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June 5, 2019
Bram Presser's Playlist for His Novel "The Book of Dirt"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Winner of the 2018 Voss Literary Prize, Bram Presser's The Book of Dirt is an ambitious and marvelously complex novel.
The Australian wrote of the book:
"A heartfelt and original attempt to bridge the ever-growing gaps between history, memory and silence…Its heart beats so earnestly, and so loud…A meditation on the ethics of storytelling, of the duties we owe to the people whose stories we tell, and to the people whose stories we don’t."
In his own words, here is Bram Presser's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Book of Dirt:
When I started writing The Book of Dirt, I was still schlepping around the world, screaming into a rubber chicken and smearing hummus over my half-naked body, all in the name of punk rock. A tour stop in Israel afforded me the opportunity to look into a family story that had troubled me for a while. Some years earlier, shortly after my grandparents died, an article was published in a local Australian newspaper, claiming that my grandfather had been chosen by the Nazis to curate the literary exhibition in Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Other than that two page spread, there was no other evidence. Where better to look, then, than in Israel? The other guys flew home and I stayed on, committing a few weeks to trawling through the records of Yad Vashem, then flying to Prague to pick up my grandparents’ trails from the start. So began eight years of research and writing (and a nervous breakdown) that would culminate in a novel I never intended on writing.
It seems strange to consider a playlist for a book that mines such catastrophic events; even more so as the Holocaust lends itself to the same silence that plagued my grandparents throughout their lives. To paraphrase Adorno, there can be no music after Auschwitz. And yet music is what sustained me, what inspired lyricism and flow, and awakened me to the beauty that might still be salvaged from horror. So here’s an unlikely, mostly punk playlist for an experimental novel about memory, identity, family and the Holocaust.
1. Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen
It began with a single scene. A village in the Czech countryside, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. A village of Jews, going about their daily routines in the late 1920s, untroubled by modernity. A village that my grandfather first called home. As I wrote of those people, I was repeatedly struck by images of how they died, each more horrific than the last. I couldn’t escape the association with the passage in the Yom Kippur service, and the song that prayer inspired: Leonard Cohen’s classic "Who By Fire." And so now I cannot escape my own association. This song reminds me of all those my grandfather loved and lost.
2. Der Golem – Fantômas
The mythical Jewish creature of clay features heavily in The Book of Dirt, so it’s unsurprising that this dark, experimental treatment of the classic movie theme song should have found its way to my writing studio playlist. The whole album is staggeringly good (and absolutely bonkers), perfect for setting the brooding mood I needed on the odd day when life seemed, well, quite alright.
3. The Intense Humming of Evil – Manic Street Preachers
Ah great. Three songs in and I’m already here. The single most depressing pop song of all time. Not many jangly 90s Britpop guitar bands were willing to stare into the abyss, let alone take a running jump straight down. Pain, suffering, starvation, depravity, the Holocaust; with The Holy Bible, Manic Street Preachers brought any vestiges of hope from their previous two records and rubbed them in the stench of decaying filth. This is the bleakest song on it, engaging explicitly with the Nazi atrocities. As most Preachers fans know, guitarist and main lyricist Richie James disappeared soon after the album was released.
4. Unity – Operation Ivy
Time for something a little more optimistic. And a bit more punk. Of all the songs that talk of overcoming differences and banding together against bigotry, this ska punk anthem is my favourite. It’s messy as hell, but brims with positivity. And it perfectly reflects how I feel about the possible decency that might still exist despite all the awful things we’ve seen. I’ve always dreamed of getting a bunch of my favourite local punk bands from different cultural backgrounds together to make a big “We Are The World” style cover of this. As the song says, “Ain’t nothing wrong with another unity song.”
5. We’re All In This Together – Ben Lee
For some reason this song reminds me of my great grandmother, Františka. Though I set out to write about my grandfather, it was Františka who was ultimately the book’s hero. A convert to Judaism, she was not taken by the Nazis, and from Prague cobbled together a band of smugglers and rebels to get supplies into the concentration camps to keep her daughters alive. Her story taught me above all else that survival often depends on the kindness of strangers, and their willingness to assume risks that aren’t really theirs. Even the melody reminds me of Františka: sweet on the surface, but with a determined, hypnotic drive. Check out the video clip, too. It will make you love life, if only for five minutes.
