Amerika by Franz Kafka

 

More than 40 years ago, I entered the strange world of Franz Kafka in the usual way: reading "The Metamorphosis."  This strange story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up having turned in a bug (maybe a cockroach) fascinated me. The story begins with the struggles of a big bug in a Vienna household.  Over time his family adapts to his state and eventually continues with their life--the way humans adapt to every sort of horror we face.  

In Amerika, the central character, Karl Rossmann arrives in America, abandoned by his family. He begins a series of  misadventures that are a descent--some of his problems are of his own making through pride and stubbornness, some are bad luck.  But the descent is inexorable.  

The story left me feeling pain, both empathy for Karl and for the author. Kafka's life was short, isolated and miserable.  Below is a New York Times review of the 2009 translation of Amerika, the one I read. It gives much more context than I could.  When I first read Kafka, I thought he would be one of the authors of whom I read all he wrote.  That list includes Hannah Arendt, Mark Helprin, CS Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernard-Henri Levy, Leo Tolstoy (fiction) but not Kafka. The pain I feel as I read him makes his books a very occasional read (two in 40 years).

America, ‘Amerika’

By Adam Kirsch

Jan. 2, 2009

Most writers take years to become themselves, to transform their preoccupations and inherited mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it took a single night. On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”

Everyone who reads Kafka reads “The Judgment” and the companion story he wrote less than two months later, “The Metamorphosis.” In those stories, we already find the qualities the world would come to know as “Kafkaesque”: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate. But readers have never been quite as sure what to make of the third major work Kafka began writing in the fall of 1912 ­— the novel he referred to as “Der Verschollene,” “The Missing Person,” which was published in 1927, three years after his death, by his friend and executor Max Brod, under the title “Amerika.”

The translator Michael Hofmann, whose English version of the book appeared in 1996, correctly called it “the least read, the least written about and the least ‘Kafka’ ” of his three novels. Now Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka’s works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. “If approached afresh,” Harman promises in his introduction, “this book could bear out the early claim by . . . Brod that ‘precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.’ ”

Harman offers a compromise between Kafka’s intended title and Brod’s more familiar one by calling his version Amerika: The Missing Person ($25). And he follows previous English editions by retaining the German spelling of America, with a “k.” This lends the name, in American eyes, a more ominous and alien quality than it would have for the German reader. That “k” is hard to resist, however, and not just because readers have come to expect it. No writer has ever annexed a single letter the way Kafka did with “k.” Between the two in his own last name, Joseph K. of “The Trial” and K. of “The Castle,” the letter seems imbued with his own angular essence. Amerika is not America; it is a cipher for Kafka’s dream of a country he never visited.

The difference becomes clear in the very first paragraph, when Karl Rossmann sails into New York Harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty: “The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” The torch of liberty has metamorphosed into a punishing sword, an omen of the many chastisements in store for Kafka’s victim-hero. Indeed, America itself is a punishment for Karl, who was sent there by his parents after he got a servant girl pregnant back home. What Kafka actually writes, however, is that “a servant girl had seduced him,” and when Karl remembers the fatal episode, it is clear he was more the victim than the aggressor: She “shook him, listened to his heart, offered him her breast so that he too could listen but could not induce Karl to do so, pressed her naked belly against his body, searched between his legs with her hand — in such a revolting manner that Karl shook his head and throat out from under the quilts — then pushed her belly up against him several times; it felt as if she were part of him; hence perhaps the terrible helplessness that overcame him.”

Taking into account the fact that Karl is 17 and Johanna, the “girl,” about 35, this sounds less like seduction than rape. And it is a template for the way everyone Karl encounters in “Amerika” will ignore his desires and overpower his will.

In the first chapter, Karl tries to intercede with the ship’s captain on behalf of a stoker who has been mistreated, but his rich American uncle simply waves off his protests. Later, when Karl pays a visit to one of his uncle’s friends, Mr. Pollunder, his uncle treats it as a terrible transgression and cuts him off — even though Karl made sure to get permission beforehand. (This arbitrary rewriting of the rules looks forward to the unwritten laws of “The Trial.”)

While at Pollunder’s house, Karl is nearly raped once again, this time by a teenage wrestler named Klara. (“I won’t stop at one slap,” she threatens, “but shall go on hitting you left and right until your cheeks start swelling.”) When he escapes, he falls in with a couple of tramps, Delamarche and Robinson, who rob and bully him. He becomes an elevator boy at a luxury hotel but gets fired for crimes he didn’t commit. So it goes, humiliation after humiliation, until Karl ends up a virtual slave to Delamarche’s grotesquely obese mistress, the singer Brunelda.

