It is customary to say about Paul Auster that he is a New York writer, but the benefactors of the definition will call him a “Brooklynian”. “I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn to me,” testifies his hero Tom Gales in the opening of “Brooklyn Errors”, his book from 2002. Auster became the face and voice of the sprawling brownstone district long before gentrification and galleries and co-working spaces. There, in 1982, he wrote “The Invention of Loneliness” – the novel that made him an international star almost overnight.
The benefactors of the definition will call him “Brooklyn.” Paul Auster, photo: AFP
For decades Auster devoted the privilege of urban and existential solitude with great piety: he walked from his Park Slope apartment to Sweet Melissa Cafe with a short cigar in hand, a black woolen coat and sunglasses. It was a light refreshing walk in the tough work routine. He wrote with a “Fountain” pen and an “Olympia” – the typewriter that became the protagonist of one of his books – and abstained from technology and networks. “Keyboards have always scared me,” he told The Paris Review in 2003. It was not a moral position, he explained, but “my comfort with myself”.
Selfishness, introspectiveness, looking at the body and mind with a melancholic and ironic eye – Paul Auster’s writing stepped on the fine line between loneliness and isolation, and from there became a universal literary gospel. “Loneliness proves that we are human, because it is the state in which we are cut off from our necessary needs. It represents a longing to be with other people. Loneliness is the opposite of isolation, which can be by choice. A person will never be in loneliness by choice,” he said in an interview with Israel Hayom in 2012 .
Consecrate the privilege of urban solitude. Paul Oster, photography: Shahar Ezran
Augie’s photo
Paul Auster was the modernist version of postmodernism. In his book of conversations “A life in words” he testified that he “seeks to write about what is good and beautiful in my eyes, but always to find new ways to tell stories. To turn everything inside out”, and expressed his identification with the deconstructivism of Jacques Derrida. However, his language was clear and narrative, on the seam between her urban actions and the detective genre, which is why she was accessible to so many readers in the world.
He was a special case of a writer of the generation of parents and children for at least two decades – he appeared on the shelves of home libraries in the Upper East and Petah Tikva, and was a superstar in Paris. He was never at the top of the betting for the Nobel and he didn’t even win in the morning, and to sum it up to the clichés of the industry – he was a writer for people and not for writers.
Auster was good at capturing the present and “saw life itself as a part of literature, in the sense that one’s self develops just as a character develops in a book,” according to Will Blythe, literary editor of “Esquire.” That is why it is perhaps so tempting to see him as a precursor to the New Age, even though he is a relic of a classical era that has sunk.
His writing can easily be perceived as conservative-subversive. Another expression of Austrianness can be identified in a ritual of his hero Augie from the script “Smoking”, which was given a wonderful cinematic adaptation by Wayne Wang in 1995, played by Harvey Keitel. Every morning, at precisely 8:00, Auggie takes a photo from his corner tobacconist’s shop in Brooklyn of the opposite corner facing him. Every day, at the same time, at the same angle. Ogi keeps the photographs in albums: the changes are minor, almost imperceptible. And yet, over the years the reality is not the same as it was. There was a turn that we didn’t notice. Paul Auster was a writer of a world that was just here – and gone.
Paul Auster, photo: AFP
Plant trees for Israel
And he also had Israel. He grew up after World War II to Jewish parents in South Orange, New Jersey, in rural New York State, and later in urban Newark. As in every Jewish home on the East Coast in the years after World War II, the fate of post-war European Jews preoccupied the family. “I grew up with Israel,” he said in 2012, “Every morning I went to the Hebrew school in New Jersey knowing that a large part of the lessons would be dedicated to raising money for the young country. We were constantly busy planting trees and writing little greeting cards to people in Israel. The children and the adults, that we We were very excited about helping to build a new idealistic place.”
He visited here in the mid-1990s and then only in 2010, and since then he has been impressed that “the Israelis live between despair – which characterizes the left side of the map, and denial – which characterizes the right side, and very little in between. The denial is unbearable, it cannot To survive. And despair – it doesn’t inspire hope either.”
As befits Bon-Ton, he criticized Netanyahu on the Morning News, and despite being a harbinger of “New York Times Jewry” he looked at the progressive vanity that had taken over the elite on American shores and said: “People are so fixated on themselves that they have no ability to look at the world in a different way than usual, And maybe change their minds.” The occupation of his alma mater, Columbia University, by anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli minds – has not had time to address in recent weeks.
In the last decade, he lowered his volume a bit, yet he published two books of prose and several books of essays, and even a new book of poetry. In December 2022 Siri Hustvedt, his writer wife, announced his battle with cancer. Yesterday he passed away. Perhaps he fulfilled what he asked for in his first book: “Whatever the circumstances, he managed to keep a distance between himself and life, not to immerse himself in the heart of things.”
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