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Lichtenstein, and Sinclair, fit-up Rodinsky to an imagined past
More a story about the author than the subject, ignore Sinclair's part.
This book is actually a projection of Rachel Lichtenstein's search for a particular type of Eastern European, Jewish past. It begins with a tale of an room, undisturbed since its solitary occupier - the Rodinsky of the title - mysteriously abandoned it in the late 1960's.Rachel Lichtestein begins the tale by trying to rediscover her Jewish origins, and discovers Rodinsky's abandoned room above a desolate synagogue in a part of the East End of London which was a Jewish area in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

While the narrative moves along Rachel's attempts to find out more about the life and circumstances of Rodinsky, however it becomes clear that she is overtaken by her imaginings and projects her increasing interest in cabbalistic thought and Jewish mysticism.Her search in London is rather mundane, however the book comes alive when she travels to Poland to visit abandoned Jewish villages in the borderlands of the present-day Poland and Ukraine. It was from this area that a significant number of the East End Jews arrived, following pograms in the late 19th Century. The impact of the devastation of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide is still palpable in the area, especially to Rachel and her companions.There are interesting insights into the devastatedfolk culture, in particular the Golem - a fictitious, menacing ogre, and the lamed vavnika, a collection of righteous, learned men, whose identities are secret. Their presence and their anonymity, prevent the world from being destroyed.It's a highly evocative tale of vengeful Deities, secrecy and scholarship. Rachel associates this with Rodinsky's fevered,multilingual note taking, and this is where the storyis at itsmost tenuous.
The balance of the story is a straight-forward description of the twists and turns involved in Rachel's quest to piece together Rodinsky's last movements and, finally, his last resting place. Her motivation is to offer a prayer - Kaddish - over his grave, as she has done for others in Eastern Poland, is very moving.Usually Kaddish is offered by the deceased's next-of-kin, however both Rodinsky and the victims of genocide had no one to pray for them and Rachel feels the weight of this desolation. The book can be very deflating in terms of the cycle of woe which befalls the Jews - the Polish pograms of the 1890's, the genocide of the Second World War,and there are mentions of subsequent anti-Semitism in Poland of the 1960s. There is a hopelessness about the fate of the Jews in the storytelling which is belied by the energy of the storyteller in her research and in her real life.This does not gel with my experience of Israel/Palestine, which I know to be a highly energetic, cosmopolitan, diverse and troubled society, whose energy is its most appealing characteristic.That being said, the part of the story told by Rachel, while being somewhat incredible, is sincere and well told.

Have you ever experienced a bore at a funeral? Someone who is so intent on telling his/her own story with only glancing references to the deceased?For a reason, which is inexplicable to me, the story of Rachel's quest is periodically interrupted by irrelevant chapters by Iain Sinclair which completely break the flow of the narrative.He mentions `waiting for Godot', Bob Geldof, Harold Pinter, his own writings, the writing of some of his obscure friends, other Jewish legends, other people who are dead or missing - all tangentially related to Rodinsky or Rachel. Why? Sinclair shows up at the launch of the book and its readings, but he does not carry or contribute to the story.I can only surmise that Rachel was not confidant in her abilities to get the book started without him, but surely an experience editor should have intervened at some point in the books creation and dropped Sinclair;s contribution.As it is, the book can be quite usefully understood without bothering with Sinclair's pieces - indeed each chapter's author is listed, so perhaps the editor is making some effort at guiding us through the dross.

Through Rachel's recounting of the story, it is obvious that the room, abandoned by Rodinsky in the 1960's, has been used as a powerful metaphor by both writers and photographers since it's `rediscovery' in the 1980's. It becomes clear from the photographs of the room that various photographs have rearranged the `undisturbed' room to fit their own needs for a story over the years.I think Rachel is also guilty of the same transference, it is possible that Rodinsky saw himself as an autodictat, in splendid isolation or it may be that he was a disturbed, isolated and frightened man who lived and died in extreme poverty and loneliness.Once it becomes clear thatRodinsky's actual personality and possessions are not knowable at this remove, the story could have focussed more on the social life of the Jewish area of the East End, the story could have included social progression, increasing affluence and assimilation; instead I believe the narrative explores Jewish tragedy and isolation, the necessity to acquire and disseminate knowledge so as to leave a record which may survive the inevitable disasters that will be visited upon the population.

A misunderstood (and misread) classic
I just finished teaching *Rodinsky's Room* and was amazed to see the variety of misreadings posted here as reviews.Among the many contemporary works of historical recovery or revision, *Rodinsky* stands out because of its alternating -- and often warring -- authors, each of whom has a different purpose in recovering Rodinsky's history, as well as a different form and style through which to accomplish this recovery.