It is enough to make the reader want to ask Karl what he demands of the stoker: “So why don’t you speak out? . . . Why do you put up with everything?” “Amerika” never provides a good answer to this question: Karl is simply helpless, unable to make sense of the world or get along in it. Not until the last chapter, when he finds a job in the enigmatic Theater of Oklahama (Harman preserves Kafka’s misspelling), does Karl seem to find a home in America — and even then, it’s possible that Kafka would have had other torments in store for him, if he had completed the novel.

Karl’s innocence is the main reason “Amerika” remains less persuasive a parable than “The Trial” and “The Castle.” To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height.

But the crucial innovation of the later novels, which makes their dream-worlds so convincingly uncanny, is the way Kafka’s avatars always seem to be colluding in their own punishment. In the first chapter of “The Trial,” when the officers come to arrest Joseph K., he thinks, “If he were to open the door of the next room or even the door leading to the hall, perhaps the two of them would not dare to hinder him.” But he doesn’t make a move to escape, just as, later on, he freely obeys the summons of the court and finally submits to his execution. It is his own sense of guilt, especially sexual guilt, that makes Joseph K. accept his trial.

Karl Rossmann, however, refuses to accept responsibility for his desires, and it is a mark of Kafka’s own immaturity that he allows Karl to be constantly seduced and abused, never to act as seducer or abuser. Compare Karl’s childlike description of sex with K.’s wholly knowing, wholly mutual encounter with Frieda, in “The Castle”: “She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other’s breasts; . . . like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other’s bodies.”

Klaus Mann, introducing an edition of “Amerika” in 1946, wrote that Kafka “deeply and simply loves his innocent creature, his favorite dream, his heir,” Karl Rossmann. But it was not until Kafka accepted the guilt of his “creature” and “heir,” and confiscated all but the first letter of Karl’s name as punishment, that he could become the poet of the inexpungible guilt in all of us.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of “Benjamin Disraeli.”

   

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of "Between Past and Future" by Hannah Arendt

When we say history is written by the victors, we are assuming or accusing the historians of writing propaganda.  But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in the 2nd chapter of Between Past and Future history began with Homer's impartial view--writing about greatness and courage on both sides of the tragic war that lead to the founding of Rome by the defeated.  

Here is Arendt on impartiality in history in Ancient Greece:

Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and so to praise the glory of Hector no less than the greatness of Achilles. This Homeric impartiality as it is echoed by Herodotus who set out to prevent “the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's own side and one's own people, which up to our own days characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat which moderns have felt expresses the “objective” judgment of history itself and does not permit it to interfere with what is judged to be worthy of immortalizing praise. Somewhat later, and most magnificently expressed in Thucydides, there appears in Greek historiography still another powerful element that contributes to historical objectivity. It could come to the foreground only after long experience in polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk, the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond to the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—in the way the world appeared and opened up to him δοκει μοι, “it appears to me,” from which comes δοξα, or “opinion”—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learn to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. The speeches in which Thucydides makes articulate the standpoints and interests of the warring parties, are still a living testimony to the extraordinary degree of this object activity.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, pg. 51-2

I wrote about the Preface of Between Past and Future here.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

 

I just finished Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby. 

The title is a promise fulfilled.  I have read a lot of Jewish history and listened to more in the dozens of episodes of "The Jewish Story" by the Rav Mike Feuer. 

Every history is selective, Tishby, by design, has to cram decades into sentences and eras into paragraph.  I like what she chose. Particularly, her description of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 showed how complex that disaster was.  When she describes everything the Jews did inside the walls to provoke the Romans and lose the conflict, the disaster seems inevitable.  

On the rise of Ultra Orthodox culture in Israel, she notes that their tradition and weird black hat uniform dress is a product of a 17th Century Eastern European subculture, nothing to do with Torah.  

The book was published before October 7, 2023, so it does not include the slaughter of innocents by Hamas terrorists. In a speech six months after the tragic events, Tishby was very clear in her views.

The speech us below.  I recommend this book as a brief, lucid history of Israel.  

