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Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential
Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25, 144 pages
As we scroll through the final portion of human history before it gets permanently revised by AI, Ben Lerner has written a lyrical novel of loss.
This three-part novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and the Pulitzer finalist The Topeka School, presents loss in many forms: loss of recognition which leads to a confusion of identities; loss of memory which prompts whole new stories; or just, in a banal but usefully metaphorical way, the loss of the unnamed protagonist’s iPhone when he drops it in the sink near the start of the first section, “Hotel Providence.” This tech misadventure means that he will have to use an old landline to dial up his daughter before her bedtime and to rely on his frail human memory to remember the final interview he has with Thomas, his mentor and father figure.
As in his previous autofictional trilogy, Lerner uses a narrator — a writer who, like Lerner, went to Brown University — who hovers between being him and not. A writing assignment has brought him back to his alma mater, but the visit to his professor is more than just a work project. The initial piece and, as it turns out, later pieces about the trip, will be labors of love — with all the agita that accompanies those. The absent digital transcript of his interview at Brown seems to be what gives this book its name as well as what marks him as brave or foolhardy in the eyes of his peers at a later colloquium about Thomas. But the existence of the book as a “transcription” also avows the possibilities of human creativity in the face of transmission losses.
Transcription begins on a train journey and, just to prove that it is about moving away from the here and now, its first words also imply the start of a dream state: “I was falling asleep on a train.” Through the narrator, Lerner tells us as clearly as he can, that he is writing (script) in transit — and investigating how it is to rewrite from a place that is not your own. As the narrator along with Max — Thomas’ son who becomes a second narrator — recount their travels into adulthood, the book’s journey into the unknown is haunted by Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be.” Caught between fatherhood and filiation, they navigate a world that seems equal parts Escher and Kafka.
The book comprises three sections, each named for a hotel — a place to stay while dislocated: “Hotel Providence,” “[Hotel Villa Real],” and “Hotel Arbez.” The first is set punningly in Providence, the second is set in a hotel referred to in square brackets as if interposed later by editors, and the final one sits half in France and half Switzerland. Indeed, Max is named for the wartime owner of the hotel, since “during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase.”
Hotel Providence, which is located near Brown, is a name to conjure with, and Lerner — a decorated poet as well as a Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellow — conjures with it briefly as he takes his narrator to the interview. On the way, every landmark has either changed or been infused by memory, every person he sees is overlaid by his imagination. Without his phone he feels hypersensitive to his surroundings — “my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of supersensitivity” — but unlike augmented reality, his senses overlay meaning, not information.
As the narrator walks through Providence, the ghosts of his time frame his vision — “the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war.” Generational perception, shaped by how his daughter Eva views the world, also changes how he sees the streets around him. Plus, he has to actually deal with the real world in the shape of a woman who hails him by name. She “approached me with the confidence of someone sure she’d be recognized” but when she is not recognized, “she discerned my confusion and offered, mercifully, Chloe.”
Reminded by Chloe of their mutual friend Anisa, the protagonist drifts off into one of his more significant digressions, detailing the web of lies she spun, that took him further away from his college girlfriend after a split. That girlfriend, Mia, is now his wife and mother of his child, yet we never hear how the rupture was mended. In a slender volume of scarce novella length, the story of Anisa’s lies takes up valuable real estate and hits us before we get to the ostensibly major characters. The “botanical models made by glass artists” that he and Anisa see at the Natural History Museum at Harvard become the underlying metaphor for how art is created. Their story is the story upon which this story is written.
Transcription works by exploring the specific and allowing it to stand in for the general. For example, almost no one understands the magic of technology but the narrator’s parenthetical aside about a text to his dead iPhone “(I don’t understand where a message lingers, or for how long, when there isn’t a device to receive it.)” has almost spiritual connotations for a novelist who is also an award-winning poet. When he asks Chloe about Anisa, social media is able to complete the specific web of acquaintance but at the same time we remain deeply unconnected: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said, but I know from Instagram that she’s in Atlanta.”
