Sachs, Maurice. “Witches’ Sabbath”, translated by Richard Howard, Spurl, 2020.

Maurice Sachs— 1906-1945

Amos Lassen

“Witches’ Sabbath” is the autobiography of French gay Jewish author Maurice Sachs (1906-1945). Sachs felt that this was “a statement of account, a moral memo. Or should I say immoral?” He shares how, as a young man, he was a friend of Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, both of whom he stole from, just as he stole from many others in his life (Sachs proposed writing a book entitled “Confessions of a Thief”). He tells of when, in 1925, he converted to Catholicism and entered a seminary but was expelled because of his homosexuality. He tells of drifting through America, of when he nearly drank himself to death, of his many failed love affairs. While this is a compelling, honest portrait of a unique character, “Witches’ Sabbath” is also an engagement with literature. Every period of Sachs’ life is marked by his dialogue with living and dead authors including members of the French literary elite— Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Stendhal and others. His lifelong obsession with literature let Sachs developed a style all his own— his writing is of acerbic portraits of his contemporaries, sometimes picaresque, introspective and filled with irony.

Sachs’s character sketches are filled with of venom. The translator, Richard Howard, had a rough job but has accomplished it admirably. This English version will interest those who desire to recapture the intellectual and artistic life of Paris in the Twenties.

We read of the competing and often contradictory currents of between-the-wars France. Originally published after the Second World War, Sachs was shot on a forced march from a German concentration camp.”

I must admit that I anticipated something much eviller that what this is. Yes, Sachs lived a wild life. He was born to non-religious Jewish parents in Paris, went to school in England where he discovered, enjoyed and enthusiastically practiced his homosexuality. Returning to  France, he converted to Catholicism and started training for the priesthood until he was kicked out after his sexuality was discovered. Later on, he went to the United States, converted to Protestantism, and was married for a short time to the daughter of a preacher. He returned to Paris with a steady American boyfriend  and hit bottom. He describes the seedy hotel where they were staying at the time  and made me itch as I read. Throughout, Sachs was involved in several shady business schemes and suffered from alcoholism. Yet, he managed to write and befriend a number of famous writers. During the war, a period not covered by the book, he worked for the Gestapo for some time before being sent to a concentration camp himself and was killed during a forced march to another camp in 1945. 

He was just 39 when an SS bullet entered his neck. His life ended as a Hollywood
fantasy. He was a self-destructive French charmer, cad, deceiver, thief who had no morality whatsoever. This memoir and his other writings make him an infamous underground literary figure.

Sach’s  memoir was finished in 1942, the year before he was arrested by the Gestapo. Reportedly an informer, Sachs even double-crossed the deadliest thugs .  When he was just 15 years old he helped his mother (his  father deserted them years earlier) flee to England after she bilked a friend out of thousands. He never saw her again. In his teens, he became involved in the literary/art scene and used relatives and male sex workers to gain a place. He always seemed to be out on the town with his pals. Men were his pleasure.
Meeting Maritain, he decided to convert to Catholicism and become a priest. He gives an intense explanation of his need for Godliness. Then, feeling religious pressures, he’s off to see Glenway Westcott and Rebecca West at Juan-les-Pins. He claimed that kneeling at a long Mass, he explains, gave him an erection. 

When finding himself hungry, he goes to work for Coco Chanel, creating a library for her. He makes money, wastes it and owes Chanel who fires him. For consolation he goes to a male brothel that was furnished by Proust.

He goes to America and marries the daughter of a minister in Smalltown, USA but rushes back to France – with a boyfriend right after the honeymoon.  He began his downward spiral into alcohol and soon his life was over being shot as a Jew, the religion he left.
His autobiography is fascinating and disturbing.

Parts of this read more like a novel than an autobiography. Sachs lived life to excess, drank too much, had sex too much and stole too much. He actually wrote much deeply about his interest in Catholicism than he did about his time of “vice”. During his most decadent periods, he never really seemed to enjoy himself, He had alcoholism but succumbed to it. He went from having lots of money to being very poor. Yet it was during his time of poverty and living with the man that he really loved that his book shines. I could not help but wonder if his despair came from his being a queer Jewish man living in a prejudiced society. I also wonder, knowing the extent of his lies, how much of Sachs’s story is actually true.

Altman, Elissa. “Motheland A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing” Ballantine , 2019.

Mother and Daughter

Amos Lassen

Elissa Altman survived a traumatic childhood in New York in the 1970s  and a young adult she lived in the shadow of Rita, her flamboyant mother, a makeup-addicted former television singer. Somehow, she  has managed to build a very different life, now living in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years.  It was not easy and took a lot of “time, therapy, and wine”. She feels that she is finally in a  safe and healthy place. She keeps her far enough away so that Elissa can have a stable, independent world  and career— she is a writer and editor. But then Rita, a “flaneur” who flits around Manhattan fell and becomes completely dependent upon Elissa making her confront their differences. Rita yearns for beauty and glamour; she sees the world through her days in the spotlight. Her money has gone to her preserving her youth. Now, forced to sustain their fragile mother-daughter bond, Elissa must deal with their shared lives and the challenges of caregiving for someone who refuses help, is a  narcissist “and the mutual, frenetic obsession that has defined their relationship.”