----

This is the most challenging speech I’ve ever delivered, but it’s time the world wakes up to what the Jewish community has been saying all along. What we experienced on and since October 7 was sadly, predictable. We’ve warned of the danger of radical Islam or, more accurately, the radical Islamic Nazism that is constantly lurking at Israel’s borders. And we’ve warned of the ongoing grooming of Western civilization – through universities, the media, and social media. We warned what the phrase “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” really looks like. It means “itbach al Yahud” – “slaughter the Jews.” This demonization of Israel is not “progressive”, it’s not peaceful and it absolutely won’t Free Palestine. It is a modern-day blood libel calculated to incite, pave the way for, and then justify - a genocide. We’ve seen it for over three and a half thousand years of Jewish “lived experience”. It’s the generational trauma that is in our bones. We understand it. That, is our “Jewish privilege.” We knew where it would lead, and we are devastated to be proven right. Israel is one of the greatest stories ever told and its vilification is one of the greatest smear campaigns in the history of the world. But we have news for you: when we say Never Again, we mean it. When you tell us you want to kill us, we believe you. And when you set out to do it in the most horrific of ways, we will defeat you. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the families of Israelis and Americans held hostage by the Hamas terrorists and demand they return the hostages now! Bring them home! Above all I am grateful that for the generations to come, the Jewish people will still live, love, and thrive and reach out a hand to the world. And Hamas will be nothing but a footnote in history, just like those who tried to exterminate us before. Am Yisrael Chai

Marking Major Anniversaries

 

9-11 Memorial NYC

One reason for marking fateful days in history is to remember how much the world has changed in your own lifetime.

Fifteen years ago today, 11 September 2009, I was a soldier on a one-year deployment to the Iraq War with the US Army.

Fifteen years before that, in 1994, I was a civilian still not quite believing the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991.

Fifteen years before that in 1979, I was tank commander on the East-West border in Germany waiting for the Soviet invasion of that never happened.

Fifteen years before that I was an 11-year-old 5th grader at Robin Hood Elementary School in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Our school was a fallout shelter. Nuclear war was a shadow on life during the Cold War.

The world has changed a lot in some ways, and not at all in others.

In just over a week, I will be advocating for Ukraine in the US Congress. Russia invaded. The attack I was waiting for for the first four decades of my life happened in Ukraine.

Huge changes, some sad consistency.

Glory to Ukraine!

Icons on Ammo Boxes: Seven Galleries Show Ukrainian Art at NYC Art Week Preview

On September 4, on the eve of the beginning of  Art Week in NYC, I went to a gallery in Chelsea for the Volta Art Fair. Dozens of galleries exhibiting and thousands of works of art on display.  Seven of the galleries featured art by Ukrainians, both in Ukraine and from the Ukrainian diaspora.  

On gallery featured several Orthodox icons painted on ammo crates.  I saw the icons just passing and then looked closer at the one on the right in the photo above and noticed latches that are used on NATO machine gun ammo crates.  Ukrainian soldiers create these icons.  It was a lovely display of faith expressed in art in a country invaded by a tyrant.

Below are a sampling of what was on display by Ukrainian artists.

And one more icon

Quoting Hannah Arendt: Not Easy, but No Excuse for Fake Quotes

On Friday, 6 September, the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will begin the discussion of "Between Past and Future" first published in 1961. 

Recently, Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic direct of the HAC, wrote an excellent essay about the problem of made up quotes of Hannah Arendt and by extension all authors.  He is right. Read it here. 

Last month an insightful essay on this book was published on the HAC site.  It begins with a quote from Arendt's preface to the work that I marked as "theme" in the margin.  Here is the essay by Mark Aloysius, S.J.

The opening quote on the essay shows why quoting Arendt can be so difficult.  The 70-word sentence has three independent clauses, with three dependent clauses. Reading this sentence made me glad I am old enough to have diagrammed sentences in elementary school. The quote is an entirely appropriate opening for an essay on the HAC web site, but not the kind of thing that would get likes on TikTok or Snapchat. 

Here is the quote:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

One of my many reasons for being a member of the HAC is the discussions that guide the reading of Arendt's complex thought.  After reading Arendt's preface, I transcribed the paragraph that the above quote is in. The 263-word paragraph has just five sentences. One is a simple16-word sentence quoting William Faulkner.  The other four have 60, 36, 70 and 81 words.  

The relatively snappy 36-word sentence has two dependent clauses.  The closing 81-word sentence has two independent clauses and four dependent clauses.  Arendt was not writing for social media.  

In a decade and a half of reading Arendt, the former ad writer in me has never found her quotable, but I have been able to discuss with enthusiasm what she has said with people who care about the human condition (to make a pun) in all of its complexity.

