A Crowd Gathers for Canetti

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The New York Sun

Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti was the subject of a symposium on Sunday celebrating the centennial of his birth. The Bulgarian-born author, who died in 1994, is best known for his wide-ranging study “Crowds and Power” and his novel “Auto-da-Fe,” about an intellectual who is immolated in his library.


Though he immigrated to England in 1938 and eventually became a British citizen, Canetti continued to write in German. As the Swedish Academy noted, “The exiled and cosmopolitan author Canetti has one native land, and that is the German language.”


Natalia Indrimi curated the symposium, which featured two panels moderated by University of Pennsylvania professor Liliane Weissberg. The program was presented by the Center for Jewish History, Centro Primo Levi, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the American Sephardi Federation.


Tufts University professor Gloria Ascher explored Canetti’s Sephardic identity. Hailing from Ruschuk on the Danube River, Mr. Canetti was born into a family that spoke Ladino at home. He wrote that he sometimes thought of himself as “a Spanish poet in the German language.”


University of Haifa professor Robert Elbaz described the unclassifiable nature of Canetti’s writing: “None of his texts resemble anything we know.” His novel “Auto-da-Fe” is one of a kind; “The Voices of Marrakesh” is “not your typical travel diary”; and even his plays are “formally unlike any plays we know.” Likewise it is a challenge to describe the structure of “Crowds and Power,” he said, since the book is not a political tract or a historical survey. Nor was it strictly an anthropological or psychological study, though it draws upon those disciplines. The book, he said, has “no thesis to speak of” and follows no linear development.


“In Canetti there are least two writers,” said writer Claudio Magris. First, an author who wrote universal literature like “Auto-da-Fe,” and second, as interpreter of himself, a writer whose autobiographical prose concealed as much as it revealed. “Few writers have known how to hide himself as well as Elias Canetti,” Mr. Magris said, describing how Canetti would sometimes answer the phone as a female housekeeper to avoid those he did not want to speak with.


Mr. Magris said his friendship with Canetti began to cool after Canetti became annoyed when Mr. Magris visited the author’s native Ruschuk and wrote about it in the book “Danube.”


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MATHEMATICAL MINDS Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences professors Louis Nirenberg and Peter Lax each earned their Ph.D. from New York University in 1949. Both are towering figures whose contributions cover a range of topics, many relating to partial differential equations, an area of mathematics that explores how quantities vary over time. And both were honored this weekend on the occasion of their 80th birthdays. Colleagues from Princeton University, Hebrew University, University of California at Los Angeles, and elsewhere delivered mathematical papers at the Courant Institute. A banquet was held Saturday night at Kimmel Hall in the Rosenthal Pavilion. Mr. Nirenberg was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and Mr. Lax is a Hungarian Jewish emigre from Budapest.


The Knickerbocker talked with Albert Blank,a professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, who attended the conference. He recalled a technique Mr. Lax would use years ago to avoid falling asleep while listening to lectures. He said Mr. Lax would rest a pencil vertically on his thumb and finger so that if he began to nod off, the pencil would fall and quickly awaken him.


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MAGICAL SCENE Roger Dreyer, chief executive officer of Fantasma, which manufactures parlor tricks and unusual magic sets, held a going away party at his home last week for Sarah Hendee, a colleague who is getting married and moving to Washington, D.C.


Standing near the Houdini posters and magic memorabilia were Bryan Berg, who holds the Guinness record for constructing the tallest house of cards at 25 feet high; daredevil David Blaine; female conjurers Belinda Sinclair and Maritress; and Los Angeles-based magician and publisher Mike Caveney, whose next biography is of Harry Willard, known as “Willard the Wizard.”


Entertainment that evening included Todd Robbins demonstrating carnival feats, Mark Mitton performing with silk handkerchiefs, and Simon Lovell transforming tissue paper into a white rose, which he presented to Ms. Hendee.


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COMPASS POINTS TO COULTER The American Compass Book Club awarded its first annual conservative book award on Thursday to Ann Coulter for her bestseller “How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)”(Crown Forum). The outspoken author answered questions at a ceremony in Manhattan. In response to Harriet Miers’s withdrawal as a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, she said, “I’ve been watching TV and drinking champagne.” On the issue of whether Ms. Coulter would ever run for office, she said it is always flattering to be asked, but “I lack a crucial skill politicians have – diplomacy.”


gshapiro@nysun.com


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