L ifestyles /C ulture
Books: A Complex Life, Inside Online Hate
B OOKS
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
“Max Jacob: A Life in Art and
Letters” Rosanna Warren
W.W. Norton & Co.

THE EUROPEAN JEWISH
artists, writers and thinkers of
Max Jacob’s generation tended
to kill their fathers, some with
greater enthusiasm than others.

Intense social, profes-
sional and political pressures,
from Jews as well as non-Jews,
induced those whose fathers had
been rabbis and professionals to
renounce the world that each
had created; the first as stulti-
fyingly provincial, the second
as rapaciously acquisitive. Their
new religion, in many cases,
became the literary and artistic
canon of the country in which
they happened to live.

In Jacob’s case, this was
France. He arrived in Paris in 1894,
just a few months before the
Dreyfus affair, as a devotee of
France’s liberal and literary
tradition. By 1900, he was an
employee of a particularly vicious
anti-Semitic newspaper. In 1915,
Jacob, openly gay, converted to
Catholicism, and would spend
a few years shuttling between
Paris and a monastery. In 1944,
he died a Jew in Drancy, an
internment camp in the suburbs
of Paris.

The story of Max Jacob,
groundbreaking poet of “The
Dice Cup,” friend of Picasso
and many other artistic
luminaries of his age, has been
set down by Rosanna Warren,
a poet and literary critic whose
long-nursed love for the work
of Jacob led her to take her first
crack at a biography.

What Warren has produced is
most certainly a poet’s biography
of a poet — chronologically jumpy,
and a little lighter on details than
you might like, but illuminat-
ingly perceptive as a reading of
the subject’s life and work. Jacob,
a long-dead figure whose relative
obscurity and complexity could’ve
made for a ponderous trudge, is
instead brought alive by Warren’s
hand in “Max Jacob: A Life in Art
and Letters.”
Part of what makes a biography
of Jacob such a difficult proposi-
tion is that, as Warren notes, he
was an inveterate fabulist when
it came to the details of his own
life. His journal entries contra-
dict reality and, sometimes, each
other. But the falsehoods and
misremembrances that Warren
piles up help create a portrait
by omission, whereby what Jacob
was becomes more clear as you
see what he was not, or could
not, be.

Why did the comfortable
Jewish boy from Quimper
claim a saintly Christian
grandmother from Avignon,
and five years honorably served
in the navy? Why did Jacob, a
close friend of Picasso’s, seek
to exaggerate the artistic influ-
ence of his former roommate?
He writes and he writes, for
newspapers, for children, for
magazines, for poetry journals.

His books, most notably “The
Dice Cup,” make waves. He
does more than rub shoul-
ders with the likes of Picasso,
Cocteau, Chagall, Apollinaire
and Modigliani. He is a close
friend and even a subject of
their work. If you happen to
mosey into Gallery 267 of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art
any time soon, you can see
him represented in a Picasso
as a monk.

Warren states early on that
she sought to keep Jacob from
being trampled by all these
giants in the accounting of
his own life, and she succeeds
at this. He appears not as
Gump or Zelig, but like a
more obscure Zweig, another
committed Europeanist and
friend of giants who did what
he could to annihilate his
Judaism, until it contributed to
his own annihilation.

“The Jews are men of intel-
lect; I need men of heart,” said
Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Co.

Max Jacob, Parricide Extraordinaire
Jacob, the intellectual, echoing
the desire of many of his
co-coreligionist intellectuals of
the era. I wanted to grab this
beautiful poet by the shoul-
ders and tell him that he’ll
be wearing a yellow star soon,
regardless. “The mystery is in this life,
the reality in the other,” Jacob
wrote in “The Dice Cup.” “If
you love me, if you love me, I
will show you the reality.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
Journalist Plumbs Unseemly Depths of Online Hate Groups
most hate-filled spaces on the
internet? SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
If you’re Talia Lavin, you
do it to deprive far-right
“Culture Warlords: My Journey
extremists “of the power to
into the Dark Web of White
organize in total darkness,
Supremacy” to operate as the terrifying
Talia Lavin
bogeymen they would so like
Hachette Books
to be.” The activist journalist
is, as the jacket copy of her
WHY WOULD ANYONE new book notes, a skinhead’s
dive head-first into some of the worst nightmare: she was
B OOKS
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM raised Modern Orthodox and
is a self-described “schlubby,
bisexual Jew” whose politics
are “considerably to the left of
Medicare for All.”
In “Culture Warlords: My
Journey Into the Dark Web
of White Supremacy,” Lavin
presents her findings from
years of researching cesspools
of online hatred that foment
real-world violence. She
JEWISH EXPONENT
sometimes talks to her subjects
face-to-face, but readers are
more likely to be hooked by
her use of false identities to
observe them in secret.

Lavin invents Tommy
O’Hara, a 21-year-old man
whose romantic failures drive
him to seek out the violent
misogynist community of
“involuntary celibates,” or
incels. There’s also Ashlynn, a
Jew-hating waitress from Iowa
seeking a mate on white suprem-
acist dating site WhiteDate
(she receives a barrage of love
letters that read “like a car
crash between Nicholas Sparks
and ‘Mein Kampf.’”) In one
of the book’s most satisfying
chapters, Lavin uses Ashlynn
to infiltrate the white terror
See Books, Page 22
NOVEMBER 12, 2020
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