repetition and a not a few grandiose statements.

For an author as radically individualistic as Lispector, it is difficult to compare her with other authors, and Moser rarely attempts this. Brazilian literary critics often drew connections with modernists, but Lispector herself denied the influence of figures like Joyce and Woolf.

In the end, “Why this World” is an uneasy mixture of biographical sleuthing, mystical exegesis and literary analysis; the last of which is most successful in discussing G.H. and The Hour of the Star, the work where “her inflexible individuality would find its last and greatest expression.” What isn’t as persuasive is whether Clarice truly “became her own fiction.” Even so, Moser should be applauded for writing a biography that will hopefully introduce Lispector to a broader readership.

From Today’s WSJ / wsj.com:

A.J. Goldmann

Berlin

Copious Gropius

No artistic movement of the 20th century has been more lauded, ­debated, misunderstood and maligned than the Bauhaus, the interdisciplinary workshop for modernity whose name has ­become practically synonymous with the stripped-down functionalism that the movement brought to architecture and ­design in the short-lived Weimar Republic.

Bauhaus turns 90 this year and Berlin is celebrating with “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model.” The exhibit presents a comprehensive overview of the school in all its plurality and paradox. The exhibit is organized by Germany’s three main Bauhaus institutes, the ­Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, with assistance from the ­Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a more modest version of the show will be mounted in November.

With nearly 1,000 ­objects—including models, studies, paintings, photographs and furniture—spread over the ground-floor galleries of this stately neoclassical building, the exhibit is the largest Bauhaus retrospective ever mounted and the first time that the three Bauhaus institutes, once separated by the Iron Curtain, have collaborated.

“There are different notions, or different views of the Bauhaus in the three different institutions,” says Annemarie ­Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Berlin. “There isn’t one Bauhaus, but many Bauhäuser,” she adds, stressing the amount of transformation within the Bauhaus itself during the years of the school’s existence first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and ­finally (briefly) in Berlin.

“Bauhaus” is often tossed around as a catchall phrase for the constellation of modernism, design and architecture. ­Another misconception is that Bauhaus refers to a specific ­architectural style noted for its clarity and functionality; in fact, this was true of only one phase of the Bauhaus, a two-year ­period in Dessau under the ­directorship of Hannes Meyer. “Many people think that Bauhaus is a style, or a period, or that Bauhaus stands for modernism, for everything that was created between the two World Wars and maybe even afterwards,” Ms. Jaeggi said. But, she noted, Bauhaus was only a piece in the puzzle of European modernism.

Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, was fueled by populist ideas. He spoke of Bauhaus’s ability to unite individuals “using the idea of new producing, working and living communities.” Responding to the “eclecticism” of contemporary trends in art, his goal was to merge the arts under the wing of architecture. In 1923, he pronounced a new ideal: “art and technology—the new unity.”

The bursts of creativity and exuberance are seen in the roles that Bauhaus masters and students took in Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and Dadaism. It is discernible in a list of the school’s teachers: Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers were internationally recognized artists all, but the Bauhaus was for many of them just one stage in a long and varied career.

At the Bauhaus, Gropius had a tough time controlling all the egos he had gathered around him. The Bauhaus masters could often outdo Gropius in the loftiness of their proclamations. Johannes Itten, who structured and taught the school’s preliminary course, the Vorkurs, told his students “to awaken the personal life that is inherent in the form.” Klee, who later taught the course, stressed a study of nature to “freely design abstract shapes that go beyond the forcedly schematic and arrive at a new naturalness, the naturalness of the work.” The exhibit showcases teaching materials and exercises from the Vorkurs, ­including myriad studies in composition, contrast, rhythm, material and form. What all these classroom analyses show is the intense dissection and experimentation being pursued by both masters and disciples.

The exhibit progresses both chronologically and thematically, with different colors corresponding to periods and topics. Most of the time, displayed items are left to speak for themselves, without much in the way of accompanying text.

One of the most extraordinary items is Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Space Modulator” (1922-30), a mechanical apparatus that fuses light and color with movement inside of a blue and purple display. In his Vorkurs, Moholy-Nagy emphasized visual and tactile perception. The importance that he ­attached to light can be gleaned through his photography and filmmaking, and this kinetic sculpture was, in a sense, a logical outcome of his fascination.

The exhibition makes clear the double sense in which Bauhaus was a school: It was a new approach to art, comparable to other European modernist movements; but it was also an academy, a community, a social entity. The photos of everyday life at the Bauhäuser—students playing sports, attending parties, playing music and creating their art—affirm this rapturous description in Tom Wolfe’s otherwise critical book “From Bauhaus to Our House”: “It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus.”

In the artistically and experimentally charged atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Bauhaus strove to be exemplary and exceptional. To this end, its members harnessed propaganda to spread their message. Many items on display deal with how the school ensured it was talked about. Its name became a seal of quality and a label. This branding is responsible for the enduring misunderstandings about Bauhaus, as well as its lasting successes.

Ninety years on, it’s tough to pin the Bauhaus down, and the exhibit shies away from raising critical questions about its guiding philosophy. Concentrating on the 14 years of the school’s existence, the ­exhibit doesn’t interest itself in the Bauhaus’s origins or reception: neither the parallel theories of art education in Germany during the Weimar Republic nor the world-wide spread of Bauhaus in the postwar era.

But even without these perspectives, the show brings the Bauhaus vividly to life as a movement in a constant state of flux between idealism and ­indecision.