#you escaped communism and were a stranger in a strange land and married my father who became a bat from hell and you had to escape him

[enigma-absolute]

…

[miniatureglitterprincess]

Ereri fic rec!

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now but finally got to it lmao. All of these are really, really good fics (hence why they are here lol) but I’ve marked my absolute favorites with ***. All of these are from AO3 and are complete. They’re mostly short with a few longer ones mixed in. Enjoy?

***Thank You For The Daisies by suagrplumsensei under 1k, absolute and pure fluff

Levi and Eren are dating.

Since the authorities wouldn’t approve, they are trying to be discreet about it.

taking flight by candycity 1k+, crack, wing!fic

“Touch his wings. I dare you.”

In which Levi has (really pretty) wings, Jean is an asshole and Eren can’t resist a dare.

***Aprés Toi by synergenic (Losseflame) 3k, angst with the smallest hint of fluff, trigger warning for self-harm

Eren can fill the bathtub with his blood twice before he passes out.

(I have to add, this is my favorite favorite ereri fic ever, but a fair warning, it tugs at your heartstrings real bad)

You’re Not The Ordinary Type by chasingthebooty 20k+, fluff

Levi’s a mafia member who has a thing for the cutie who serves out bakery bread and wears short skirts.

***there’s magic between you and me by driedupwishes 1k + 3k, fluff, hogwarts!AU

It made sense to Levi and always had, Eren’s sorting. He didn’t understand why it kept coming up, especially since they were in their sixth year at school, but apparently some people didn’t know when to drop a topic.

And the sequel, everything you do is magic (kiss me once now I can’t leave)

five years time by cottontale 3k+, fluff and humor

Eren hadn’t realized how touchy he was with Levi until he couldn’t touch him anymore.

Or the one where Eren is a touch starved soldier and his Captain accidentally fixes it.

Don’t Let Me Down by SailorHeichou 20k+, kid!fic, mostly fluff

Levi is a twenty-three-year-old runaway raising his six-year-old cousin, Mikasa, after escaping from their abusive alcoholic Uncle several years before.

Now a young man, Levi works two jobs just to support Mikasa and himself. With a string of failed relationships behind him, Levi pours himself into working to make sure Mikasa can live comfortably. With a six-year-old child to support, Levi firmly believes he is better off alone but his friends all think otherwise.

Enter Eren Jaeger. It’s love at first sight but Levi stubbornly refuses to act on his feelings. Can Hanji and their friends, including one very attractive Eren Jaeger, convince Levi that it’s okay for him to try to be happy despite his broken past?

Nape by ryuusea 4k+, PWP (had to get one of these in here lmao)

Levi wonders if it is ironic or just pure coincidence that Eren’s weakest spot is the back of his neck. He licks one, two stripes across that exposed nape, then another up, then down, reveling in how this always turns Eren into a keening mess in his arms.

***An Unlikely Alliance by Moonsoon 110k+, slow build-ish, fluff

When Scouting Legions main trading partner, Wall Maria, is experiencing economic strain from constant attacks by the neighboring kingdom Titan, the leaders of the two nations come to an agreement: Scouting Legion will provide military protection in exchange for land and financial aid for the still growing nation.

Their new alliance will be sealed with the union of King Jaegar’s son Eren to the Scouting legions strongest soldier, Lance Corporal Levi. But how will the cold, impassive soldier warm to his new husband, who is far from the weak, spoiled princess he was expecting?

***Guardian Angel by artenon 3k+, wing!fic, fluff-ish?

He’d been in this same situation before, not too long ago, except now he was the one chained up and behind bars. And, fuck, did it hurt, because these were the two comrades he trusted the most, and Erwin was looking at him with a guarded, wary expression, and Hange was staring at him with the light of science in her eyes, analyzing him like he was one of her experiments.

(I absolutely adore this writer I would fetch the moon for them. If you’re even remotely interested in Haikyuu, I would highly recommend to check out their Kurotsukki fics as well!)

Want by artenon 1k+, fluff

Eren sits on the edge of the bed. Levi waits for him to lie down next to him so they can sleep, but Eren just continues to stare at the floor. He looks like he’s working up the nerve to say something, so Levi waits patiently, and sure enough, Eren turns to him a minute later and opens his mouth.

“Have you ever thought about sex?”

they say that an end can be a start by uro_boros 2k+, fluff i quess?

“But I recognize the signs of someone who’s running away from something.”

