One of our recent guests, David Winitsky, was asked to recommend a work of art he loves — he chose Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found myself returning to its insomnia plague scene: a plague that causes forgetting so total that the community must label everything just to function ("this is a cow, you must milk it") — a meditation on what happens when a society tries to forget its political violence and darker episodes. The novel insists that memory is essential to identity, individual and collective.

America feels like it's walking into a forgetting plague of its own making — asked to forget the norms of democracy, and asked to forget the harder parts of our past. Memory and forgetting have been on my mind. Jews are commanded to remember, but being Jewish has also always meant forgetting — every generation, ours included, has had to let go of some of what came before in order to recreate itself.

I wanted to talk through all of this, so I sat down with Rachel Atias — a wonderful writer with a fertile mind — on day one of her Art Lab alumnihood. (This cohort of Art Lab artists just completed the program; she's the first to be interviewed, with more voices to come.) Rachel recently taught a workshop on forgetting and on writing the pieces of our forgotten selves, at The Shuk, the Jewish Day of Learning sponsored by the Jewish Federation here in Portland. Forgetting came up a lot in our conversation — but so did hope, and whether hope is warranted.

I think you'll enjoy this one, and enjoy getting to know Rachel's writing.

Links in the show notes as usual.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Links

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org/

Rachel's Website: rachelattias.com

Gefilte Fish — Portland Review: portlandreview.org/gefilte-fish-by-rachel-attias/

Pond Scum — Does It Have Pockets: www.doesithavepockets.com/fiction/rachel-attias

A Fish in the Bathtub: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Bathtub