6. Ted Just Admit It – Jane’s Addiction
The song is about Ted Bundy, but for me it is the quintessential encapsulation of our ever-increasing penchant for atrocity porn. As we drift further away from the years of the Holocaust, those of us who write about it become more aware of the ethical dimensions of using concentration camps as setting for fiction. “Showed me everybody/naked and disfigured/Nothing’s shocking.” Could there be a starker warning against the slide towards desensitisation?
7. Walls Fall Down – Bedouin Soundclash
There is a sublime beauty to Jay Malinowski’s song-writing. It’s so buoyant, and contemplative and just downright lovely. Plus, there’s his voice. Unique, odd, mesmerising. "Walls Fall Down" is my pick me up song for whenever I feel I can go no further with my writing. I play it and it makes me smile. It tells me to walk away for a few minutes, an hour, a day. Whatever it takes. Because when I come back and the obstacles clear, that feeling of relief, of satisfaction, of achievement will be worth it. It’s my "Eye Of The Tiger", if you will.
8. Cease – Bad Religion
Writing The Book of Dirt had me thinking often about the ways we choose to remember; the narratives we perpetuate, the monuments we build, the names and places we privilege. In Cease, one of my favourite (and most wordy) punk bands traverse similar ground, laying waste to the idea that memorials in and of themselves service the promise of peace. The catch-cry of Never Again resounded loudly after the Holocaust, countless memorials were built, and yet we had Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and more. What pretension everlasting peace, indeed.
9. To The World – Strike Anywhere
“I pledge allegiance to the world, nothing more, nothing less than my humanity.” This song fires me up every time. I discovered Strike Anywhere on a free compilation album I picked up at a record store on our first tour of America. The combination of passion, melody and political ferocity seemed almost custom built for me. This song is the great rallying cry, and inspires me now more than ever in the wake of what I learned from The Book of Dirt and the deeply concerning rise in intolerance across the world since it was published.
10. Hero of War – Rise Against
Although they have faded into the amorphous realm of middling stadium rock, Rise Against were once one of the most exciting punk bands on the scene. This melancholy ballad joins songs like "Brothers In Arms," "Goodnight Saigon" and "I Was Only Nineteen" in the pantheon of heartbreaking musical insights into the emotional cost of a soldier’s service and survival.
11. Letters Home – Good Riddance
Twenty-five years after their debut, I’d half expect Good Riddance to have literally been consumed by the heat of their incredible passion. Nope. They’re still around making incredible music. This song from their mid-career Operation Phoenix album, speaks directly to my family’s story. Years after Františka died, my cousin found letters my grandmother had sent her from concentration camps. It’s how I found out about the smuggling, and the incredible heroism of the women in my family. I was immediately reminded of this song, and the terrible longing of those forcibly separated and dreaming of seeing their loved ones again.
12. We Rise Again – Gogol Bordello
There is little I enjoy more than hearing the chaotic sounds of cultural renaissance, and nobody does that better than gypsy punks Gogol Bordello. "We Rise Again" is a defiant anthem for all people who have been displaced and decimated but who can never be defeated.
13. They Tried to Kill Us. They Failed. Let’s Eat! – Yidcore
Lucky thirteen! I couldn’t make a list without embarrassing myself (this coming from a guy who spent an awful amount of time drunk on Manischewitz, mostly-naked and smeared in the blood of smashed chickpeas). Ten years before The Book of Dirt was published, I wrote a song that inhabited the same space. Survival, cultural rebirth, triumph in the wake of catastrophe. Sure, it’s far sillier, but to me it’s a shot of adrenalin straight from where this all began: that same little village at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.
Bram Presser and The Book of Dirt links:
The Saturday Paper review
Sydney Morning Herald review
Jewish News profile of the author
Sydney Morning Herald profile of the author
The Times of Israel profile of the author
The Virtual Memories Show interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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