NAME: Jake Marmer
YEAR: 2020/ HUMOR
GENRE: Anti-genre!
TITLE: Skazz
DESCRIPTION: I'm working on a book called "Skazz", which I've been describing as a post-memoir-oral-prose-vaudeville. It's inspired by the word "skaz", a term coined by early-Soviet Formalists to describe an oral bard's voice on the page. Somewhere on the cusp between prose poetry, theatrical performance, rambling essays - dense and personal, holding eye contact with the reader. Growing up in Soviet Ukraine, I wasn't merely reading skaz in the works of Gogol and Babel, Leskov and Sholem-Aleichem - I also heard the skaz's source, a peculiar kind of old-school communication everywhere around me. As I started to put together fragments of my life in Ukraine, skaz came back to me as a form and inspiration, both. Humor was central to the project from the start. And, needless to say, in light of current events, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the stakes of holding on to humor and its Ukrainian origins feels more life-giving and hope-filling than ever.
Some of the segments of Skazz have already been published in various literary magazines, and you can continue to keep an eye on those by checking in here: https://linktr.ee/jakemarmer
Borscht Prelude
There’s an old story I heard as a child, and I don’t mind if I tell it. A man returns to Odessa after many years of being away. He bursts into his childhood friend’s home, and finds the friend alone, in the dark, silent, eating. “Misha!” he yells. “My dearest! Where’s everyone, where’re your mama and papa?”
“Dead,” says Misha, blankly.
“Oh, Misha … And your sisters, where are they?”
“Dead.”
“Oy, oy! But our friend and neighbor, little Borya, he still lives here, right?”
“Dead,” says Misha, again, at which point our repatriate, a reasonable person — exactly as reasonable as you, reader — exclaims: “Was it the war? The plague? A pogrom?”
“I’m eating borscht.”
“What?”
“When I eat borscht, everyone might as well be dead.”
¤
Read the rest here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/on-skaz/