The London Review of Books has a new subscription podcast called Close Readings. The Odyssey has an extraordinarily sophisticated take on what a Nostos narrative is. Listen to leading critics explore some of the great works of literature. The poet of Beowulf says that was a good king, that was called Kooning, which we can decide whether we take that straight or ironically. Enjoy an introductory grounding like no other, from Europe's leading literary journal. I found reading him when I came across him in my early 20s the most exhilarating poetic experience of my life and rereading it for this session today. I'm afraid I was in tears. Find Close Readings wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we have another reading from the LRB archive. Adam Schatz, the paper's US editor, is reading his piece from February this year on the photographer and French resistance forger Adolfo Kominsky.

In the spring of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Petanist Milis outside the Saint-Germain de Prey Metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julian Keller, age 17, a dire, born in the de parte d'amont of the cres. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers. But he was confident that the police had no idea how frightened he was, because he'd learned to affect an heir of serenity. I also knew with certainty that my papers were in order, he were called many years later. After all, I was the one who had made them. Julian Keller was the known de Guerre of Adolfo Kominsky, who died in Paris on the 9th of January 2023 at the age of 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German occupied zone of wartime France was flooded with false documents. The occupation authorities were on his trail, but they never suspected that the forger they were after was a teenager. It was actually 18, but claimed to be a year younger to avoid conscription into the compulsory work service. Kominsky worked out of a laboratory on the Rude Saint-Paire, disguised as an artist studio. Housed in a tiny attic, it belonged to the 6th, a secret section of the general union of Israelites of France. An organization the Vichy regime had set up and financed with money and property confiscated from Jews. The UGIF pretended to be a humanitarian outfit, but would be instrumental in organizing the deportation of the Jewish population. The network of the 6th set out to undermine its parent organization, resisting the occupation and forging links with various resistance groups, communists, Zionists, and supporters of Chaldagol. Over the course of the war, the 6th helped to save as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation. Only four people worked in the lab. The director was a man known as Lutr, Adir. Kominsky's assistants, the Shidloff sisters, Susie and Herta, were students at the Echol de Bozar. This group was not the only one producing false documents, but it was unusually good at making them in large numbers. Most fake papers were made by falsifying existing documents. Kominsky, however, had discovered a way of manufacturing new documents, which, as he put it, looked as real as if they had come out of the national printing office. Kominsky described the work in his memoir, A Forger's Life, published in 2009 and written with his daughter, Sarah. I dreaded the technical error, the small mistake, the tiny detail that could have escaped me. The slightest second of inattention can prove fatal, and on each piece of paper depends the life or death of a human being. He brought the same rigor to the forgeries he later produced for Algerian rebels, insurgents in Latin America and Africa, anti-apartheid activists, and opponents of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal.