Sam Sax: Apocalyptic in New York

Dead Year the first novel by the American author Sam Sax, about which it is reported in blurbs and on his website: »Sam Sax is a queer writer, a Jew and an educator. They are the authors of Dead Year (2024) and PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit…«

Sax has a place in the world of American poetry, both because of his award-winning poetry books (besides PIG, these include burial from 2018, madness from 2017 and some chapbooks, ie short collections of literary works) as well as because of his particular appearances at popular poetry slams. Sax has not yet been translated into German, which is both a shame and a respect for the original texts with their own connections that work closely through the American language. Sax currently teaches at Stanford University.

Dead Yeardescribed by the publisher “Daunt books publishing” as a “diasporic bildungsroman” and immediately longlisted for the National Book Award, it is very sad, touching, Jewish, clever, a very human book . Its pages are only filled with short literary or very different literary forms that capture memories in their own way. This ranges from conversations to Jewish folk tales (and italics) (“In a town called Zloknovia, in present-day Kaunas, there was…”). Everything seems to be lyrical, everything fragmentary.

The limit of knowledge has been reached

In terms of content, the pieces of text preserve critical moments of life in retrospect. With a fragment, the picture shows a highly conscious man who now, at this very moment, decides that he has reached the end of his experiences, which makes his decisions as free as they are extreme. It has disappeared (disappeared from the beginning), irretrievably.

Ezra disappears, disappeared from the beginning, inevitably.

Ezra, as the main character is called, becomes selfish out of the conviction that all the protests he and others have brought to the streets over and over again (” At the last complaint before my last complaint…”), that this common struggle requires, at least now and again, exaggeration. Apocalyptic-charged sentences, reflecting the radical nature of this step, permeate the book from the beginning (“The year the global temperature will break all records, we will go to the January protests there their briefs and t-shirts.”).

The period reported includes: Dead Year not longer than the hours between the first man’s self-confidence (in the center of New York, during a protest march) and his death. Donald Trump’s presidency is never discussed, never a new outbreak that keeps the whole world under suspicion (“News about new diseases…”). The novel is mysteriously charming, it is realistic without telling facts.

Ezra’s Jewishness has nothing to do with his father

We know ourselves in New York, we know ourselves in the time under Trump, which is listening to a strange coming-of-age story that doesn’t really get out of this feeling that regarding coming of age. Someone is deeply engaged in a perpetual search for identity (“Belonging… is an inaccessible and uncertain state of mind”), determined by limits to others: Judaism has nothing to do with Ezra to his father’s position, which became recently. a member of a tight-knit, sect-like community (the mother is long gone). It has nothing to do with the Jewishness of the generation of the grandparents who landed in America from the East and who show that they are very Jewish in rejecting everything Jewish with a theatrical movement.

His identity no longer has anything to do with his childhood in Queens, with the “Hebrew School” (“Surrounded by other little dirtbag Jews…”), with the summer camps. And yet Ezra places himself squarely in the Jewish tradition of continuity of any form (or as Sax’s poem “L’Simcha: The Tree of Life” about the 2018 attack on the synagogue says in the Pittsburgh: “My people are the living. My people are geniuses / at the turn / trauma to text.).

The interest that… Dead Year it must also be related to the fact that Sam Sax rejects the idea that time runs according to history. Like real, visible light from a long-dead star, existence and non-existence (of the protagonist) merge in the text. The book draws us close to Ezra, pulls us down deep with him.

As long as we read, we live, reading about little glimmers of hope

There will always be a small distance: As long as we read (the text), we will live, reading about small glimmers of hope, as if Ezra had an American flag on his T-shirt, as if the complaints of the – residence. effect, but they are there anyway. And what does it even mean that Ezra’s voice is still heard (every time we read on)?

Dead Year negotiating suicide. The book does not mince words when it comes to violence and sexual scenes. According to Sam Sax (as he says right at the beginning of the book in Yiddish under the dedication “for everyone who kept me alive”) it is intended for “wajber un far manssbiln woss sajnen asoj wi wajber, doss hejsst sej kenen nit learn.”

As it happened, liking Sam Sax’s literature does not mean endorsing his political statements. Sax, as read on Instagram, is “for a ceasefire, an arms embargo & a free Palestine”. He doesn’t even shy away from the word “genocide.” He also writes: »The genocide that is happening now, funded by American tax dollars, is ideologically motivated by taking advantage of Jewish grief and suffering. (…) We are not the people of the state, we are the people of the book. I can think of nothing more urgent and more Jewish than fighting to end the occupation and working for the freedom of the Palestinian people.” And Ezra is silent.

Sam Sax: “Yr Dead”. Daunt Books, London 2024, 270 S., 12,50 €