Click Here to Read: A Hanukkah Tale From Old Russia: A mysterious czarist soldier tries to persuade his community he’s Jewish by Curt Leviant on the Tablet website on December 16, 2020. Hanukkah menorah, Russia, 1890, brass, National Museum of American Jewish History. Imagea: Wmpearl Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Click Here to Read About and Purchase: Memory’s Eyes A New York Oedipus Novel
By Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau on IPBooks.net
American Board of Psychoanalysis Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD, FABP
MEMORY’S EYES is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles’ three Theban plays, the psychoanalytical concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in cartoons and jokes. Consequently, this novel is meant to be tragic and funny, playful, but also uncomfortable. Ann, a modern Antigone, candidate in training at a psychoanalytic institute, relives and rethinks the complex story of her wide-ranging family clan. The Prologue reminds the readers of the myth’s characters and destinies, and yet they will find themselves simultaneously knowing and not knowing, anticipating and being surprised by the truth’s revelations.
“In Memory’s Eyes Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau renews the emotional richness of psychoanalysis and ancient myth. Even Continue reading Memory’s Eyes by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau
Click Here to Read: A Jew Is a Jew Is a Jew: Novelist and critic Clive James and theater director Jonathan Miller, who died within days of each other this fall, shared breadth of passions and influential cultural positions. One was Jewish. The other was not—but he understood Jews better by Howard Jacobson on the Tablet Website on December 11, 2020.
Jonathan Miller appearing on “After Dark” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Clive James and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower.
Click Here to Read: Lost Yiddish Words: The language contemporary Hasidim use in everyday life borrows from English and simplifies a richer linguistic ancestor—and yet is more alive by Rose Waldman on the Tablet website on December 11, 2020.
A page from Yiddish-Latin-Hebrew-German dictionary. Image: Elijah Levita. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Good morning, all – and happy post-Thanksgiving, our first, yes, since the pandemic lockdown and a time to relieve and refresh ourselves with poetry.
I had known of Forrest Hamer’s work as a poet long before I learned that he is also a psychoanalyst (notice what I put first here). Since so many of our readers are also in mental health professions, it seems more than appropriate to feature him now, when it’s what so many of us seem to need.
These are trying times, as Forrest Hamer reminds us in his article, “This Country Is Going to Kill Me” (The American Psychoanalyst. Vol. 54, No. 3. Fall 2020). I do hope you will be able to read his stirring article for yourselves, in which Hamer discusses his feelings of vulnerability on first learning that the virus is “disproportionately affecting Black, Latino, and Native populations in the U.S.” As one who is older, has health vulnerabilities, is Black and male, he knows he is at greater risk than many others, even though he realizes he is privileged by being able to work remotely and having access to good health care. He also observes that most of the Black male patients in his practice feel the same way he does. Then other Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: December 7, 2020
