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Adam Shechter has published in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Home Planet News, and The Subway Chronicles, among other publications. Adam is the editor of the forthcoming poetry journal The Blue Jew Yorker. He was born, raised and continues to reside in Brooklyn.
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Published Spring 2007
 
On Actively Halting Nostalgia—A Self-Referential Critical Essay on the Heroics of Family Crisis as the Only True Subject of the Chassidic Tale
Jews who drive cars are idol worshippers. Jews who watch color television while laying down in the comfort of wall-to-wall carpeting have lain down before their ultimate idol, and shall never stand. Your cousins are lazy my mother told me. Listen to them, they cry if they have to walk from a parked car to the entrance of the mall. You love to walk! You're a Mensch! And it is true, I love to walk. It must be understood that my predecessors have made a deeply entrenched habit out of wandering in a medieval chemically imbalanced terror, where Brooklyn as 11th century vacuous privation has turned out to be a culturally embalmed phenomenon, and it will be a hot evening in blessed heaven before we give up this luscious and particular moral sensation of splendid impoverishment. Though my father is from Israel, he left in 1966, thus losing out on the new burgeoning ego-face of the post-1967 border Sabra machismo; his fresh Ukrainian roots whimper and ripen with rotted green and blue hues in the Brooklyn moist top soil mix. A humble hill balding with the sinking lines of a glorious middle aged castration. He was once a great hip immigrant man who fed his seed to an outer-borough Jewish painterly woman who in turn bore a son whom this patriarch crammed with the feeling to succeed in order to make his father proud, and to fail lest succeeding make this Pop feel how bad he actually felt about not succeeding himself; of course all done in order to punish and hate his own withholding failure of a father. Anyway, having tried out a variety of cures for this existential-family condition including afro-centric acupuncture and the plethora of available 12 step programs, finally, one morning the son sat down with an enraged Sephardic zealot who studied Torah with the eyes of a Bumble Bee. Having engaged the learning of these scared Jewish texts with intense neural eye contact, it appeared that a Zohar phenomenon released the spirit of an ancient Bee upon the Ashkenazic son's skin. The Bee bit the son over and over, each bite sending epileptic shockwaves through the son's inner body. With each wave came a new configuration that made a lasting impression on his central nervous system. Some may say there are comparisons to the Tefillin straps; that what is brought kindly into the bulging flesh of bicep is Torah, deep inside the television, completely muffled on the glass spread in wild quotation marks.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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