Beginning Moods

As Adam Kirsch's essay states, and you no doubt have realized, Moods is a fragmented book, in some ways as much like poetry as prose. Since you'll be reading poetry next semester in 102, I think it's good to develop some strategies about how to read complex texts. One good strategy in a text like this is to mark as you read specific sections that strike you as interesting, important, peculiar, puzzling, etc. and then return to those moments and try to make sense of them apart from the whole text. That way you learn to focus and be specific instead of making generalizations and vague statements unsupported by the text. Let's practice together:

45 begins:

      "Penina Tuchner we loved like the Twin Towers, especially when they were burning. If her bra were preserved in a museum, we'd go there and break the display-case glass.
      How she'd say 'Shalom,' ["peace" in Hebrew, used both in greeting and farewell] with that first syllable precisely placed between s and sh. Generally. She pronounced words like a swan sailing along on the Thames, next to the hotels..."

It's easy to see how 46 follows 45, esp. w/ this delightful statement:

     "We thought to ourselves then that they (which is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Tuchner) brought a baby girl into the world and waited until she grew up and now we take off all of her clothes."

However, how does 47 go w/ these two sections? A big part of reading Hoffmann seems to be the fluctuation between traditional transition and juxtaposition. Explore these three sections to see what the book is doing.

You might want to try this w/ some different sections in the reading. 


Also...

One question that I asked last week, which I feel we're only starting to explore, is the importance of the Holocaust to Hoffmann (we could just as well ask the importance of the Holocaust to all Jews). Neither Hoffmann nor his parents were put in a concentration camp, in fact, the reason they immigrated to Israel was to escape the Nazis. Still, the Holocaust seems to be a big part of Hoffmann's book, like it is for a lot of Jewish writers. Why do you think this is? How does he write about the Holocaust? (One good example is in section 49 where the narrator tries to see if the tattooed numbers on Mr. and Mrs. Hirsch's arms are in sequence. Jews were tattooed w/ numbers as they were being interred into the camps during WWII.)