loveitallabove

The below was a first draft...finally posted by the CJM on its blog here: http://cjmvoices.blogspot.com/2013/08/modern-nostalgia.html Beyond Belief makes me nostalgic. It is an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum right now. It is also the opening track on Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello - not the first record I owned, but maybe the first record I owned , and knew every word in a way where I thought I was the only one in the world who knew every word. It was the summer of 1982 I was 13. My Bar Mitzvah was that year, and I knew I'd be leaving public school that next year to begin a private high school. My performance in school had been less than sterling but my interests at home reflected a different kind of kid. I would steal away from the stiflingly humid Maryland summer heat into the one room that had air conditioning in the nineteenth century farmhouse in which I grew up. It was the guest room beside my parents’ bedroom. On the shelves were my mother's m...

I cannot tell whether I hated this book, could just barely bear it, or what. I was consumed by the idea that it had won the Booker Prize , and really there was something about the studied conversational language that carried me forward through to the end. There were painful, truthful elements about pain, infidelity and lifetime friendships that rang true across the plaza like a church bell. Still, I think maybe it was abysmal. But I am a Jewish professional, as a Deputy Director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and so I felt some sense of obligation to get to the end and more fully grasp over what the author was puzzling. A few quotes made me want to fold down the page and refer to them later: [Parenthetically the author writes,] “(he would have said his faith but Finkler was Finkler and Finkler had no faith)” p. 56 ‘So this museum…’ Finkler said, when the table was cleared. Hephzibah inclined her head on his direction. ‘…don’t we have enough of them already?’ ‘Museums in gen...