Eren’s head tilts on his shoulder, craning back to look at Levi. “Why?” he says, the line of his mouth dark and unamused. “You running from something?”

(or the one where Eren’s homeless and Levi’s neurotic. They make it work)

***Fairy Tales by surveycorpsjean 50k+, slow build-ish, ModernPrince!Au, mostly fluff

Eren is found discouraged and homeless, when he is offered a job as a maid by a stranger. He does the one thing he tells himself not to do; fall in love with the prince.

The (Last) Name Of The Game by missmichellebelle youtuber!Au, pure fluff

“Hey guys, Jaegerbomb here, and, due to very high demand—like, actually, I’m a little floored by how many of you were asking me for this—I give you the much anticipated… Boyfriend tag!”

What’s New, Pussycat? by Lucyndareads 30k, Cat!Levi, basically crack, fluff and smut in a pretty package

Apparently Eren is now living with a neurotic, possessive, clean freak, shapeshifting cat man.

Kinky.

Another Time, Another Place by appleapple 50k, angst-ish with little fluff

The one where they have to pretend to be married.

***Moments Of Grace by orphan_account 20k+, angst, kid!fic

“It’s not going to be an easy road,” Levi said, “but the right path never is. Do you regret taking custody? Do you regret your daughter?”

“No!” Eren said, anger flashing across his face.

“Good. Remember that on the days when you’re struggling.”

My Home Is Where Your Heart is by bfketh 15k, kid!fic, fluff, light angst

Single father Levi is left scrambling to find an after school daycare for his daughter, Mikasa, when his regular babysitter announces that her husband’s job is being relocated. The only problem - they’re all far more expensive than he can afford.

The solution to his dilemma comes in the form of a college student, Eren, who will do it for a fraction of the cost - as long as Levi will save him from a steady diet of ramen and pop-tarts by feeding him dinner every night before he leaves.

Darkest Before Dawn by ellewrites 3k, angst

Levi wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep when he was torn from the endless darkness of his mind by a deep, disturbing groan. Eren’s body jerked roughly, his nails digging painfully into Levi’s upper arm. Levi was disoriented for a moment as he sat up, unsure of what was happening. Eren dug his fingers in harder, a sob caught in his throat as he begged – “Please don’t go.”

***This Charming Man (series) by Plexus (toitsu) combined: 4k+, angst, angst, angst

Eren Yeagar is a problematic high school student who is faced with expulsion unless he enrolls into some kind of community service program. Since he is not that stupid, thank you very much, he decides to go with it.

The program he’s enrolled into puts high schoolers to work in the homes of elderly and disabled people who don’t have any family or friends, helping them with housekeeping, errands and suchlike. No big deal. He expects to end up cleaning house for some sweet little elderly lady with a lot of cats, or at worst a crotchety grandpa.

He doesn’t expect Levi.

Home Sweet Home (series) by ferric combined: 15k+, kid!fic, (if you’re looking for heavy Ereri I wouldn’t recommend this one as it mostly focuses on young!Eren)

Levi raising a young Eren.

***Chasing Disaster by freshia 4k, fluff, a bit of humor

Eren crashes into Levi’s life. Literally. And he takes out a fence and a mailbox along the way.

A Tenuous Third Space by artenon 14k, fluff

In which Attack on Titan is the MMORPG they all play, and Eren meets Levi online.

Ashes by scarrletmoon 1k+, angst, reincarnation!Au

Levi is a former criminal who has recently been released from prison. Eren is in his final year of high school when the two finally meet.

Little Titan Cafe by pocketsizedtitan 65k+ slow build, fluff

Just another cliche AU in which Eren works as a barista in his mother’s café, specializing in latte art. And then there’s Levi, who’s not exactly your typical patron, because, well, he’s blunt and rude (which Eren supposes isn’t that much different from regular customers) but mostly he just confuses Eren’s poor little homosexual heart.

***Playing Favorites by Ketita 6k+, pure tooth-rotting fluff

In which Levi seems determined to spoil Eren rotten, whether he likes it or not.

(For the record, Eren hadn’t expected his confession to lead to this sort of thing at all).

