Tag
Jewish
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“I’ve Embraced the Outsider Status”: A Conversation with Francisco Goldman
“That reality, such suffering, and violence, so much evil, was just shattering. Of course I witnessed so much courage too, and goodness, much of it doomed.”
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The Netanya-who?s: Gossip and Other Kinds of History
Benzion Netanyahu—father of the former prime minister—is not the protagonist; rather, it is his scholarship and the practice of history itself.[none-for-homepage]
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Philanthropy and the “Jewish Continuity Crisis”
Today, Jewish philanthropy—like all philanthropy—is big business, thanks to US philanthropy’s torturous entanglement with US capitalism.[none-for-homepage]
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Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
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Who Gets to Be a Jewish Writer?
“The term ‘Jewish writer,’” argues Cynthia Ozick, “ought to be an oxymoron.” Yet 82 years earlier, in 1924, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva proclaimed that “in …
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“Who Knows If They Found Any Burial At All?”
In the novels and short stories about Ferrara that he published in the 1950s and ’60s, Giorgio Bassani uncovered the Fascist side of his hometown that many …
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B-Sides: Ivan Olbracht’s “Nikola the Outlaw”
Some of Central Europe’s greatest political novels have been meditations on disillusionment. Many of them—from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to …
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Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness …
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“A Writer Should Never Get Over How Embarrassing This Is”: A Conversation With Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut novel, Inherited Disorders, makes its method visible to you as you read: you watch the book, feel it turning itself inside out in order to say something worth it. Its preoccupations—its stumbling blocks, but also its most beloved themes—are literally announced in the titles of the 117 tableaux that make up…
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Stumbling Over a Violent Past
When Jennifer Teege was 38, she discovered a book in Hamburg’s central library that dramatically transformed her self-conception and her life: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The book concerned the daughter of a prominent, infamous Nazi. That woman, Teege realized with shock, was her own mother, Monika. In that moment, Teege went…
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Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in…
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Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies …”
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Virtual Roundtable on “Transparent”
Jill Soloway’s original program Transparent abounds with firsts: the first TV series to feature a transgender character as its protagonist; the first transgender-themed series to win Golden Globe …
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Far Outside and Deep Within:More Novels on World War II
Even in the paroxysm of publishing around the centennial of the First World War last year, novels about the Second World War dominated, as they usually do, historical fiction about the 20th century. In honor of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2015, I binge-read a slew of books published…
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For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of Zionism and its excesses, assailed Arendt for her wishy-washy support of Israel and for an overall deficit of love for the Jewish people.…
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Was That All There Was to the Left?
In the wake of Pete Seeger’s death in January, eulogies, memorials, and obituaries routinely mentioned his youthful communist affiliation. The famous folk singer had, like many of his contemporaries in the world of arts and music, joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) as a young man. He did so in the late 1930s—a time when not…
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Is She the Future of Germany?
Olga Grjasnowa’s novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (recently translated by Other Press as All Russians Love Birch Trees) was published to considerable acclaim in Germany in 2012. The book was widely celebrated for its almost documentary ability to describe the vicissitudes of a younger generation of Germans, many of multiethnic backgrounds. Belonging…
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Polish Dreams
I often joke that everything I know about Israel I learned from comic books. As a secular Jew with deep ambivalence about Israel, this quip has served as a shield against being engaged on the topic by friends and colleagues on either side of the Zionist divide. So imagine my surprise when I recently gave…
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Fly on the Wall
What is it like to be a fly? What is it like to be a Jew? Despite its trans-species premise—an 18th-century French Jew is reincarnated as a fly in 21st-century Long Island—Jacob’s Folly, the new novel from author and filmmaker Rebecca Miller, is far more interested in answering the latter question than the former. Yes,…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi-multiplatinum. We did not hate, because we knew the truth: we too binge, chant, and passionately blur the pages of our passports with so many stamps from Senegal, Salvador,…
