The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell *HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99. * *‘But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did….. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your…
The Jews as a Chosen People By S. Leyla Gurkan Routledge, 246 pages, $140.00. The Chosen: The History of an Idea, the Anatomy of an Obsession By Avi Beker Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $35.00. Who Are the Real Chosen People? By Reuven Firestone Skylight Paths Publishing, 158 pages, $21.99. Here’s an obvious statement: The doctrine…
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…
Rhyming Life & Death By Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange *Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 128 pages, $23.00. * 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…
The Believers By Zoë Heller HarperCollins, 352 pages, $25.99. 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…
Singer By Ira Sher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages, $25.00. 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…
There is still hope for the novel. In a climate increasingly hostile to fiction that does not adhere to the conservative parameters set by the publishing industry, some writers continue to work according to their own lights. Gabriel Josipovici is remarkable for producing novels that belong to the modern European tradition of Kafka and Proust,…
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son By Sholom Aleichem, translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin Penguin Classics, 416 pages, $16.00. Finding out exactly how many daughters Tevye actually has might be a tricky business, but no more so than settling the issue of how many translations into English of “Tevye der Milhiker”…
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