***The October Story by angstwithtea 55k, fluuuff, cat!levi

It all started on October first. The day that Eren found that strange little cat alone in the street outside the thrift store. Everything afterwards might have been coincidental. Or fate. Some might say that crossing paths with a black cat is bad luck. But for Eren, things weren’t so certain. In fact, finding that cat may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Help Me Stand by ichigoangel 170k+, heavy angst, please read the trigger warnings

Eren’s best childhood friend and high school boyfriend, Armin, dies in a car accident in which Eren had been the one at the wheel. Unable to keep from blaming himself, life itself becomes agonizing for Eren and he turns to the more negative side of coping mechanisms. Eventually, he meets a college student named Levi who seems like he has it all figured out, just to discover that they have more in common than he thought. Modern!AU.

Also, Levi has a motorcycle because it was definitely necessary.

***Shattered Façade by kylar 40k+, heavy angst, trigger warnings for domestic abuse, self-harm and cheating

After being disowned by his homophobic father during his senior year of high school, Eren’s only option was to move in with his boyfriend, Reiner. But Reiner soon became possessive and controlling of Eren, and it turned into an abusive relationship. Five years later, Reiner’s control over Eren is complete, until one night they meet a detective who will shatter Eren’s happy façade.

Trompe-l'œil by appleapple 10k+, angst and a whole lot of misunderstandings

He has never minded the bitterness at the bottom of the cup

The Misanthrope by kazuma85 25k+, fluff and angst

The story is set in an AU world where Eren was only a child when the humanity won against Titans. When he’s fifteen, he meets Levi, humanity’s introverted hero, who is not exactly the kind of person people believe he is.

[auskultu]

The Strange New Love Land of the Hippies

Loudon Wainwright, Life, 31 March 1967

Just in case anybody's still got his head stuck in the sand, something is happening with American youth, and if others hope they will wake up one morning to lind ended the spreading youthful rebellion against virtually all the fine, old. established values, I think they can forget it. In fact, I believe the hour of the hippie—which could well enlist enormous numbers of young people from all over the country—is coming and that the most sensible thing we straight types can do is to take a good look at this bizarre new scene.

I recently had a brief contact with the hippies in their new national capital in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and my own reactions to this scene were unexpectedly mixed. As a not-so-youthful square, I guess I thought it would repel and outrage me. As a parent engaged in the endless struggle to defend the worth of hard work and the merit of an orderly existence, I was prepared to suffer my own indignation. Yet I quite simply felt none of this at all.

Some of the hippie ways struck me as awful. Some of their talk is nonsense (but whose is not?), and some of their behavior. like the behavior of the squares they deplore, seems both self-destructive and immoral. The hippies jarred me, but there is much about them that is distinctly appealing. Those I met use the word "love” a lot and dispense it freely among themselves and to outsiders w ho don't bug them. It is a weapon of astonishing power.

The Haight-Ashbury section houses perhaps 30,000 people in a somewhat gonc-to-seed area of the city, and its central thoroughfare is Haight Street, an ordinary mixture of grocery and drugstores, shops and saloons. What is decidedly not ordinary about Haight Street are the pedestrians who stroll there, and on a clear day, clothed in wild combinations of capes, boots, turbans, necklaces, bells, chinos, earrings, bearded or not, long hair and short, they parade and lounge in such big and colorful numbers that carloads of sightseers create w eekend traffic jams. These are the hippies (plus some would-be hippies, runaway kids and some outright fakes who get dressed up and come to Haight Street just to join the fun), and it is estimated that between 6.000 and 8,000 of them from all over the I nited Stales are living in the district. By and large, the ages of these voting men and women range between 18 and 23, but there are older hippies, and there are hippie children, too, toddling along between their parents or strapped papooselike to the hack of a bearded father. If it is a strange scene, it is also an entirely peaceful one, and emerging here and there from the crow d are faces of true benignity and beauty.

Among the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury are college graduates, people who have left good jobs, dropouts, men who have completed their military service, girls who couldn't stand their mothers (and boys their fathers), kids of high intelligence from well-off homes (from whence remittance money comes), drifters and misfits and a smattering of the human flotsam that might be expected to drift along with any crowd. Some work regularly, others irregularly, others not at all. Their common bond is revulsion against established authority and against the whole system ("the missile race is just a big, sick, sexual trip”), and among their most widely practiced tribal mores is the use of marijuana and LSD. A great majority of the hippies turn on frequently with these drugs and, though the practice is deplored by the more thoughtful members of the community, others use Methedrine ("speed”) or even heroin. The group's language is clearly drug-oriented, the posters, lapel buttons and literature sold in hippie-run shops have that distinct cast, and some wags have called the area Psychedelphia.