Thomas, the mentor who left post-War Europe for Rhode Island, is described by his son, Max, as “kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman.” Max, who is the main narrator of the third section “Hotel Arbez,” is only a year older than the narrator and the two were friendly for a while at college. Thomas confuses them with one another as, increasingly, we do as readers. Their lives, their young daughters, their relationship with Thomas, merge. Max recounts the difficulty of looking after a distant elderly parent, while bringing up a child. He feels the distance from family, as many of us did, most keenly over the pandemic. The scenes of phone calls and visits that take place during and after the COVID period are intensely moving: what is done and what is said, despite what cannot be said.
The narrator’s relationships with Anisa and Mia, the near twinning of Max and the narrator, the fraught, heavy, insecure filiation of Max, narrator, Rosa and the others at the colloquium with Thomas, all of these spill over one another in ways that are endlessly reflective.
Many have written about the difficulties of conveying meaning from one person to another, from one generation to another, from one language to another. Translation, for example, is often viewed with distrust — “translation is treason” as the saying goes — but for Lerner, transcription is a new way of thinking about how we write meaning down or across or over. The concept becomes a way of thinking about translation, transmission and also, in the sense of over-writing, palimpsests — pages written over previous writing. Transcription is a function that our machines and AI can produce, but it is also the word that we use for expressing our genetic inheritance: DNA code expresses its nature through transcription into RNA.
In our age of Zoom, where we meet through machines and delegate our next steps to transcriptions and AI, it makes sense for Lerner to probe the nature of those pregnant gaps between humans that we all too often assume are filled with facts and decisions.
In the second part “[Hotel Villa Real],” the narrator continues to think about the Anisa episode about which Chloe reminded him. He googles Andrés, the Spaniard that Mia had had a fling with decades ago, an episode embroidered and extended by Anisa at the time. As if to compare the nature of testimony, he is made aware by his friend Rosa, a curator at the host institution, that his colleagues felt that he had “falsified” Thomas’ “testament” in the paper he had given, confessing that he had not recorded the final interview. Rosa says they feel his account of the night is a “deepfake.” The narrator finds it inconceivable that he is not trusted, but revisiting that evening, especially in the wake of the Anisa episode, makes it feel somehow suspect.
There is a convenient transactional conceit that a transcription will be complete or accurate but it is a convention intended for business, not for life. Everyone knows that even if Zoom transcriptions were not filled with errors, inconsistencies and nonsense, they would be woefully inadequate records of how humans experience one another. What we hear can have transactional value but, without context of the whole gestalt — the smells, the sounds, the body language of the person that we are interviewing — to claim that a recorded and transcribed interview is more accurate than a curated memory by a trusted author is to mistake the idea of veracity itself.
The closing epitaph from an artisan about how to “become a glass modeler of skill” is just the final example of how the glass touchscreens that enclose our lives are the least interesting of the ways of understanding our existence. We have no “secret apparatus” to form our worlds, but we increase our abilities by honing them from parent to child, “the touch increases in every generation.”
For Lerner, the Jewishness of his writing is in what he cannot escape: whether that is noticing the fringe cultists of Neturei Karta holding Free Palestine signs at a protest in the background of his daughter‘s FaceTime as he talks to her from abroad, the quirk of Hotel Arbez that gave Jews safe harbor from the Nazis, or the murky European history of his mentor with his Holocaust survivor wife. But in the end, what is more Jewish than a book written to study how we write and how we transmit wisdom, knowledge, information, behavior, and mistakes from generation to generation.
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Their sons are fighting for Israel, and it’s driving them mad
Oxygen and A Burning Man, two films showing at the Israel Film Center Festival, zero in on the deep-seated anxiety Israeli parents face when their sons are called to duty. Though both are flawed, each captures the universal experience of parents yearning to protect a child from outside forces that they cannot control, yet on some level helped create. They tell personal stories that are also political.
The films evoke a world where war and the threat of war are constants. The sound of warning sirens and drones abound. A repeated scene in Oxygen features apartment dwellers dashing down darkened stairways to the basement for shelter as the alerting alarms shriek in the distance.
Oxygen and A Burning Man are singularly Israeli films — I’m not sure they could be made anywhere else — and on many fronts they are stunners.
Netalie Braun’s Oxygen forges a claustrophobic space. Even the title summons forth the image of gasping for air.