Here is the paragraph I transcribed:

"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid of in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.  Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a  continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it's broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.  Only because man is inserted into time, and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it in Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle of the body which gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes."

The (Pot)Hole Story -- Panama is a tough place to ride

 

First Week in Panama--The Daily Downpour

I bought a bike the first full day I was in Panama.  The bike is great. I wrote about it here.    

I quickly got good at dodging the rain. The weather app in my phone that is so reliable in America, is rubbish here. It says it will rain when the sun is shining and it will be cloudy when rain is falling in sheets.   

Rain I could handle.  But the farther I ride, the more I have to contend with potholes.  On a descent a few miles from the city, I hit a hole so deep it flatted the tire and tore a hole in it.  I wrote about that here.  

And the holes deep enough to flatten a tire are everywhere.  It's not so bad riding uphill, but downhill, I have to scan for holes the whole way! I'm riding the brakes and very focused--not having fun feeling the wind.  It's surely safer to roll down hills on high alert hands on the brake hoods, but it's not fun. 

On the way up the hills, the holes are no problem, but even riding the white stripe at the edge of the tarmac, buses and trucks have to move around me.  One the main roads in and out of the city, there are no shoulders.  

When there are shoulders, another hazard appears at random--sewers without covers.  Some of these uncovered drains are big enough to swallow a whole wheel, not just flat a tire.  I told a local guy about this. He shrugged and said people steal the covers and sell them for the metal.  When there is a shoulder, I ride just off the roadway and scan for the uncovered drain.  

I've been riding every day here, but my rides are getting shorter and are on roads where I have memorized the holes and know the hazards.  On Labor Day I will return to the US until mid November.  

When I return, I will have Gatorskin tires and be looking for weekend groups to ride with.  Right now, I'm feeling like the cocodrillo in the photo below is waiting in holes on every road here.

 

Why the West Rules — For Now: A Review by The New York Times

Why the West Rules — For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris 

A friend recommended I read "Why the West Rules--For Now" and I was delighted with this long history of the entire world.  This is my kind of book, so I was predisposed to like it. Other books in this genre I love:

• Sapiens, Yuval Harari
• Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
• Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson
• These Truths,  Jill Lepore
• Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall

A one-volume history of all or part of the history of the world is ambition incarnate. When a historian can assert: Here is the history of the world (or a large slice of it) and make a good case, it is both interesting and opens a hundred interesting questions.  

Ian Morris writes about the history of the East and the West in parallel. At the time the book was published they looked to be converging. A decade and a half later the West retained economic leadership, but the world is much more fragmented and dangerous than in 2010.  

I am going to read more of Morris starting with "Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels" published in 2015.  I have read at least one other book by all the other authors in my  list above, but the one in the list is my favorite, so far.   

---------

"The Final Conflict" a review by Orville Schell

Dec. 10, 2010

This is a big “big book.” To accomplish his ambitious goal of both understanding the evolution of mankind’s past development and prognosticating the future of the continuing East-West horse race, Ian Morris starts around 15 millenniums ago. That’s a lot of history.

With such a grand design, “Why the West Rules — For Now” suggests the pretension of those Imperial Chinese encyclopedists who produced works like the Qing dynasty’s “Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings From the Earliest to Current Times,” which sought to document “everything under heaven” in its 800,000 pages. It is hardly surprising that China, which has recently stolen up behind the “developed world” to threaten its supremacy (and all its common wisdom about development models), sits at the center of Morris’s book.

A British-born archaeologist, classicist and historian now at Stanford University, Morris is the historians’ equivalent of those physicists who search for a still elusive unified field theory. In his new book, he sets out to discover broad patterns, “the overall ‘shape’ of history,” by sifting through the world’s long development process. Following the oscillating forces from prehistory to the present, he shows how both the East and West managed to catalyze themselves at different times and in different ways to progressively new heights of development. But his ultimate challenge is to make sense of all these cycles of rise and fall, the better to judge whether either side was in possession of any innate superiority. His answer to that question is an emphatic no. East and West, he tells us, are just “geographical labels, not value judgments.”

If neither East nor West has had any innate developmental advantage, what then allowed the West to propel itself forward so successfully in the 18th century (answer: the discovery of fossil fuels), and what does that dominance portend for the future? “One of the reasons people care about why the West rules,” Morris explains, “is that they want to know whether, how long and in what ways this will continue — that is, what will happen next. . . . How long the West will stay on top is a burning question.”