Perhaps because the hippies are peaceable (they don't drink, for one important thing), the population of San Francisco is relatively relaxed about their presence in the city. The attitudes of some are strongly positive. One such man is Father Leon Harris, the rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in the district. On the door of Father Harris’ office is a hippie poster in electric reds and greens which says "Haight is Love.”

’’I'm a booster for the hippies,” Father Harris told me. "They have some very fine ideas. They believe in sharing and they’re against hypocrisy. They’re for love and peace. They are honest and open. The drugs deeply concern me. They may have washed their hands of the Establishment, but in many way s that is quite understandable. Our example has been far front good. These people are trying to find a way, and I admire them for that.”

Of course, the view held by Father Harris is more loving than many. The drug situation in the Haight-Ashbury, where arrests tripled last year, is considered alarming by the police, doctors ami other authorities, and, aside from the effects on health, the obvious preoccupation of the hippies with the pleasures of the regularly drugged existence seems to me a most disruptive sort of escapism. All the talk about “mind-expanding” might just be masking a headlong flight from reality.

The worry is not just confined to the use of drugs. A lot of the hippies, as opposed to the equally long-haired hut busy and activist young students at Berkeley across the hay, are not really doing anything, and this aimless vegetation is a matter of concern to many hippie-watchers. Among them is a man named Bill Graham, who manages a wild and wonderful rock music group much admired by the hippies and called the Jefferson Airplane. Graham continually upbraids his hippie acquaintances for their idleness. "They run around shouting ’Rebel! Rebel! Rebel!’,” says Graham, "and nothing really is happening. A lot of them aren’t for anything, even themselves.”

One of the best-known small hippie groups in The Haight-Ashbury is an outfit called the Diggers, and they are by no means idle. They have taken on the responsibility of caring for hippies in general. To this end they provide shelter in two or three houses they have been able to rent. They gather, repair and distribute old clothing, and they scrounge for or buy at cut prices food which they pass out free and daily in a nearby park to anyone who arrives with a howl and an appetite. This regular mass feeding, which usually consists of a hot, stew like dish and bread, often accommodates upward of 100 diners, and the atmosphere, with the hippies in groups on the grass, is clearly picnicky. It is also inviting, and one story in the district has it that every few days a stranger in old clothes arrives to eat. When he is finished, he crosses the park and then gets into a car his chauffeur is waiting to drive away.

Father Harris, who considers the Diggers much like mendicants of the Middle Ages, has given them office space in the church basement and lets them use the kitchen for cooking their handout meals. A group of perhaps 10 were in the church the morning I was there and, feeling somewhat strange in my own costume of suit and necktie, I introduced myself.

They were wonderfully indifferent to my outlandish appearance ("that’s your trip, man”) and welcomed me immediately. For perhaps an hour we talked—or rather I listened as they talked—about a wide variety of matters. They attacked the war in Vietnam, the President, Governor Reagan, the press, the courts, the fuzz. "This system isn’t working,” one intense young man with an earring told me. "The people aren’t eating. This kind of setup encourages madmen.” He rapped his finger on the table. "You dig?” I shrugged hopefully.

Some of their concerns that morning were more immediate. There are estimates that 200,000 young people will he migrating to the Haight-Ashbury this summer, and the Diggers are trying to find ways, including getting the help of the city, to prepare for what might prove to be a realty horrendous demand for housing and food. Indeed, the situation right now in the district is growing critical. On the day I saw them, the Diggers were very short of food and were incensed because they had discovered that in one hippie house there was a big supply of beans that should have been more generously shared. Not quite believing my own presence, I tagged along in their wake when they went to the house, burst up the stairs, had a brief and noisy argument with the startled hippie leaders there, came to agreement and departed carrying half the beans into the rain in boxes and a great, sagging blanket.

The house where we then took the beans was packed with people. In the living room there were perhaps 20 sitting around on shabby furniture and on the floor, some talking, some writing in notebooks, some listening to softly played guitars. Throughout the rest of the house every available bit of space was covered with cushions, mattresses, sleeping bags. Makeshift walls of cardboard and sheets partitioned the bedrooms into still smaller spaces, and in most of these, w hose walls were painted with splashes of color, psychedelic designs and slogans like "Love is the Trip,” more young men and women sat and talked or were sleeping ("crashing”). One boy spoke to me from his bed in a closet, and against a wall in the basement stood the lower half of a metal coffin. "It’s great, man,” said its proud tenant. "And you get to satisfy your death wish, too.”

There were possibly 50 people in the house that day, and it has held more. Singly and in couples (some legally married, some not), they come and go daily, and none of them is turned away unless he is under 18 or breaks the rule which forbids taking any drugs in the house. It’s perfectly all right to take them outside and then come in. There is a continuing effort to fight the squalor natural to such crowded conditions, and the battle against the plumbing is losing and constant. Yet to a great extent the dirt and discomfort are embraced as the logical companions of full freedom.

But the squalor does make one wonder. What is there about dirt and disorder that is so appealing, even desirable? What has the Establishment done to drive people to express their repudiation of it by wallowing in a mess they themselves make? If theirs is a form of protest, they seem clearly to be both the initiators and the victims of it. Would some small measure of self-respect (and I’m not talking about haircuts) undermine the revolution?

Certainly not all of the hippie quarters in The Haight-Ashbury are as jammed. I was invited to a smaller place where about 12 were living. This apartment was tidy, and one of the girls, who said that she produced her financial contribution to the household by panhandling, gave me coffee and a bowl of macaroni. When I refused sugar and said I had a pill for the coffee, the group laughed, and one boy called out: "Get the middle-aged hippie!” The girl curled up next to him on the couch said she had never been really happy until she left home. Now, she said, she thought she w as pregnant, and she and the boy exchanged fond looks.

It was all so loving—good friends together, warm shelter, food, the rain against the window—and it almost seemed plausible. But not quite. What about those who weren’t there, the families of the hippies? Were they looking for these young people or had they given them up? What, I wondered, about the girl who was becoming an accomplished panhandler? How long could she happily ply that humiliating trade? And the girl who thought she was pregnant, would she feel in a few months, as she obviously felt now, that her event was blessed? Or would she feel bitter and swindled and angry at herself for having once had the courage of her folly? In that context, the word "love” seems a ludicrous distortion, and at the very least I would wish for these young people that they had not taken this foolish and painful journey to find it.

The rain was coming down too hard for us to go out then, and we just sat around and talked for awhile. One of the boys took his guitar and began to sing, first folk and blues I didn’t know, then, in deference to the guest, he started on more familiar things like “House of the Rising Sun” and even “Summertime.” We all joined in, and in the middle of one song, a boy lying on the floor tugged at my trouser leg. "You get the vibrations?” he asked. "We’re all together, aren’t we, man?” Indeed we were, in that space and in that moment, and I was sad it could not last. Yet it could not for me, for I know of better afternoons, and it cannot last for them either.

[adambstingus]

Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik review – Gershom Scholem and Zionism

The author, like his subject, rejected consumer capitalism and travelled to Israel to find a more meaningful Jewish life. But problems arose

One day before the outbreak of the first world war, a precocious boy called Gerhard Scholem burst into a room at home and began the rite of symbolically castrating his father. Papa, I think I want to be a Jew, he exclaimed. He was planning to learn Hebrew, study the Bible and become a Zionist. His father, an assimilationist German businessman who despised his Jewish heritage, was appalled: You want to return to the ghetto? he asked. Youre the ones who are living in the ghetto, his son snapped back. Only you wont admit it.

Scholem meant that his father had established the family in a gilded bourgeois Jewish prison within a hostile German society his friend, Walter Benjamin, who grew up in a similarly privileged west Berlin milieu, described it as something of a ghetto held on lease. These rebellious sons turned out to be unwittingly prescient.

Such Oedipal confrontations were common in German-speaking lands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the privileged sons of Jewish businessmen rebelled against their fathers devotion to bourgeois accumulation and deluded patriotism for a Wilhelmine polity that denied Jews equal rights. Some rebels such as Gerhards brother Werner (who would die in 1940 in Buchenwald) became communists. Others, Scholem for one, were attracted by the Zionist hopes advanced by political activist Theodor Herzl and philosopher Martin Buber. Scholem kept a portrait of the former on his bedroom wall, and felt a jolt of electricity when he heard Buber lecture and identify Jews as Orientals for whom the priority was mutuality and community, processes and relationships against the atomised, petrified western man of the senses.

He dreamed that the Jews could replace, as George Prochnik puts it, the attitude of impotent suffering with rambunctious perilously naked self-expression. Instead of being strangers in European lands, Jews could go home and become themselves not hobbled melancholics of the diaspora, nor spiritless worshippers of degrading consumer capitalism.