Sinclair, the experimental London novelist and essayist, draws on a pastiche of languages and approaches: the short, grotesque sentences of crime novels; classic gothic imagery of the uncanny; filmic montage and surrealist juxtaposition; gossip and rumor and arcane whispers.As he follows Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky's history, Sinclair questions traditional ways of fixing history that overexpose, erase, or create a fictional simulacrum of the past.While he is quite aware that his early writings on Rodinsky were the stuff of romantic urban legend, he is also insistant that heritage trusts and yuppie preservationists are no better than the City developers who want to erase the multiple layers of time sedimented in Spitalfields.The latter erase history, while the former use urban myths to increase property values.

Lichtenstein's style, while more straight-forward than Sinclair's, is comparable to Paul Auster: a clean, seemingly transparent surface, with a plot built on unexplainable coicidences.If Sinclair is obsessed with the Room as a set for his own fictional musings, Lichtenstein wants to demystify the room, unfix energy from a fetishistic attachment to Rodinsky's objects and redirect it onto the human story of David Rodinsky.

And to those reviewers who see Rodinsky as ultimately an ordinary man or a mentally disturbed recluse, I can only ask: did we read the same book?Rodinsky apparently taught himself several ancient languages, was at work on a treatise on the origins of language itself, definitely studied Kabbalah, and maintained himself in near obscurity in the closely-knit Jewish community of Spitalfields.Lichtenstein also debunks the mental illness theory: the behaviors that seemed "crazy" in London would have been totally normal in the Polish community of his grandparents.The very complexity of Rodinsky's identity is used to evoke the heterogeneity and brilliance of a Jewish immigrant community the history of which is currently elided in the pursuit of parking garages, office blocks, and silk weaver garrets.

Ultimately, *Rodinsky's Room* is thematically similar to works like Sebald's *The Emigrants* or Amitav Ghosh's *In an Antique Land*, works that explore the porous boundaries between fiction, history, and myth, works that seek to protect history without romanticizing it or cutting it off, museum-like, from the plurality of possible fictions.

The right story, the wrong storytellers
Having lived in London, where I came to know the Spitalfields neighborhood where the book is set and heard much about the "urban legend" of David Rodinsky, I expected to enjoy this book. Reading Liechtenstein and Sinclair's evocative impressions of Spitalfields took me back, but otherwise "Rodinsky's Room" was a disappointment.

The perceptive reader senses the truth behind the mystery of David Rodinsky early on: Rodinsky was neither a genius nor a scholar, but a man of limited intelligence who lived most of his life with his protective, reclusive mother. After losing his mother, the sheltered Rodinsky couldn't make a life for himself in an unfamiliar world and was ultimately institutionalized. The authors find witnesses and documents who tell the truth about Rodinsky, but against all the evidence they dutifully record in the book the authors persist much too long in the belief that Rodinsky was some kind of inspired cabbalist mystic.

The Rodinsky story is an interesting one, but Liechtenstein and Sinclair are not the right authors to tell it. Sinclair veers between disjointed autobiographical ramblings (none of which bear any apparent relevance to Rodinsky) and repetitive efforts to psychoanalyze Liechtenstein, asking over and over, "Why is this woman so interested in David Rodinsky?" While she writes more coherently than Sinclair, Liechtenstein comes across as flighty, self-absorbed and ludicrously naive; the story of Liechtenstein's rediscovery of her Judaism, the real heart of the book, gets old very quickly. Also, one does not need to be a former Londoner to notice Liechtenstein's factual errors (many of which don't even involve London; for example, she places Massachusetts' Brandeis University in California), the large number of which led me to question the publisher's editorial competence.

Despite its many shortcomings, I can recommend "Rodinsky's Room" as a well-written memoir notwithstanding its content. However, readers looking to learn something about David Rodinsky's milieu - the disappearing Jewish East End - should look elsewhere.

Enchanting mystery, but inadequate and a bit parochial
Lichenstein and Sinclair have taken a fascinating and perplexing mystery and have raised it to the status of urban legend. On many levels, their collaborative attempt succeeds admirably: Lichtenstein skillfully (with some elements of a suspenseful detective story) presents her search for David Rodinsky, whose room was rediscovered, virtually untouched, two decades after it had been abandoned, and Sinclair places the story in its many cultural contexts. Yet, in other ways, their narrative falls short: more questions are raised than answered by their book, and Sinclair's contributions occasionally suffer from a parochialism that makes his discussion difficult for the general reader. As Sinclair himself admits, "The more the mystery of Rodinsky was discussed and debated, the dimmer the outline of the human presence."

