Que veut dire « Gravité des choses »? Grave ne veut pas dire terrifiant, inquiétant, stressant. Ce mot désigne les grandes questions de la vie, les questions qui ont le pouvoir de faire souffrir ou de construire, de détruire ou d’éveiller, qui permettent de ramener à l’essentiel derrière le bruit de la vie quotidienne, les énervements dans lesquels on peut s’enfoncer sans raison et surtout sans savoir comment émerger.
« C’est avec ces mots que Florence Piron (disparue en 2021) [a] débuté en 2019 l’écriture de son livre La gravité des choses – expression née de la bouche de son plus jeune fils, qui lui avait déclaré, vers l’âge de dix ans, que son grand frère ne « comprenait pas la gravité des choses ». Séduite par cette expression toute simple et renvoyant pourtant à un monde immense, Florence [a] décidé d’intituler ainsi le livre qu’elle projetait depuis longtemps d’écrire. Celui-ci aurait constitué l’aboutissement de toutes ses réflexions, issues non seulement de sa carrière de professeure-chercheuse à l’Université Laval, mais aussi de sa vie de femme, de mère, de militante et d’éditrice. » (Sarah-Anne Arsenault, extrait de l’avant-propos)
Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell, photographies de Laure-Hélène Piron et Érika Nimis, photomontage d’Audrey Legerot, sur une idée de Florence Piron
Communist Ontologies. An Inquiry into the Construction of New Forms of Life Bruno Gullì & Richard Gilman-Opalsky “To be communist is to be lost, looking for an answer, looking for a way out. Communist Ontologies is an explicit dialogue between Bruno Gullì and Richard Gilman-Opalsky. The book breaks with the monologue form, brings us away too from any monological concept … Continue reading →
The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figiel Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can … Continue reading →
The closing of Fenwick’s department store on New Bond Street a couple of weeks ago adds another name to the long list of the capital’s once prominent, now defunct palaces of shopping: Debenhams, Dickins & Jones, D H Evans, Bourne & Hollingsworth, Marshall & Snelgrove, Swan & Edgar, Multevey & Princk, Walpurgis & Nettlepink, Goliath & Mastodon...
Readers, particularly those familiar with London, may by this stage be smelling a rat – surely there can’t have been a department store called “Goliath & Mastodon”? Of course there wasn't: the last three were invented by the Edwardian writer Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen-name ‘Saki’.
The last of them features in his story ‘Fur’: “In the near distance rose the colossal pile of Messrs. Goliath and Mastodon’s famed establishment”. It was during the Edwardian period that many department stores’ flagship buildings were built (just think of Selfridge’s on Oxford Street, or Harrod’s in Knightsbridge) and for that reason many people associate department stores with that era. The new style of shopping, with its glamour and gimmicks, intended to appeal to a female clientele, also offered potential for social satire. In ‘Louise’, the absent-minded Jane Thropplestance is unsure which store she visited earlier that afternoon. “[...] Perhaps it was Harrod’s. I really don’t remember. It was one of those places where every one [sic is so kind and sympathetic and devoted that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such pleasant surroundings.”
I was prompted to think about Saki and department stores when I rediscovered a short text of his inside a newspaper advertisement for Selfridge’s. Munro (1870-1916) was a freelance writer specialising in short stories, and as such published his work in whichever journal or periodical would accept it. His death in the First World War meant he never had the chance to prepare a comprehensive collection of his tales in book form. If you are already a Saki fan and own one of the many “Complete Short Stories” on the market, then I have to break it to you: it isn’t complete. Over twenty forgotten stories have turned up since the 1960s. Finding them used to be a hit-and-miss affair that entailed trawling through microfilms of likely publications. But these days the task is much simpler thanks to the digitisation of newspapers so that one can run a full-text search on their contents. Certainly, I would never have thought to look in the London Daily News and Leader, as this was not one of Munro’s regular outlets.
Munro’s story is called ‘The Romance of Business’ (not to be confused with ‘Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business’, published in The Square Egg and Other Sketches) and was commissioned as part of Selfridge’s fifth birthday celebrations in 1914.
As anyone who watched the TV series ‘Mr Selfridge’ will know, Selfridge & Co. was one of the grandest and most innovative department stores in the British Isles. It was also pioneering in terms of publicity. (The public appearance in the store of Louis Blériot, the first man to fly across the Channel, along with his monoplane, was depicted in the first series.) Munro’s text appeared within a special full-page advertisement and is surrounded by an elaborate illustration of laden men, trucks and even elephants passing through an ornate classical archway on their way to a dock with cargo ships. Selfridge’s commissioned several such illustrations from noted artists, complemented by short texts on subjects such as “The Dignity of Work”, “Imagination” and “Markets of the World”, and had them printed in a number of prominent newspapers. “It is possible that no more remarkable ads than these have been produced in the entire history of retail advertising,” gushed trade paper Dry Goods Economist. Munro, though a well-known and successful writer, was small fry compared to some of the contributors Selfridge's managed to secure. Other ads in the series contained testimonials from Prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmark (German nobility and one of the richest men in Europe to boot) and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose celebrity reached around the globe.
Munro’s tale, raved the Dry Goods Economist, deals “with the great principle that all work worth doing has a broader appeal to the mind than mere mental exercise–has its spiritual side.” I wonder. While he may have been happy to pocket the Selfridge shilling, Munro’s real view was probably closer to what he put into the mouth of one of the two young ladies in ‘Fur’: “even quite good shops have their counters and windows crowded with things worth about four shillings that look as if they might be worth seven-and-six, and are priced at ten shillings and labelled seasonable gifts.” Business, Munro implies, is all about how much one pays.
You can read ‘The Romance of Business’ in the forthcoming Saki (H. H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories, which I have edited and annotated for OBP. OBP books, by the way, are free.
Guardian, ‘“I’m devastated it’s closing”: London shoppers say farewell to Fenwick’, 2 Feb. 2024, online at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/02/fenwick-london-new-bond-street-department-store-close?ref=biztoc.com
Fables of Re-enchantment. Multiplicity, Imaginary, Revolution Stefania Consigliere Translated by Steven Colatrella Ghosts, oracles, and talking plants… an atlas for escaping disenchantment Enchantment has disappeared from our lives. Whoever dares to mention it violates the most basic epistemological canons that hold our world together and is immediately labeled ignorant or mad. It is suspicious, however, that the taboo on enchantment … Continue reading →
According to official statistics, a language dies approximately every 40 days. The critical situation of language diversity worldwide is worsened by globalization and advancing climate change. Although Arabic may not be perceived as an endangered language by many, some of its varieties are expected to vanish within the next two decades. The Jewish dialects of Arabic are predicted to disappear within the next few years and are among the most endangered within the Semitic family, along with Neo-Aramaic.
The Jewish communities of North Africa have a rich and extensive history spanning over two millennia. From Morocco to Libya, these communities thrived within the vibrant fabric of North African society, leaving behind a distinct linguistic legacy in the region. Jewish dialects of North Africa, believed to have originated during the initial wave of Arabization in the 7th century, represent the earliest strata of Arabic in the area. Formed through a blend of Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and French, these dialects reflect the diverse heritage of the communities that gave rise to them.
However, in the 20th century, there was a significant migration of Jews from Arab lands to Israel. This migration occurred primarily due to a combination of factors, including the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, rising anti-Semitic sentiment in Arab countries, and political instability in the region. Following Israel's independence, many Jews faced persecution, discrimination, and violence, prompting them to leave their homes and seek refuge in Israel. This mass migration resulted in the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews in Israel, where they contributed to the cultural, social, and economic fabric of the newly formed nation.
In addition to the political and social factors driving the migration of Jews from Arab lands to Israel in the 20th century, there was also a significant loss of their vernacular languages. As these communities resettled in Israel, many of them faced pressure to assimilate and adopt Hebrew as their primary language. Consequently, the vibrant and diverse Jewish dialects of Arabic, spoken for generations in countries like Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and Tunisia, began to decline rapidly. This loss of vernaculars represents a poignant aspect of the migration experience, as it severed ties to cultural heritage and linguistic traditions that had been integral to Mizrahi Jewish identity for centuries. Despite efforts to preserve these languages and revitalize their use within the community, the shift towards Hebrew as the dominant language has contributed to the gradual disappearance of these unique linguistic heritages.
The Jewish varieties of Arabic exhibit several differences from their Muslim counterparts. As early as the 20th century, linguists like Marcel Cohen recognized the scholarly value of these Jewish dialects and conducted studies to document them and explore their distinctive features. My volume focuses on documenting the critically endangered Jewish dialect of Arabic once spoken in Gabes, Southern Tunisia. Gabes, alongside Tunis and Djerba, was one of the most important centres of Jewish life in Tunisia, with the Jewish community of Gabes being one of the oldest in the country. Currently, only a handful of native speakers remain, while their children and grandchildren have limited knowledge of Jewish Gabes or do not speak it at all. Drawing from several years of fieldwork in Israel and France, the book delves into the grammatical structure of this dialect and seeks to elucidate its typological relationship with other Jewish and Muslim dialects in the region.
The volume is structured into three main sections: phonology (Part I), morphology (Part II), and syntax (Part III). While the first two sections adhere to a traditional grammatical model, syntax is approached from historical and cross-linguistic perspectives. Chapter 2, dedicated to phonology, is broadly divided into two subsections: an analysis of the sound inventory and phonotactics, which includes a description of syllable structure and epenthesis patterns. The morphology section comprises Chapter 3, which covers verbal morphology, and Chapter 4, addressing nominal morphology, including pronominal forms. Lastly, the syntax section (Chapters 5–7) encompasses various subsections exploring syntactic phenomena such as definiteness, genitive constructions, grammatical agreement, subordination, expressions of tense and aspect, syntax and pronouns, and sentence typology. This linguistic study underscores the differences between the Jewish dialect of Gabes and its Muslim counterpart. While the former exhibits features typical of sedentary, first-layer dialects, the latter could be classified as a Bedouin-type dialect. Moreover, the examination of the tense and aspect system suggests that Jewish Gabes, like other Jewish dialects of North African Arabic, features a distribution of the active participle that sets them apart from the Muslim dialects. The grammar is complemented by an appendix containing a corpus of selected folktales cited in earlier sections of the volume.
The destiny of Jewish Gabes and other Jewish dialects of Arabic is sealed—they will all cease to be spoken within the next several years. Therefore, it is crucial to embark on comprehensive fieldwork and systematically record the language while reliable speakers are still available. The study of Jewish Arabic varieties is essential for understanding the social networks of the Middle East and North Africa that these dialects reflect. Their loss represents not only the disappearance of linguistic diversity but also the erasure of centuries of cultural heritage, identity, and coexistence between Jewish and Muslim communities.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
No Life Without You emerges as an extraordinary account of real-life experiences through letters, offering not only a love story but a profound exploration of resilience and human connection. Especially poignant in the tumultuous times we are living in, No Life Without Youis a story of history, hardships, and hope. Frank Felsenstein, Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor in Humanities in the Department of English at Ball State University, founding director of the Honors Program at Yeshiva College in New York, Reader in Eighteenth-Century Studies at Leeds University, and the editor of the book, embarks on an enthralling exploration of his parents’ lives. Mope and Vera, Felsenstein’s parents, were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany for the United Kingdom during the Second World War, and their astonishing love story is encapsulated in over a thousand letters.
We should feel forever grateful to our family and to ourselves for the preservation of letters, journals, diaries, and artefacts. They serve as channels to crucial facets of our identity and origins: Frank Felsenstein’s work certainly stand as a testament to the profound impact that these touchstones can have. The trajectory of Mope and Vera’s lives, refreshed within the pages of this book, can now be sustained through history. Readers are afforded the opportunity to glean insights from their story, while the editor and his family, present and future, can find solace in its reverberation.
The Importance of Then and Now
Felsenstein has created a mosaic woven with thirty-two chapters, dividing it into two realms – the evocative ‘Then’ and the resonant ‘Now’. The former delves into Mope and Vera’s lives before their paths intertwined, and the editor uses journals, letters, and family memoirs to bring their voices to life. The ‘Then’ chronicles unfold a prelude to Mope and Vera’s stories before their lives merged. Delving deep to capture their voices truly, the letters exchanged between Vera and her mother during the year after she fled Nazi Germany offer a glimpse into Frankfurt at the time and unveil the shades of Vera’s childhood. Mope’s story is shared through a typewritten curriculum vitae and the vivid recollections he presented: a chapter dedicated to his engagement with Zionism echoes his ideological musings in the Leipziger Jüdische Zeituing in 1922.
The ’Now’ section, starting in 1936 and ending in 1939, captures the imminence of Mope and Vera’s position. The letters, written in the throes of uncertainty, reflect the instability of their lives amid the looming shadows of war. At the start of each chapter, Felsenstein provides the reader with contextual overviews of the historical backdrop in which his parents were living and writing.
The editor’s decision to separate the ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ offers the reader a kaleidoscopic lens through which to view history. Every chapter stands as a testament to the enduring resonance of human stories across ages. The book’s structure, complemented by Felsenstein’s skilful editing, ensures that Vera and Mope’s authentic voices shine through while vividly telling their story. The editor’s interventions are expertly blended into the narrative, enhancing rather than overshadowing the authenticity of the tale. Their love story serves as a beacon of hope amid the uncertainties in which they lived.
Historical Parallels
This collection of letters delves into the personal exchanges between Mope and Vera, taking place in Nazi Germany, where the utter erosion of civil liberties for Jewish people cast a long-lasting shadow over their lives, and the fascist dictatorship inevitably continued to resound after they left Germany. The book serves as a lens into the wider political turmoil of the time.No Life Without Youoperates as an astute historical commentary, shining light on pivotal moments of the 20th century. However, its true merit lies in preserving a human connection amidst history, making the past come to life.
No Life Without You also investigates Britain’s historical standpoint on refugees, contrasting moral obligations with modern challenges. An introduction by Rachel Pistol, a digital historian & author of modern British and American history, sets the letters against a historical backdrop that has echoes in the present day, while evolving public opinion, government policies, and their impact on refugees in Britain unfold through the lens of Vera and Mope’s journey. This allows readers to witness the complexities of these moral dilemmas and the impact of politics on individual lives. The book is a lesson from history, insisting readers pay attention to early signs of discrimination and hatred. Felsenstein offers the dehumanisation that paved the way for atrocities during the Holocaust as a warning, acting as a call for compassion. It emphasises society’s fragility, highlighting our collective responsibility to protect the rights of every individual, irrespective of their background.
Both the contextual introduction by Rachel Pistol and the rest of the book delve into the refugee experience, encapsulating the nuances of the emotional journey undertaken when escaping one’s homeland to seek solace in unfamiliar territories. It captures the near-inexplicable feeling of the stripping away of identity, the loss of autonomy, and the resounding impact of displacement.
Then, Now, and Forever
As this narrative draws to a close, Felsenstein reflects on the profound legacy laced through the letters between his parents. This story is both his birthright and a fundamental part of who he is, urging the reader to question their own identities, and to think about who we must thank for them. Felsenstein posits that, in more ways than one, there would be no life without his parents. Vera and Mope’s story resonates through time, allowing us to acknowledge history while simultaneously embracing the spirit that transcends it. We are not who we are without the people who preceded us, and this book is a testament to that. The amalgamation of love and history not only imparts insights into the challenges faced by the people during this era, but it stands as a symbol of resilience, love, and the lasting promise of hope.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Sasha Kirkham is an English Language and Russian graduate from The University of Manchester, now pursuing a Masters in Publishing at City, University of London. With experience in copywriting, proofreading, and translation in St Petersburg, Sasha's passions lie in literature, Russian history, publishing, editing, writing, and supporting NGOs.
Recently, a graduate student spoke about a favourite book, one which crystallizes many of the conflicting qualities of Russian literature today: post-colonial angst, fading relevance, moral authority, and sheer ubiquity. Early in this novel, the hero’s father falls in love with Russian fiction (in Bengali translation). He is reading one of Gogol’s short stories at the very moment when his train, speeding across northern India, derails. Seriously injured, he spends two years almost immobile, regaining his strength while gorging on Russian novels. Years later, as a engineering professor at an American university, he names his son “Gogol” after his favourite writer. The strange syllables bewilder other Bengalis as they do most Americans, and young Gogol legally changes his name as soon as he’s old enough. Resenting his intercultural, untranslatable moniker, he never opens the volume of Nikolai Gogol’s stories his father gives him. Only after decades of negotiating cultural difference, and only after his father’s death breaks the direct family connection with Russian literature, can he read those tales and become Gogol again: the Bengali-American namesake of a Ukrainian-Russian writer.
This novel is of course Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), a key text of contemporary diasporic fiction. Our edited volume, Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context, studies how literature itself acts as diaspora. In this collection of forty-one essays by three dozen international scholars, we trace how, since 1900, Russian literature has been disseminated beyond its political borders; how individual Russian and Russophone authors are translated and emulated abroad; and how cultures and individuals from the Republic of Ireland to South Vietnam have absorbed Russian cultural influence, from Pushkin to Sholokhov. Our methodology is informed by both sociology and Translation Studies, relying upon Pascale Casanova’s concept of central and peripheral languages, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, Jeremy Munday’s microhistorical methodology, the focus on literary translators consolidated by Klaus Kaindl and colleagues, and David Damrosch’s erudite yet accessible comparatist analysis. National engagement with Russian literature varies with political as well as geographical climate; successful cultural integration is often pre-determined by the literacy of the target audience, and indeed by the nature of the transmission process – whether voluntary or compulsory, state-funded or profit-driven. Hence the definition of ‘Russian literature’ – and public attitudes towards it – alters sharply with time, place, and politics, as our contributors show.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context also explores an equally important issue, much harder to quantify: the influence of Russian literature on individual creative inspiration. This edited volume maps, for the first time, global connections between Russian authors (nineteenth-century classics, Socialist Realists, and even Soviet dissidents) and canon-shaping writers around the world, including Norway’s Knut Hamsun, Germany’s Thomas Mann, Greece’s Ares Alexandrou, the great Hindustani author Premchand and Japanese prose stylist Futubatei Shimei, through to modern-day award-winning authors like Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk and South Korea’s Bora Chung. Where Lahiri’s novel traces the progress of Gogol the reluctant reader, we follow the (global) progress of Gogol the reluctant writer. How did a neurotically anxious fabulist, an ex-pat twice over (he left Ukraine for St Petersburg and St Petersburg for Rome, returning to the Russian Empire only to die), leave such a powerful legacy across so many continents? How could writers like Pushkin and Dostoevsky, their horizons restricted by the rigid social hierarchy and narrow politics of the Russian Empire, reach so far and touch so many readers? There are as many answers to these questions as there are nations where Russian literature is read today. This volume speaks for most of them.
Thus, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, Progress and Raduga (Rainbow), the USSR’s gigantic, multilingual, state-subsidized literary translation presses, developed book distribution networks to extend soft power across the Global South. In the process, they introduced Indian readers like Lahiri’s characters to Russian and Soviet literature (morally engaged writers like Tolstoy and Gorky were already popular on the Indian subcontinent even prior to Soviet power). Moscow’s quest for hearts and minds brought Russian literary fiction in translation to readers in South and Central America, Africa and the Arabian nations, Central and South-East Asia, China and to both Vietnams. In Europe and the Anglophone world, where academics, freelance translators and commercial publishers determined the reception of Russophone literature, the nineteenth-century classics and twentieth-century dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak have always dominated both sales and literary culture. Across much of the Global South, however, political pragmatism and effective Soviet cultural propaganda ensured the popularity of twentieth-century pro-Communist authors, starting with the so-called father of Socialist Realism, Maksim Gorky, whose name reverberates throughout this volume.
Ebbs and flows in translation in places as disparate as Brazil and Greece obeyed political trends: leftist governments promoted Russian literary authors, while far-right leaders discouraged them. Our essays on Latin America explore Cuba’s immersive Cold War reception of Russian language, literature and culture (including cinema); the contributions made by Brazil’s Russophone émigré diaspora to their native milieu; and Mexico’s uneven relationship with Russian culture (even now, no Mexican publishing house specialises in Russian literary translation into Spanish). Within the Soviet Union, soft-power infiltration gave way to forcible translation programmes: our contributors describe how target-language translators in Estonia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were often brutally co-opted into replacing their native literature with fiction translated from Russian. Our Ukrainian contributors strikingly liken the era of literary control by the Kremlin to “the slow but increasingly deadly compression of a rabbit by a boa constrictor”. Even Finland did not escape such tensions. But pro-Soviet authors’ value as Communist propaganda does not negate their genuinely inspirational value; Gorky’s Mother (1906) remained an ideological beacon for the poor and oppressed globally, as many essays show. Today, for reasons that are all too obvious on the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine and in the ruined homes of bombed-out cities, Russian influence has become toxic: a legacy to reject, an identity to disavow. Translation, of course, never has been separate from politics; and Russian is not the only literature to be implicated, if not actively complicit, in imperialist expansionism and aggressive cultural policies. In The Namesake, Lahiri’s hero “Gogol”, struggling with his complex, unwelcome name and mixed-up identity, eventually accepts the impossibility of rejecting a gift woven into the fabric of one’s character. Today, Russian authors are indelibly inscribed in the library of world culture: this volume introduces the translators, publishers, politicians, editors and readers who made Russian literature a global phenomenon.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Intimate correspondence of a Jewish couple writing in the face of Nazi persecution
COMPILED AND EDITED BY FRANKLIN FELSENSTEIN. With an Historical Introduction by Rachel Pistol.
This book voices, through their personal letters, the love story of a German Jewish couple caught up in the turmoil created by the Nazi regime in the years leading up to the Second World War. It is a story of refugees and lovers torn asunder by political events and reliant on correspondence as their primary means of communication.
Vera Hirsch, a final year medical student at Frankfurt University, flees Germany shortly after Hitler comes to power in 1933, seeking refuge in England. She meets Moritz Felsenstein, a fur trader with a background in the sciences, on a spur-of-the-moment visit to Leipzig in January 1936 when, during the year of the Olympic Games, the Nazis moderate their anti-Semitic agenda. Their correspondence begins immediately, and continues uninterrupted through to the end of August 1939, with explicable gaps when they are able to be together. It is supplemented by extracts from Vera’s private journals and from other such primary sources.
Nearly all the letters are written from Germany, England, and the Soviet Union, where Moritz is given temporary working papers in 1937 after an SS arrest warrant prevents him from returning to Leipzig. The couple are able to marry in London in August 1937 but lack permission to settle together in England. In separate environments, each engages in the business world. The correspondence provides unique insights into the pre-war fur market in Moscow and Leningrad and the retail trade in Britain, where Vera joins the first (and, at that time, quite experimental) personnel management team at Marks & Spencer, the major retail chain. Moritz’s peripatetic life style, with short visits to his wife, continues over the next two years, the pair being reunited on the final night before the start of the war.
The letters and journals are written in German, but have been fully translated into English. The present book is abridged to less than one third of the full correspondence. It has been edited by their only son. The first part of the book contextualizes the early lives of these two individuals in the aftermath of the First World War, with telling indications of their ties to the emergent culture of Weimar Germany. It provides an intimate picture of two different versions of German Jewish family life during the era prior to the Holocaust, the one Orthodox with a strong commitment to Zionist ideals, the other assimilated and skeptical in its religious beliefs.
For us today, there exists a profusion of memoirs, several of them now iconic, relating to the Holocaust. Most of these are written after the fact, but gain their immediacy through our fascinated fear and accompanying horror, engendered through their disclosures. However, given the lack of available material and a secure place to write, the chronicling of the on-the-run happenings of Jewish refugees endeavoring to escape the Nazi strong arm has rarely had the attention it deserves. It represents a major lacuna in our knowledge of the everyday lives of exiles during one of the most tragic eras in human history. The existence of this large, and hitherto untapped, cache of letters and journals by Vera Hirsch and Moritz Felsenstein presents a rare opportunity to document and to authenticate a largely unrecorded element of the refugee experience.
