Beth Kissileff is co-editor of Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy and author of the novel Questioning Return. She is at work on a book about Jewish wisdom on healing from trauma and grief and lives in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh with her family.
Beth Kissileff
By Beth Kissileff
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Culture Honesty Is Real
Wherever You Go By Joan Leegant W.W. Norton 272 pages, $23.95 Finally, a novel about Israel by an American Jew that’s written well and without sentimentality. Joan Leegant’s “Wherever You Go” is unafraid to address the pivotal but ambiguous role that Israel plays in providing an identity for certain types of American Jews. Israel, in…
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The Schmooze A Serious Party With the Coen Brothers
On March 22, I went to a “Serious Night” party at B’nai Emet synagogue, in St. Louis Park, MN where the bar mitzvah scenes as well as some others in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man” were filmed. One of the audience members recounted his query to one of the Coen brothers asking why…
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Books Taking a Cold Shower in Philip Roth’s Room
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
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Culture Cooking Up a Novel With Katharine Weber
Katharine Weber is the author of the award-winning novel, “Triangle” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Her new novel, “True Confections,” plays with the characters’ and readers’ sense of truth. In the spirit of protagonist Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, the narrator of “True Confections,” the following interview may not have happened exactly as written. But these…
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Culture Sweet Morsels of Faction
True Confections By Katharine Weber Shaye Areheart Books, 288 pages, $22.00. Look online, and you’ll see a Web site for Zip’s Candies, complete with an online order form for their three varieties of confections. Katharine Weber’s new novel, “True Confections,” is about a candy company, Zip’s Candies, and the lives and loves of the Ziplinsky…
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News Bringing the Text Outside Its Bounds
Literary critic Frank Kermode, in his 1996 work, “The Sense of an Ending,” reminds us that we must often re-evaluate an entire text in light of its conclusion. With that in mind, let us examine the end of the Torah. On a plot level, we all know that Moses dies. Fine. But which are the…
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