This issue is the last of the year before the summer. But K. won’t really be on vacation and will offer a series in July and another in August. An intellectual odyssey to begin with: in two weeks, you will discover the first episode of an unpublished interview by Déborah Bucchi and Adrien Zirah with the great American writer and Europhile Daniel Mendelsohn.
Before our summer program, however, we had to repair a few omissions. First of all, we neglected to mention a part of the contemporary Jewish world which we had not yet mentioned enough in K. The little-known world of Orthodoxy, which from the outside seems to be closed, but which journalist Anshel Pfeffer reveals to us here some of the great underground movements. For some years now, young Orthodox families have been leaving London for Canvey Island, where real estate prices allow them to settle. Thus was born the community of Kehile Kedoshe, which seems to integrate perfectly alongside an aging native Tory and pro-Brexit population: “One of the local councilors told me that we’ve finally brought diversity to Canvey,” said Mr. Friedman, one of the leaders of the community. Originally published in the American journal Sapir, this British postcard is both touching and exotic.
The next oblivion is not ours: it is the one into which a number of attacks and assassinations that struck European Jews in the 1980s and 1990s have fallen. After the synagogue attack in Rome in 1982, K. returns this week to the Wybran Belgian Case. In 1989, this great doctor was murdered in front of his hospital. Agnès Bensimon has reopened this file and takes stock of an unsuccessful investigation and of the obvious denial of justice that it implies. From Brussels to the Kingdom of Morocco, from international terrorist networks to the failures of the police and of the justice system, a fascinating investigation on a scandal that has been widely publicized in Belgium but has remained little known outside.
In the last text of this week, a text that is both fragmentary and choral, Daniella Pinkstein brings together significant Jewish figures of writing and representation who once crossed paths in Warsaw and Paris — notably around the two issues of the magazine Khaliastra. Between references and excerpts from the works of Kafka, Chagall, Markish and Greenberg, she pays homage to the davar that held them together, that “dislocated thing that joins, undulating and impatient, the word.” In this in-between period when Jewish artists were at the forefront of modernity, she describes a condition where “responsibility is not acquired, not learned, it is transmitted, in this inhabited language, which places the individual in front of its duplicate.”