The book alternates between chapters by the two authors, and Lichtenstein's contributions are far more straightforward. She weaves her investigation into Rodinsky's identity with her own quest for her Jewish identity and ancestry, and I found her chapters to be far more compelling. Unfortunately, Lichtenstein seems a bit out of her depth when discussing Rodinsky's writings. She confesses she doesn't have the background necessary to understand or translate most of the scraps of papers and journals found in Rodinsky's rooms, yet both she (and Sinclair) repeatedly refer to Rodinsky as a talented linguist and scholar (or a cabbalist). This claim would have been greatly supported by reprinting or summarizing some of the texts left in the room, but we are given only four examples of Rodinsky's apparently prodigious output: two grammatically inept notes to his aunt (including one notable for its venom), the translation of a page of Chinese characters that turns out merely to say "I am David Rodinsky" over and over, and a journal entry on the study of the Assyrian language that could have been written (stylistic errors and all) by a college freshman. Was Rodinsky truly a scholar and a linguist, or was he just a reclusive dabbler? The evidence presented in the book is hardly convincing either way.

Sinclair's nonlinear meditations are also absorbing; he finds parallels to the mystery of Rodinksy in a broad range of literary themes and cultural myths, and he aptly illustrates the East End neighborhood where Rodinsky spent nearly all his life. Although he is a wonderful stylist, Sinclair seems to be writing for his fellow members of the East End literati (and for the critics) rather than for the general reader. Time and again, he mentions London-based semi-celebrities without any introduction whatsoever; I can't imagine many American--or even British--readers knowing most of the people and friends Sinclair mentions. If, before you begin this book, you can't identify Steven Berkoff, David Gascoyne, James Fox, George Melly, John Harle, and dozens of other similarly obscure artists and writers, you will know even less about them after you finish reading Sinclair's chapters. Even better-known writers like Kathy Acker and Arthur Morrison deserve some sort of identification.

Furthermore, Sinclair's chapter placing Rodinsky's story within the context of the mythology of the golem seems far-fetched; the parallels just aren't there. Indeed, most of those who knew Rodinsky clearly find this comparison odious ("There must be no talk of golems, cabbalists, interdimensional voyages, invisibility," says one. "Rodinsky was a man to be pitied, an inadequate [who] unfortunately attained nothing . . . due to his low IQ.") But such objections hardly keep Sinclair from attempting to substantiate this analogy for nearly 30 pages.

Nevertheless, in spite of my rather significant reservations, I found this book overall to be an affecting celebration of the life of a man who otherwise would be one of the many reclusive loners and social outcasts who disappear in the world on a daily basis.

Deceptively simple
Gradually this story of one apparently fairly ordinary old Talmudic scholar and how he became emblematic of the diaspora
and then of the holocaust.Deceptively simple in the way the
story is slowly revealed, I found this one of the most moving books I have read in several years.Without any dramatic special effects, the authors make the mysterious occupant of Princelet
Street at once far less of a mystery and far more of a human being.This is a wonderful picture of Jewish immigration to London's East End, but it also helps us understand the kind of loss and sense of yearning which the immigrants from Eastern Europe brought with them into their new place of exile.
Anyone interested in Jewish life in London should read this. ... Read more

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Leading intellectuals reimagine the city as a site of ceaseless change and motion.The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a ‘city-symphony’ to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from International Fiction Review, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2006. The length of the article is 5393 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: The frummer in the attic: Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room and Jewish memory.
Author: Ruth Gilbert
Publication: International Fiction Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 33Issue: 1-2Page: 27(11)

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Chapters: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Iain Sinclair, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, Tom Raworth, Peter Finch, J. H. Prynne, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, Gilbert Adair, Eric Mottram, Ecopoetry, Clive Fencott, Richard Caddel, Tom Pickard, Lee Harwood, Christopher Logue, Angel Exhaust, Chris Torrance, Roy Fisher, the New British Poetry, International Poetry Incarnation, Barry Macsweeney, Better Books, Gael Turnbull, Andrew Crozier, Denise Riley, Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970, Ken Edwards, Anthony Barnett, Conductors of Chaos: a Poetry Anthology, the English Intelligencer, John Riley, Maggie O'sullivan, Fulcrum Press, Allen Fisher. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 130. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, (28 October 1925 - 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. In 1942 he joined the British Army. At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on the island of Rousay, Orkney. He published books including The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958) and The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960) (which was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later), and some of his work was broadcast by the BBC. In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press. Eventually he began to compose...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=206126 ... Read more

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Word count: 1960. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on March 22, 2002. The length of the article is 920 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Iain Sinclair. Landor's Tower.(Brief Article)
Author: James Sallis
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2002
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 22Issue: 1Page: 128(1)

