Tag Archives: Naomi Schor

Birthday Postcard, Naomi Schor

I’m going to Paris next week for the first time in 26 years. Despite my French education at the Lyçée Français de New York, I have spent relatively little time in Paris, in France, and have complex feelings about speaking French–having been bilingual, I allowed the language to rust. Yet my emotions about Paris run deep. Last week, looking at a map of the Arrondissement I will be staying in, reading names of streets and boulevards, I began to sob and, at great expense, bought myself one extra day.

October 10 is my sister Naomi Schor’s birthday. She would be 76 years old. She died 18 years ago December 2, 2001. It is such a long time ago. I sat down in the subway the other day and realized the lady sitting down next to me was an old friend of my sister’s. She was off to work, a professor, like my sister, but she was still teaching. I am meeting another friend of my sister’s in Paris and we plan to toast our long friendships and the role Paris played in our lives, at La Coupole.

I bring this up because my sister loved Paris and knew it well, spending in the aggregate several years of her life there. Before that my parents, young Polish artists, had lived in Paris, fleeing for their lives in June 1941. They would have probably settled there permanently had it not been for the war.

I will let my sister speak:

from her 1992 essay, “Cartes Postales,” in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1992: she noted that collectors of postcards are advised to focus on one category, often the city or even the street where they live:

“from the outset [as a collector turn of the century postcards] I was drawn to postcards of a place where I neither live nor work, France, and very quickly within France, Paris. This choice suggests the inadequacy of a model based strictly on an unexamined notion of one’s place of birth, work, or daily life as grounding one’s identity, what Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty call the “unproblematic geographic location of home.” This model cannot account for the possibility of a dis-location constituting the foundation of one’s being, or at any rate one’s collecting, but as we have seen for the collector being and collecting are intimately related. In Martin and Mohanty’s text the “illusion of home,” or of at-homeness is shattered by the realization that “these buildings and streets witnessed and obscured particular race, class, and gender struggles.” This is the postmodern, post-colonialist condition: what is at first experienced as a secure, identity-giving and sheltering space is revealed to be a place of bloody struggle and exclusion. Like the unheimlich, in whose semantic field it participates, home is a word whose positive connotations are undermined by an antithetical and negative meaning.

For me the home that is not home is Paris: but what is hidden there is a form of violence and racial struggle not generally understood today when the trinity of race, class, and gender is invoked. I am speaking of anti-Semitism, theirs not mine. My parents, Polish Jews, left Poland in the late thirties with the intention of settling in Paris. In June 1941, they along with thousands of others fleeing Hitler’s impending arrival left Paris and headed South. They were among the lucky ones; unlike Benjamin and the countless others who did not make it, they eventually crossed the border between France and Spain and settled in New York. French was my first language and the language in which I was educated. In 1958 I visited Europe and Paris for the first time. Since then, as a professional student of the French language and culture I have been back often. Perhaps someday, I fantasize, I shall retire to Paris. For now I have chosen to write on it, in order to come to terms with a longing, a fascination, an ambivalence, unfinished business.

These are pictures taken on October 8, 1965 as my sister departed New York City for Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had first visited Paris in 1958 when my parents took us back on what effectively was a test of their new identities as Americans, as New Yorkers. Having fled the city they loved, returning as successful naturalized citizens with two American children, might they be tempted to return to live in Paris? The trip clarified that their lives were now in America. My sister returned to France August 1961, shortly after my father’s death, having won a poetry contest whose first prize was a trip to France where she was treated like a visiting celebrity on a countrywide tour. Now she was returning for real, as a “Fulbrighter!” I am always struck by these pictures, captured by the ship photographer, first of her walking alone towards the boat, exemplifying the difference between us then and later, her dignity and sober elegance and her love of travel and adventure, second as what for me was always the epitome of elegance, an Audrey Hepburn moment, sunglasses, about to go up the gang plank, one patent leather clad foot tipped up ever so delicately as she balanced her bag on her knee.

