In each of Alan Furst’s 14 novels about spies—not spy novels, he insists there is a difference—characters inevitably end up dining at Brasserie Heininger in Paris. The fictional restaurant, based on the real Brasserie Bofinger, with its opulent marble staircase and shucked oysters, represents the glamour and the joie de vivre of 1930s Paris, a city he calls “the heart of civilization.”
There is a tradition, more prominent in theater than in fiction, of the unwanted guest. One thinks of such works as Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner; the 1967 Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…
The Holocaust (Shoah) and the Nakba (al-Karitha) share three characteristics. First, both terms mean catastrophe, disaster or calamity.
Refugees are flocking to the European continent in ever-growing numbers, and Europeans show increasing resistance to accepting them.
It is Book Week in Tel Aviv. At Rabin Square, the tables are loaded with volumes, old and new, light and heavy, and buyers are leafing through them as they move from one publisher’s table to the next.
When I started at Moment more than six years ago, I quickly gravitated toward the magazine’s books section. It wasn’t long before every review copy of a new book that arrived at the office landed on my desk.
