Biography

Gini Alhadeff published a memoir, The Sun at Midday, Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She edited and co-translated My Poems Won’t Change the World, an anthology of poems by Patrizia Cavalli, with Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, and Jonathan Galassi, among others. She won the 2022 John Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s I Am the Brother of XX. Storybook ND, a series she devised for New Directions, has so far issued eight titles of short works, with covers by contemporary artists including Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool, with a cover by Wayne Thiebaud, and Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City with an image by Cecily Brown. She is at work on a book on Louis I. Kahn for the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series.

Project Summary

In Nathaniel Kahn’s film Louis I. Kahn was presented as a mystic. His family was from Estonia and the Jews in that part of the world had been persecuted, and escaped. The main function of the Kabbalah was to erect a theory that would give people hope and in which they could dwell. The Jewish Kabbalah originated in the total despair of persecution. One of the points of the Kabbalah was the invention of a kind of golem that would come to save the Jews. The other feature of the Kabbalah was that it didn’t believe in a single impeccable god but in a god having many forms and many contradictory types of behavior. Kahn was also an animist. His notion was that materials have an anima, they have a spirit you cannot violate because if you do the building will crumble. That, too, was in the tradition of the Kabbalah—the notion that animals have anima, and material has anima, and that the spirit of the material has to be respected. This is also an Estonian trait and one that suggests Kahn may have been an Estonian at heart, rather than an eccentric American, as he is often portrayed.