I don’t think she could have taken the blow of the fire at Notre Dame
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My generation and Paris

We were born in the safe interval between catastrophes. Which is worse? To have been born in a catastrophic moment and live life at all times informed by danger, fear, and the necessities of bare survival, or to have been born in a moment and place of relative safety and bounty. My generation, many of us the children of war refugees, Holocaust survivors, war survivors in Europe, or of survivors of the Great Depression, was steeped in the history of the previous catastrophic era, but we grew up in a golden moment of post-war middle class relative security and cultural possibility. Now darkness descends: fascism, austerity, poverty, war, extremism, the eradication of symbols of civilization by men and the eradication, by men, of the planet as a site for human existence. Is it worse for us born in an illusory moment of security or for those beginning their lives, born into a transitional moment of lingering entitlement but growing desperation?

Among responses to what happened yesterday evening in Paris, are shock, horror, grief, but also a condemnation of the West for its causative historical policies of colonialism and exploitation, its recent history of senseless war, and its lack of interest in anything that happens any place but at its core. Behind that lurks something else, a critique of the Enlightenment as the philosophical source of Eurocentric domination, something that one encounters more particularly in the one place that has any concern for the Enlightenment, that is to say academia. It is a contradictory discussion, whose terms are largely determined by Western thought, much of it emerging from Paris since the Seventeenth Century and particularly since the French Revolution. Last night the familiar meme, “Today we are all French, Today we are all Parisian…” began to appear, just as monuments around the world were illuminated in the tricolor of the French flag. And certainly anyone who critiques the Enlightenment, just as anyone who is interested in democracy, is going to use French thought to do so, which is to say, largely, Parisian thought.

I am not qualified to engage with the critique of the Enlightenment. But I did receive a French education. That was my “formation” (pronounced as the French word meaning education and training). I later turned away from it yet my mind was formed and marked by that education.

This morning I reached for some of the books from my education at the Lyçée Français de New York and then some of the other books that have been so central to so many of us.

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First I got on a little step ladder  to get down from an upper shelf my trusty Lagarde & Michard readers from high school at the Lyçée. I loved these books. Do I remember anything from them enough to discuss or teach? No, and yet when I open them I see the work that we did every week, reading these texts, doing “explication de texte,” being formed by thought and a detailed approach to language about thought itself. They do place human thought at the center of the world. The text most frequently quoted by my students the past few years is Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, where human agency and participation in events is decentered. This is an interesting and importantly egalitarian view, and yet the earlier human centered philosophy is still instructive and even necessary.

Yet here is Blaise Pascal‘s “Le Roseau Pensant,” which posits man as a frail thing, dignified only by his capacity to be self-aware of his mortality and to think. Below that, from the Lagarde & Michard reader, a holographic reproduction of a piece of paper found in the lining of Pascal’s jacket upon his death, the Memorial.

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Below that I found two copies of René Descartes’ Discours de la méthode.

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From my readings of the past three decades, in another part of my library:

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My generation grew up into the spirit of 1968. It was our time. We lived Paris and its philosophy through the films of Jean Luc Godard and also in a different way those of  François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer. The CalArts I attended in 1971, as I realized much later, represented the flowering, in America, of the spirit of ’68, in its approach to freedom within learning and teaching. Most graduate students today still read Debord‘s The Society of the Spectacle and thoughts on détournement are metaphorically traced over the street plan of Paris.

…and in this thread I am not even addressing the importance of French and French based visual art, but…

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&

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&

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All graduate students in visual arts or media studies are assigned Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” Few immerse themselves in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a massive, unfinished, mythical,  collection of research about the early years of commodity culture studied through the cultural history of Paris in the Nineteenth Century.

