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James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul: America Made the DifferenceNovember 26

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008

James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul: America Made the Difference

An excerpt from The Men in My Life Vivian Gornick

Two men of color: one black, one brown; one American, one Trinidad-Indian; both in a bottomless rage over having been born outsiders into a world dominated by whites; both released into a genius for writing by the force and influence of that very rage. If ever there were a pair of writers who, with roughly equivalent results, made the same virtue out of the same enduring necessity, surely it was V.S. Naipaul and James Baldwin. But it is the difference, not the sameness, between them that is compelling.

Born in Trinidad in 1932 into a large, noisy Indian family whose grandfathers had come to the island as indentured servants, Naipaul wanted out from childhood on. Everything about Trinidad and Indian family life made his skin crawl. At eighteen, he won an Oxford scholarship and went off to England, never again to live on the island. In England—now a man without a country—he suffered an unspeakable panic, and a loneliness that sent him into a near clinical depression. But he came out of it, got his degree, went down to London, got a job at the BBC, and within fi

Archive Feature: On BelongingNovember 24

SUMMER 2005 Archives

On Belonging

What we owe people who stay Joseph H. Carens

Discussions of immigration policy often focus on borders: on who should be allowed into a country. I want to focus instead on the people who have already arrived, especially those who are likely to stayon the men, women, and children who have crossed political boundaries to live in states of which they are not citizens. Public policies addressed to this group are bound to vary, but we must reject the popular idea that anything goes. Political morality sets basic limits on the treatment of immigrants, whether legal or not.

Lying at the heart of this argument is an idea about the moral importance of membership. Whatever their legal status, individuals who live in a society over an extended period of time become members of that society, as their lives intertwine with the lives of others there. These human bonds provide the basic contours of the rights that a state must guarantee; they cannot be regarded as a matter of political discretion.

The claims I will makethat most immigrants and their children have a moral right to citizenship and that resident non-citizens ought to possess most of the legal rights of citizensmay sound radical in comparison with conventional views of state sovereignty and democratic self-determination. And they would require some significant

Archive Feature: The Lost World of Richard Yates, foundNovember 17

Uproars: Leslie Epstein's MagicNovember 10

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008

Uproars

Leslie Epstein’s magic John Crowley

Leslie Epstein has always been a master of uproar in fiction. His early story “The Steinway Quintet” (1976) opens in the Steinway Restaurant, a Jewish eatery on New York’s Lower East Side, as a couple of armed Puerto Rican thugs invade the place (the quintet’s immigrant pianist Leib Goldkorn, the narrator of the story, pegs them for Sephardim). They wreak increasing havoc, first breaking the deaf viola player’s instrument when he refuses to stop playing:

‘Er hat gebrochen de strunes fin mein fiedl!’
      Murmelstein stood up. ‘That ain’t right, what you done. He doesn’t hear.’
      ‘Er hat gebrochen mein boigenhaar!’
      ‘I am the Quintet leader,’ Salpeter said. ‘What is it you want? Why have you done this? Never has such a thing happened before! Do you know what Goethe said about music?’
      ‘And W.H. Longfellow?’ added the Bechstein artist.

Worse happens, until at last the noise rouses the owner of the Steinway Restaurant, V.V. Stutchkoff, from his basement lair:

It was a kind of snorting, snorting through the nose, and crashing against things, and the thud and bang of heavy feet from s

The Mourner's HopeNovember 10

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008

The Mourners Hope

Grief and the foundations of justice Martha C. Nussbaum

On August 16, 2008, Martha Nussbaum—University of Chicago professor and Boston Review contributing editor—became a bat mitzvah. Part of the ceremony is the d’var Torah: a talk by the bat mitzvah on a section of the Torah portion (parashah) and the haftarah (pl. haftarot, a biblical reading accompanying a thematically related Torah portion). Nussbaum’s talk is reproduced here.

Va’etchanan, today’s Torah portion from Deuteronomy (5.1-18), is paired by tradition with the first of a series of haftarot of consolation: nahamu, from Isaiah (40.1-26). Taken together, the two texts generate a puzzle. Consolation appears to be a very personal, even intimate, idea. The Isaiah text expresses it as such. The words of consolation are spoken to Jerusalem “tenderly,” and consolation is depicted throughout in intimate metaphors of personal love and care: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young” (Isaiah 40.11). A later passage of Isaiah, which ancient commentators often connect with this one, even depicts God as a mother feeding Jerusalem at her breast (Isaiah 66.11). Being consoled, then, is being filled up, completed, restore