The opening scene metaphorically hints at airless entrapment. Anat (brilliantly played by Dana Igvy) and her child are romping about in the waves. They are neck high in water and appear to be in the middle of the ocean. The moment conjures a nostalgic portrait, but a touch of surreal menace is also present. So too is the openly erotic relationship between mother and son, bordering on incest. They touch each other and their bodies intertwine. And later, when her son Ido (Ben Sultan) is an adult, Anat becomes even more obsessed with him.
Though Ido completes his tour of duty and is coming home, as skirmishes break out on the northern border, he volunteers to return to combat. Anat feels abandoned, betrayed and enraged. Her over-protective maternal instincts kick into high gear as she sets out to get her son discharged from duty. Storming onto the off-limits army base to confront the powers that be, Anat succeeds only in demeaning herself and publicly humiliating her already infantilized son.
Anat’s life is further complicated by her relationship with her larger-than-life warrior father (film producer Marek Rozenbaum) who suffers intense PTSD episodes thanks to his experiences in earlier wars. Sweating and shaking, he belly crawls across the living room floor as if heading to a foxhole. Anat blames his jingoistic furor for boosting Ido’s determination to be a military hero. “You wanted him to be a martyr,” she accuses her father.
He, in turn, reminds her that she gave her written permission for Ido to serve even though she had every right to refuse on the grounds that he was an only son. Anat has grown opposed to Israel’s policies, perhaps even moving towards pacifism, and these feelings are at odds with her own national tribalism. Duality is everywhere.
The final section of the film is enigmatic. It’s unclear to me if what we’re witnessing is real or Anat’s dreams or imaginings or combinations thereof.
She has managed to get her son a temporary leave of absence to celebrate his birthday, which slowly morphs into an explosive celebration that feels more like purgatory than a joyous occasion.
“My mother would do anything for me!” Ido bellows and the large crowd at the shindig repeats the words, growing louder with each repetition. “Anything!” “Anything!”
In a last ditch effort to save him from returning to the base, Anat drugs him, rendering him unconscious. She’s driving away with him, blindfolded and shackled in the passenger seat.
At the coda, he has shape-shifted into a child again and she’s carrying him, cradled in her arms, onto a ferry’s empty vehicle deck. No cars. No workers.
What’s happening in this flight of fancy? Anat successfully protecting her son who will always be a baby in her eyes? Still, one wonders where her adult son is at this point in the story. Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded.
I wish I could say the film’s resolution is hauntingly ambiguous, but alas for this viewer, it’s just confusing. Still, despite the shortcomings, the film starkly brings to life the anguished experiences of a parent and an adult son trying to survive and failing dismally in a war-ravaged universe that celebrates nationalism and extols sacrifice, coupled with a particularly unsettling mom-son relationship.
Eyal Halfon’s A Burning Man is the more successful of the two films. Set outside a remote army base on a stretch of endless sun-baked desert it immediately elicits an atmosphere of oppressive tedium, pointlessness and futility. It has its Beckettian elements and absurdity is never far from the surface.
Yonah (Shai Avivi who gives a complex understated performance) cannot let go of his child, Omer (Ran Kaplan) and instead of depositing his son at the bus terminal to make the trip on his own, he camouflages his own anxiety by lightly dubbing the three-hour drive across the flat no man’s land a father-son road trip. Throughout much of the ride, Omer is sleeping and when they arrive at the military outpost he departs for his tour of duty with a wave of the hand.
Driving home, Yonah sights a convoy of military vehicles on flatbeds heading towards the garrison, their presence further provoking his deepest fears. He spins around and speeds back to the base.
He asks one of the drivers what the armored carriers will be used for. “Maybe maneuvers, maybe exercises,” he shrugs, not especially interested. But in an unexpected gesture of friendship he gives Yonah a sandwich. The scene is at once comic, poignant and unexpected.
Yonah’s most trenchant and arguably least subtle encounter is with an aging motorcyclist (Benny Avni) who brags about his son having dumped the national service to make animated films instead of working for “Netanyahu’s freaks.” The usually impassive Yonah is triggered, accusing the man’s son of being a “shirker,” “a privileged leech.” It’s a confrontation many Israeli parents, especially those who have children serving tours of duty, might find all too relatable.
Yet Yonah, like Anat, is an amalgam of contradictions when it comes to politics. Later in the film, he meets up with a deserter and desperately tries to defend him when the arresting officers arrive on the scene. They lock arms with the defector, marching him down the hill away from Yonah who screams words of encouragement to him as the threesome recede into the distance.
