The recently published posthumous publication, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir, draws attention to the powers of endurance of the American Jewish poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014). The Yiddish word for strength, koyach, might have been the middle name of Kumin, a skilled swimmer and horsewoman who battled back after a near-fatal ...
Ally would have been a more effective book if Oren had taken the time to consider the impact of his take-no-prisoners approach, writes Glenn Frankel. ...
For Slava Gelman, Fishman’s main character, finding a balance between his Russian and American selves proves difficult. ...
As he lay dying, Saul Bellow, “the most decorated writer in American history,” slipped back into consciousness, looked up, and asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Somewhere within that sentence lies Bellow’s greatness as a novelist—his fabulous sense of wonder and entitlement about himself, coupled with ...
On October 9th, 2014, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano, it seemed to his loving readers as if their long quest on his behalf had finally been fulfilled. Not that this shy and modest man ever considered fame or awards, but that ...
“Listen,” says Tomás to his daughter, Daniela. “I know what you wrote.” Tomás is an academic, a Czech, who got out of Prague before the fall of communism, along with his wife, Katka, and baby Daniela. Now, he’s teaching at a two-bit college in Maine, divorced from Katka when their ...
Sometime in my mid-teens, I asked to join the CYO basketball team at the parish church in my New Jersey hometown. For the uninitiated, CYO stands for Catholic Youth Organization, and it was the group to which my two best friends belonged. Jimmy Lyons lived across the street from me, ...
Reza Aslan is an Iranian American scholar of religions, whose internationally acclaimed books include No god But God and Beyond
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Michael Duffy reviews "The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company," by Jay Neugeboren ...
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, is the author most recently of ‘Til Faith Do
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Norman Gelb is the author of many works of history, including The Berlin Wall, Less Than Glory, Desperate Venture, and
...Glenn Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent many years as a Washington Post reporter and editor, now serves as
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