The Berlin Woman - Softcover

Kaufman, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942134584 ISBN 13: 9781942134589

Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press, 2019

Synopsis

Lena is a married, chronically infidelitous Berlin-based European writer, devoted only to gratifying her ambitions and hard-driving libido. Nathan is a footloose womanizing American author, unable to produce the big novel for which he’s been contracted. When both writers meet in the Alps, they fall into a mad kind of addictive love, chasing each other selfishly, sexually and even digitally across Europe and America, turning their affair into a high-stakes reckless game of jealousy, rivalling ambitions, gender conflict, political combat and artistic outrage. But beneath it all, their hearts are breaking, dark secrets haunt their pasts, while overshadowing their love is a fast-changing, ruthless world in which not only is The Holocaust denied or forgotten but across the social and political spectrum a new kind of totalitarianism -- spearheaded by a new breed of “strongmen” leaders -- threatens to sweep Lena, Nathan, and all of humanity, to the very brink of annihilation. Fast-paced, written in contagious gonzo style, and with leading characters whose wild bohemian lives make for binge-worthy compulsive reading, The Berlin Woman is a new kind of no-holds barred love story written by Alan Kaufman, an author known for his storytelling power and who’s been not only praised by everyone from Dave Eggers, Etgar Keret and Sapphire to David Mamet, Hubert Selby Jr. and Thane Rosenbaum but has been compared by critics to such prose masters as Henry Miller, I.B. Singer and Jack Kerouac.