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I find that some things are hard wired to an extent that is surprising. I’ve never lived in Paris, have only spent a few weeks there my whole life, and for various reasons and tropisms I became as much of an Anglophile as my sister Naomi Schor became a Francophile, but its role in my parents life and in that of my sister–her red-covered arrondissement map of Paris was one of her most treasured possessions–and the particular role that it plays in the history of the civilization that was the focus of my education from first grade through the final year of the Lyçée, “Philo,” is evidently so deep that I feel a particular spike of hysteria and rage when I hear news of terrorist attacks in Paris. I feel rage at many of the violations of civilization that we experience, from the deep sin the USA committed in waging the Iraq War, for which we will pay for decades, to the destruction of Palmyra, to the near daily mass shootings in the USA. As it is, post 9/11, fear of terrorism inflects my movements in the city, and if that fear is realized in a manner like what has occurred in Paris and elsewhere around the world, I would be under the bed with fear. But apparently Paris occupies a special space in my imaginary.

My father Ilya Schor came to Paris on a grant from the Polish government in 1937. My mother Resia Schor joined him in 1938. Here they are that winter, Place de la République, near where one of the attacks in Paris took place last night.

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It is my belief that most likely they would have lived their life based in Paris, returning to Poland to visit family, if it were not for the war. They fled Paris in either late May or early June, 1940, a few days ahead of the German Army. One of the many things I forgot to ask my mother was which day, exactly. Her memory was excellent, particularly for those few weeks of their life, from their departure from Paris, by the Porte d’Orléans, on one of the last trains or the last Métro, then on foot through Orléans, down to Bordeaux, towards the Spanish border, to their arrival in Marseilles in August 1940, where they stayed until October or November 1941, then on through Spain to Lisbon, arriving in New York December 3, 1941.

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There are some books I have, but perhaps this is the moment to confess I have not read them.

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I will open to a page of Jacques Derrida‘s Archive Fever.

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Through chance operations I find this paragraph, in which “the process of archivization” matches and is matched by “anarchiving destruction.”

The news from Paris is one of the many blows to our sense of the loss of reason and hope of our time, yet the day is followed by the day, and one has to figure out how to make the days count even if the idea of accumulating material for the human archive is increasingly revealed as a fantasy.

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Letter from a schoolgirl c.1960

In a documentary about 2014 Nobel Prize for literature author Patrick Modiano, historian Henry Rousso says, “Il a..interiorisé quelque chose qu’il na pas vécu”–“he interiorized something he did not live through.” This is the story of the way in which trauma, here the historical trauma of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War, filters through generations and shapes creativity and thought.

The texture of the world at every given moment is riven with traumas, personal, political, historical and at times they compete in ways that compound the psychic damage.

For my sister Naomi and me, my father’s Hasidic background, our parents’ experience of the Second World War, their massive personal losses in the Shoah and their miraculous survival were the past we had not lived but that we lived with, that we interiorized.

Today October 10, 2014 would have been my sister’s seventy-first birthday. She died in 2001 at the age of 58, which seems very young, particularly since I was the younger sister but am now older than that age, so I like to mark her birthday each year in some way.

Ilya Schor, The Tzadik, 1950s, wood engraving

Ilya Schor, The Tzadik, 1950s, wood engraving

A few weeks ago I found a torn scrap of paper among a box of her things: it is the draft of a letter she wrote to André Schwartz-Bart, the author of the 1959 novel Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just). I have not read the novel but perhaps because of Schwartz-Bart’s book and the discussions that took place around it in my childhood, and in particular because the theme of the novel and its title was the theme of a major work from 1956 by my father Ilya Schor, I am haunted by the Talmudic notion of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six “”hidden righteous ones,” whose existence redeems and preserves the world, their identities hidden to others and even, perhaps most especially, to themselves.

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My sister’s handwriting was distinctive and sometimes hard to decipher, this letter for some reason more so than usual: here it is in French and then in English, with cross outs left intact to show the process of writing and certain passages marked […] as undecipherable by me.

Cher Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

Je voudrais, tout simplement, vous remercier d’avoir écrit “Le Dernier des Justes,” Je voudrais vous remercier d’avoir raconté avec tant de poésie et de simplicité cette triste histoire de la famille Lévy, et par extension de tout notre peuple. Je voudrais vous remercie d’avoir exprimé ce que nous sentons tous.