David Ben-Gurion (centre), Israels first prime minister, giving an address in Tel Aviv, 1948. Photograph: AP

This at least was the messianic dream that led Scholem in 1923 to quit Germany for Palestine, where the young philologist and scholar of that mystical thread of Judaism called Kabbalah spent the rest of his life. That was the year of Hitlers beer hall putsch, only 10 years before the Nazi leader was elected German chancellor and 19 before the Wannsee conference implemented the Final Solution. Scholem figures as an antithesis of Stefan Zweig, subject of Prochniks previous book, the cosmopolitan humanist who couldnt abandon his idealised vision of European culture: Scholem is a hero to the author because of the virtuosity with which he developed alternative, non-European Jewish, visions.

In Jerusalem, Scholem changed his first name, becoming Gershom the name given by Moses to his son after the escape from Egypt. It was after that escape that Moses said: I have been a stranger in a strange land, with its implication (encoded in one meaning of the name Gershom) that the prophet was home after the woes of exile. But, for Scholem, anarchically esoteric exegete that he was, Gershom also meant Stranger is his name. Prochnik tells us he revelled in this paradox, glossing it thus: Once a stranger, now home; forever a stranger, by destiny. He was never at home, not quite.

Certainly if Scholem had been a stranger in Germany, he was to be differently alienated in his new home. Prochnik takes us through the history of British mandate-era Palestine to the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel, whose birth pangs were witnessed by Scholem. From the heights of the newly founded Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, the professor looked down on his disappointing people like a new Moses on Mount Sinai finding that, instead of Zionism meaning the transcendent salvation of the Jewish people, in practice it involved the recrudescence of godless western materialism, dubious religious conservatism and heartless treatment of the Arab population. He stayed but became something Guardian readers can identify with, a remoaner.

Yet Scholem also became a source of pride to the new Israel, symbol not of its martial valour or economic chutzpah but its intellectual excellence. Prime minister David Ben-Gurion reportedly shut his office for five days in 1957 and went to bed to read Scholems magnum opus on the false Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Sevi. Imagine, by way of parallel, Theresa May suspending Brexit negotiations to curl up with volume three of philosopher Derek Parfits On What Matters.

But thats only one thread of this ardent, beautifully written book. The other is Prochniks parallel rebellion and Zionist awakening in the late 1980s when he quit the US, converted to Judaism, learned Hebrew and settled in Jerusalem. He describes his upbringing in Fairfax City, Virginia, as spiritual violation. The despoliation he witnessed as malls consumed Americas wilderness resonated somehow with the ruins of European history that my fathers family had fled. Israel promised, or so it seemed, escape from both ruins. Like his hero, Prochnik was a first-born son sticking it to the old man for letting the flame of his Jewish identity burn down as low as it could go.

And so, one day in the late 80s he flew to Israel clutching his battered copy of Scholems On the Kabbalah and Its Mysticism. In Jerusalem he married Anne, an artist and teacher, and raised three children, all the while struggling with his writing career and with his place in, and commitment to, Israel. Like Scholem, only more so, he was both beguiled by and estranged from its realisation of Zionism rising consumerism, irksome dress codes, the unresolved Arab question.

Harvesting wheat in a field near Modiin, Israel. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

As he delved deeper into Scholems mystical Jewish thought, Prochnik explored the notion of the Shekinah, roughly the glory of the divine presence interpreted in Kabbalism in feminine terms. Just as Aristophanes had imagined in Platos Symposium human nature split into gendered halves who yearned for their original wholeness, so Scholem suggested that a part of God Himself is exiled from God, namely the feminine part, who is the spiritual personification of exile and Jewish exile in particular. For Kabbalists and for Scholem, humanitys task of bringing Gods masculine and feminine aspects back to their foundational unity was akin to Zionisms dream of overcoming Jews exile.

One imagines Prochnik looking up from his exciting esoteric readings, to be confronted with Israels sometimes disappointing reality, gender-wise. Jewish religious practice, at worst, was hardly premised on rediscovering that foundational unity: Orthodoxy effectively cut women out completely from non-domestic religious activity, Prochnik writes. I felt there had to be a more meaningful role for women than just replicating male functions in a ritual territory demarcated and dust covered by men.

