| Description |
The Airship, a historical novel, tells the story of Nathan Cohen, who was deported from the US under the Alien Act in 1911, and who spent the first years of World War I on a passenger ship, shuttled between the US and Argentina. Newspapers called him "The Wandering Jew" and "The Man Without a Country," speculating he would spend the rest of his life at sea. After fleeing the pogroms of Russia, being exiled from the United States, then being cast adrift at the beginning of World War I, Cohen epitomizes the profound (un)making of political, social, and cultural identity in the 19th and 20th centuries. An extended meditation on the relationships amongst fact, memory, displacement, loss, and time, The Airship is the biography of a wanderer, a ghost of the diaspora. The book is a loosely woven tapestry of stories and histories emphasizing iteration and repetition. I recycle (quote, cite, paraphrase, appropriate) text from a number of different sources (encyclopedias, bibles, literature, science), with the intention of raveling something derived but new (paralleled in the image of the tarot). Part of The Airship follows the three years Cohen is stuck aboard the Vasari, during which time the world stage collapses. His contemporary moment is contrasted with his days spent in las pampas, in Argentina, where Jewish emigrants had established the thriving Moisésville. In these sections, I locate Cohen's years in the kibbutz within the history and context of the pampas itself, particularly the extermination of the plains peoples by the iv Conquistadores. The reverberations of one tragedy (Jewish diaspora) blend into another (the Shoah of the conquest of the Americas). As the book traces Cohen's trajectory across time and an incredible amount of geography, until he bottoms-out in the limbo if an Atlantic crossing, the concept of home or homeland is stretched until it breaks. Was there ever a home? The Airship is enmeshed in these paradoxes of location, nationality, faith, and belonging, and finally, the wish to find a new line of flight. |
