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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/woman-reborn-john-rechys-miraculous-day-amalia-gomez-answer-simone-de-beauvoirs-woman-destroyed/"></div>All women think they are different, Simone de Beauvoir writes. They all think there are some things that will never happen to them. And they are all wrong. There are many women, no longer in the flush of youth, who find themselves horrified to discover themselves in black tangles of circumstances they never would have imagined.
There are two ways to go with this. The first is complete ruin, exemplified by Simone du Beauvoir’s Monique in The Woman Destroyed. At 44 she finds her seemingly safe and insulated world shattered by the discovery of her husband’s affair. That and the simultaneous emptying of her nest by both her daughters and her husband. The second is resurrection, like Amalia Gómez in John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez.
Rechy’s work, told in the course of one day, slashed with knife-like flashbacks, has protagonist Amalia, a Mexican woman, living in one of the decaying neighborhoods off Hollywood Boulevard. She awakens one morning to the sight of a large silver cross in an otherwise clear sky. Was this a miraculous sign that things would get better or simply streaks of smoke? Miracles do not come to a twice-divorced Mexican woman, with rebellious adult children, who is living with a man not her husband…do they?
Amalia follows the trajectory of many women who find themselves wondering what the hell happened. A beautiful flower of a girl, she is brutally raped by a boy she thought liked her. Then she is forced by her parents to marry that boy. You know where this is going with the boy. Salvador — his name means “savior,” and names carry a great deal of significance for Amalia — beats her, joins a gang, shoots up, and abandons her and their child.
Burdened by this traumatic experience and the responsibility of caring for a young one, Amalia bounces from man to man, seeking safety, only to find herself with less safety and more children. Amalia goes from being a maid for affluent whites to working in a sweatshop to trying other ways of scratching out a means of survival for herself and her three young children.
How did Amalia, who sought only to please and basked in delight when called “m’ija” — my daughter — end up like this? The story has her tied to her mother, an emotional bully, who constantly taunts and blames Amalia for her misfortunes. Unsurprisingly, her mother’s problems stem from her own jealousy and unhappiness, not Amalia’s actions.
While Amalia prays to a prized image of the Blessed Virgin, an immaculate deity surrounded by light in glorious robes, Teresa, her mother, lugs around her own Blessed Virgin, “La Dolorosa,” a black velvet robed statue with a face of constantly endured pain.
Amalia’s naïveté can become annoying, with her constantly pleading to a seemingly deaf Blessed Virgin, but we all have our means of self-protection. Sometimes this makes her narrative a warped reality, as it is distorted through a protective veil of self-justification and a subconscious refusal to see the truth.
“When did they change toward me? Why? What do they have against me?” Amalia agonizingly wonders about her formerly loving children. She did everything she ever did for their benefit, didn’t she?
Was it because of her forbidding them to call her by “Amita” when their older brother Manny was killed in jail, seemingly at the hands of the guards, and the wound of his death was too fresh? Hadn’t she hugged them right away and told them she didn’t mean it? Didn’t they appreciate the long hours she worked or the “father” and bill payer Reynaldo she had living with them, who loved them and put food on the table?
Reynaldo loved Amalia purely. He loved her children as if he were actually their father. Didn’t they see that? How did her tiny, sweet Gloria turn into a hard-eyed young woman with teased hair, who carried a knife in her shiny black boot? And where was her sensitive, handsome son Juan, who distained menial jobs, suddenly getting his money from?
Amalia’s pained and confused personal life takes place alongside the constant pressure and stigma of poverty and discrimination that the Chicano population faces. She passes an old man relaying the story of his younger days, when tired of being treated without dignity, even while Chicano sons were dying for their adopted country in Viet Nam, he and others staged a protest, shouting No mas! No more abuse! No more!
While Amalia is “legal,” many of her compatriots are not. They are often exploited by coyotes, men of their own race who smuggle them across the border only to abandon them in desolate areas, kill them, or sell them to “la migra” — border patrol guards — so they can win accolades for turning them in.
