Anticipating summer with its promised pleasures of a relaxed pace, I thought I’d take a piece of my own advice and peruse the Posen Digital Library (PDL) to see what the word “summer” brought me. Such a diverse collection of poetry and prose appeared!
The selections ranged from the Yiddish writer Der Nister’s The Family Mashber published in the Soviet Union just before the Holocaust to Zalman Schneour’s lyrical account of “Making Jam” from raspberries. Then there was the Hebrew writer A. B. Yehoshua’s compelling account of a Bible teacher’s stubborn refusal to retire, from The Lover, alongside Aharon Appelfeld’s moving depiction of a charged encounter in a summer field during World War II between a Jew passing as a peasant with Jewish refugees in “The Escape.”
But I want to dwell upon the excerpt from the Israeli writer Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Perfect: A Novel. Shabtai writes about summer and motherhood, truth and lies, self and other. After Meir’s father leaves for a summer visit, Meir goes over to check on the apartment to make sure all is well. In a long sentence, Shabtai limns a powerful portrait evocative of the season:
“[A]s he approached the building, with the dusty hibiscus hedge in full summer bloom and the evergreen ficus trees at the entrance, and glanced up at the closed blinds as he walked along the quiet street, which was already full of shade at the end of a hot summer’s day, he was seized by suppressed excitement, for a veil seemed to have been unexpectedly drawn aside, and he saw his mother sitting upstairs in the silent, empty flat, where a very pale ray of light had penetrated a slit in the blinds and lay on the wall, filling the big room with the reddish-gray glow of the setting sun, and she was clean and her hair was combed, as if she had just emerged from the shower and changed into fresh clothes for the evening, and she was holding To the Lighthouse in her hands, and there was a cup of coffee and a thick slice of cake on the low table next to her, and she seemed boundlessly serene and content, for there was no one to disturb her and rob her of her enjoyment and her freedom, and he went upstairs, and although he knew that there was no one in the flat, he was full of joyful expectation, and he passed his hand over the locked door and tried the handle, and even peered through the peephole, and then, after pausing a moment to listen, he turned on his heel and went slowly down the stairs and into the shady street and started walking in the direction of Gordon Street.”
There’s more to this contemplation of love for his mother, but I will not give away how Shabtai unravels the vision. To read more go to Past Perfect: A Novel on the Posen Digital Library. Registration on the PDL is fast and free.
Two images appeared with “summer” in their title: a photograph by William Klein, “Summer Evening, Via di Monserrato, Rome,” and a wonderful painting by Camille Pissarro, “A Road in the Woods in Summer.” While it would be hard to distinguish any summertime lineaments in Klein’s photo, despite his title, Pissarro’s painting invites viewers to meander beneath the thick trees on the shaded path. His greens are definitely summer ones, dark and rich.
A Road in the Woods in Summer (1809) by Camille Pissarro. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
Wondering if there were any images of that favorite summer activity—swimming at the beach—I decided to search “Coney.” Two delightfully different photographs of the beach at Coney Island, taken in the 1940s rewarded me. Sid Grossman’s photo of Puerto Rican teenagers conveys their erotic energy while Weegee’s picture of the masses on a hot July day has become iconic, a visualization of democratic leisure.
Coney Island (1947) by Sid Grossman. Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986.(1986.1023). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. Digital image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
Visiting the PDL and searching just a single word can yield rich fruits, just like those that ripen in summer sunshine.
If you missed “What’s New in the Bible?” our April 28 event in which I interviewed Posen Library senior editor Alison Joseph about our just published Volume 1: Ancient Israel, from Its Beginnings through 332 BCE, you can watch a video of the entire event here, as well as many others on our YouTube channel. And if you’re active on social media, you can keep up to date with everything The Posen Library is doing by following our posts on Twitter and Facebook. And if you know others who might enjoy these emails, please share this link https://bit.ly/Email_SU and invite them to sign up.
Wishing you a summer of fruitful discovery,
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
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