I used to watch Nightline every night back in the good old America Held Hostage days and beyond, when Ted Koppel appeared to be a sophisticated analyst of politics and policy and opened a window into the world inside the Beltway. Now I wonder what has happened to him.

In today’s New York Times ($$), he chides Ahmadinejad for “tweaking” the West (Mr. Koppel’s parents were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany) and then goes on to make the following suggestion for how we should deal with Iran:

If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.

But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.

What a clever notion! We should cede first strike capability to Iran, and if they hit us, well then we’ll just hit them back. Pure genius.

No, not the Clinton Giving Orgy, which raked in more than $ 7 billion from a bunch of very rich liberal do-gooders who have a lot of guilt to expiate, I guess—bless them and may they keep feeling very, very guilty. Seriously.

But I’m writing about something completely different: a real labor of love, which I happened upon as I was filling my virtual library at Library Thing.

Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov were the most beloved Russian writers of the early Soviet period. Mel Brooks made a lousy movie of their novel The Twelve Chairs, and I guess their reputation has never recovered. I understand from friends who’ve read the sequel The Golden Calf that it is even funnier, but the book has been out of print in English for a long, long time.

Works translated from foreign languages are among the least desirable publishing properties—they generate even fewer sales than volumes of poetry and short stories. (Don’t get me started about this hideous oversight on the part of American publishers. PEN recently took up the cause and sponsored a “world voices” symposium, but it didn’t inspire publishers to offer money for translations. This unfortunate absence of even a tiny niche for works in translation underscores the shocking isolationism of America—including American friends of literature.)

Now two friends—amateurs—have undertaken the job of translating this beloved Russian novel, and have solicited help online from Russian speakers on LiveJournal. The first few chapters of their effort are posted online here.

The Golden Calf is the kind of book you don’t expect to exist. It’s funny, irreverent, deeply subversive, beautifully written and somehow got itself officialy published in the Soviet Union just as the rest of Russian literature was going into the Stalinist deep freeze. Even more remarkable, it’s a joint effort by two authors whose working method was to sit at a typewriter together, smoke, and argue over each sentence as they wrote it….

The Twelve Chairs is freely available in English translation (including a free online version), but for some reason The Golden Calf, an even funnier book, is not. Peter and I thought this was a shame, and operating on the theory that even a rough English translation would be better than none, we decided to give it a shot.

I studied Russian in college and can read it reasonably well; Peter (in a tour de force of ethnicity) is a California Austrian from Bulgaria who grew up speaking Russian at home. When neither he nor I can figure out what is going on in the text, we post questions to a LiveJournal (or zhivoj zhurnal, as the locals call it) that has proven enormously helpful. The Russians are skeptical of our ability to do the text justice, but in the hopes that anything is better than nothing, we’re making our initial draft available online as we proceed. For the moment, I’ve set up a homepage for the novel and put up a rough draft of the first three chapters.

Here’s a little bonus: a link to an exhibit of the photographs Ilf and Petrov took on a 1935 trip to America, which they also documentedn in a book. Call it Soviet Satirists on the Road:

One brave woman salutes another—Aayan Hirsi Ali on Oriana Fallaci:

And as fragile as her physical body is, so strong and resilient is her spirit. I listen, and after a discussion of her life travels through Italy, through the Middle East, and now in the U.S., she arrives at what brought our life paths together: the threat of radical Islam.

Suddenly she changes the subject. “You must have a child,” she says. “I only regret one thing in my life, and that is that I do not have children. I wanted them, tried to have them, but I tried too late, and I failed.” “Darling,” she says, “it hurts to be alone. Life is lonely. It must be, sometimes. Still I would very much have liked to have a child. I would have liked to pass on life.”

Read the whole thing.

She hands me her books, in Italian. Then many life lessons follow. “Darling, don’t let life pass you by.” She refuses to let me say goodbye and invites me to visit her again. This morning I still wanted to visit her again, when I heard, on the radio, that the life of this greatness was over. “Darling, when the cancer kills me, many will celebrate.” I will mourn her.

Jay Parini writes:

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

Now you all can view my virtual library in my sidebar as I add titles to it over at Library Thing, which is really, really cool. Check it out.

Judging from the Sunday-like throngs on the streets of New York City today, the tribe seems to have grown.

Here’s a little trip down memory lane: a clipping from October 20, 1950, from a Los Angeles paper called The Torch, memorializing the first-ever (live) TV broadcast of a Kol Nidre service on the West Coast:

We are grateful that the University Synagogue was honored by KTLA to perform a pioneering task for Jewish life. Our members and friends will never know of the many difficulties for such a program which were surmounted by courage and faith.

(click on the image to enlarge it)