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16 Oktober 2023 PARIS – Ketika saya, sebagai pemenang penghargaan sastra Jerman LiBeraturpreis 2015, merilis pernyataan saya soal LiBeraturpreis 2023 pada 14 Oktober lalu sebagai respons terhadap artikel New York Times bertajuk “Award Ceremony for Palestinian Author at Frankfurt Book Fair is Canceled” (13/10/2023), saya telah membaca beberapa artikel di media Jerman yang mengatakan bahwa LitProm, organisasi pengelola LiBeraturpreis, menyatakan bahwa keputusan menunda penyelengaraan upacara penghargaan dilakukan dengan persetujuan pemenang penghargaan, yaitu novelis Palestina Adania Shibli. Saya juga membaca artikel-artikel di media Jerman lain yang mengutip LitProm bahwa upacara penghargaan tetap akan diselenggarakan, hanya menunggu setting dan format yang tepat, seusai pameran buku. Tapi, hari ini, saya membaca dalam artikel The Guardian bertajuk “Palestinian Voices ‘Shut Down’ at Frankfurt Book Fair, says Authors” (15/10/2023) bahwa agen sastra Adania Shibli mengatakan pada The Guardian bahwa keputusan penundaan upacara itu TIDAK dilakukan dengan persetujuan sang pemenang. Menurut agen sastra Adania, bila upacara tetap diselenggarakan sang novelis akan menggunakan kesempatan itu untuk merenungkan peran sastra dalam masa yang kejam dan penuh penderitaan ini. Ketakinginan “merayakan kemenangan” tidak pernah menjadi tujuan Shibli, sebagaimana dikatakan oleh LitPtrom dalam penyataan persnya beberapa hari yang lalu. Sebab tujuan penghargaan ini adalah memberi apresiasi terhadap peran penulis dan sastra dalam masyarakat. Berdasarkan info terbaru ini saya mendukung pengunduran diri delegasi Indonesia dari Frankfurt Book Fair tahun ini. Saya juga mendukung teman-teman penulis seluruh dunia yang telah menandatangani surat terbuka yang mengecam keputusan FBF. Saya bersikukuh pada pendirian saya bahwa loyalitas tertinggi sebuah pameran buku adalah pada kemanusiaan, dan ketakmampuan FBF untuk membela dan mempertahankan keputusan sastrawinya—meski keputusan ini disebabkan oleh luka sejarah yang dalam dan bukan bagi kita untuk menimbang nilai maupun keabsahannya—adalah sesuatu yang perlu disesalkan. Lebih lagi, keberpihakan FBF pada Israel di mana Israel dan Palestina sama-sama mengalami penderitaan hebat menunjukkan bahwa pameran buku ini tak lagi mewakili suara dunia, di mana semua bangsa dan negara berhak dan layak mendapat panggung untuk menyuarakan kebenaran mereka masing-masing. Sebagaimana FBF ingin menambah “panggung untuk para penulis Israel” seharusnya mereka juga menambah panggung untuk para penulis Palestina, bukan malah membungkam mereka. Sebagai pameran buku terbesar di dunia, FBF bahkan berada dalam posisi yang baik untuk mencoba mempersatukan mereka dalam sebuah dialog yang konstruktif, dan yang punya potensi memulihkan. Seperti kata seorang teman, “buku seharusnya menyatukan, bukan memecah belah.” Laksmi Pamuntjak

14 October 2023 PARIS – As the recipient of Germany’s LiBeraturpreis in 2015, I am not only saddened, but also deeply disturbed by the headline of the news article I read today in the New York Times about Frankfurt Book Fair’s decision to “cancel” the award ceremony to honor Adania Shibli’s novel next week “due to the war in Israel.” Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail, is about the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/frankfurt-book-fair-cancels-award-adania-shibli.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Further down the article, however, at the very bottom, it says that LitProm, the award organizers, is still searching for a “suitable format and setting” to hold the ceremony after the fair concludes. So, it appears that the ceremony has been postponed, not canceled—a conclusion broadly reported by most news outlets in Germany. Journalistic sensationalism aside, it is still a shame to let the war detract from the spirit of the fair, and the premise of the LiBeraturpreis, which is awarded annually to an author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab World for promoting freedom and tolerance and for speaking truth to power. Yet it seems to obey the mechanisms of politics today, especially when war and misery are involved, and that the best possible recourse for the moment is to wait until cooler heads prevail. I’m sure it is not a decision that the Frankfurt Book Fair took lightly. “Due to the war in Israel,” LitProm writes on its website, “it was decided “along with the author” to cancel the planned award