Je me demande […]  si d’autres que nous peuvent sentir ce que nous sentons. Le succès de votre livre en France et ici en Amérique semble indiquer que oui. J’espère que grace à vous et d’autres comme vous qui auront pu lutter contre notre sort – non les […], les cris, la résignation, mais l’art des moyens artistiques, les générations futures de notre peuples pourront vivre, inutile de le dire, en paix.

Je suis une jeune étudiante (17 ans) au Lycée Français de New York. Mes parents, des artistes d’origine Polonaise, ont fui Paris la veille de l’arrivée de Hitler, ont traversé la France, passe deux ans à Marseille et sont enfin venu en Amérique.  Eux, ils ont échappé mais toute leur famille, leur amis ont péri. Mon père peint son petit village polonaise avec sa synagogue, ses hommes, ses femmes: je connais bien le visage de mes ancêtres et confrères disparus et je ne peus dire le vide que je ressens à ne pouvoir jamais jamais connaitre les modèles dont s’inspire mon père.

Mon père travaille aussi fait aussi des objets religieux et décoratifs en argent,  parmi eux il a fait une porte pour une synagogue dont le thème était les Lahmed Vov, les 36…

J’essaye seulement de vous dire que je suis sure que partout où un cœur juif bat votre livre sera chéri et pleure là-dessus.

Respectueusement

Naomi Schor

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Ilya Schor, 1950s, Steps to Women's Gallery of Synagogue at Zloczow. Gouache.

Ilya Schor, 1950s, Steps to Women’s Gallery of Synagogue at Zloczow. Gouache.

Catalogue for Ilya Schor, 1956, The Doors of the 36, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY

Catalogue for Ilya Schor, 1956, The Doors of the 36, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY

Dear Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

I would very simply like to thank you for having written “The Last of the Just”, I would like to thank you for having told with so much poetry and simplicity this sad story of the family Levy and, by extension, that of our whole people. I would like to thank you for expressing what we all feel.

I wonder if others can feel what we feel. The success of your book in France and in America seems to indicate yes. I hope that thanks to you and others like you who have been able to fight against our fate, not the …, not the cries, the resignation, but [through] artistic means future generations of our people will be able to live, needless to say, in peace.

I am a young schoolgirl (17 years old) at the Lycée Français de New York. My parents, artists of Polish origin, fled Paris just before the arrival of Hitler, they crossed France, spent two years in Marseille and finally arrived in America. They survived but their whole families, their friends perished. My father paints his small Polish village with its synagogue, its men, its women: I know well the face of my lost ancestors and brethren and I cannot express the emptiness I feel to never never be able to know the models that inspire my father.

My father also makes religious and decorative objects out of silver, among these he made a door for a synagogue, whose theme was the Lahmed Vov, the 36…

I just want to tell you that I am sure that everywhere a Jewish heart beats your book will be cherished and wept over.

Respectfully

Naomi Schor

I don’t know if my sister sent the letter. Based on its contents it was written between her seventeenth birthday October 10, 1960 and my father’s death in June 1961, because in the letter she refers to my father as living.

Ilya Schor and Naomi Schor, Provincetown, Summer 1960, Photo: Ryszard Horowitz

Ilya Schor and Naomi Schor, Provincetown, Summer 1960, Photo: Ryszard Horowitz

 

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Naomi Schor at 70

She was born October 10, 1943

in New York City, during World War II, to two refugees in their thirties who had arrived in America barely two years before and who would not become naturalized citizens for another four years.

 

 

At first they spoke to her in Polish so that their child would speak their language. But she was the first child born to a circle of friends, all recent refugees, from all over Europe. There was, as my mother put it, a “revolution” among these friends, who protested that they wanted to be able to communicate to this first child. So they spoke to her in French, which they spoke well though with a marked Eastern European accent . I assume that at that time in 1943, 1944, their English was not very good. Her first words were in French: she asked our friend Nadia Temerson, who, while feeding her, was taking little bites of food to encourage her to eat, “c’est bon, Nadia?”

 

Naomi Schor boarding the SS.United States to begin her first Fulbright Scholarship year in Paris, October 8, 1965.

Naomi Schor, (center, with her foot tipped up) boarding the SS.United States, July 5, 1967, I think returning from her second Fulbright year in France.

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Here are some of her many books and articles that are of continued interest, both for her original theoretical insights, her perceptive and nuanced writing style, and also, as traces of the theoretical and linguistics styles that mark developments not just in her work but in the fields within which she worked, from French Literature to Feminist Theory to Gender Politics to Aesthetics. Continue reading FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Day by Day in the Studio 12: August 11

Three Tables

August 11, 2011

A drawing from August 11, 2011 finds me at a table, at night. Instead of picturing myself at the table where I did the drawing, I have placed myself where I live much of my life, in front of  my computer, at another table. The table is the one I am writing this blog post on now, a small Parsons-style table my sister Naomi bought for herself to use to write sitting at the same spot: for many years it had a small but treasured view of the Provincetown bay, but over the years two trees have come to block that view…I used to wonder what I could pour onto the roots of the first tree in order to stunt its growth or even kill it, by the time the second one was planted smack in front of the window, the view was mostly gone. She loved that view but she would still love looking out at the sky through the leaves. She always loved the way one could see Norman Mailer sitting in his little study in both his houses here, looking out at the bay, and liked to think of herself in a company of people who have been writers in this place. We shared that love of tradition and of belonging to a place, an American place we felt that through time we could claim to belong to, I think because we also shared the trauma of displacement, one we had not experienced ourselves, but that marked our lives, that of our parents’ forced displacement from Europe.

The drawing was done at another table, a jeweler’s worktable that has been in my family for about 70 years. It was my father Ilya Schor’s worktable in New York, I think perhaps as far back as the 1940s, certainly as far back as 1955. When my mother bought this house, she commissioned a young artist to build a worktable identical to it. The new table stayed in New York, and she brought the old one up here to Provincetown where she worked several months a year for the next 35 years. She always cleared and cleaned the table before her return to New York, covering it with a layer of the New York Times. The first summer after she died I felt the table should not be left alone. I put a fresh layer of newspaper down, unpacked inks, gouaches, brushes, and sketchbook. Sitting at that worktable at night in a pool of light from an ancient fluorescent desk lamp, I worked my way back into life. The worktable was an engine of creativity, a hearth. I thought of it so much as sitting down to her table and continuing that only later did I remember that it was not just her desk, but also his, the one she had sat down to, to continue the work.

Resia Schor, working in Provincetown at age 91, 2002.

Ilya, Resia, and Mira Schor’s worktable, August 11, 2013

I paint on another table where I have worked since before graduate school, next to windows with starched gauze white curtains. I would be happiest having ten such tables, I could use an infinite amount of tables, I am pea-green with envy at artists who have huge studios and giant tables (the kind you see in documentaries, where the artist’s assistant religiously brings out some work for the great man to work on) but this one, always more than half occupied with supplies, has been a place I can work.

Painting table, Provincetown, August 11, 2013

You cannot go home again, in some basic sense: today I walked past the house where I lived when my family was intact, the summers we first came to Provincetown when my father was still alive. Sometime in the 1980s I had the eerie experience of walking past the door and as a young girl came out I heard her mother call her, “Mira.” I had never met or heard of anyone with my name until Marilyn French wrote The Women’s Room, with a heroine of that name, now here was a child named perhaps for that heroine, coming out of the house I had spent perhaps the happiest times of my life. But long since the door, which opened directly to an staircase to the second floor apartment we rented, was boarded up and the entrance moved to the side. But I can sit at my father and mother’s worktable. Tables must be stable and this link to the past creates a kind of stability of tradition and time.

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