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A HAPPY PASSOVER
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22 FEBRUARY 11, 2021
JEWISH EXPONENT
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



L ifestyle /C ulture
Reviews: Fashion’s Flaws, Getting a Get
Beauty Hurts in Editor’s Essays
B OOKS
SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
“Everybody (Else) Is Perfect:
How I Survived Hypocrisy,
Beauty, Clicks, and Likes”
Gabrielle Korn
Atria Books
WHEN GABRIELLE KORN
was a Jewish teenager growing
up on Long Island, fashion fell
into two categories. Korn and
her peers could be either Jewish
American Princesses, clad in
velour sweatsuits and Tiffany
jewelry, or emo kids in black
hoodies and Converse sneakers.

She fell somewhere in the
middle and put together outfits
consisting of bat mitzvah jewelry
layered over band T-shirts or
dresses with combat boots.

In her essay collection
“Everybody (Else) Is Perfect:
How I Survived Hypocrisy,
Beauty, Clicks, and Likes,” the
former editor-in-chief of Nylon
Courtesy of Atria Publishing Group
chronicles her journey to the
upper echelons of fashion and
beauty media. She also details
her fight to use her role to
make the industry more inclu-
sive to people of different races,
genders, sexual orientations and
body sizes.

Korn balances accounts of
the misogyny and homophobia
she encounters as an out
lesbian in a largely straight
workforce with her awareness
of the privilege that allows her
to obtain positions of influence
in a system rooted in white
supremacist beauty standards.

“I understood that as a white
Jewish lesbian, the parts of my
identity that might marginalize
me were largely invisible; I was
benefiting from the system
while being tokenized by it,”
she writes.

Toxicity in the fashion and
media industries is often played
for laughs in pop culture —
think “The Devil Wears Prada”
or even “Zoolander” — but
Korn articulates the deeply
personal and disturbing toll
of a workplace that glorifies
impossible beauty standards.

She battles anorexia for years
amid peers who compliment
her dangerous weight loss (she
weighs around 100 pounds at
her lightest and sickest), promote
unhealthy fad diets and issue
passive-aggressive judgments if
she dares to eat a bagel.

Korn is also the grand-
child of Holocaust survivors
and writes about how she first
learned about the atrocity
from her parents’ explana-
tions of her grandmother’s
hurtful behavior, like telling
Korn she was ugly to “ward off
the evil eye.” A link between
trauma and outward appear-
ances is established early in
her childhood, and the pattern
reproduces viciously in the
fashion world, where constant
insecurity is weaponized
against workers and eating
disorders are common.

The title of the book comes
from another toxic phenom-
enon Korn identifies: how
often women are willing to
declare other women beautiful
while privately tormenting
themselves over perceived
flaws. Even as brands push
“woke” lifestyles and people
become increasingly willing
to support body diversity and
empowerment for others, many
remain incapable of embracing
themselves. Korn is bracingly honest
about her struggles to find
meaningful work and healthy
relationships in her industry’s
vortex of image obsession and
personal branding. Even more
intriguing are her abilities as a
cultural commentator; in one
essay, she successfully ties the
restrictive skinny jeans trend
of the early ’00s to the politics
of the Bush administration.

Reading the book during
an unprecedented health and
economic crisis makes it diffi-
cult to sympathize with her
stories of six-figure salary
negotiations and attending
fashion week, but her grueling
quest for inclusivity and self-ac-
ceptance in an industry built
on exclusion forms the basis of
a book that is both compelling
memoir and haunting exposé.

a nattering mother-in-law here
and a cantor straight out of
Chelm there. When Iczkovits
stays with the perspectives of
his most compelling charac-
ters — Fanny, Mende, a
painter named Ignat Shepkin
and Zizek (forced to leave his
Jewish name and past behind
after he’s conscripted into the
czar’s army) — the book is a
pleasure. But the time spent
with some of the stock charac-
ters, as well as with the secret
agent of the Russian Empire
who’s meant to be somewhat
menacing, can be a drag.

Fanny, the vilde chaya of
the village and the one-time
apprentice to her shochet
father, wields her knife across
the Pale, slitting and threat-
ening her way to Minsk while
she tries to figure out how to
reconcile her lives as a mother,
wife, Jew and woman. When
the narration stays close to
the slaughterman’s daughter
herself, the novel shines.

Iczkovits’ story is often
funny, if a bit old-hat in its
sense of humor, which makes
the conclusions he appears to
arrive at regarding religion,
conformity and the calam-
ities to come to these Jews
of the Pale feel oddly harsh.

He demonstrates real love
for the characters of “The
Slaughterman’s Daughter,”
though the space given to
some overestimates the extent
to which readers might feel the
same. And in a 515-page novel,
Iczkovits may have done well
to take after Fanny, and carve
with a little more precision. l
spanzer@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
Married Woman Seeks Get at Knifepoint
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
“The Slaughterman’s
Daughter” Yaniv Iczkovits,
translated by Orr Scharf
Schocken The year is 5654 in the Pale
of Settlement (1894 to you
Gregorians out there).

Mende Speismann’s holy
fool of a husband has run off
some time ago, leaving her an
impoverished agunah depen-
dent on the generosity of her
sister Fanny’s comparatively
wealthy husband.

In a fit of indulgence,
Mende turns the handful of
rubles she’s scraped together
for survival into a disastrously
expensive day at the market,
ending her spree only with a
plunge into the Yaselda River.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Courtesy of Schocken
She survives, but Fanny, the
strange, wolfishly intense
younger sister, knows that
Mende was born to be a wife
and mother, and that she’ll
never be happy in the world she
returns to unless some things
are made right.

Unhappy with her loving
but mostly silent husband, and
determined to give Mende a
better life, Fanny enlists the
assumed town fool Zizek
Breshov in her journey to find
Mende’s husband and force
him to sign a get. The road
from Motal to Minsk, it turns
out, is longer than the miles
the pair sets out to cover; the
chaos that ensues will ask them
to trek across their entire lives,
as misunderstandings and a
few sticky rumors soon involve
the secret police, hostile locals,
the czar’s army and a terrible
cantor named Shleiml.

Iczkovits, a celebrated Israeli
writer with several novels to
his name, sets out to tell a
rollicking, madcap tale, and
mostly succeeds. He populates
his story with a mix of original
characters and stock Jews, with
JEWISH EXPONENT
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
FEBRUARY 11, 2021
23