Let’s not forget our hero’s name is “Yonah” (translation Dove, bird of peace). It’s heavy-handed. I could also have done without the repeated closeups of babblers, small desert birds, known for their cooperative social behavior. Creatures who embody life lessons I suppose.
At one point, Yonah’s zealously religious real estate agent (Vladimir Friedman) arrives on the scene sporting a yarmulke, tzitzit, and frequently quoting biblical text. He is there both to try to sell Yonah an apartment but also to help a fellow Jew who he understand is in trouble. But nothing goes right. Yonah does not welcome his company, his car has broken down and he grows increasingly terrified in the desolate desert, especially as night falls. This segment has some great comic moments.
Along the way, Yonah enjoys an erotic brush with a nubile young woman who is part of a hippie commune, and is helping to set up a “Burning Man” festival in the desert. It’s inspired, she says, by the annual countercultural event in Nevada.
In the final scene, we’re presented with a stoned Yonah dancing wildly about, first by himself in a psychedelically altered desert and then in the middle of the pop-up festival, which is even more hallucinogenic with its strobe lights flashing, music blasting and congested crowds stomping and gyrating. Jonah’s dancing becoming progressively more intense and out of control.
But in the end, it is a hollow, totally meaningless Bacchanalian eruption. The scene takes on a mythic flavor, punctuating both visually and emotionally, all the events that have led to this moment. Yonah is a burning man. He, along with Anat, both living in a neverending combat zone and forever anguished over their sons’ potential fates, have perhaps become a new Israeli archetype.
‘Oxygen’ and ‘A Burning Man’ are being shown as part of the 14th annual Israel Film Center Festival in New York City, June 9-16.
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For many queer Jews, Pride has lost its joy
I noticed something during last year’s Pride that I could not stop thinking about afterward: silence.
Not total silence. Pride events still filled city streets in San Francisco, where I live. Rainbow flags still hung from windows. But many queer Jews I knew had become quieter in subtle, almost imperceptible ways. Some had stopped posting online. Some had withdrawn from political conversations altogether. Others no longer mentioned being Jewish in spaces where that identity had once felt unremarkable.
A few quietly disappeared from communities they had helped build. Invitations were declined. Group chats went unanswered. One friend told me they hesitated before wearing a Star of David necklace to Pride for the first time in years.
At first, I told myself I was imagining it. Then I began hearing the same thing in private conversations: people calculating whether it was safe to say certain things out loud. Wondering whether expressing ongoing grief over the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 would cost them friendships, belonging or community. Deciding it was easier to remain silent than risk becoming a problem to manage.
I recognized that instinct, because I felt it too.
As a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco who has facilitated support groups for queer Jews since Oct. 7, I’ve perceived a clear phenomenon: While for years, many queer Jews experienced queer spaces as a refuge, after Oct. 7, that sense of refuge became less certain.
The spaces where we built chosen family, recovered from shame, fell in love, and constructed identities used to be shaped by the belief that vulnerability should not have to be hidden in order to belong.
Now, in some of those spaces, it feels like certain forms of Jewish grief have become socially suspect.
In some spaces, expressing horror at the massacre of Israeli civilians has felt permissible only when immediately qualified or contextualized.
In conversations over the past year, I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern: queer Jews becoming more cautious and less certain about what they could safely say in response to pressure to express grief only in publicly acceptable ways.
Silence can be a form of self-protection. People grow quiet when they sense that emotional honesty may carry steep social costs inside communities they still want to belong to.
Some queer Jews no longer attend events they once loved. Others still attend, but carefully. They edit themselves in real time, measuring how much grief they can express before it becomes unintelligible to others.
None of this is unilaterally true about queer communities, which are not monoliths. And many LGBTQ people feel profound anguish over Palestinian suffering, as do many Jews.
But queer Jews are exhausted. The strain of constant self-translation; the effort of proving that mourning one people does not entail hatred of another; and the vigilance required to navigate belonging that feels increasingly conditional have taken their toll.
The loss of a place where you were supposed to exist without negotiation feels existential. And as each Pride passes, certain griefs intensify as they remain unspoken.
