Boris Fishman’s Soviet Fish Soup Is Better Than It Sounds
“Russians had spoons four hundred years before they had forks. It’s soup country, and this is the mother soup.”
With A Sapphire Ring, We Embraced The Uncertain
“With Jessica, I will probably instill Jewish knowledge in our children more than I would have with a secular Jewish partner…”
Master Harold and the Boys
Athol Fugard’s apartheid-era drama ‘Master Harold… and the Boys” proved especially timely in light of the 2016 political climate.
Seeking Bernard Malamud on His 100th Birthday
There was a time when Boris Fishman felt stymied, lovelorn and miserable. But then he started reading Bernard Malamud, who was born 100 years ago today, and everything changed.
What Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me
You wouldn’t think that a Soviet-Jewish immigrant would find much in common with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But the late novelist once helped Boris Fishman find his first love.
Wedding the Personal and Political
Politics so comprehensively saturates Israeli life that even the most apolitical Israeli film ends up invoking it, if only by assiduous omission. In “The Syrian Bride,” opening November 16 in New York, Israeli director Eran Riklis not only acknowledges the elephant in the room but also gives it central billing. Ironically, he ends up
Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry
Blood Relation By Eric Konigsberg HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *|As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his family’s well-meaning
In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo
The far-western Austrian market town of Hohenems (population 14,000) is a good place to take in a chamber orchestra during one of many regional summer music festivals or to learn about water-driven mill technology, once a mainstay of the town’s economy. Less predictably, it’s also the location of one of Europe’s most innovative
Brave New World Music
Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that “Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands” — and pitch them into the trash. Don’t sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based
Nico loves Lupita, his classmate at an exclusive Mexican boarding school. Joel and Yoli, Nico’s parents, disapprove. Nico has dumped Karen to be with Lupita, and Yoli worries that Joel’s business partnership with Karen’s father will suffer. The stress drives Joel to a heart attack. Soon after his recovery, Nico brings