But before you get to the answer, you must be ready to steel yourself for Morris’s early chapters, which nonspecialists will no doubt find arcane. His discussions of primitive man’s common African gene pool; of how the “Hilly Flanks” in the Middle East developed after the Ice Age; and of China’s ancient Zhou dynasty can seem awfully remote. And as he visits ancient places like Urartu, Erlitou, Tenochtitlán, Uluburun and Yue; introduces us to individuals like Hoshea, Tiglath-Pileser III, Khusrau II, Merneptah and Zhu Xi; or sets us down among the Ahhiyawans, Xiongnu, Kizzuwatnans, Hurrians and Jur­chens, your head may begin to spin.

However, just as you begin to wobble beneath the breadth of such impressive research, Morris will pull back and give a brief coda of down-to-earth clarification, rescuing those readers with the will to soldier on through a few more millenniums. Or he will drop in a welcome wry aside to goad you down the trail of history. Commenting on the Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He, he notes that Zheng “was enlisted in the emperor’s service and castrated,” but nonetheless “seems to have taken all this in his enormous stride.” Or, on the discovery of the Americas, he observes, “Europe got a new continent and Native Americans got smallpox.”

Fortunately, Morris is a lucid thinker and a fine writer. He uses a minimum of academic jargon and is possessed of a welcome sense of humor that helps him guide us through this grand game of history as if he were an erudite sportscaster. He shows us how different empires were boosted by periods of “axial thought” to surge up the development ladder, only to crumble upon hitting a “hard ceiling,” usually inflicted by what he calls the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse: climate change, migration, famine, epidemic and state failure.

But failure of one civilization only allowed another to arise somewhere else. The Roman Empire, Song dynasty China, Renaissance Europe and the Britain of the Industrial Revolution came along, got lift under their wings from new technology, social innovation or a creative organizing principle and pushed the whole process of development forward another notch.

According to Morris’s scorecard, since this age-old process began, the world index of social development has risen to 900 points. And, he predicts, in the next 100 years this index will rise an additional 4,000 points. He calls such progress “staggering.”

But with the West’s power and confidence now declining, and China’s authoritarian form of capitalism ripsawing its way toward an ever more dominant position in the world, a reader may be forgiven for becoming somewhat impatient. Is Morris ever going to answer the “burning question”? Who will win the next phase of our East-West horse race, the United States or China?

Finally, Morris surprises us. He duly acknowledges that “patterns established in the past suggest that the shift of wealth and power from West to East is inexorable” and that we may even be moving from “bankrupt America to thriving China.” But what really concerns him, it turns out, is not whether the West may be bested by the East, but whether mankind’s Promethean collective developmental abilities may not end up being our common undoing.

The competition that East and West have been pursuing for so long, Morris warns, is about to be disrupted by some powerful forces. Nuclear proliferation, population growth, global epidemics and climate change are in the process of radically altering old historical patterns. “We are approaching the greatest discontinuity in history,” he says.

Sounding suddenly more like an admonishing preacher than the amiable sportscaster to whom we have grown accustomed, Morris counsels that we now need to concentrate not on the old competition between East and West, but on a choice. We must decide between what Morris, borrowing from the writer Ray Kurzweil, terms “the Singularity,” salvation through the expansion of our collective technological abilities, and “Nightfall,” an apocalypse from the old Five Horsemen aided by their new accomplices. He warns that this choice offers “no silver medal.” One alternative “will win and one will lose.” We are, he insists, “approaching a new hard ceiling” and are facing a completely new kind of collective historical turning point.

For the Singularity to win out, “everything has to go right,” Morris says. “For Nightfall to win only one thing needs to go wrong. The odds look bad.”

Because distinctions of geography are becoming increasingly irrelevant, Morris views the old saw that “East is East and West is West” as a catastrophic way of looking at our present situation. Like it or not, East and West are now in a common mess, and “the next 40 years will be the most important in history.”

Although he implies it everywhere, Morris does not explicitly call for the United States and China to find new ways to collaborate. There may be no other solution. But will the leaders of these two unpredictable countries be able to rise to the unprecedented challenge they face? Not even Morris’s polymathic research abilities and pathbreaking analytic skills can help us answer that . . . for now.

------

Illustrated. 750 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35

Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, is writing a historical interpretation of China’s economic boom.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 12, 2010, Page 19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Final Conflict. 