ceremony at the Fair. “No one feels like celebrating at the moment," the statement adds. Still. While I understand the historical depth of the moral grounds on which FBF bases their commitment to stand with Israel, and am also aware of the fact that the award decision process itself was deeply divided and rife with tension (The PEN writers’ association in favor of the award, the Book Fair against it, as cited by Die Presse), I still wish there is a way for a big and influential cultural organization like FBF to more fully defend its literary decisions, with the full courage of its own, non-partisan convictions, and for the award-winning book to be read and judged on its literary merits. But we do not live in an ideal world. It would be a shame to take the valor, and the spirit for which Shibli is honored further away from the novel’s achievement, by not holding the award ceremony at a later date, for whatever reason. This, too, is a moral decision. It would send a wrong signal to the world that the largest book fair in the world favors one people over another, when both sides have equally suffered. It would hurt Palestinians, who have lost what words cannot even begin to describe, even more than they already have to bear. After all, a book fair’s allegiance ultimately lies with humanity, and Palestinians, too, have suffered greatly. “No book becomes different, better, worse or more dangerous because the news situation changes,” says the Austrian writer and PEN Berlin spokeswoman Eva Menasse, “Either a book is worthy of an award or it is not. In my opinion, the jury’s decision for Shibli, which was made weeks ago, was a very good one. To deprive her of the prize would be fundamentally wrong, both politically and literarily.” And let us not forget that Hamas does not represent Palestine—and while the rape and murder of a young girl by soldiers could easily happen the other way around, such a heinous act has no place in the world, and should be condemned as staunchly as the courage of those who tell the story should be honored. Here is the link to other less polarizing news articles on the subject: https://ground.news/article/frankfurt-book-fair-postpones-tribute-to-palestinian-authority

"There is a way of walking in New York, midevening, in the big, blocky East Fifties, that causes the heart to open up and the entire city to rush in and make a small town there. The city stops its painful tantalizing then, its elusiveness and tease suspended, it takes off its clothes and nestles wakefully, generously, next to you. It is there, it is yours, no longer outwitting you. And it is not scary at all, because you love it very much.” That is Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite short story writers, in one of her short stories published in 1988. For many years, this is how I’ve come to see New York, my New York. And not just in the big, blocky East Fifties, but also the leafy and genteel West Seventies; the greener still West Nineties toward Columbia; Central Park in April just as the magnolia blooms give way to the first flush of cherry trees; the West Village with its odd-angled streets and quaint beauty (which Michael Cunningham describes, not unbeautifully, as ‘the filtered Jamesian slumber’), the East Village with its well-worn tenements and parks, still deserving of its former Bohemia status; the Soho cobblestones that light up a sallow orange under the streetlights; the boisterous, music-filled, more carefree lower part of downtown; the Pastis-and-Spice Market-colonized cobbles of the Meatpacking district; the brooding brown bulk of Tribeca; the gaudy neon and fluorescence of Chinatown. We haven’t even gotten started on Brooklyn and Queens, entire planets that always give us something to talk about—food we can talk about. Every part of the city seems to be made of a different substance, and such, it seems, is the ideal approach to New York. My love affair with New York started in October 2001, barely a month after The Day that Shook the World, and two months shy of my 30th birthday. Everything about the city I had learned secondhand—from movies, novels, essays, poems, photographs—came alive exactly as I knew they would, my memory of them so tactile, my recognition of things so precise, as if they had been petrified, as in that brief moment in Sleeping Beauty, awaiting my touch to bring back to life. I felt reborn, as if my eyes had been truly opened for the first time. Drinking sights and sounds, the wonderful immodesty