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Weekend Reading
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"Moonlight, Strandgade 30" by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1900 - 1906. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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“The entire first winter in Berlin I kept saying I only wanted to speak one clear and meaningful sentence, but in truth, I also wanted a beautiful apartment with a view of the canal, where sometimes, in summer, a ray of light could slip in.”
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So says Danielle, the narrator of Tamar Raphael’s short story, Westwards, Through Air, in a sentiment that will be familiar to many Berliners who have experienced the realities of the city’s housing market. Danielle has just moved to Berlin from Tel Aviv—one of many leftwing Israelis who have found refuge in the city—and occupies herself by learning German and teaching Hebrew. In the story, the characters operate in the interplay between irony and conviction, between bourgeois desires and political facts, between self-absorption and the desire for connection.
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Raphael’s first novel There Were Two With Nothing To Do was released in 2024 in Hebrew. Westwards, Through Air, published by the Diasporist today, is Raphael’s first appearance in both English and German (the latter translated by Lucia Engelbrecht).
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In other literary news, in honor of this week’s Nobel Prize ceremony, we are also featuring a new Seifenblase written by Alexander Wells, which takes a look at this year’s recipient for literature, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, and how he deals with the haters.
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Also, in case you missed it, last week we featured an essay by Marcel Krueger, which reflects upon his family’s forced displacement after the end of WWII, challenging the appropriation of the exilee narrative by the far-right nationalists.
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Next week, we will be launching a fundraiser, to celebrate our approaching first anniversary. But it’s never too early to do a good thing. Please consider making an end-of-year gift to the Diasporist. Your support is essential for us to continue our project.
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But for now, happy reading!
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— Julia Bosson, Editor in Chief
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by Tamar Raphael
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"When Bianca read the word “I” in a book, she translated it, I feared, to 'you,' resisting the first-person narrator’s invitation to identify with them. Upon reading lines like 'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions,' she automatically read: 'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and YOU didn’t know what YOU were doing in New York, Esther. YOU are stupid about executions.'"
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Alexander Wells on László Krasznahorkai
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"...the world of Krasznahorkai is a world opposed to cynics, opposed to winners, power-brokers, border guards, a world that sides every time with the lapel-grabbing loonies because those loonies’ vision — that thing they saw, which gives them hope, such stupid hope — is all that’s left to humanize us..."
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by Marcel Krueger
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"East Prussia is dead, and I don’t mourn it. It was the home of Cilly, but like the other former German provinces it was no utopia, not a place of an ideal civilization forever lost. After the First World War, it was a deeply conservative place, with great poverty and great prejudice, where the Nazis won the local election even before 1933. My Polish relatives here before 1945 were persecuted and killed, and I cannot feel any sadness that East Prussia has disappeared forever."
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