This Pride, I’m thinking less about who will show up than about who will remain quiet once they arrive.
What kinds of silence do communities require in exchange for belonging?
Joshua Simmons is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who serves on the American Psychological Association’s Collaborative of Jewish Psychologists.
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Thomas Massie calls for USS Liberty probe, elevating anti-Israel conspiracy theory to House floor
(JTA) — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie took to the House floor Monday to call for an investigation into Israel’s 1967 attack on an American spy ship, giving new prominence to a decades-old conspiracy theory that has become a touchstone for critics of Israel.
“It’s my great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue, to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty,” Massie said. “Fifty-nine years ago today when they were viciously attacked by IDF jets and also after that by torpedo boats.”
The attack on the USS Liberty occurred on June 8, 1967, in the midst of Israel’s Six-Day War. The intelligence-gathering ship was stationed off the shore of the Sinai Peninsula during the conflict when it came under attack by Israeli forces, killing 34 crew members and injuring 171 more.
Israel later apologized for the attack, explaining it had mistaken the boat as Egyptian, and paid damages to the United States and the families of the victims. Multiple U.S. investigations, including by the CIA, have since determined that the attack was a mistake.
Still, the incident has become a rallying point for critics of Israel who claim the attack was deliberate and gained more adherents lately as anti-Israel sentiment has swelled. On Friday, Massie cited a host of U.S. military and intelligence officials he said had cast doubt on the outcomes of the U.S. investigations.
“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” Massie continued. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary in Kentucky, used the anniversary of the incident to call for Congress to pass a resolution honoring the victims of the attack and for a new investigation into the circumstances surrounding it.
The USS Liberty Veterans Association praised Massie’s remarks in a post on X, writing that it was a story that “NO other member of Congress will even listen to.”
Massie is far from the only critic of Israel to use the attack as broader evidence of Israeli misconduct.
Last year, the far-right influencer Candace Owens interviewed a survivor of the attack and tweeted that there was “perhaps no story that can more enlighten you to the deceitful and despicable nature of the modern state of Israel — and its stranglehold on the American government.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has called for the attack to be taught in schools, and the antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes has claimed that Israel initiated the attack to “conceal their troop movements.”
During his speech at Amfest in December, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who devoted part of his podcast last year to elevating the conspiracy theory that the attack was a false flag operation on the part of Israel, told attendees that asking “why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967” does not “make you an antisemite.”
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his organization had been concerned about the “normalization” of Carlson’s views, including his rhetoric on the USS Liberty attack.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” Segal said.
Following Carlson’s remarks at Amfest, the annual conference of the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s, the ADL denounced conspiracy theories about the attack that it said had swirled for decades.
“Despite official findings that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity, these narratives continue to be amplified by actors seeking to inflame distrust and undermine U.S.-Israel relations,” the ADL said in a post on X.
At the conference, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro was also asked about the attack by an audience member, and responded that “the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America.”
Some of Massie’s fellow critics of Israel praised him for bringing up the incident on the floor of Congress on Monday.
“Thank you Thomas Massie for recognizing the heroic members of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by Israel, where 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded,” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former member of Congress. “Why did our ‘greatest ally’ attack us??”
Other right-wing figures, including at least one member of Congress, criticized Massie’s gambit.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tweeted that he had previously believed that Massie was “standing on heartfelt principles and had intellectual backing” even as they did not always agree.
“But comments like this make me question his authenticity,” Crenshaw wrote. “The USS Liberty incident is a tragic one, but it’s an incident with a clear conclusion if one uses any objective analysis of the facts. … Perhaps we are simply witnessing another example of the irresistible incentive to jump on the bandwagon of grifters that guarantee you a specific kind of social media audience and attention that ultimately results in profits.”
Adam Mossoff, a former legal fellow of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, took aim at Massie’s address in a post on X, writing that the Kentucky Republican had “fully gone down the rabbit hole of antsemitism and Jewish conspiracy theories — via the modern American antisemite’s favorite boogeyman, Israel.”
“For the American woke left and woke right, the USS Liberty is the equivalent of the Dreyfuss Affair in France,” Mossoff wrote. “It’s the cause celebres of nationalism and bigotry in which history’s greatest villains — the Jews — can be smeared again with nefarious and evil motives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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