Here, writer Joshua Cohen and artist Michael Hafftka interpret the twenty-two letters of the Aleph Bet, the Hebrew alphabet. Through their images and texts, Cohen and Hafftka engage these letters, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: the letter HEY becomes a hat, or a ritual head-covering; the letter YOD is said to represent a young girl... These images, and their three texts (two stories entitled Naming and Shabbos Dinner, with Letterforms, and the essayistic A Metaphysical Disquisition Upon the Nature of the Hebrew Sophiyot), together formulate a challenge to the Second Commandment, which forbids representation, in a style at once traditional and modern, expressively mindful of what it means to lack faith and yet, in the turn of a phrase, at the stroke of a paintbrush, refusing the consolation of cult. Here is a rewrite, and a re-depiction, of the spoken, the written and the visual Law a brilliant, future classic of Judaica... An Alphabet for the Perplexed.
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By Bess Lovejoy, KGB Bar: In the Jewish tradition, language is holy. More precisely, one language is holy Hebrew. Hebrew letters were created by God, the story goes, and are deeply powerful. They can summon new life if arranged in the right order; and once deconstructed, can offer clues to the meaning of the Torah. Even their shapes are suffused with significance. Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed follows this tradition, but from a postmodern perch: skeptical, personal, and as inclined to find meaning in the subjective as in Jewish grand narratives. Composed of three texts by Joshua Cohen, sprinkled with images by Michael Hafftka, the book unites image and text, sacred and profane. Two of the three texts are short stories, and the third, a linguistic essay that s challenging but rewarding in equal measure. The second story, Shabbos Dinner, with Letterforms, is the standout, at least in this reviewer s opinion. Here various Hebrew letters represent members of Cohen s family as they sit down to Friday night dinner. His little sister is a yod, a tiny squiggle that fills only the top quarter of a line: spun and wound, how she always seems crimped, coiled, rapt and tightly as if ever-prepared, about to pounce. His father is a vav: upright... unbending, narrow in the knees. Each letter is linked, in free-form disquisitions, to the concrete qualities of his family s posture, speech, flesh. This is Cohen s personal aleph-bet, his emotional gematria. The first story, Naming, ploughs the history of Cohen's names (both Hebrew and English) and explores the position of a lapsed Jew: a Jew who no longer keeps kosher, who drinks wine in taxis home with foreign girls, but who is happy, despite . And though the piece s relationship to the Hebrew aleph-bet may at first seem tenuous, according to Jewish tradition God created the world by naming, and so this primordial power introduces the interrelationship of language and the physical world. If we learn more about Cohen and his family in the first two texts, we learn more about Hebrew in the third. This essay explores the five sophiyot, or final forms: letters that take a different shape when they appear at the end of a word. The final piece also contains some of the most beautiful of Hafftka's images, including an inky, somber ayin and a somehow terrifying tav. Cohen is searching for significance, and the text is loud with theory, as if the din of many rabbis arguing had been transmitted to the page. His essay s conclusion is radical: that all of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet... may, in fact, be impure not false but... fictions, merely the perversion of possible truths. The answer is dramatic for a religion that believes itself holy in its singularity. Yet for Cohen, the history of these forms and of Judaism itself is consecrated randomness, converted to a condition of choseness. His final analysis makes the book all the more remarkable, since it comes not from a place of religiosity, but from the grand Jewish tradition of challenging engagement, and finally, from the love of questioning itself. --kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews
About the Author
JOSHUA COHEN was born in southern New Jersey in 1980. His books include a collection of stories, The Quorum, and a novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. Another novel, A Heaven of Others, is forthcoming in 2008. As of this writing, he has just completed work on Graven Imaginings, a book of the last Jew in the world. Cohen is a literary critic for The Forward, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. MICHAEL HAFFTKA was born in NYC in 1953. His books Michael Hafftka Selected Drawings, 1982, and Art of Experience Experience of Art, 1981, were published by Guignol Books, Tivoli, NY. Conscious/Unconscious, a collection of stories, is published by Six Gallery Press. Hafftka has had one-person shows in New York City since 1982 with Art Galaxy, Rosa Esman Gallery, DiLaurenti Gallery, Mary Ryan Gallery and Aberbach Fine Art. His work has been shown in the US and abroad in numerous museums. Hafftka s work is in the permanent collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA NY, The National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco MOMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art. Hafftka s work has been the subject of critical monographs by Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Princeton University, John Caldwell, Curator at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the novelist Michael Brodsky. Hafftka s work can be seen online at hafftka.com.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heart-breaking and Sublime,
This review is from: Aleph-Bet An Alphabet for the Perplexed (Paperback)
Joshua Cohen, one of the most brilliant and challenging young writers in the world, has many eyes. He may have eleven eyes, sixteen eyes, four eyes, or one eye: it's hard to tell which orb is swirling and glistening and perceiving. However, even if the number of ocular orbs is open to revision, Cohen definitely has what in Buddhism is called the "heavenly eye."