About this title

About the Author

Poet, editor, writer, and painter Alan Kaufman was born and raised in the Bronx, earning a BA at City College of New York. In 1977 he moved to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces. After studying fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University, he relocated to San Francisco, where he helped build the community of performance poets at Cafe Babar and participated in the 1993 San Francisco Poets Strike. In addition to his involvement with the Spoken Word community, Kaufman has also been a central figure in the Jewish countercultural movement, co-editing It's the Jews! A Celebration of New Jewish Visions (1995, with Danny Shot) and editing the magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution. Influenced by Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski, Kaufman writes free verse and spoken word poems that often engage themes of spirituality, identity, and cultural memory. He is the author of the poetry collection Who Are We? (1998), the novel Matches (2005) and the memoir Jew Boy (2000). His reviews appear widely in journals such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the Partisan Review. Kaufman is also the editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999, co-edited with S.A. Griffin) and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (2004, co-edited with Barney Rosset and Neil Ortenberg). His own work has been included in the anthologies ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994, edited by Muguel Algarin, Bob Holman, and Nicole Blackman) and Nothing Makes You Free: Writings from Descendants of Holocaust Survivors (1993, edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet). A resident of San Francisco, Kaufman holds American, French, and Israeli citizenship. A selection of his papers are held at the library of the University of Delaware.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sample of Manuscript CHAPTER ONE Since meeting her I've lost all interest in sex but the more unresponsive I become the wetter she grows, a form of corpse-love no doubt, spawned in her native Ukraine where as a kid she lived close by the mass grave at Babi Yar and to which her parents drove her each month to some place she described in a flat voice as a grassy unmarked meadow and her father, face expressionless, points to a patch of ground: “We think your grandfather, three aunts, one uncle and several distant second cousins are buried somewhere down there” which she didn't grasp. No one explained. They held the usual tailgate party from the back of their car, sat on folding lawn chairs sunk into the corpse-fertilized grass, feasting on kasha with meatballs, buttered bread, borscht, cucumber salad, and drinking Orangina, Lena sprawled with legs akimbo jumping up and down and with outspread arms tracing about in a helicopter whirl: wheeeeee! The sky spinning overhead so dizzy that she fell to the mass grave laughing. Now in Ukraine a new black market has sprung up. Earnest American Jews inspired by Claude Lanzmann and Steven Spielberg have commissioned small bronze plaques to mark the mass graves where their distant relations perished. In turn, local thieves open them up, excavate the bones, sell them to tourists for souvenirs. Some of these have started to show up on eBay where you can bid on the femur of a Jewish child. Lena saw one going for nine hundred Ukrainian Hryvnia (about $350 U.S.) and nearly bought it. “Whatever for?” I smiled unhappily. “I'm a shopaholic.” For this remark I wanted to leave, never to see her again, but instead stayed, staring at her, spellbound, appalled as Lena explained through a mouthful of shawarma in the local Turkish restaurant to which she had dragged me, ravenous from our latest bout of loveless sexual failure, that in Ukraine there is no Seventh Ring of Hell but the rings themselves just keep descending, infinite, to depraved unimaginable black depths, each echoing with the unheard cries of murdered Jews. She showed me a website on which people post selfies taken by millennials yoga-posing downward dogs, Vriksana, and Kapotsana atop the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and another of a Prague-based modern dance troupe gamboling naked at Auschwitz: a gas chamber Woodstock. This, she told me, is today's customized and personalized moral core. That I do understand for in my repugnance at myself for engaging in love with her I cry alone. Yet, by nature I'm no weeper. In Dachau stood tearless before ovens into which picture-snapping tourists had tossed their used flashbulbs. In Frankfurt bore dry-eyed witness to the cow-tipped gravestones of the Jewish cemetery spray-painted with Swastikas. Always, I shrugged, thought: What can I do about that? Nothing! As a soldier saw men injured horribly but did not sniffle, not even when Yoav lay there screaming with his foot blown off in Lebanon; not even when Buki, stepping from our position to yawn, stretch and smile at morning took one smack in the chest. I am slowly going nuts, barely have the strength to work. Had to promise Gerhardt, my Austrian writer friend, swear with a hand on his translation of my last book, 'KIKE: A Memoir'' that: a) I would not kill myself b) If I really must then first, I will set to words what occurred with Lena so that Gerhardt and all my friends, acquaintances, colleagues, readers will grasp why I, Nathan Falk, lay me down to die of such an obvious psychopath as her. Have tried so hard without success to explain it to myself, and failed, needing witness, for my problem after all is that Lena and I are symptomatic of something much larger: the self-destructing pawns of a world barreling hell-bent-for- leather towards Holocaust 2.0 where Anti-Semitism like a seeping poison gas seeps into everywhere, on the Left and Right, and all signs point to as resurgence of new improved ghettoes, more stream-lined death camps, and greener, more ecologically-sounder methods of Jew disposal. Today's Fascist butchers will be tomorrow's green corpse recyclers. Who to warn, how, why even bother? No one cares, or even reads, every single human being almost dead, face down in a cell phone, soul-stripped captive to the depraved technological coffin of late-stage Capitalism, where cities have turned into shopping malls peddling the commodification of Moloch and Baal, and cold-eye predators like Lena find tired hearts like mine to devour just for the fun of it. She intuits that I am a writer, too broken to produce the dystopic novel for which I have been contracted by Wyndham and Read, the famed publishers. If ever written and published despite Lena she will, of course, scan it hungrily, not as a colleague but fearful of what her chicken-necked unmanned spouse, Hubert, with his soft sarcastic eyes, effeminized voice and Eraserhead haircut, might learn not only about our liaisons but even more, about Rolf, and never mind the hundred and one anonymous dicks that she has mounted thanks to chat rooms and social media. Everyplace looks like every other place. Even atrocities around the globe seem alike. Keffiyeh-masked killers charge over manicured lawns mowing down tourists. Where is that? Mumbai? Riyadh? Amaan? Tel Aviv? Brussels? Paris? Sleepily, I blink, click, surf, comatose with sameness, in a globalized world in which any new book is momentarily notable only for its