To read this is to be touched by it. We see a great deal about maternal love, moral obligation, the choices women make about motherhood, and the possibility of healing. Altman writes with tenderness and irreverence about herself, her mother and unforgettable characters as she explores leaving the past behind and then having it return. Her book shows the power of family and love,

The story is  an intimate and fascinating look at complex mother-daughter attachments. The relationship is codependent. We read of role reversals in parent-child relationships that are entertaining and painful.

Drager, Lindsey. “The Archive of Alternate Endings”, Dzanc Books , 2019.

Looking at Stories

Amos Lassen

In “The Archive of Alternate Endings”, writer Lindsey Drager follows the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with earth’s visits by Halley’s Comet. The book looks at how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold.

Drager imagines past happenings and fictionalizes historically-based stories from the lives of Johannes Gutenberg, Edmond Halley, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Ruth Coker Burke. The book is written with two themes: the story of Hansel and Gretel and homosexuality. The author brings both of them together seamlessly and in amazing ways. We see that the potential dissonance between considering a fairy tale and pondering sexual orientation is erased completely.

Visually, the book is gorgeous and filled with great historical tidbits. It jumps back and forth between characters, settings and time periods and every combination is filled with more emotion than the next. It comes in at just 168 pages, and can be read quickly but I reread it over and over because of its poignancy.

For anyone who enjoys being challenged to think or who loves beautiful writing, this is the book for you. The ideas presented here are meaningful. Drager does a wonderful job of illuminating the darker concepts and human relationships  as she gives us her take on connectedness and purpose and the immensity of existence.  Drager shows that our stories are related, our narratives are interlocking and we are never alone. Poetically she investigates queerness and gives us a philosophical meditation on the nature of stories.. by bringing together fairytale archetypes, astronomical phenomena and queer history.

Rabinowitz, Jacob. “Blame It On Blake: A Memoir of Dead Languages, Gender Vagrancy, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso & Carr”, Independently Published, 2019.

Literary Gossip

Amos Lassen

Jacob Rabinowitz’s “Blame It on Blake” is a memoir of the Beat generation authors that he knew, and his own explorations of Witchcraft, Egyptology, Voodoo, gender confusion and mind-altering drugs, authorized (more or less) by William Blake.

Literary histories do not always include the later years of the beat movement  and in fact they are often omitted in literary histories. This memoir fills an important role in fleshing out what it looked like to be in those circles in the later ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Rabinowitz mentions all the big names with his personal, original and valuable observations and insights. Even Ginsberg is revealed here in ways no one else has done. But the memoir is more than literary gossip about famous folks. It is also Rabinowitz’s own life, with its ups and downs and is perhaps the “truest” description of the beat generation as it has evolved after the ‘80s. There is something affirming and liberating here.

When Rabinowitz ( who is later known as Jonathan Robbins) was a handsome teenager growing up in the suburbs, he sent Allen Ginsberg letters proposing a tempestuous kind of Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship, and Ginsberg was intrigued and he adored the charms of young men so he took him up on it. The result was one of Ginsberg’s poem, “Contest of Bards,” which painted the precocious young man as a charming tempter and friendly nemesis. It was here that Rabinowitz began his journey through the world of Ginsberg’s Beat and post-Beat comrades— poet Gregory Corso and novelist William Burroughs, to lesser-known but equally interesting historical figures like Harry Smith, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Andy Clausen, and Peggy Biderman. Rabinowitz’s observations and fine prose make this a pleasure to read. Many of his portraits are definitive, as when he describes Corso, after shooting up, spraying “the blood left in his syringe across the wall with an arcing flourish and [saying], ‘I have used my blood like an extravagance.'”

Rabinowitz also writes about suburban paganism, Jewish mysticism, and the pre-AIDS gay subculture of New York City. He blends the sacred and profane like when he writes of reading the Mahabharata in a room at the old St. Mark’s Baths, with the sounds of guys having sex all around him.

This is not a book for everyone; it is often irreverent and might offend some readers. 40 years ago it was very difficult to be seriously Jewish and seriously gay (Rabinowitz was bisexual), there was still a lot of work to do. Some probably people dealt with it by emphasizing one side and closeting the other, but Rabinowitz is too honest to do it that way. He comes to an emotionally effective solution that, it’s safe to say, no one else in the world could have come up with, and which was fun to read about. Rabinowitz founds his own “joke religion,” and organizes the “Committee to Restore Sodom and Gomorrah.”

There is  a chapter that begins with seventeenth century Kabbalah ends it with sex outside leather bars and how Rabinowitz’s sees “religion” is very funny.  Anyone who is interested in the Beat Movement and values literature will love this book. It is well written and totally engaging.  Aside from the Bet poets, this is a memoir about being gay in NYC in the ‘70s— the days before the aids crisis and it is quite nostalgic.  

Freeman, Emily L. Quint. “Failure To Appear: Resistance, Identity and Loss: A Memoir”, Blue Beacon Books by Regal Crest , 2020.