Dharma adepts classify the eye into five categories: physical eye, heavenly eye, wisdom eye, dharma eye, and buddha eye. Obviously, the human eye is not the loftiest, nor is the buddha eye one to be disregarded, unless you are content to be born in a dream and die as if drunk. However, that's another story which never happened: what we're dealing with here is the heavenly eye, as described, manifested, and interpreted by Cohen in his singularly difficult yet worthy tome, illustrated superbly by artist Michael Hafftka. The book is half Jewish familial microscopic narrative where you get to smell your Jewish grandmother's ancient neck wrinkles while you're sitting on her lap, nuzzling sweet red wine memories of her boyfriend Baruch when she was sixteen in Odessa; where you have the opportunity to cradle your beloved Jewish sister desparately before she's baked in an oven, bitch slap your atrophied and despairing Jewish brother across his impervious kisser, and celebrate your Jewish daddy as he responsibly and absurdly shuffles to a briefly occupied grave site which will soon be excavated and replaced by an office tower. Is what I'm saying profane? Conversely, am I overly kind and also overdressed, like meeting your Russian Jewish extended family for the first time and learning they, too, are horribly sad and filled with grandiose ambitions to live in Atlantic City and own a health spa? If you understand these drumbeats of doom -- if you feel them -- then the Hebrew language unveils its ostensible mysteries into a bathtub full of blood and disappointment. Now by that I mean the Hebrew language, as Cohen astutely realizes, is but the reflection of a city in a mirror. In other words, it is a reflection of a reflection and as the city in the mirror is not apart from the mirror, so also the universe as reflected in the Hebrew language is not apart from Consciousness -- or G-d, if one is so inclined. But is Joshua Cohen so inclined? Perhaps he spells it "consciousness" with a small c: and then the goes off and tells his own tales about birth and death and Jews and sorrows rendered in a Hebraically-outsourced metaphysical pointilism, a fictional "style" which requires maximal attention well worth the effort! Or does Joshua Cohen, the creative creator, slip a tallis over his shoulders and speak to The Creator in a special building on certain days and each and every day wrap his arm in leather straps with little scroll-filled boxes on them (teffillin for goyim and assimilated yids). Will he pray to G-d and ponder/reflect the Hebrew language like a walkin' talkin grandmother/sister/brother/father, delightfully obsequious and tormented and winsome and radioactive and knotted up ninety different ways about the Great Master Who Must Ever Remain Nameless, or -- conversely -- the Name of Names, or the I-Will-Be-What-I-Will-Be guy whom generations of rabbis and scholars and "simple Jews" have acknowledged as Boss of Bosses -- although He historically (I utter this, naturally, with utmost respect) may indeed have fallen down on the job or taken a lunch break, especially in Europe at periodic intervals -- may the Jew-hating mass murderers be cursed for a thousand generations. No, Cohen definitely does not indicate that belief in God is nothing but a mechanical habitude of childhood. Nor does he suggest it is neither less nor more criminal to believe in G-d than not to believe in him. That would be vulgar. Rather, in part 2 of Aleph-Bet (A Metaphysical Disquisition Upon The Nature Of the Hebrew Sophiyot) Cohen probes unceasingly into the generating reflections in the mirror -- the Aleph-Bet, the ever reflecting and permeating and biological foundation stones of all Israelite narratives -- the Hebrew alphabet that produces the other reflections in the mirror: those four Jews amplified with guttural epiphanies and luminous teardrops, and millions more like them, including reverent and kindly NYC professors and raging poets in ripped red scarves and a million and a half Jewish children murdered by nazi demons. Then he draws his own conclusion as to whether the whole thing is fiction or whether the Aleph-Bet is final and REVEALED. And you, dear reader, will do the same. I highly recommend this book.
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