On Marriage

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So, this is an extraordinary piece of family history – the survival of my family has to do with my ancestor being such a loser [laughs]. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience.

So that wasn’t a direct experience of aggressive, hostile antisemitism, but it was implicit in the acceptance of Shylock as staged Jew.There are all kinds of closed spaces that I respect, but I also recognize that tribalism, in the way we’re seeing it at the moment, is so… toxic. For if the word ‘Jew’ is not fitting in comfortably with other words, if there’s a kind of pause before the word, a momentary decision about how to utter it exactly, then that tells us something.

So as they saw it, their choice was between condemning him for being bad, or showing a liberal understanding of why he turned out so bad. In this conversation, Lisa and Devorah will discuss Losing the Dead and then, more generally, the role played by familial stories in their work. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Baum looks at marriage from multiple angles, legal and political, social and narrative, its interminability and its dailiness . It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression.Devorah Baum brings her literary understandings, psychoanalytic scholarship and great aplomb to the marriage conundrum. The argument in the book is that envy is nearly always caught up with envy of expressivity, of another person’s ability to be creative, and to get their voice out.