First Flat Fixed: Pinched in a Panama Pothole

Today I had my first flat in Panama.  The pothole was not quite as bad as the one above, but for those who kvetch about potholes in Pennsylvania, Panama has a lot more.  

Today I was rolling back toward the canal from the Gamboa road junction. I stayed away from the edge of the state highway running along the canal to avoid the gaps in the pavement, but saw a pothole too late to swerve.  The front tire flatted immediately, the back was fine.  

I was near a bus stop at the village of Paraiso a five miles from where I live.

Buses in Panama do not allow bicycles on board.  I waved at  a couple of taxis, then ordered and Uber.  It was $5.83 to take me home.  The driver didn't have a bungee cord to put the bike in the trunk, so I took the wheels of and held it in the back seat.  

I fixed the flat at home and rode to a local bike  shop to buy another tube. When I got there I saw a small bulge in the sidewall.  The tube was coming out. I had cut through the sidewall. The shop owner wasn't busy so I bought a new tire and he put it on for me.  $50 with an extra tube. All the tires he sold were Goodyear Eagles--which is what was on the bike already.

With all the potholes here, I will bring back more tubes and cartridges and a pair of Continental Gatorskin tires.        

Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch Offensive Into Russia

 

Ukraine Defies the U.S. to

Launch a Showy Offensive

Into Russia

Observing Israel’s moves in the Middle East, Kyiv gambles on an American power vacuum

BY VLADISLAV DAVIDZON

AUGUST 18, 2024

On Aug. 6, Ukrainian mechanized forces, likely a division strong, invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast. In the process, Kyiv had recaptured the battleeld initiative, undermined the narrative that it was doomed to surrender, and caused the Kremlin obvious political embarrassment. The Ukrainian high command claims that the incursion has resulted in the capture of 74 settlements and the occupation of 390 square miles of Russian territory— more than double what the Russians concede. Moscow was forced to evacuate nearly 200,000 civilians from the Kursk and Belgorod

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 1/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

regions, as it brought in reserves and heavy weaponry, while the Russian air force began striking the Ukrainian forces in Kursk and across the border in the Sumy Oblast. While the Ukrainian military claimed on Tuesday that it has gained an additional 15 square miles, the Russians said they have blocked any further advance.

Whatever its strategic signicance turns out to be, the Ukrainians maintain they were sending a signal to the Kremlin as well as to the White House that Kyiv was nished operating under self- defeating constraints and that it would now probe red lines that had been set out by both powers. Kyiv has long been frustrated at being provided with just enough support from Washington in order to not lose—but not enough to overcome the numerically superior and better nanced Russian army. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed that frustration publicly, stating that “our partners are afraid of Russia losing the war.”

Unlike last summer’s failed counteroensive in Kharkiv, Ukraine launched the Kursk operation without rst informing Washington of its plans. In fact, Zelenskyy waited a week to break the remarkable operational secrecy that had enveloped the operation.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 2/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

“Ukraine’s decision to proceed came exactly a week after Israel had carried out a pair of high-profile assassinations deep in enemy territory.”

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What changed in July is that the Ukrainians, like other embattled U.S. allies, were faced with a new opportunity in Washington: The cognitively impaired president had been forced out of his reelection bid in favor of his vice president, who was now out on the campaign trail, three months before the election. With this emergent power vacuum at the White House, the Ukrainians decided to bypass both the deposed occupant of the White House as well as the sta of his hypercautious National Security Council, instead of slowly bleeding to death under rules guaranteed to produce slow-motion defeat.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia

3/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

“The United States government currently has no strategy for Ukraine. Zero. None at all,” a former high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence and national security ocial told Tablet. “That fact is apparent to the current Ukrainian government. The political decision and the timing chosen to go into Kursk were made at the political level by the Zelenskyy administration at the request of the army command. Which wanted to take the initiative.” The former intelligence ocial added, “This is war, and I cannot recall an example, any time in history, of a war being won while commanders were unable to make their own decisions and to take on their own responsibilities.”

The Ukrainians had planned this type of operation for a long time—reports of Kyiv’s plots to launch incursions into Russia go back to early 2023. Tellingly, however, the decision to proceed came exactly a week after Israel had carried out a pair of high- prole assassinations deep in enemy territory. On July 31, the Israelis took out Hamas’ former chief Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse during the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president. The day before, they had eliminated the top Hezbollah military commander, Fuad Shukr, in the heart of the group’s stronghold in Beirut.

