As a university student in Warsaw in the first half of the 1970s, I used to spend much of my summer vacation hitchhiking around the country. This is how one fine July day I found myself in Jedwabne, a nondescript but beautifully located small town in Poland’s Northeast. Wandering through the meadows and forests, I lost my sense of direction and eventually had to ask a local for the road out of town.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery published in Russia in 1903, has been called a “warrant for genocide.” However, as early as the 12th century in England, what is now known as “the blood libel”—the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood—may be the original warrant that gave the world a pretext to deny the Jewish people a place in civilized society.
There is a seeming transparency in the prose of On the Move, the late Oliver Sacks’s memoir about leaving home and the divergent, sometimes vagabond, life he made.
In this probing, lavishly illustrated volume, the historian of American Jewry, Jonathan Sarna, and Benjamin Shapell, a leading collector of Civil War documents and artifacts, interweave two texts: a chronicle of Lincoln’s cordial relations with Jews and an extensive gallery of letters, photos and prints.
In November 1938, as Hitler was preaching his gospel of hate, French Prime Minister Léon Blum delivered a speech to the International League Against Anti-Semitism about “the tragic Jewish question.” Urging European nations to open their doors to the growing number of Jewish refugees who had been condemned “to a bitter and unfortunate fate,” he left no doubt about his identity…
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 carriage-driving accident at age 73
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 a magical gift for language and a rattling insecurity. This is what Zachary Leader writes about in his doggedly detailed and adoring biography of Bellow.
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 he never even considered that writing novels was a career.
“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 little girl was only two, and nearly estranged from his grown daughter, now a playwright. As “The Quietest Man” begins, Daniela has sold her very first play—and her father, the tale’s narrator, is determined to use her good fortune to reconnect with her…
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, and Tim Mulligan was his buddy from parochial school. Needless to say, I was Jewish.