Other demarcations slowly impinge on Prochnik. At one poignant moment, he wonders why Arab boys cleaning tables at a restaurant arent at school. While he is graceful in admitting his omissions of empathy, the book reads as if he sometimes lost sight of how, to repurpose Walter Benjamins remark, Israeli civilisation, like every other in human history, has its barbarous flip side.

His estrangement came to a head with the 1995 murder of Yitzhak Rabin by ultraconservative student Yigal Amir, who was opposed to the prime ministers support for the Oslo peace accords that entailed Israeli withdrawal from West Bank settlements. The villain of Israels recent history, for Prochnik, emerges as the nations current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, before Rabins murder, made the breasts of conservatives swell with a sense of their own vigilante machismo while sending psychopaths into a frenzy.

He doesnt quite indict Netanyahu for creating favourable circumstances for Rabins assassination, but when Bibi was months later elected prime minister, it was time for Prochnik and Anne to leave for the US. He writes: the very thing that once drew us was what we needed to renounce. Worse, their marriage, founded on the joy of their Israeli adventure, couldnt survive the rupture. What remains, however, is Prochniks adoration for Scholem, and his unrealised and perhaps unrealisable notion of Zionist transcendence.

Stuart Jeffriess Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School is published by Verso.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershon Scholem and Jerusalem s published by Granta. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/stranger-in-a-strange-land-by-george-prochnik-review-gershom-scholem-and-zionism/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/173473695312

[allofbeercom]

Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik review – Gershom Scholem and Zionism

The author, like his subject, rejected consumer capitalism and travelled to Israel to find a more meaningful Jewish life. But problems arose

One day before the outbreak of the first world war, a precocious boy called Gerhard Scholem burst into a room at home and began the rite of symbolically castrating his father. Papa, I think I want to be a Jew, he exclaimed. He was planning to learn Hebrew, study the Bible and become a Zionist. His father, an assimilationist German businessman who despised his Jewish heritage, was appalled: You want to return to the ghetto? he asked. Youre the ones who are living in the ghetto, his son snapped back. Only you wont admit it.

Scholem meant that his father had established the family in a gilded bourgeois Jewish prison within a hostile German society his friend, Walter Benjamin, who grew up in a similarly privileged west Berlin milieu, described it as something of a ghetto held on lease. These rebellious sons turned out to be unwittingly prescient.

Such Oedipal confrontations were common in German-speaking lands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the privileged sons of Jewish businessmen rebelled against their fathers devotion to bourgeois accumulation and deluded patriotism for a Wilhelmine polity that denied Jews equal rights. Some rebels such as Gerhards brother Werner (who would die in 1940 in Buchenwald) became communists. Others, Scholem for one, were attracted by the Zionist hopes advanced by political activist Theodor Herzl and philosopher Martin Buber. Scholem kept a portrait of the former on his bedroom wall, and felt a jolt of electricity when he heard Buber lecture and identify Jews as Orientals for whom the priority was mutuality and community, processes and relationships against the atomised, petrified western man of the senses.

He dreamed that the Jews could replace, as George Prochnik puts it, the attitude of impotent suffering with rambunctious perilously naked self-expression. Instead of being strangers in European lands, Jews could go home and become themselves not hobbled melancholics of the diaspora, nor spiritless worshippers of degrading consumer capitalism.

David Ben-Gurion (centre), Israels first prime minister, giving an address in Tel Aviv, 1948. Photograph: AP

This at least was the messianic dream that led Scholem in 1923 to quit Germany for Palestine, where the young philologist and scholar of that mystical thread of Judaism called Kabbalah spent the rest of his life. That was the year of Hitlers beer hall putsch, only 10 years before the Nazi leader was elected German chancellor and 19 before the Wannsee conference implemented the Final Solution. Scholem figures as an antithesis of Stefan Zweig, subject of Prochniks previous book, the cosmopolitan humanist who couldnt abandon his idealised vision of European culture: Scholem is a hero to the author because of the virtuosity with which he developed alternative, non-European Jewish, visions.

In Jerusalem, Scholem changed his first name, becoming Gershom the name given by Moses to his son after the escape from Egypt. It was after that escape that Moses said: I have been a stranger in a strange land, with its implication (encoded in one meaning of the name Gershom) that the prophet was home after the woes of exile. But, for Scholem, anarchically esoteric exegete that he was, Gershom also meant Stranger is his name. Prochnik tells us he revelled in this paradox, glossing it thus: Once a stranger, now home; forever a stranger, by destiny. He was never at home, not quite.