Kyiv observed carefully how Israel conducted its strikes immediately after Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from a triumphant speech before the U.S. Congress. In fact, earlier this

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 4/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

week the chair of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Roman Kostenko, explicitly referenced the Israeli example in a televised interview. “So Israel announced that they would take the advice of their partners very seriously but would afterward make their own decisions in the best interest of their own national security. I think that we can simply mirror that approach in our own case.”

There are limits to the analogy with Israel, which is ghting a much weaker terror group in an innitely smaller territory the borders of which Jerusalem controls entirely. Nevertheless, Ukraine seeks to leverage the optics of turning the tables on the Russians to force the Americans to back a fait accompli on the battleeld. While the motivation behind the Ukrainian decision is clear, less so is its ultimate objective. It is far too early to draw serious assessments of Ukraine’s battleeld successes. Caught o guard, the Russians are currently on their back foot. But they may very well regroup, counterattack and drive out the Ukrainian forces. Should the Russians succeed in recapturing the entirety of the occupied Russian territory, before the Ukrainians are able to leverage their gains, the Ukrainian gamble could prove to have been a costly waste of scarce resources and manpower. It is also

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 5/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

possible that this assault is merely a preamble or diversion for another forthcoming strike in a dierent theater of operations. That said, there is no denying that the current incursion into Kursk is substantively and qualitatively dierent from Ukraine’s earlier, limited raids into Russia’s Belgorod region. Last year’s lightning raids and temporary raising of Ukrainian ags over a few Russian border villages were conducted using units of exiled Russian defectors to oer a modicum of deniability. The current oensive has seen detachments of elite, battle-hardened Ukrainian battalions deployed, backed by air power, and with the mechanized Ukrainian force seemingly attempting a blitz to take as much territory and as many targets of opportunity as possible: railroad hubs, energy infrastructure such as the Sudzha gas hub currently in the Ukrainian forces’ hands, and possibly the local nuclear power plant. Signaling their intention to dig in, the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced last Thursday that Kyiv had set up a military commandant’s oce in the parts of the Kursk region under its control.

The Ukrainians hoped the Kursk operation would challenge the consensus that they could not break out of a stalemate. While Kyiv intended to get the Russians to transfer some units out of front-line positions in order to make them defend their own territory and reduce pressure along the front, the number of Russian battalions likely to have been rotated out from the front

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 6/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

lines appears to be less than what the Ukrainian general sta would have hoped for. Much of the defense of Kursk Oblast seems to be conducted by ad hoc Russian forces cobbled together from a combination of conscripts, interior ministry troops, border guards, Chechen units, national guard, and units already stationed inside the country. Furthermore, the Ukrainians also had to shift their own resources for the Kursk operation, which led to Russian gains around, and the likely fall of, the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk Oblast.

One eect that the operation has denitely had is lifting the stoic but somewhat depressed public mood, which is now at its highest point since the start of the successful Kherson counteroensive two years ago. The Ukrainians have long desired to bring the consequences of the war home to the Russian citizens who are perfectly willing to countenance the war so long as it does not inconvenience them directly. Moreover, Kyiv hopes to showcase its capacity to deploy Western arms (including the newly arrived American F-16 ghter jets) in order to create the impression that it is more than just a romantic lost cause. Introducing a new equation that ostensibly exposes the limits of the Russian military and forces a stalemate of sorts would be the best outcome Kyiv could hope for with this operation, as both sides wait to see the results of the November election in the United States.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 7/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

Putin seems to understand the Ukrainian oensive as a negotiating ploy. On Monday, he said that Kyiv, “with the help of its Western masters,” was trying to improve its negotiating position”—though the Russian oer remains a set of nonnegotiable demands (which include Ukraine giving up ve provinces to Russia) and a Ukrainian surrender.

All the Russian rhetoric about Kyiv’s “Western masters” notwithstanding, the White House and the Pentagon were also caught o guard. White House spokesman John Kirby admitted that the U.S. was still trying to gain a better understanding of what Ukraine is doing with its Kursk incursion, quickly adding that “There’s been no changes in our policy approaches,” with respect to U.S. weapons and how they’re used, stating that the Ukrainians were still using the weapons “in an area where we had said before that they could use U.S. weapons for cross-border strikes.”

Kyiv’s gambit, therefore, rests on its ability to show Washington that it not only can mount meaningful military maneuvers, but that it can do so inside Russia, while also maintaining U.S. buy-in and support. A meme circulating over Ukrainian social media captured this tightrope walk: “If the United States will only let you use ATACMS at a certain distance from the border, you should simply move the border!”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 8/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

For now, the Pentagon has signaled its approval by releasing a previously planned $125 million tranche of new munitions and air defense materials several days after Kyiv initiated the Kursk operation.

