Jimmy Smith live

to end the age-old social and intelectual isolation of Judaism

 "In the fall of 1743, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were alllowed to pass. The boy had arrived from his hometown of Dessau, some one hundred miles away in the small independent principality of Dessau-Anhalt. For five or six days he had walked through the hilly contryside to reach the Prussian capital.

We do not know whether he was wearing shoes; it is more likely that he was barefoot. The boy, later famous throughout Europe as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was frail and sickly, small for his age. Early years of poverty had left him with thin arms and legs, an awkward stutter, and a badly humped back.

(...)

The boy was all but penniless and traveled alone, carrying his few possessions in a satchel on his hunched back. In 1743, the movements of Jews - many of whom where wandering peddlers - were tightly regulated and controlled. Only a limited number of rich jews (occasionally, a scholar) were allowed to settle in Berlin, but peddlers were barred.

(...)

At the time of his arrivel, Mendelssohn knew only Hebrew and Judendeutsch, a raw medieval German dialect mixed with Hebrew. German suffixes attached to Hebrew verbs produced the infinitives; the limited, rudimdsmentary vocabulary of Judendeutsch permited only the simples exchanges. On the rare occasions when it was written, Judendeutsch was spelled in Hebrew letters read from right to left.  Non-jews derided it as a mongrel and barbaric dialect, a form of mauscheln, whinning, "the accents of an unpleasant tongue (Goethe). Mendelssohn's education had been exclusively religious. He was still unable to speak German or read a German book. Less than two decades later, almost entirely self-taught, he had become a renowned German philosopher, philologist, stylist, literary critic, and man of letters, one of the first to bridge the social and culural barrier between Jews and other Germans.

His life suggests a saga not only intellectual but human and dramatic. No fabulist would have cast this stuttering ghetto hunchback as the central character in a unique drama of language and Kultur. Mendelssohn's great ambition was to end the age-old social and intelectual isolation of Judaism, some of which had become self-imposed. In some ways he fully succeeded. (...)

He was the first of a long line of assimilated German Jews who worshiped German culture and civilization and whose enterprise, two centuries later, would come to such a horrendous and abrupt end."

 Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp.1- 5                   

the "German Socrates" p.34

Nils Landgren & Esbjörn Svensson - Song from The Valley

Isaac Bashevis Singer - how long can a man be happy?

Oscar Peterson, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie - Drebirks

CAMPO

Estou só nos campos

A doce noite murmura

A lua me ilumina

Corre em meu coração um rio de frescura

De tudo o que sonhou minha alma se aproxima

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Obra Poética II, Caminho, 1995 (2ª ed.) p.125.

blind to our human condition

"Appelfeld has taken this group of people spending their summer in a 'city of leisure' as an instance of the way we all of us try to keep ourselves occupied, to amuse ourselves, in order to shut up what might be too painful to acknowledge: our failures, our losses, and the inevitable march of time. It was Eliot, after all anything but a Jew, one might say, who wrote: 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Appelfeld's book merely exposes a common topic of modern philosophy, one that Kierkegaard and Heidegger for example, devoted their lives to exploring and alerting us to. We live 'inauthentic' lives, say these philosophers, evading the facts of our human condition, the chief of which is death. Man needs to recognize this and change himself radically, for only thus will he, in effect, truly be able to live.

Appelfeld's take on this is typically Jewish. 'Dear Doctor Professor Heidegger', writes Saul Bellow's hero, Moses Herzog, in the novel of that name, 'I should like to know what you mean by the expression ''the fall into the quotidian". When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it occurred?' And he answers these questions himself when later he says: 'No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough'. In other words, man is more varied and complicates than Heidegger imagines. No single act can free him from his 'inauthenticity', from his confusions and contradictions. The hinhabitants of Badenhein, from this perspective, are only human beings, struggling, as all human beings do, with the complexities of their fate. Appelfeld is shocking because he does not take sides. He may be critical of Dr Landsmann for trying to dissociate himself from the fate of his fellow Jews, for insisting that there has been 'some mistake', but what of Samitzky, Dr Pappenheim, even Peter, who tries to hide at the last moment to escape deportation? Far from satirising these people, or being critical of them for not seeing what was coming, the book gives us a sense that history has simply caught them in its trap. By putting them under the microscope Appelfeld reveals how all of us are similarly caught, even if in less tragic and obvious ways, by the traps of history: we struggle to escape, to lead more meaningful lives, but we also struggle to deny that anything is wrong, and we go on living, blind to our human condition.

               Gabriel Josipovici, introduction to Aharom Appelfeld, Badenheim 39, (tr.) Penguin Modern Classics, 2005, pp. xiii-xiv.                   

Gary Burton - olhos de gato

Enrico Rava - Rain

Aharon Appelfeld em entrevista

Estados de espírito

"The Six-Day War brought  with it much understandable joy, but I found it hard to be happy. Though I'm hardly a gloomy person, there isn't any joy in me; suspicion always flickers there instead. Anyone who went through the Holocaust could not retain his faith in the world."

Aharon Apellfeld, A table for One, Toby Press, 2007, p. 93

Maria João e Mário laginha

Maria João e Mário Laginha

A Child’s Introduction to Jazz by Cannonball Adderley (with Louis Armstrong & Thelonious Monk)

FELICIDADE

Pela flor pelo vento pelo fogo
Pela estrela da noite tão límpida e serena
Pelo nácar do tempo pelo cipreste agudo
Pelo amor sem ironia - por tudo
Que atentamente esperamos
Reconheci tua presença incerta
Tua presença fantástica e liberta.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Obra Poética II, Caminho, 1995 (2ª ed.) p.121.

Sarah Vaughan - Embraceable You

Em teoria, devias ter acesso a tudo o que se publica no mundo inteiro

"Uma livraria de fundos tem todos os livros que não são novidade. Os livros novos são 15 mil por ano, mas os outros são 250 mil. Se tiveres só novidades também és capaz de saber tudo o que tens lá porque desses 15 mil só tens 1500. Quem quer ter uma livraria de fundos não pode pensar que sabe o que está ou que leu tudo. Esqueça. Perguntei ao Pacheco Pereira e ele disse-me que uma pessoa, na vida inteira, não consegue ler mais do que quatro ou cinco mil livros. Uma pessoa que leia muito. Os que não leem muito chegam a 400 livros. Há pessoas que falam como se tivessem lido tudo o que existe. Depois há pessoas que gostam de determinados temas e pensam que os outros também têm de gostar e nem percebem como tu não leste. Há uma coisa que me enerva, quando me vêm falar dos livros que leram como se fossem quase bíblias. Falo-lhes nos que li e eles nem sabem do que estou a falar. O assunto fica logo encerrado. "

Excerto da entrevista de Ana Sousa Dias a José Pinho, Revista Ler, nº127, Setembro de 2013, pp.39-40              

O VELHO ABUTRE

O velho abutre é sábio e alisa as suas penas
A podridão lhe agrada e seus discursos
Têm o dom de tornar as almas mais pequenas

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Obra Poética II, Caminho, 1995 (2ª ed. )p.151