Publication Announcement: "Burn the Boats"

at Judith Magazine

Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat serve as homes for my weekly creative writing and intellectual exploration. HV persists as my original and primary Substack in these pursuits; AS arose in resistance to Trumpism and is dedicated to its defeat. From memoir and poetry to fiction and drama, mostly in HV, to history and political philosophy, predominantly in AS, you will find it here, integrated across the two stacks through a creative and intellectual sensibility I hope you will find invigorating. The stacks may be subscribed jointly or singly in Manage Subscription.

Your support for my writing on these two stacks lifts me up. Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the creative project of my writing life and in my mission to offer a renascent light against the darkness: art, information, culture, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people. Thank you for your interest and support.

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Hail Vitruvians!¹

I make this brief midweek interruption of your valuable time to bring to your attention my latest publication off Homo Vitruvius.

Regular readers of this stack will recall that just a couple of months ago, I finished nearly a year of writing here a first draft of my memoir Reason for Being in the World, to be published in the future in book form. An early chapter of the memoir, titled “Burn the Boats,” recounts my efforts to piece to together the sparse information I had of my father’s distant childhood in Ukraine, in pre and revolutionary Russia. It’s a hybrid chapter of creative nonfiction, in which I ultimately imaginatively recreate the day my ten-year-old father and his 12-year-old sister left their small Jewish shtetl to be rowed across the Zbruch River into Poland on what became their seven-year journey to the United States. The chapter originates in writing I composed in a cabin on the California coast in 2005, just weeks after my father’s death at 94, 20 years ago this August.

The young Meyer Adler, a right-proper looking, early 20th century Socialist, always the dapper dresser.

I’m delighted to say that a revised excerpt of that chapter appears today in Judith Magazine, a magazine published by the indefatigable writer, and more, Elissa Wald and dedicated to publishing the work of Jewish writers. I worked with fellow writer and Judith nonfiction editor Howard Lovy. I’d be honored if you read the chapter a first or second (revised and improved!) time there. Likes, comments, and shares for me and the good folks at Judith would be greatly appreciated, too.

Burn the Boats

While the excerpt at Judith is free, if you’d like to read more of Reason for Being in the World, which now resides in the Homo Vitruvius archive until book publication, month-long access to the book-length work costs only $2 for the monthly subscription.

Coming Up / Going On

• August fiction off Homo Vitruvius

• This Saturday, part 5 of What We Were Thinking Of: “Radical Confessions”

• While American Samizdat is on something of a temporary hiatus, What We Were Thinking Of, in the many issues it addresses, is very much in the creative spirit with which American Samizdat aims to address the current American moment.

• I continue to address the national and global calamity of Trumpism, also in the spirit of American Samizdat, daily on Substack Notes: https://ajayadler.substack.com/notes

• Short and long fiction actively being composed behind the scenes because I barely sleep, and when I do, I dream of writing.

Thanks for your time! Thanks for your attention! Thanks for reading! Remember, you read; therefore, the writer exists. Summer on!

1. As we all know, homo sapiens is the long-accepted paleontological designation of our “evolved” human species. A more contested though common designation is homo sapiens sapiens, for the more modern sub-species of homo sapiens considered to have developed between 90,000-160,000 years ago in Africa and then dispersed over the earth. Since a sub-species implies a division into at least two subcategories, some of the contest over the term includes questions of what the other sub-species might be. I propose — paleontologist in another life that I am — the more Enlightened sub-species homo sapiens vitruvius, and all that is required to be so categorized, to be hailed as Vitruvuian!, is to subscribe to Homo Vitruvius.