Jewish Cock by Katharina Volckmer translated by Pierre Demarty

  Intense book Jewish Cock

by Katharina Volckmer translated by Pierre Demarty this August 28th chez Grasset. At the end of this little book Katharina will thank a certain Joachim because he introduced her ar the perfect french writing-style.

Pretty absorbing and dense, this one is a monologue long 180 pages between a German girl and Dr. Seligman. The results? Well, like all the monologues, it spaces in different directions:being born in Germany there is a great obsession for Hitler, and for example in the passage that you can find at page 38 she will tell to the doctor: "Un Juif vivant, c'est quelque chose de diaboloquement excitant pour un Allemande, un phénomène auquel personne ne nous a préparés durant notre enfance." Later she underlines how no one will think that a Jew can be a taxi-driver, but, considering the distinguished people seen, someone important.

The girl lives in London at the moment although she is obsessed by the past, the years of the Shoah.

At the same time, describing pretty vividly sexual behaviors, she meets along her way interesting people who marked her existence: M.Shimada, the creator of sex toys, or mr.K, a married man with which she started to have sex in public toilets with extreme excitement, although, while she was having sex with K. she couldn't help herself, if not thinking at her father and his love for her mother, his devotion, his being constantly there for the family; in love for K. she tries to define the expression "making love" thinking that, no, it is impossible this expression, it is not correct, because...How can we define the idea of giving, with that words, meaning to profound feelings like the one that bring a man and a woman together?

She imagines dr.Seligman, her listener, a good man with a wife, his children, oh, someone who, like his father is unable of committing big errors, someone who hasn't been for sure taken by the trendy idea of plastic surgery at all: dr. Seligman doesn't have a kind of glamour; he is someone normal in his simplicity, maybe boring for someone like our young girl.

What is solitude, if not an existential condition pretty known by the girl, maybe, the sign of the original sin? 

Oh, but for sure, dr.Seligman doesn't know the solitude: she is different from him and his being calm and simple; she is like a kind of deforminity, a monster invented by the pen of some contemporary authors, someone, a girl, who capture, eat, absorb the happiness of other people, resulting at the end a repugnant, corroded pigeon.

After all, she has been intrigued also by a girl, Helen: Hellen called her Bambi... and again returns her  obsession for Hitler but also the fear of an hypothetic Third World War and her obsession for chocolate for trying to avoid this possibility, imagining that chocolate would protect her against the maleficient bomb. 

There are words also on cinema and star-system: She doesn't think she would find comfort as a lot of unknown people do, putting posters of idols in the bedroom.

K. is a guy who to her means a lot; although in great confidence with him they haven't never shared any kind of fear...The fear of the night, or other ones as well, because as remarks the girl fears are intimate feelings too personals for being shared: K. loves theather, but not his wife and he suffers for this reason; there are described the sexual intercourse between the two and the fantasies he had. One day, looking at a picture of K.'s wife, she noticed the same attitude of Helen: living well their being women.

If she would ask for a plastic surgery, she would ask for keeping silenced the muscles of her face, putting an end at that industry of happiness.

The Holocaust could be resolved to her only falling in love for a Jew. She starts to see some perversions at some point also in the perfect dr.Seligman, adding later consideration on God, a father but also someone pretty... carnal: after all what she is searching is sex, because the idea of staying with someone, terrifies her.

Her mother, is so perfect, so classy: she is becoming like her: she loves to repeat concepts, exactly as her mother does.

Religion is like an obsession and returns the comparison: catholicism versus Judaism, with their differences and cult, a cult the catholic one explained analyzing it through her parents's eyes.

Complex, a revealing book, pretty dark, but after all, in this conversation there is the naked, exposed, sincere soul of a person. Maybe it would be the same hearing from other unknown people their life-story because each of us have demons, difficulties, joys, happinesses and precise ideas on religiom, policy, society.

Highly recommended.

I thank Grasset for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori