Autumn Reading with Julia

Autumn Reading with Julia Fermont-Cheisler

Join us for a series of high-quality, unique reading sessions. Together, we will read some of the most interesting and influential contemporary literary works. We will explore global literary phenomena, genres, and trends. We will also discuss the status of literature in a broader contemporary cultural context and its ability to influence culture.

Julia Fermont-Cheisler is a writer who received the Ministry of Culture Award for Emerging Writers, a PhD in Jewish-American literature, and director of the International Writers’ Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim.

Session 1: The King by Szczepan Twardoch

The year is 1937, the setting is Warsaw and its Jewish community, and the narrator—from a distance of years—is actually an Israeli (“I am sixty-seven years old. I changed my family name”). The protagonists of this distinctive crime novel are two Jews: the boy Moshe Bernstein, “the skinny, poor son of nobody,” who comes from a devout home, and Jakub Szapiro, “ninety-two kilograms of compact muscles, hard bones, and the precise amount of hard fat above the wide belt of his boxing trousers,” who killed Moshe’s father.

Szapiro, a Jewish gangster and professional boxer who murders Gentiles and Jews alike without mercy, with the word “death” emblazoned on his arm in Hebrew letters, takes the boy Moshe under his protection. Warsaw is fascinated by Szapiro, and from time to time a mysterious leviathan hovers above the city in the Polish author Szczepan Twardoch’s noir novel. Alongside its depiction of the violence of Warsaw’s Jewish underworld on the eve of World War II, the novel portrays the growing antisemitism in Polish society during the period. The King was a bestseller in Poland, was translated into many languages, and served as the basis for a television series produced in Poland in 2020.

Session 2: Happening by Annie Ernaux

Happening, the book by 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Annie Ernaux, deals with an illegal abortion in France in the 1960s and with the reverberation of the social and emotional silence surrounding it.

A 23-year-old woman, a brilliant student from a working-class family, is forced to confront almost entirely alone, at the risk of death, the fate of having become pregnant against her will—at a time when women were ostensibly already free to have sex outside marriage.

In a memoir extraordinary in its power, one of the most important and disturbing texts ever written about abortion, Ernaux transforms what has no remembered date, what people tend not to mention, into an “event”—something that can be written about and spoken about—and brings the wordless experience of many women into culture. As stated in the reasons for awarding Ernaux the Nobel Prize, her writing is marked by “the courage and clinical acuity with which she reveals the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.”

Session 3: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård

“A literary act of suicide”—this is what Karl Ove Knausgård called My Struggle, a monumental autobiographical series through which the author examines his life and the lives of those close to him as if through a high-resolution microscope.

Free of all sentimentality and the constraints of self-censorship, he examines the psychopathology of everyday moments—ordinary, small, and grand—and attempts to formulate some kind of meaning from them, delving into the ultimate question: “What profit hath man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”

In A Death in the Family, the first volume in the series, Knausgård writes about coming of age in the shadow of a beloved yet distant mother and an alienated father whose marriage is falling apart; his relationship with his older brother and his few friends; his marriage and his mixed feelings about parenthood; his father’s descent into alcoholism and his death.

Overnight, Knausgård’s book series became an unprecedented sensation in Norway. It sparked controversy across the media, received enthusiastic reviews, and sold an unprecedented half a million copies.

Session 4: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book by American author Jennifer Egan. The subject of this remarkable book is time: what time does to us, how we experience it, how we change with it, how we survive within it. How it takes us from there to here. The backdrop is the world of rock and popular music in the United States from the 1980s through the 2020s, and there is no need to elaborate on the profound connection between music and time.

Each chapter is an episode in its own right. A character who appeared on the margins of one chapter may play a central role in another, but no one can escape encountering the goon squad that is time. The only question is what resources of integrity and inner strength each person can bring to this inevitable encounter.

In a breathtaking range of styles and voices, moving from tragedy through satire to a PowerPoint presentation, Egan describes the underground current of self-destruction that we are all destined either to fight or surrender to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal desire to escape loneliness and time’s merciless ticking into the realms of art, where, at our best, we can soar and touch others. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a sly, surprising, and exhilarating work by one of the bravest writers working today.

Duration of each session: approximately one and a half hours.

Location and atmosphere: A charming space filled with natural light, overlooking eucalyptus trees, in a communal atmosphere.

We will meet on Thursdays (4 sessions):

8.10, 15.10, 22.10, 29.10, from 18:30–20:00

You are encouraged to read the book, or part of it, before each session.