Forward.com

A Plot Against America: A Jewish Writer’s Forgotten ‘Future History’ Of a Nazi Takeover

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:59:00 EST

Arch Oboler’s “This Precious Freedom” (1942) is the first film ever made about a Nazi takeover of the United States. It was suppressed by its producer, an automaking company better known today for financial than moral bankruptcy: General Motors Corp.

An Actor Exits

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:45:00 EST

Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the enfant terrible of American Jewish literature, Philip Roth (Long may he live!) is now 76, and in “Everyman” (2006), “Exit Ghost” (2007) and “Indignation” (2008), the virtuoso of boisterous provocations has taken on the urgent task of confronting mortality. “The Humbling” extends that project.

On Becoming a ‘Beaner’: A Mexican American Story

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:44:00 EST

‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school.

Found in Portugal: World Famous Jewish-American Novelist

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:43:00 EST

Though he still maintains his accent and caffeinated New York pulse, Richard Zimler is far better known in Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, France and England than in the United States. He may be the world’s most famous unknown living American Jewish writer.

Toothy in Gotham

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:42:00 EST

‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence by sentence. The reviewer becomes, in a sense, the author’s projection or double, questioning choices of plot, wording and punctuation, and revising paragraphs and pages, until what results is an alternate book: Like it or not, you’re reading my own version of “Chronic City” now. (This is apropos of nothing much. But it seemed important and pleasurable enough at the beginning.)

Immortal Bloodsucking Opportunists

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:40:00 EST

Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world that didn’t include redemption.” In her new novel, “Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim,” then, Rice creates a new hero, one who seeks redemption with the divine aid of an angel and explores another idea from that same Author’s Note: that the sheer miraculousness of Jewish survival is proof to her of God.

Six Takes on God

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:36:00 EST

Regular readers of the book review pages (or even of books) are no doubt familiar with the so-called New Atheists — Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, in order of increasing shrillness — and how they’ve been raising hackles with their screeds. After reading their books last year, I could see why people were ticked off. The New Atheists like to conflate any kind of religion with extremism, as if all believers were boneheaded fundamentalists. Similarly, they rail against a cruel, straw-man God, as if the fundamentalist projection of brutality onto the Creator is the only way to conceive of Him.

Shrink And Grow

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:31:00 EST

With many shrinks away between now and the end of the summer, Susan Shapiro, the author of the new novel “Speed Shrinking” (St. Martin’s Press) suggests abandoned patients get their fill of talk therapy from these works of fiction.

La Mort Que Je Conviens

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:44:00 EST

Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which hated its Jews but occasionally sheltered them, too.

Sting Like a Bee: Ali of the Typewriter

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:43:00 EST

One of the last pieces A.J. Liebling ever wrote was about an up-and-coming boxer and versifier named Cassius Clay. Liebling wasn’t entirely sold on the egotistical young fighter, but he was clearly struck by Clay’s magnetism and the excitement he brought to the ring, and he sensed Clay’s promise.

Receiving the Original Text Messages

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:42:00 EST

As I sat next to Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz at a recent bar mitzvah reception, our chat turned to the Amazon Kindle. Ehrenkrantz, who is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, is considering getting one.

The Rise and Rise of Haredi Thrillers

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:37:00 EST

‘Elazar had the sensation of having left the secure boundaries of the world he knew,” reads an ominous sentence in the middle of Chaim Eliav’s “The Runaway” “and entered a strange new one — a dangerous world.” Like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock thriller, the protagonist has been accidentally wrenched out of everyday life and thrust into an international imbroglio. But unlike Grant or Stewart, this improbable hero wears peyes. Eliav’s novel is a prime example of a new literary genre that has been blossoming, modestly, over the past decade: the Haredi potboiler.

Disobedience As An Article of Faith

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:36:00 EST

Quoting Yeats’s famous image of a center that cannot hold and the anarchy that is thereby loosed upon the world, Rabbi Harold Schulweis begins the final chapter of his short book “Conscience” by asking, “Who, during such unstable times as ours, can quarrel with the call for heightening obedience to authority?” What’s refreshing about “Conscience” is that Schulweis in fact does quarrel with this call. His book is a brief for, if anything, disobedience.

Words in Flux

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:35:00 EST

The world of American Jewish letters isn’t what it used to be, and it’s changing in fascinating, manifold and, in many cases, encouraging ways.

Furious Responsibilities

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:27:00 EST

Max Aue, narrator of Littell’s new novel — translated from the book’s original French, in which it received the Goncourt award — is a former Nazi officer. His phrase “ordinary men” recalls the seminal 1993 book “Ordinary Men” by historian Christopher Browning. In it, Browning argued that men in the German police killed Jews not “because they were devils, but because they were humans,” motivated not necessarily by antisemitism, but by peer pressure and career concerns. (Browning writes in his preface, striking a similar chord to Aue: “The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader….”)

Chosen, Us?

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:25:00 EST

Here’s an obvious statement: The doctrine of divine election is central to the identity of the Jewish people. What’s less obvious is that the concept of the “Chosen People” — and thus the identity — is less static than one might think. How the Jews feel about being chosen is often inversely related to communal security: The worse life is for them, the more they take consolation in exceptionalism. The doctrine itself has been modified in relation to Judaism’s daughter religions, which claim that their divine election supersedes that of the Jews. More recently it’s been further complicated by relativism, the somewhat paradoxical idea that no religion or culture is better than any other — to the point where many Jews reject the concept of divine election, or at least downplay its chauvinism.

‘The Beginning’

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:23:00 EST

One of the great Russian writers of the 20th century, Isaac Babel was born in Odessa to middle-class Jewish parents in 1894. In his classic “Red Cavalry,” he writes about how he rode with Cossacks in their Polish campaign; and in his comic Odessa stories, he depicts the Damon Runyon-like Jewish gangsters of Odessa’s Moldavanka neighborhood. A protégé of Maxim Gorki, who always protected him, Babel was arrested a few years after Gorki’s death in 1936 and killed by Stalin’s secret police in 1940. This is the first English translation of this short story.

Rhyming Life and Fiction

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:50:00 EST

Readers who last encountered Amos Oz in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” his elegiac and often somber memoir, may be taken aback by the literary sleight of hand he performs in this highly entertaining short novel. Though nearly plotless, and ostensibly a work of postmodern metafiction, “Rhyming Life & Death” never taxes the reader’s patience. Based on a story that Oz published decades ago (“The Author Meets His Readers”), the narrative encompasses a single night in 1980s Tel Aviv. Much of it takes place in the consciousness of a figure known simply as “The Author,” who, while giving a presentation about his new book, finds himself preoccupied with such matters as the peculiar nature of the cult of the author, the imagined lives of the strangers attending his event and the unsettling lust stirred within him by a young waitress earlier that evening.

Faith in a Barren Land

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:47:00 EST

In her new novel, the British-born and, for the past 20 years, New York-based novelist and cultural critic Zoë Heller (her last novel, “Notes on a Scandal” (2003 was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in England and made into a popular film starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett) casts a shrewd, satiric eye on the Litvinoffs, a dysfunctional, fiercely secular Jewish family shaped by the crucible of the 1960s, devout in its professed “religion” of social justice, unswerving in its embrace of radical politics.

Muffled Singer

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:46:00 EST

If the charge of fiction is to tell a story that reveals the mysteries of human behavior, Ira Sher is writing for all the right reasons. His second novel, “Singer,” is a book damp with the sadness and confusion of middle-aged men waking up to the muddle they’ve made of their lives.