of the skyscrapers competing against the skyline, the way certain monuments just melted away in the eye, disappearing in the crowded street, I fell in love with everything—the good, the bad, the ugly; the high points, the low points and everything in between. And as with every affair to remember, you develop—cue Josephine Hart—an internal landscape, a ‘geography of the soul’ that only the city can unlock; with me and New York it lies as much in its restaurants as it does in its parks and its streets, its secret chambers and its hidden paintings, its brownstones and its steel-and-glass, its underground music and poetry slams. Those restaurants had witnessed, and become part of my rebirth. And so after a three-year absence—hard to believe, when I’d been going almost every year since that fateful year, 2001—I found myself back in the city, in mid-August, with my daughter, all of seventeen and Brown University-bound, where she will be spending the next four years—at least that was the plan—of her life. ‘But not before a week of eating at some of my favorite restaurants,’ I told her. ‘Sure, Mum,’ she said. ‘Life as you knew it will be no more,’ I persisted. ‘And that goes for the food. Especially the food.’ ‘Yeah, Mum, I know,’ she said, not looking as perturbed as I expected her to be. ‘But then again, I don’t know anyone my age who has had an eating life like me.’ (Fair point, I thought.) So we had a week to eat, plus a few extra days in New York with K, who flew in late from Australia to make sure that I did leave and not be one of those mothers who cling on to their kids and embarrass them in front of their new friends. Because there were still not enough days, we had to forgo some of my firm favorites, notably Pearl Oyster Bar, Eleven Madison Park, Sushi Yasuda, Blue Hill, 2nd Avenue Deli and Congee Village in Manhattan—oh, and Roberta’s in Brooklyn. We also had to put on hold many new restaurants I’ve been dying to try—Gwynett Street, Blanca, Marlow & Sons, Brooklyn Fare and Pok Pok NY in Brooklyn, Sripraphai in Queens, Marea, Acme, Torrisi, Osteria Morino, Perla, Red Farm, Mission Chinese and Lafayette in Manhattan. In the following entries I will show you what the week-and-a-half looked like, including snapshots of Buvette, which tend to plunge me into a long, delicious daydream without any time to write down my impressions. ABC Kitchen 35, E. 18th St. (between Broadway & Park Ave South), Flatiron Tel. +1 212 4755829 AURORA 70, Grand Street (Wythe Ave.), Brooklyn Tel. +1 212 718 3885100 BABBO 110, Waverly Place (between MacDougal St. & 6th Ave.), Greenwich Village Tel. +1 212 7770303 BALTHAZAR 80, Spring St. (between Broadway & Crosby St.), Soho Tel. +1 212 9651414 DANJI 346, West 52nd St., Hell’s Kitchen Tel. +1 212 5862880 GRAMERCY TAVERN 42, E. 20th St. (between Broadway & Park Avenue South), Flatiron Tel. +1 212 4770777 IL BUCO ALIMENTARI E VINERIA 53, Great Jones St. (Bowery), W. Village Tel. +1 212 8372622 Katz’s Delicatessen 205, E. Houston St (Ludlow t.), Lower East Side Tel. +1 212 2542246 LITTLE OWL 90, Bedford St., W. Village Tel. +1 212 7414695 LOCANDA VERDE Greenwich Hotel, 377 Greenwich (N. Moore St.), Tribeca Tel. +1 212 9253797 MINETTA TAVERN 113, MacDougal St. (between Bleecker & W. 3rd Sts), Greenwich Village Tel. +1 212 4753850 www.minettatavernny.com MOMOFUKU SSÄM BAR 207, Second Ave. (13th St.), E. Village Tel. +1 212 2543500 PASTIS 9, Ninth Ave at Little West 12th St., Meatpacking District Tel. +1 212 9294844 PRUNE 54, E. First St. (between 1st & 2nd Aves), East Village Tel. +1 212 6776221 PULINO’S 282 Bowery (E. Houston St.), NoLita Tel. +1 212 2261966 THE DUTCH 131, Sullivan St. (Prince St.), SoHo Tel. +1 212 3344783 WONG 7, Cornelia St. (between Bleecker & W. 4th Sts.), W. Village Tel. +1 212 9893399

“Strangely enough these were women in history, Louise de la Valliere, Catherine of Russia, Madame de Maintenon, Catherine de’ Medici, and two women out of literature, Anna Karenina and Catherine Heathcliff; and now there was this woman Austria.” – Djuna Barnes in Nightwood My introduction to Austrian cuisine dates back to 1984, when I spent a week of what remained of my summer holiday with my parents in Tyrol, in the western part of Austria. I had just spent a month in a small English town called Thame, in Oxfordshire, boarding with a local family and going to the school their children went to. After a steady diet of sandwiches and cold cuts, I was ravenous for good food, for I always had a big appetite. In