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

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Chapters: Ralph Rumney, Guy Debord, Stewart Home, Luther Blissett, Peter Ackroyd, Paul Conneally, Iain Sinclair, Space Hijackers, Gil J Wolman, Michèle Bernstein, Patrick Keiller, Ivan Chtcheglov, Mimmo Rotella, Rachel Lichtenstein. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 72. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Stewart Home (born 1962) is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art. Home's mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and Situationist Alexander Trocchi. Home was put up for adoption soon after his birth. In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited widely and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books. They chiefly reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history and influence of the Situationists of whom he is a severe critic and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde movements. In Home's earlier work, the focux of these reflections was often Neoism, a subcultural network of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. Typical characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s included use of group identities (such as Monty Cantsin) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot"); overt emp...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=221985 ... Read more

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Chapters: List of People From Hackney, Iain Sinclair, Harry Wilcox, Frederick Henry Bradley. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 28. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Among those who were born in the London Borough of Hackney, or have dwelt within the borders of the modern borough are (alphabetical order, within category): Edmond Halley Arthur Aikin, a prominent scientist DJ Dextrous 1907 Hetty King sheet music cover, 1907 Samuel Rogers, poet and banker Mary Wollstonecraft, (c. 1797); a painting by John Opie Samuel Rogers, poet and banker James Burgh, writer, educationalist and philosopher John Aikin, physician and author (e.g. Evenings at Home), brother of ALB Lucy Aikin, a biographer, daughter of John AnnanFuture Primeminister ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=13312450 ... Read more

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1972 found avant-garde film documentarist Peter Whitehead ensconced in a chateau in southern France with a teenage heiress model and a month's supply of film and psychedelic drugs. The startling results, never before published, are contained in Baby Doll, a beautiful yet distrubing visual diary of a last four weeks spent in the pursuit of both physical and spiritual erotic extremes.

An uncensored, unflinching photographic journal of sexual metamorphosis and personality disintegration, Baby Doll is also a unique testament to Peter Whitehead's experimental vision, a forbidden legacy of an era simultaneously marked by its innocence and its licence to explore previously uncharted areas of sexuality and psychic experimentation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Scary and Sympathetic
Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely were collaborating with Whitehead and Mia Martin on the film DADDY to enter into the New York Film Festival, but film production was spotty at best, so Martin and Whitehead whiled away the time by shooting the photos that now appear, all these years later, under the title of BABY DOLL.In some ways it is Whitehead's response to the uber-feminism of Saint-Phalle's vision of DADDY, and so there's a harshness and a coldness that speaks as a rebuke.

Otherwise the warmth and passion of the French Riviera suffuse these photographs.You can almost feel the summer air puff back the curtains at the French windows, smell the salt and the fish in the air.At least a dozen different dolls can be identified from their arms, legs, and china faces, and this body of work shares an affinity to the "Doll Parts" that Courtney Love wrote about in Hole's first LP.Mia Martin, who was to go on and become one of the most memorable Hammer girls in THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA with Joanna Lumley, is very young and sweet, and looks pretty high even when she manages to get her eyes open.If you wanted a time capsule of the very early 1970s, this book wouldn't be a bad place to start.It's a concept album without a concept, but it has virtues and fans of its own.

The Rolling Stones it ain't!
Peter Whitehead, Baby Doll (Velvet, 1997)

Peter Whitehead is best remembered these days for chronicling the rise of sixties London psychedelia in such films as Charlie is My Darling (arguably the finest Rolling Stones film ever made) and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. Whitehead found himself in the south of France in 1972 with a month's supply of psychedelic drugs, a month's supply of film, and model/actress/heiress Mia Martin (best remembered these days as one of the Benny Hill Show girls during the 1971-72 season). The result was Baby Doll.

Baby Doll didn't see publication for twenty-five years. One wonders, cynically, whether the reason is the nudity or the track marks it exposes in a few of the photos. Either way, Velvet got hold of it in 1997 and brought it to light. The photos are stark black-and-white surrealist images; Whitehead obviously spent a good deal of time during his formative years looking at Hans Bellmer's disturbing photographs of dolls. (Aside from the obvious connection, Whitehead also uses disembodied doll heads and mannequins as props; Mia is the only live subject.)

What sticks in the mind, though, is Whitehead's ability to conceptualize. The whole, though it's obvious in various ways that the photographs are presented out of chronological order, comes together in a coherent way. The book is presented in four "chapters" of photographs, each building on the ones before in surreal/dadaist content until, in the climactic photographs, there are little more than blurred figures. (It's worthwhile speculating that Alan Parker may have had this in mind when conceiving the "Comfortably Numb" segment from Pink Floyd's The Wall; there are a number of similarities between the way the book and the filmed version of the song build.) The construction of the presentation makes this more than just prurient interest in a now-retired TV actress. It's not earth-shattering, and Whitehead wasn't covering any new ground here, but it's not bad by any means. *** ... Read more