Because the letters were written to each other on an almost daily basis, they are incredibly immediate. They record not only the couple’s against-the-odds escape, but also the desperate – and ultimately unsuccessful -- endeavors to evacuate from Germany Moritz’s older sister, brother-in-law, and close cousins, who were to perish at Auschwitz. Most centrally, the letters recount an astonishing love story, sensual in its intimate detail, and full of dramatic pathos in its unfolding of hope for the creation of a new life and the anxieties of coping with pregnancy when apart. It is told through the voices of two exceptionally articulate letter writers, unraveling profound moral and psychological dilemmas, and the fears brought about by separation and the ongoing intrusion of political events. Incredibly, more than fifty years after the death of Moritz and over thirty years since the passing of Vera, their distinctive voices are kept alive through their letters and resonate for our own age in which the plight of refugees has once again found its way into our consciousness.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
“So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94).
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Sweeney’s story of encountering the hum for the first time is remarkable. It begins in Taft, California, which Sweeney recounts as “a podunk little desert bowl town in the middle of nowhere. You can literally drive from one end to the other in under 10min, under 5 if you was speeding.” On this particular night, while walking down the main road of Taft, they report the scene being charged with electricity, and following this charge, hearing a moving sound, a traveling yet invisible sound. “This invisible thing was creating a noise like I had never heard before and sending a wave of static electricity throughout the air in every direction around it,” Sweeney explains. They try to track it down, but to no avail. After following the hum a few blocks and around a couple of corners, it just simply vanishes. As Kristin Gallerneaux aptly claims in her bookHigh Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, “the Hum’s oppression seems to come from everywhere and nowhere” (196), and this is especially true in Sweeney’s encounter.
“Spectrogram of Papuan Malay Sentence De Bicara Keras” by WikiMedia User EmflazieCC0 1.0 DEED
While their account of the hum as electrically-charged is exceptional, Sweeney’s story adequately represents both the anomalistic qualities of the hum and its ability to elude a locatable and identifiable source. They attempt to describe the hum during this encounter as “like an invisible traveling vehicle of some sort,” but that, altogether, they are “not really sure” what it is. And they even admit that this explanation “makes no sense… whatsoever.” This difficulty in describing the phenomenon is reaffirmed not only by the stories told by other listeners but, too, the numerous scientific experiments that have been conducted after the hum’s frequent emergence beginning around the 1970s (Deming “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” 583).
Beyond the limits of current scientific logics which attempt to make sense of sonic events and their impacts, the hum exists as an exceptional and unknown anomaly. It transcends the valuative limits of current knowledge in acoustics and ways of understanding how sound moves through, across, and within spaces to address potential listeners. “I’m not saying I saw waves of electricity or anything of the sort,” Sweeney adds to their above description of the hum as a sound “charged with electricity.” “It was more of a feeling than something you saw. I could just feel electricity everywhere, and see little tendrils of it from my fingertips as I ran them across each other… I just KNEW it was coming from whatever was making that sound, this invisible force that was traveling down the road.” In such an account, the hum defies scientific explanation, and this fact is supported by the multiple failed investigations into the phenomenon. As Franz Frosch details in their article “Hum and Otoacoustic Emissions May Arise Out of the Same Mechanisms,” some scientists have built multiple “custom shielded chamber[s]” out of copper and magnetic material to test for a potential acoustic or electromagnetic source of the hum (604). These investigations, time after time, can’t provide an answer—leaving it up to listeners of the hum to form their own.
Sweeney’s story—and the endless other stories of the hum that have been told across the world—depict the lived, affective, and rhetorical experience of anomalistic listening. To hear, to listen with the hum, is to experience the affective dimensions of a “sound” that has no apparent acoustic or electromagnetic source. This is because “sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience” (84), as Mark Peter Wright notes in his bookListening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, and Critical Practice. So, to listen with the hum is to occupy a state of affection that is altogether unknown to not only science but the listener themself. Sweeney bluntly continues, writing about their experience of the hum, saying, “I only know exactly what I’ve told you today.” To know this sound, for this sound to exist as truth, this unfolds through stories found in the still-to-be-explained.
