Hans Fallada

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Marissa Brostoff has a piece – again in Tablet, which might be the best Jewish magazine out there – on the…well, you read the title of this post, right?

So they are a network, they are Jewish and they are left-wing. What else? Shot by both sides, apparently.

Brostoff reports:

Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

Loyalty versus purity? I’m not even going to comment. And genug with the anonymity. If you want to lend an air of clandestine profundity to your cause, just pretend they’re out to get you. Better, read Hans Fallada if you want to know what it’s like to live in perpetual terror of having opinions. Or talk to a few Iranian dissidents. But don’t go blabbing about being “silenced” by the Israel lobby, trying to turn yourself into a martyr for free speech.

Or was he referring the purists on the hard left?

Alone in Berlin

Last night I caved and bought a copy of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (in the US it’s called Every Man Dies Alone), which has been taunting me for a while now. A little research reveals that Hans Fallada was a basket case, a drunk and a morphine addict who did time in a Nazi asylum. He had also killed a friend in a duel (which brings to mind both Pushkin and Caravaggio). He wrote this book in 1947. It’s about everyday resistance to Nazism by ordinary Germans, a theme we hear far too little about.

Now that even Roberto Bolaño’s laundry lists have been published to wild acclaim, it looks like Hans Fallada is the new forgotten master on the block. Read him before your mother has to for her book club.