The Ukrainians demonstrated remarkable operational discipline in preparing this oensive—ordinary soldiers were reportedly only informed of the battle plans the day before they were sent over the Russian border. Keeping the Americans in the dark was also key to keeping the Russian intelligence services and army from being able to prepare. “We have learned some very hard lessons from the events of the previous counteroensive,” a highly placed member of Zelenskyy’s team informed Tablet. “Last summer we told everyone what we were going to do and we all know how that turned out. Everyone knew what we were going to do and in which location we intended to strike. There is denitely something to be learned from the Israeli example of acting rst and only later explaining what you are doing.”

A senior member of the British government who is involved at the highest levels of shaping British policy toward Kyiv has informed Tablet that he was pleased with the start of the operation, since the more careful American approach had not been working for Kyiv. “The Ukrainians had to change the dynamics of the war quickly or to suer the consequences and they are now done ghting with one hand tied behind their back.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia 9/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

So we now have the spectacle of the Russian air force bombing their own cities,” he told Tablet with bemusement. “The British have a very dierent approach to military strategy in which attack is the best form of defense.”

All the Ukrainian ocials that Tablet spoke with expressed cautious optimism over the outcome of the incursion, despite the inherent risks of such an operation turning out badly and large numbers of elite Ukrainian troops dying for no discernible strategic battleeld purpose. The highly placed member of the Zelenskyy team was philosophical about the possibility of bad outcomes: “We will see how it will all turn out in the long run. But for now we really needed this victory. We really, really needed a bit of peremoha, or victory. People were really starting to lose their nerve.”

More importantly, the ocial was also condent that the Americans would not pull back support in the aftermath of the Ukrainian incursion. “We have just received the latest aid package from Washington, which represents a de facto legitimization,” he underlined. “The lesson here is that you should just behave in the way that the Americans do themselves. You should do what the Americans themselves do. Not what they tell you to do.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia

10/11

8/19/24, 5:05 PM Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia - Tablet Magazine

Vladislav Davidzon is Tablet’s European culture correspondent and a Ukrainian American writer, translator, and critic. He is the Chief Editor of The Odessa Review and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.

#UKRAINE #RUSSIA #VLADIMIR PUTIN #VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY #ISRAEL

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia

11/11

I Love Panama; It's Like Florida without Rednecks!

 

The Panama Canal near Panama City

So far, I have traveled to 59 countries on all six inhabited continents. In some countries, I feel very much at home. In some, I feel like I am on another planet.  

Panama is among the most familiar and easiest to be in.  The plugs are just as in the US.  No adapters. There is local currency, but US dollars work everywhere. The countryside is tropical. It seems very much like the Everglades and other tropical parts of Florida, but without rednecks and their ridiculous Trump and Rebel flags.

Also, there is a Mormon Temple near the canal:

And a cemetery that has many US military graves:

On my second day here in Panama, I bought a bike and rode up to the first lock of the Panama Canal. 

Traffic laws seem much like the US. And the cars are left drive like the US. Of course, the official language of Panama is Spanish, but I can speak a little Spanish and understand a lot from so much Spanish culture in the US.  

The Contrast

When I first went to China in the 1990s, I really knew I was in a foreign country and culture.  I took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. It had a uniformed Chinese Communist crew.  Two hours later I was in the smoggiest place I had ever seen. Brown haze everywhere.  

A van took us from the train station to the hotel.  The driver hit a bicyclist and kept going. The bicyclist was supposed to get out of the way of the van. There is no tradition of chivalry I would later learn riding in Beijing, Shanghai and near the Great Wall.  

So Panama is just like home--if it rained every day.

 

Buy or Rent? I Bought a Bike in Panama

 

My second day in Panama, I bought a Giant SCR 16-speed aluminum road bike.  I bought the bike for $500 at a used bike shop in a residential neighborhood near the canal called ReCyclingPTY. They had road and mountain bikes of many vintages.  They also rent bikes for $50 per day  or $200 per week so $500 to buy for 6 to 9 months is a much better deal for me.

Andre, the owner, will also sell the bike on consignment when I leave. 

Right after I bought the bike I rode to the first lock on the Panama Canal.  Soon I hope to ride the length of the canal continuing on the same road.