I consider “after sound” to characterize this felt condition for rhetorical action that is a result of listening beyond or after acoustic valuations. Instead of this being a moment void of sound, “after sound” defines a state of experience that is complicated by an attempt to control the valuative limits of what is and isn’t sonic. In this way, “after sound” only gestures toward the temporal to develop the different emergence of the sensorial. Because the hum affects in a manner similar to sound but without acoustic or electromagnetic origin, people who hear the hum make sense of this relentless experience through a condition that is after sound. Such a claim is represented in Sweeney’s admission that “[they] just have this weird feeling that this story needs to be told. That there’s more to The Hum than anyone has realized, and that maybe it needs to be further studied and looked into” (added emphasis). This felt, “weird feeling” is initiated after sound, and this is what I am considering as the call for rhetorical action. Such an affective, felt, and lived experience may only exist after the “logical” answers, failed scientific studies, and experiments lacking helpful results become determinative of sonic limits.
Further, “after sound” moves from Marie Thompson’s discussion of “source-oriented” noise (30) that she posits in her bookBeyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism. Speaking to the phenomenon of the hum, Thompson explains that an “unidentifiable noise is often amplified in perception, grasping the attention of the listener” (29). “After sound” is an hyper-attuned condition wherein the rhetorical actions of listeners are always attentive to what-may-(not)-be acoustics. It is their presence within utter sonic mystery that fuels the potential for persuasive response. And David Deming, a researcher in Geosciences, articulates in his article “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” that “in the absence of an answer provided by science, Hum hearers tend to find an explanation and hang on to it” (579), which illustrates the potential for listeners to respond via story within the conditions foregrounded by anomalistic encounters. “After sound” describes a moment of malleability that opens up in soundtime for different negotiations of sense and affect.
Responding to the conditions of listening with story, like Sweeney does, reflects an intention to share and persuade through an expression of sonic experience. As Katherine McKittrick states in her bookDear Science and Other Stories, “story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with creative precision” (7). And V. Jo Hsu, speaking to the rhetorical potential of story, elucidates in their bookConstellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics that “story can slow down, hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine our physical movements to renegotiate their shared meanings” (18). How I’m conceiving of storytelling after sound develops from the insights developed by these authors and other scholars exploring the rhetorical potential of story in cultural rhetorics.
Story, in the domain of sound, enables listeners to reconsider how, when, why, and where the sonic is defined and valued. While it must not be the sole rhetorical technology after sound, Sweeney clearly relies on storytelling to make sense of their encounter with the hum. This story and other stories told about the hum illustrate how listeners practice the negotiation of sound’s meaning by collectively exploring ways of investigating and experimenting with(in) phenomena. Telling stories after sound is to reach across and through a community of listeners to find shared truths that come to be through encounters with hearing. Altogether, rhetoric after sound queries the intersection of perception and intelligibility to jostle forward the meaning of listening. At a moment when the world is at a loss for answers, this is a practice of seizing opportunities for hopeful and imaginative intervention into the valuative limits of the sonic.
“I’ll end it here,” Sweeney begins in their last paragraph, “and I can assure you that everything I have told you is the absolute truth. It happened to me and not a friend of a friend. I was awake, I’m not making any of it up, and all I want are REAL answers.” Sweeney’s call for a resolution was posted 10 months ago, in May 2023. And still today, the hum continues to lack answers, and the unsolved mystery continues to impact listeners. More recently, Popular Mechanics reported in a November 2023 article, titled “A Ghostly Nighttime Hum Is Invading Random Towns. Scientists Don’t Know What It Means,” that the hum has reached Omagh in Northern Ireland and that citizens are “trapped inside [of a mystery].” So far, no matter the amount of media coverage nor number of affected people across the world, encounters are ultimately defined by sounds unknown. After sound—when communities of listeners are left behind by these valuative limits—rhetorical action persists in search of an explanation.
Trent Wintermeier is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Graduate Research Assistant for the AVAnnotate project, where he helps make audiovisual material more discoverable and accessible. Next year, he will be an Assistant Director for the Digital Writing & Research Lab. His research interests broadly include sound, digital rhetorics, and community. Currently, he’s interested in how researchers can responsibly engage with communities impacted by sound and the local rhetorical ecologies which materialize under sonic conditions.
Une anthologie des textes de Florence Piron
