Nine years have passed since the mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan, the senior Egyptian government official who volunteered to spy for Israel’s Mossad. Marwan remains at the center of a bitter controversy over why the October 1973 attack that launched the Yom Kippur War took Israel by surprise.
A devoted reader examines the odd relationship between the so-called queen of British detective fiction and her Jewish characters.
Around the time I first read Aharon Appelfeld’s Unto the Soul (1994), I was just barely starting to write about Jews.
We asked 20 prominent Jewish authors to discuss the books that shaped them.
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…
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.
Australian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former journalist Geraldine Brooks has made her mark with daring fictional reimaginings of some of the most iconic figures in history and literature. A convert to Judaism, Brooks delved into Jewish history in her 2008 novel, People of the Book, which recounts the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah through centuries of war and strife.
Many writers seem daunted by the autobiographical novel—ashamed to write of themselves, as if that were either self-indulgence or exploitation. And of course with James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paragon, many do not even dare to try. But Joyce didn’t frighten off E.L. Doctorow, who mined his own Depression-era childhood in New York for the 1986 National Book Award-winning World’s Fair.
When Jack Miles approached me with the proposition to edit the Judaism volume of the projected Norton Anthology of World Religions, I was naturally flattered but also confounded. There are, of course, many anthologies of Judaism in different formats. But the Norton anthologies are different.