Amalia’s friend Rosario, a strong and clear eyed character, passionately says to Amalia in the sweatshop where they work, “Every day hundreds — a thousand now — are arrested for crossing the border — every day — risking danger because they’re hungry, fleeing poverty, risking la migra hunting them down like animals, with horses, helicopters, brutal ambushes to keep the desperate people away — and from what? From jobs no one else would take? … And those who reach the cities? Slums! The Streets? Terrorized by gangs and violence and the migra always tracking them down. Illegals? Huh! How can a human being not be legal?”
Amalia, John Rechy has said, was an extremely real character to him. In an interview with UCLA professor Hector Calderon, he speaks of the perfection of coincidence when after he himself sees, while sunbathing in Griffith Park, a perfect cross in the sky and wonders what a Chicano woman living in the projects would make of it? A miracle?
As Rechy walks into a drugstore to buy a sunbathing chair, he sees the living Amalia, a woman with thick, wavy black hair, impressive breasts, slit skirt, and pumps, in a style entirely her own, strolling the aisles. After the sudden questioning appearance of her aggressively mustached man, the author left the drugstore and walked the very streets where his Amalia would live and looked at the various things his Amalia would see. And Amalia Gómez was born, the written offspring of a writer and the personification of his ideal.
“You’re a very smart woman, Amalia, perhaps smarter than you know — but what good does it do you, corazón,” her friend Rosario continues. Puzzled, Amalia asks what she means. “Think. Just think” is the answer. This is in her subconscious as she walks though her streets in Hollywood, like Joseph Heller forced Yossarian to do in Italy, as if through the streets of Hades.
Nightmarish sights assault her, shootings, two Mexican men harassed by the police for seemingly no reason, a ragged woman crawling on bloodied knees up the stairs of a church offering her pain and sorrow to God’s glory, gang members, a boy in the bloom of youth getting shot by members of a gang while leaping to slam dunk a basketball.
She seeks succor in a church to find the peace of confession only to realize her confessor is masturbating to her confession. Getting further and further beat down, like de Beauvoir’s Monique who finds herself seeking hope from magazine astrology columns and handwriting analysts, Amalia seeks salvation in faith healers, and then again back to the church where she begs, pleads, and reasons with the cold statute of the Blessed Mother before finally demanding a miracle from the immobile statue.
Rechy states that this was an extremely painful book for him to write, as Amalia goes from horror to horror to horror. He shares that it was necessary for her to face total disaster, in order for her to finally face the truths her self-defense mechanisms had hidden from her, and thereby achieve salvation. Her thoughts slash her like harpies, until a confrontation with her children causes her veil of self-protection to be ripped away, revealing the ugly, sordid truths of her life. Only in that moment is she granted a chance at salvation.
Seeking her friend Rosario for guidance, who is on the lam for helping a friend hide from the police, because he killed a crooked migra agent for his part in his son and daughter-in-law’s disappearance, Rosario exhorts her: “you’re left to find your own strength, corazón, you don’t accept that you must be a victim.”
Leaving her streets of poverty, Amalia walks, sweaty and disheveled, into an expensive mall in a more affluent area, not realizing at first that the stares of the people are not due to her beauty and lushness, but due to her outsider status as an obviously poor Mexican woman who has no place in their mall.
Before she can fully comprehend the indignity of this, she is grabbed by a crazed eyed gunman who, pressing his gun against her temple, threatens to kill her if the police do not drop their weapons. Feeling the cold iron pressed against her head and hearing the tiny click at her ear signaling the bullet sliding in place to kill her, Amalia finally breaks out of her paralysis and victimization, screaming “No more!” and thrusting the man away from her.
Shots are fired and through the iridescent rainbows of shattering glass that blazed, shimmered and sparked as they fell on the red of spilled blood and the glaring light — Amalia finally sees the Blessed Mother with her arms outstretched to her.
John Rechy has said that those who wish to believe that Amalia did receive her miracle in the form of her heavenly vision could be right and those who wish to believe that her vision was the result of an overwrought mind in the glare of lights could be right. Her real miracle, Rechy says, was her finally screaming the battle cry of the Chicano movement, “No more!” and shedding her status as victimized woman once and for all.
And unlike Simone de Beauvoir’s frightened, broken Monique, isn’t this what women should do?
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The Woman Reborn: John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez As an Answer to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed

The Woman Reborn: John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez As an Answer to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/cyberpunk-berlin-los-angeles-conversation-marilyn-macron-stefan-kiesbye/"></div>Marilyn Macron is a practicing attorney and promoter of reading under The Literary Chick™. Here, she talks with Stefan Kiesbye about his latest book, Berlingeles. Berlingeles is a move towards cyberpunk, a genre that is new to Kiesbye, who has worked mostly in the German Gothic vein. In Berlingeles, Kiesbye gives us a Los Angeles on the precipice of a civil war, superimposing the upheaval of Germany and its resulting Wall on the City of Angels through a cyberpunk lens. Kiesbye was the recipient of the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University.  He and his wife Sanaz live with their two dogs near Santa Rosa, California.
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MARILYN MACRON: Berlingeles is quite a different ride than your German Gothic tales. Cyberpunk, apocalyptic, dystopian, social commentary, political, what would you categorize it as?
STEFAN KIESBYE: The book is all that, but those categories are usually hindsight, once you think about marketing the book. And usually it’s your publisher who puts the book into a category to maximize sales. I started with K., who wants to stay alive to be reunited with his erstwhile lover, B., and the apocalyptic and dystopian developed because I was trying to figure out where K. would live, and what I thought might happen to Los Angeles in the future. I’m a pessimist — we’re not confronting the great problems of our time, from environmental disasters to a reemergence of the right, racism, and discrimination; we’re hiding. Berlingeles gives that pessimism a shape.
What inspired you to write this?
To some degree it’s my curiosity about what will happen once I’m gone from this planet. I’m very attached to this world, and scientists and the tech community are taking steps to prolong human life. K. is desperate to see B. again — after spending forty years apart — and he does what it takes to keep his limbs moving, to keep his hearing and eyesight intact. He’s afraid he’ll die before his life is completed. That fear really drives the book.
What comparable trauma do you see with the culture or populace of Berlin and Los Angeles that would give you the idea to create a story about a civil war and a Wall in Los Angeles?
Berlin and Los Angeles are cities that attract young people with outsized dreams. A few are fulfilled, and many of those dreams die young. Others stick around and fade slowly, some end messily. And both cities show gaps between their reputation and reality. They always seem more — more vibrant, more important, more global — than they truly are. They are never quite sure of their place in the world. Both cities feel like impostors — LA’s dreams are invaded and ridiculed by New York, Berlin is afraid it will never be Paris or London. And yet, they also infuse their citizens’ life with meaning, with a sensation of “we’re part of something big.”
Berlin and LA, to me, display lifestyles atypical to the rest of the country. The sensation of living on an island is mostly cultural. In West Berlin from 1961-89, there was, of course, a physical barrier, but the main difference was not the Wall, it was the way Berliners felt excused from Nazi atrocities. It was about showcasing Western democracy in the middle of East Germany. West Berlin created its own myth and lifestyle — David Bowie resided in the Dschungel, Peter Gabriel and U2 and Depeche Mode recorded in the city. Berlin was a feeling, a statement, a terminally ill patient everybody wanted to hold hands with.
Los Angeles is not enclosed by a wall, but by the desert. It’s a city that shouldn’t “be there.” It’s the capital of gated communities, of people moving behind walls to feel safe. It’s money that buys you a spot in a small enclave of people with similar incomes. The better the money, the higher the wall. Then there’s the odd phenomenon of people not leaving their neighborhoods. When we moved from Koreatown to Long Beach, we lost all our friends, as though there really was a wall around the neighborhoods.
Berlin was too important to be abandoned by the West. Similarly, if America were to be divided geographically, I don’t think either side would willingly surrender Los Angeles. As K. writes to B., “LA was the center of dreams, making up the narratives for the whole nation. A body needs to rest and dream, and how could America ever rest again without Los Angeles providing its dreams?”
In some of your other works such as Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames and Your House Is On Fire Your Children All Gone, there is a tension in the villages that appears it could ignite into Elias Canetti’s worst mob mentality scenarios in Crowds and Power.  Is it the urban nature of cities as opposed to villages that brought that latent threat in your previous books to this cataclysmic point?
Mobs can build everywhere, but the power in towns and villages is more absolute. Most often, the violence is not directed at destroying institutions. A small town is more homogenous, so violence is turned against the outsider, the witch, the “other.” That “other” can be erased quickly and without a trace.
