(3) - By Andre Aciman - Slate Magazine

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To: Posted Wednesday, Nov. 4, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

America:
When I made fun of the way our children are taught to play soccer--referees too serious, coach too pushy, parents yelping about like besotted morons (I even used the word "obstreperous" last Saturday with a parent I thought was on my side until he, too, started yelling)--my friend, a soccer daddy on the Upper West Side, dismissed my comment by saying that, oh, I was being so European. When I said that everyone was being thoroughly idiotic about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, down to the way even the president's defenders feel compelled to censure his morals before trying to absolve him ("He should have thought before unzipping")--while I counter by saying that what happens between consenting adults and the zipper between them is no one's business--another friend finally said I was just being too European. When I criticized the state of American writing in class last week and how it is always so diffident when it comes to taking on things from a timeless perspective, or how underclassical everyone tries to be for fear of sounding too highbrow, I was accused by my students of being so European.
For my friends, Europe doesn't just represent a different, perversely stubborn world; it's also a set of competing standards that won't go away. By dismissing my comments as being "European," they are not refusing to argue with me, they are merely refusing to argue with terms they find unfamiliar and ultimately intimidating.
Now that I think of it, I understand why America loves Norman Rockwell. Not too artsy, not too highbrow, never in-your-face, never showing more than honeyed irony before those understated-but-all-too-human foibles. Always cute, like the smell of bubble gum on an American ambassador's wife.
The converse is J.D. Salinger--the darker side of sentimentalism, with makeshift irony desperately trying to cover up an enduring scent of bubble gum. Equally sweet is Steven Spielberg--lots of gunshots: the American ambassador blowing big-time bubbles now.
And yet, after my little rant, I have been reading Kaddish this week. And realize that this is truly a strange country, that the most beautiful book written this decade should have been written in America, and that I should be lucky enough to read it.

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Blenkau:
Alexander Herzen says somewhere that he didn't want to write about his past for fear of altering his memories. He's right--up to a certain point. Some memories are, as one says in chemistry, deliquescent: They pick up humidity around them, lose their solidity, and turn liquid. You can write about certain events, places, and people all you want; but, at the end of the day, they go back to being the elusive, intangible, and living memories they had been before you transferred them to paper. Others, however, are acquiescent: They give up their liquidity and solidify. Once you've written about these memories, they acquire a different shape and harden; worse yet, you remember how you described them on paper, not how they were before you immobilized and distorted them. That's the price you pay for the transfer. In Out of Egypt, I remember making my mother--who, being deaf, can't speak properly--say the word "blenkau" when she meant "blackout." I enjoyed playing around with my mother's speech impairment. "There's a blenkau," she says when all the lights of Alexandria go out as the British war planes are spotted flying over the city. But I don't remember now what the word was she'd spoken in her fright. The word blenkau has forever taken its place. "Did I really say blenkau?" she asked, slightly mortified that I had made her sound so utterly nonverbal in my book. I began to say something--but the truth is I don't know what she had said that night.

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Fragments, by Binjamin Wilkomirski:
Finally it's out: The author's memories of his boyhood years in the Nazi camps turn out to have been a fraud. We all suspected it. None of us had the guts to say it, though. Who should be ashamed?

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From:
To: Posted Wednesday, Nov. 4, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

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André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and has lived in Italy and France. He teaches at Bard College in New York and is currently working on a love novel titled Over the Footbridge.

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