Tyrol, we stayed in a small, sleepy town called Seefeld, which only came alive during winter, when it became a full-fledged ski resort. A friend of my mother’s, Katja Rass, owned a lovely B&B on the foot of the hill that looked out over a green pasture, with a postcard-perfect backdrop of the Alps. She had let us stay there, free of charge, and I can’t remember a happier memory from my teenage years. It was during that week that I was introduced to such Austrian specialties as tafelspitz (boiled beef in broth, served with horseradish sauce), the closest thing Austria has to a national dish; zwiebelrostbraten (roast beef served with gravy, garnished with fried onion rings); leberknodelsuppe (beef liver-ball soup), kaiserschmarren (shredded pancake, sprinkled with powdered sugar, served hot with fruit compote, usually plum), and, of course, the famous Wiener schnitzel (thin, breaded and fried veal, or pork). The long, complicated names didn’t bother me at all for my father, who studied architecture in Berlin in the fifties, speaks fluent German and often peppers his speech with German words. And because he was quite the cook himself, I grew up with bratkartoffeln (roast potatoes), sauerkraut (sour cabbage) and hearty bread like pumpernickel as much as I did with sate, nasi goreng and soto ayam. My father and I even shared a love for the same jam, Johanisbeere (black currant), which I was told was an acquired taste. This familiarity made it easier for me to embrace the rest of the hearty Austrian repertoire, and even to turn cleaning out my plate—despite the gigantic portions—into something of a sport. We’re only twelve once! Three Tyrolean trips later—two of which were reached from Munich through the German state of Bavaria, which meant lunch stops at a forellen haus to feast on trout pan-fried in butter and almond and tea time of topfentorte (quark or cream cheese pie) or mohnpalatschinken (crepes doused in cream sauce) with our mélange (that most Viennese of all things Viennese: half a cup of black coffee half a cup creamy milk, topped with foam)—the I was a pro. Or so I thought. Vienna came next, and I dutifully completed my Austrian education with a quick run through the cakes—the Sacher torte, so beloved it merits its own National Day, on 5 December, apfel strudel, punschkrapfen, Malakov Torte (layered cake made with ladyfingers and cream), etc.—but I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth then. The Sacher torte was definitely too rich and too sweet for my taste, and all the other desserts seemed equally calorific. Instead, it was the humble semel—bread roll, crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside—that stole my heart. I could eat at least half a dozen of them in a day. What also became apparent to me quite early was that if Vienna were a person, it would be a woman (just as Budapest is undoubtedly a man). Cities are funny that way; you just know. It is now thirty years since that first trip, and I am back in Vienna, with K, who grew up here. We married in late 2011, and now with my daughter in her second year in college in the US, we have more time on our hands to go on overseas trips together. I had just returned from New York, where I had a full week of binge-eating in between attending The New Yorker Festival events, and at first didn’t think I would be able to relive my teenage culinary trip, reduced, ‘modern’ portions notwithstanding. How wrong I was! A week in Vienna turned out to be as much a culinary week as it was a lovely stroll down memory lane—for K, that is—and a reconnection, for me, with this strangely aloof, yet beautiful city. So here is a small taste of our experience. CAFÉ CENTRAL Herrengasse 14, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 5333763 CAFÉ KORB Brandstatte 9, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 5337215 CANTINETTA ANTINORI Jasomirgottstrasse 3-5, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 5337722 DEMEL CAFÉ Kohlmarkt 14, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 53517170 GELATERIA HOHER MARKT Hoher Markt 4, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 5333297 IL MARE Ziegelstrasse 15, 1070, Vienna Tel. +43 1 5237494 MAYER AM PFFARPLATZ Pffarplatz 2, 1190, Vienna Tel. +43 1 3701287 PLACHUTTAS GASTHAUS ZUR OPER Walfischstrasse 5-7, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 5122251 THE GUEST HOUSE Fuchrichgasse 10, 1010, Vienna Tel. +43 1 512320 ZUM RESNICEK Resnicekgasse 10, 1090, Vienna Tel. +43 3179140