In cities, violence and power are fractured and can cause the system to fracture. Nothing can be concluded quickly. Violence can spread and set other communities ablaze. Violence in cities is less personal and not easily quelled. It’s also more destructive. Villagers own their village and want to preserve it, but nobody owns large cities.
The Fleece seems to indicate an augmented reality. How would you define The Fleece?
It’s a fluid and more absolute form of cyberspace, a repository of information, misinformation, dreams and personal channels. The Fleece also adds to the visible city, erecting digital monuments, houses, facades. It has its hidden corners, its walls, digital animals and vehicles. There’s one city outside the Fleece, and a different one inside. Yet since Los Angeles is riddled with poverty, the Fleece isn&#8217;t seamless or perfect. There are gaps and ghost storms.
Why are K. and B. the only characters who are referred to by only their initials?
Traditionally, using only initials in literature signified a kind of delicacy, secrecy (for example, in Heinrich von Kleist&#8217;s The Marquise of O&#8230;). The conceit was that the names, if fully published, would be recognized, and the story could cause a scandal. It made the narrative feel more authentic. So the use of initials in Berlingeles is definitely a nostalgic nod. In K.’s and B.’s particular case it’s very fitting, since their love was never publicly acknowledged out of fear it would destroy their marriages. Waiting most of his life for B., K. has become the idea of himself. He has ceased to exist as a person, is waiting to become a person yet again.
The story is told from multiple points of view.  What made you create and employ these characters to tell it?
I love that none of the characters ‘exist.’ They appear in public, and yet they don’t have a public life. Sophie, the prostitute, is being chauffeured through the city, only to be seen in confined spaces. Gaz, the young thug, is in love with the Maze and the Tunnel, and only underground, away from prying eyes, does he feel like himself. In order to be successful at robbing and even killing people, he needs to be invisible. The most extreme case is Sophie’s grandmother Ida, who is long dead, but still bosses her granddaughter around. None of the characters own their identity, and yet their lives continue and expand and collide.
The characters in many of your books are often described as having what could be considered odd or jarring physical characteristics and in this book, real mutilations.  Why is that?  In Berlingeles, is any of it because of the radioactive fallout from the nuclear explosion in Texas?  
The fallout will contribute to it later, but the event is a recent one in the book, and the results will only become visible later. What I’m fascinated by, though, are how people create an identity based on looks. How we create a ranking system according to physical attributes. Once you don’t fit that system anymore — because of abnormalities, mutilations, or other reasons — you become both, extremely visible and invisible. You stick out, and yet nobody wants to look at you. You are able to/forced to construct an identity that is outside our normal system. That freedom is terrifying. Shakespeare’s Richard III is such a character. He can’t win anyone over with his appearance, but that gives him the power to manipulate the people around him. K., with his artificial limbs and savagely scarred skin, is waiting for the only person who will still recognize him as a body. His only chance at being seen is B. All other human connections have been severed.
In the story, the band Neuwerk released the concept album Berlingeles linking the history of the two cities.  How would you imagine this album to sound?
If the Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Einstürzende Neubauten, Section 25, Françoise Hardy, and Father John Misty got together and worked on an album, it might approach that sound.
To come around to you, what books made an impression on you as a child? Teenager? And what has hit you especially hard as an adult?
As a teenager, I was in love with Otfried Preußler’s Krabat, a novel (based on old legends) about a cursed Mill and the thirteen apprentices in service of dark forces. But for a long time I read mostly crime novels. Everything from Dorothy L. Sayers to Dashiell Hammett. I was drawn to things that happen outside of what should happen. Things that don’t have a “place” in our society because they are too dark, too inappropriate to talk about. Some of the literary novels I admire go much further than any crime story I’ve ever read — Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird; Agota Kristof’s The Notebook; Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion.
If you could select one book to be required reading on a high school curriculum, what would it be?
Roberto Bolaño&#8217;s 2666, because the book never strives to be efficient. The world is recognizable ours, and yet the ways in which Bolaño captures it are full of detours, strewn with revelations that make the reader feel alive to the multitude of voices around us. There&#8217;s nothing to &#8220;get,&#8221; no easy message, no moralizing, no redemption. You have to be along for the ride.
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Cyberpunk in Berlin and Los Angeles: A Conversation Between Marilyn Macron and Stefan Kiesbye

