Culture

‘Now, what I want is Facts...You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of far more than simply having imperial gallons of facts poured into us until we are full to the brim. The novel’s opening scene is a wink shared between naughty school-children, between Dickens and us, reminding us that teacher is being absurd. Of course knowledge means more than just an accumulation of facts. But what then?

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work. The Producers is proof of joy – with an overarching, exquisite Jewish joke: Jews fail at failure Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, has written a piece of criticism as elegant and sympathetic as Brooks is vulgar and savage.

The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there are more and more back-references, adding to what we think we know about the characters, but also contributing to a sense of uncertainty that runs through the book. It begins simply enough. We meet an elderly couple, Dora Frenhofer, a novelist, and her partner Barry. Dora will become the central character. Her memory is going, and, worse still, her career as an author is coming to an end. ‘She talks of writing another novel. There will be none.

Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive some islands as ‘books in themselves... You could think of the lakes as libraries.’ There is a productive tension between German logic and Native American spirituality in her refreshingly unusual take on the world: she calls herself a ‘mixed-blood’, born of a German-American father and French-Ojibwe mother.

Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the nuclear heat, blackened fingers claw out from the rubble’ and was convinced this was really happening. ‘The experience scarred me for life,’ she declares, ‘and it is the reason you are reading this book.’ In her twenties, she suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia, so she decided to confront her fears by becoming a journalist specialising in the nuclear threat. This book – and it is a very good one – is the result.

One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989.  There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of escape By 10.30 p.m., 20,000 people had massed in a narrow street, demanding to be allowed into the West, on the other side of the Wall – though at that crossing point the border was just a pair of gates. The mood was extraordinarily tense as the crowd became angrier.  Whenever Jäger asked for instructions from his bosses in the Politburo or the higher brass in the army they panicked and told him to do nothing and wait.