Finding True Self

Amos Lassen

Emily Freeman’s “Failure to Appear: Resistance, Identity and Loss”  is the story of “a lesbian of conscience who became a fugitive, on the run for over nineteen years using several identities.”

Those of us who lived through the period that Freeman writes about remember it as quite a time in history; a time when those of us on the college campuses really cared about what was happening in the world. Many of us were not just students but activists as well. It was a time when we could not openly be who we were yet there were those of us who dared do so even if it meant separation from family and society.  Freeman and myself experienced the same backdrops—, the assassination of a President, civil rights battles, the war in Vietnam, the Nixon and Reagan administrations (I was out of the country), the coming of the women’s and gay liberation movements and the AIDS epidemic. We need to be reminded of these events as we think about this country today.

This is a memoir about finding self and identity at a time when it was extremely difficult to do so. Freeman shares her story with a sense of immediacy and vulnerability that I had almost forgotten. Parts of the memoir are written by the name she used at the time and this is a story of survival because of the need to survive so that others would never have to go through what we all had to deal with.

Freeman was an idealist back then and she had to face rejection from her family, lost idealism, life underground and the reality of renewal. As a college student, she was a peace activist and fighter for social justice. Her journey was the kind we read of but never really knew anyone involved. It was not a short journey but one that lasted almost two decades.

She grew up as Linda J. Quint in 1950s Los Angeles, but by 1965 when she was a sophomore at Berkeley and becoming radical. Along with others from her generation, she was dealing with what she saw as the wrongs— especially civil rights and the Vietnam War.” Just those two issues would have been enough to upset her parents but Quint also shared that she was in love with another girl and the result of this was that her father stop assuming financial responsibility for his daughter. After she graduated from Berkeley, she vanished and reappeared as a member of Chicago’s activist left. She helped destroy 50,000 selective service records and was soon on the run with a new ID (Margaret Wilzbach). She hid out in places like Detroit and Birmingham, Alabama and became increasingly  feeling increasingly disillusioned with “the Revolution.” She then became Judith Jablonski and found sanctuary in Atlanta. It was also in Atlanta that she found a lover. Eventually she became Alexa Emily Freeman and got to San Francisco, where the work of liberation was just beginning. It took several identities, several cities and two decades for Freeman to become “a soldier for the cause of freedom–a cause that itself wore many guises” just as she had done. 

Freeman stuck it out, Unlike her I fled this country looking for the freedom I sought in the quickly growing nation of Israel, having had enough of the apathy of the American people. Freeman, on the other hand, has come to represent the tumultuous years of coming of age in the 60s and dealing with the many problems that America was facing. Her story is indeed made up of notes from the underground and if we think about what that means, it is quite shocking. Citizens of the greatest democracy in the world were forced to live underground so that the democratic ideals could be preserved. Identity became fluid and ever-changing and individual pasts disappeared; living in safe houses became a way of life.

Politics and individuality merged and the Freeman that we meet here is one who dared to revolt. We gain a look at the person and the times; of a subculture that we have not seen the likes of again. Freeman devoted everything to the cause and she was changed and shaped by it. We, too, were changed by it.

I must admit that I wept through parts of the book. The idea of a brave soul who really believed in what she was doing emerges as heroic. She had been sentenced to prison for her part in a non-violent protest against the Vietnam war not to forget that she had been rejected by her parents, who refused to acknowledge her sexuality when she came out to them as a lesbian. I cannot help but admire her resilience as she fought to survive and be who she was.  

There is humor here as well but there is a lot of heartbreak and emotion. How lucky as we to have this story! The prose is well-written story an is reflective and deep and above all totally compelling.  Freeman survived and has been able to build a successful life for herself on the surface but she has the scars of those years of being lost.   Freeman gives us an amazing look at identity, sexuality, loss and underground life that I will not forget.

Adjmi, David. “Lot Six: A Memoir”, Harper,  2020.

To Be a Person

Amos Lassen

In “Lost Six: A Memoir”, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art. 

 Adjmi was born in Brooklyn in the 1970’s into a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all. He soon felt displaced and trapped in an insular religious community that excluded him and drove him into suicidal depression. Through adolescence, David tried to hide and suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he decided to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knew behind. But, who should he be? He moved between identities he stole from fashion magazines, philosophy books, sitcoms and foreign films and from practically everyone he met. He began to create an entirely new adult self.

Adjmi’s story is one  of an outsider striving to reshape himself. Adjmi’s memoir is portrait of the artist in a life and death crisis of identity. “Lot Six” tells his search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.

The memoir is both heartbreaking and hilarious; the story of what it means to make things up, including oneself. It is a story of lack and lies, humiliations and reinventions and a look at how should a person be?” Reading David Adjmi iexplains aspects of ourselves that many of us have never faced.  It is not easy to build an identity and even more difficult to write about doing so with wit and candor. In doing so, Adjmi has written a love letter to art and those of us who need it to survive. There is something here for everyone and after you have dried the tears and calmed the laughs, you will realize that reading about Adjmi is also reading about oneself.