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/illusions-interview-kerry-wallach/"></div>Kerry Wallach is an Associate Professor and Chairperson for the German Studies department at Gettysburg College where she teaches courses on Germany, German-Jewish culture, gender and sexuality, and arts and culture. Her current research focuses on artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus and actress Maria Orska. Wallach’s recent book, <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/9343646/passing_illusions" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.press.umich.edu/9343646/passing_illusions', 'Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany');">Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany</a>, explores the Jewish identity during a period of relative equality and the complex decision Jews made about whether or not they would try to pass as a non-Jew. After a recent talk at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, Wallach sat down with Marilyn Macron to discuss Jewish identity, racial and queer “passing,” and what books every high school student should be reading.
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MARILYN MACRON: I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to see the discussion on your book, Passing Illusions, at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York at the Center for Jewish History. Can you tell us a bit about the book?
KERRY WALLACH: Thanks very much for this opportunity to share my work with your readers. My book deals with Jews and Jewish identity in the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). I am especially interested in Jewish visibility and invisibility, as well as instances when Jewishness was concealed, revealed, or contested. The book’s cultural studies approach blends an analysis of cultural texts (literature, film, images, advertisements) and discourses with an analysis of sources used by historians (periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents). In addition to focusing on Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, the book’s introduction and conclusion bring German-Jewish passing into dialogue with African American racial passing and queer passing to offer insight into minority visibility more broadly.
What inspired you to write this?
I have long been interested in the Weimar period because of the tensions and paradoxes it embodied. Even though it was Germany’s first democracy, it remained politically tumultuous. Jews finally gained full access to the privileges afforded to other German citizens, yet still thought twice before openly or publicly announcing their Jewishness. I am further fascinated by the strategies people use to figure out whether someone else is Jewish the first time they meet (the same goes for other identities, especially LGBT identities).
You write of “coding” and “passing” in Passing Illusions. Could you explain this? 
Passing is a widely known concept that indicates a type of concealing: either deliberately presenting or being taken for something that one is not. In the United States, it is most often associated with the history of African American racial passing (Black passing for white) as well as sexual or queer passing (non-heterosexual for heterosexual). In order to pass or not-pass, people might choose to display or conceal aspects that are associated with one identity or the other.
In my book, I write about attributes that are coded Jewish, including racialized embodied characteristics (dark hair and dark coloring, noses of a certain shape); material signifiers (certain forms of clothing, head coverings, and jewelry); and other elements that are influenced by anti-Semitic stereotypes.
I found it interesting how at the discussion you tied it in with the current Netflix series Babylon Berlin. Could you explain the connection?
The hit German television series Babylon Berlin (first two seasons released in 2017) is a period drama set in 1929, just a few years before the end of the Weimar Republic. It features one clearly Jewish character (August Benda) and references Jewishness in a number of other ways. I have written more about this in a forthcoming piece — so I won’t go into great detail here — but it’s easy to find examples of passing in this crime show: police inspector Gereon Rath attempts to pass for members of various groups; others working undercover pass for whatever they need to be; Nazis pass for Communists.
Is the idea of “coding” or “passing” relevant today?
Yes, the idea of passing remains highly relevant today, especially for members of persecuted minority groups. There is often a great deal at stake when someone chooses to pass. For Jews in Weimar Germany, Jewishness could hinder professional or personal success. Choosing to pass under those circumstances — representing oneself as non-Jewish or concealing Jewishness — generally served as a means to obtain privileges, rights, luxuries, power, or a stronger sense of personal safety and security. But other minority populations (past and present) are often dealing with vastly different circumstances and have considerably more to lose. The discovery of a concealed identity or status could result in someone being blackmailed, arrested, imprisoned, or killed.
What type of reader were you as a child? And what books influenced you the most?
As a child, I already loved books about the first half of the 20th century (All-of-a-Kind Family, Cheaper by the Dozen). In hindsight, it’s not surprising that I read everything I could find about the Holocaust at a relatively young age — I was only about 10 when I read Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (and later Briar Rose).
My college major focused on the “great books” in historical context, and I’ll never forget reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, and Goethe’s Faust. My senior thesis focused on the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler.
After college, I was incredibly moved by Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. I also read as much American Jewish fiction as I could, including lots of Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus was especially memorable).
In graduate school I found my way to a wide range of books: memoirs and autobiographies by such 18th-century writers as Glikl bas Judah Leib (Glückel of Hameln) and Salomon Maimon; stories about New York’s Lower East Side by Anzia Yezierska and Abraham Cahan; Weimar-era works by Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, and Irmgard Keun; feminist and gender theory by Judith Butler and later Sara Ahmed.
Recently, I found both Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing to be stunning and incredibly powerful works of fiction.
If you could choose one book to be on a high school curriculum, what would it be?
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is a classic that already makes it onto many high school reading lists. It also provides important insight into some of the topics I deal with in my book. I think high school students could also learn a lot from Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), which is the novel that helped popularize the term.
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Under Illusions: An Interview with Kerry Wallach

Blood Brothers

Marilyn Macron is a graduate of New York University and Fordham University School of Law.&nbsp;&nbsp;She is a practicing attorney, voracious reader, and book collector. She promotes reading and events under The Literary Chick ™. Following the destruction of Rockaway Beach libraries after Hurricane Sandy, Marilyn created The Patti Smith Free Library and The Kids’ Rock-A-Book Free Library on the Rockaway Beach peninsula.

Marilyn Macron

The Unromantic Truths of Weimar Germany

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Pablo!

Black Magic Realism: John Rechy’s First Novel

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Marilyn Macron is a graduate of New York University and Fordham University School of Law.&nbsp;&nbsp;She is a practicing attorney, voracious reader, and book collector. She promotes reading and events under The Literary Chick ™. Following the destruction of Rockaway Beach libraries after Hurricane Sandy, Marilyn created The Patti Smith Free Library and The Kids’ Rock-A-Book Free Library on the Rockaway Beach peninsula.