author's name, not content, and the book cover is just a marketing digital portal, a glyph to open for compulsive purchase of useless dreck. For if I have learned one thing thanks to the Digital Age it is that content is not just the bait but the trap, we are all cunningly placed to lure each other to a commodified doom, and that absolutely nothing changes anything, neither the hunt nor the capture, the surf nor the acquisition, the slaughter or the feast, the campaign or the election, the lobby or the legislation, the scandal or the scandalized: all transpire in a dizzyingly parallax of insensate transmission and transaction in a vacuum of perpetual commodity exchange in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is ever consummated, though somewhere far off in some heavenly impossible distance rings the great cash register of the Global Elite, whose machinations produce ever-widening spheres of mass inaction and impotence, so that even sex, fucking, death itself, seem pointless, and nothing changes anything. Since meeting Lena that's become my great new mantra: 'Nothing Changes Anything'. That includes motivational speakers, well-intentioned critical thinkers, hip-hoppy political street murals, rap song rages against the machine, leaping and tumbling dance troupes of nubile well-intentioned trust fund tards with sculpted bods in dance skin, left wing and liberal editorials, social justice demonstrations, graying pony-tailed Socialistic philosophers in dirty sneakers holding forth from stages and well-known authors raging at portable mikes from the steps of lionized libraries, artists waging social justice battle with their paintbrushes and journalists gunned down for their corruption scoops. Nothing, absolutely nothing deters dictators, blocks violent killers, thwarts graft, reduces gun violence, or even registers as shameless with some vast compassionate infinitude profoundly shaken with trembling and tears and bearing hapless and pointless microscopic witnesses from a tenth dimensional remove to earth's ceaseless blood orgy of torture, butchery and mindless mayhem. Today's shattering news is tomorrow's forgotten headline; everything, good or bad, just so much grist for brains drunk on digital addiction. 'Good' or 'Evil', notions declared outworn by imbecilic incomprehensible French pedants like Foucault and Derrida, have been displaced by contemporary human life's' only true value markers: “how much does it cost?” and “does it make for good online content?” On these alters do we lay down our own children to perish in the murder-site schools, cineplexes and malls of demotics in trench coats wielding battle-grade assault rifles or to be abducted, tortured, raped and decapitated while out jogging by serial-killing late middle-aged strangers with vans or to provide fresh meat for lunatic cults performing paroxysmal psychosexual sadomasochistic rituals or else as child porn captives snatched from home right out of their beds by secret dark pedophilic rings of internet entrepreneurs. Lena grasps that the sort of high-minded books I write are simply a throwback, antiquated, a bore, over which I slave to spill my veins onto every page, though to what end? To be briefly perused and placed on the water closet of suburban toilet bowls as pedestal for a cinnamon-scented candle from Bed, Bath and Beyond or sold in suburban garage sales along with the pink Fisher-Price Barbie Tough Trike and the Risk Game in the scotch-taped box missing half its pieces. Of course, she is monstrous, a twisted Berlin-raised Ukrainian Femme Nikita, who deems the former KGB torturing colonel Putin to be a kind of messiah; not only proudly dashes off paeans to the ruthless shirtless horseman that run in heavyweight German and Russian newspapers and periodicals but refers to the Ukrainian city of Lvov as Lemberg (its original, name under the Austro-Hungarian empire before it became Lwow as part of the Republic of Poland but then changed back, briefly, under the Nazis, to Lemberg, which the Soviets subsequently made Lvov before the Ukrainians settled on Lviv). Some dismiss Lena's antics as so much avant-garde posturing, a Susan Sontag-style fashionable fascist campiness, a double helix ironical spoofing of the alt-right. But no. It's real. She can't help herself, is a complete goner, an Alfred Jarry Ubu Roi of mass graves; a futuristic Marinetti caught in a mental shit storm of Holocaust-ravaged genes that, as with me, pretzel-twists her into agonized historically-disassociated and indefensible posteurs bordering on mental illness. Haven't researchers at the University of Haifa proved that genocidal trauma passed to the offspring of survivors throughout DNA guarantees to inculcate our lives with post-genocidal systematic furies? In other words, we of the Second Generation, now known as “2G”, were each born doomed to intensely suffer and to love each other hopelessly. The Holocaust rules not just our cells but genitals. When Lena and I helplessly marched into the gas chamber of our love, the only way out was to become a skeletal swami capable of placidly chanting lotus-style on beds of nails. Dressed only in diapers and turbans, faces painted with ash from the Birkenau marshes, we should sit ceaselessly counting to six million and back again. For it has now been further proved that any female whose orifice – mouth, cunt, anus – receives another's sperm forever carries that person's DNA The perpetually burrowing sperm wiggles deep into the host's brain, spawning quadrillions of replicants until they reach the very seat of thought and motor function where they set up shop, meaning that Lena's mind has been not only absconded with by her Austrian-born cuckolded husband or the dozens, even hundreds, of avant-garde pan-European one-night-stand psychos that she has rocked between her legs or worst still by the German philosopher Rolf (that Michael Douglas look-alike putz university academic with a collapsed six pack and tennis bum tan who plugs her every year on three month-long tropical adultery poverty tours through Africa, India, South America) but that her brain is a UN Security Council of alien sperm all conjoined in raging condemnation of me, the outlier American-Israeli. And she has yet another ring of fuck-buddies tucked away throughout Europe―Hungarian museum curators, Flemish private collectors, Italian literary critics, French film directors, Estonian psychiatrists, Serbian dramatists, British choreographers: a cultural elite all of whom to a man or woman, left wing or right, blindly adore her. With these she skypes and messages throughout the day in an ongoing ceaseless mass mutual seduction. Yet, though despite knowing that she is perfectly incapable of fidelity, I want to be with her, hold her naked, close to my chest, stroke her stubborn little head, lick her pretty pussy, lie with her entangled head to toe in a mass grave 69. And though I know too that her fiendish unrelenting mind plots its next pathetic subterfuge, that she will never let me kiss her, that her loveless cunt clasps my cock like a master sergeant’s fist, inside I perish for love of her, though to be with her spells my own certain and meaningless annihilation. She is my Final Solution

Edition details

• Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942134584
• ISBN 13: 9781942134589
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176