Certainly if Scholem had been a stranger in Germany, he was to be differently alienated in his new home. Prochnik takes us through the history of British mandate-era Palestine to the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel, whose birth pangs were witnessed by Scholem. From the heights of the newly founded Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, the professor looked down on his disappointing people like a new Moses on Mount Sinai finding that, instead of Zionism meaning the transcendent salvation of the Jewish people, in practice it involved the recrudescence of godless western materialism, dubious religious conservatism and heartless treatment of the Arab population. He stayed but became something Guardian readers can identify with, a remoaner.

Yet Scholem also became a source of pride to the new Israel, symbol not of its martial valour or economic chutzpah but its intellectual excellence. Prime minister David Ben-Gurion reportedly shut his office for five days in 1957 and went to bed to read Scholems magnum opus on the false Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Sevi. Imagine, by way of parallel, Theresa May suspending Brexit negotiations to curl up with volume three of philosopher Derek Parfits On What Matters.

But thats only one thread of this ardent, beautifully written book. The other is Prochniks parallel rebellion and Zionist awakening in the late 1980s when he quit the US, converted to Judaism, learned Hebrew and settled in Jerusalem. He describes his upbringing in Fairfax City, Virginia, as spiritual violation. The despoliation he witnessed as malls consumed Americas wilderness resonated somehow with the ruins of European history that my fathers family had fled. Israel promised, or so it seemed, escape from both ruins. Like his hero, Prochnik was a first-born son sticking it to the old man for letting the flame of his Jewish identity burn down as low as it could go.

And so, one day in the late 80s he flew to Israel clutching his battered copy of Scholems On the Kabbalah and Its Mysticism. In Jerusalem he married Anne, an artist and teacher, and raised three children, all the while struggling with his writing career and with his place in, and commitment to, Israel. Like Scholem, only more so, he was both beguiled by and estranged from its realisation of Zionism rising consumerism, irksome dress codes, the unresolved Arab question.

Harvesting wheat in a field near Modiin, Israel. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

As he delved deeper into Scholems mystical Jewish thought, Prochnik explored the notion of the Shekinah, roughly the glory of the divine presence interpreted in Kabbalism in feminine terms. Just as Aristophanes had imagined in Platos Symposium human nature split into gendered halves who yearned for their original wholeness, so Scholem suggested that a part of God Himself is exiled from God, namely the feminine part, who is the spiritual personification of exile and Jewish exile in particular. For Kabbalists and for Scholem, humanitys task of bringing Gods masculine and feminine aspects back to their foundational unity was akin to Zionisms dream of overcoming Jews exile.

One imagines Prochnik looking up from his exciting esoteric readings, to be confronted with Israels sometimes disappointing reality, gender-wise. Jewish religious practice, at worst, was hardly premised on rediscovering that foundational unity: Orthodoxy effectively cut women out completely from non-domestic religious activity, Prochnik writes. I felt there had to be a more meaningful role for women than just replicating male functions in a ritual territory demarcated and dust covered by men.

Other demarcations slowly impinge on Prochnik. At one poignant moment, he wonders why Arab boys cleaning tables at a restaurant arent at school. While he is graceful in admitting his omissions of empathy, the book reads as if he sometimes lost sight of how, to repurpose Walter Benjamins remark, Israeli civilisation, like every other in human history, has its barbarous flip side.

His estrangement came to a head with the 1995 murder of Yitzhak Rabin by ultraconservative student Yigal Amir, who was opposed to the prime ministers support for the Oslo peace accords that entailed Israeli withdrawal from West Bank settlements. The villain of Israels recent history, for Prochnik, emerges as the nations current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, before Rabins murder, made the breasts of conservatives swell with a sense of their own vigilante machismo while sending psychopaths into a frenzy.

He doesnt quite indict Netanyahu for creating favourable circumstances for Rabins assassination, but when Bibi was months later elected prime minister, it was time for Prochnik and Anne to leave for the US. He writes: the very thing that once drew us was what we needed to renounce. Worse, their marriage, founded on the joy of their Israeli adventure, couldnt survive the rupture. What remains, however, is Prochniks adoration for Scholem, and his unrealised and perhaps unrealisable notion of Zionist transcendence.

Stuart Jeffriess Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School is published by Verso.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershon Scholem and Jerusalem s published by Granta. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/stranger-in-a-strange-land-by-george-prochnik-review-gershom-scholem-and-zionism/