Readings & Talks

posted by Pearl Abraham

Up there at the B&N podium, looking out at an audience of, largely, friends and family who already know the book, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by it all and wondered why I, why any of us writers, do this. And though I am very grateful for friends who do show up, especially friends who have attended more than one reading, still, if I could look into the future, that is, if I were psychic, I’d hope to see that bookstore readings, meetings with the author, staged Q&A’s, or whatever variation these public events come in, will become a thing of the ridiculous past, and that books not authors will make their way to individual readers who will once again read in privacy and solitude, without the author’s spoken voice in their ears.

The week is drawing to a close and with it my postings for Beatrice. It has been fun, as always. And now, with deadlines for writer’s grants, awards, and fellowships looming, with the New Yorker festival gathering steam, and the academic semester already in full swing, not much fiction will be written in the next week or so, which should mean that the muses will be more accessible than usual. Therefore, I turn back to my novel-in-progress and hope to find wings.

22 September 2005 | uncategorized |

Na Nach Nachman of Uman in the Landscape

posted by Pearl Abraham

In Israel, in the streets of Jerusalem, on bus stops and buildings in Tel Aviv, at checkpoints in Jenin, the stuttering mantra, “Na Nach Nachman of Uman,” appears as colorful grafitti. The legend surrounding this mantra is intriguingly absurd in the way Hasidic writings often are:

Some eighty years ago, at the age of 17, a teenager named Yisroel Ber Odessa became enamored of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, an early 19th century Hasidic master, writer, and charismatic whose interrupted tale inspires The Seventh Beggar. Disturbed by their son’s strange obsession, Ber Odessa’s parents banished him from their home, which depressed the young man. In an effort to cheer him up, several of his friends penned a letter and signed it “Na Nach Nachman of Uman,” a kind of stutter of Nachman’s name. Ber Odessa considered the letter a genuine missive from Nachman, accepted the stuttering signature as a mantra, and persisted in his belief even after his friends confessed that they had authored the letter as a prank. When Ber Odessa became a spiritual teacher in Tiberius, his young students adopted their teacher’s mantra as their own and started broadcasting it in graffiti format. The uplifting spirituality taught by Ber Odessa came to be associated with Nachman, and the ubiquitous mantra continues to proliferate in the form of this graphic populist art.

I will be reading from The Seventh Beggar tonight at 7:30 at B&N at 8th Street and 6th Avenue.

21 September 2005 | uncategorized |