Daniel Elkind
By Daniel Elkind
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Culture For Isaac Asimov, Galactic Talmudist, on his 100th birthday
Editor’s Note: Isaac Asimov, whose 100th birthday falls on January 2, 2020, is one of very few popular authors whose published works far exceed their number of years on earth. By some counts, Asimov’s books nearly come to 500. A polymath of remarkable output, the writer, chemist and professor of biochemistry, who died in 1992…
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Culture Self-Righteous Gentiles
In the vast graveyard that is Europe, there lies a sacred plot reserved for the Weimar Republic — Germany’s bright but stillborn sanctuary for liberalism, libertinism and a host of other projected freedoms. Idealized, treated more often as an allegory than as a historical event, and celebrated as much for its exiles as for its…
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Culture A Yiddish Cat Still Laughing After Hot, Black Fire
Cat in the Ghetto By Rachmil Bryks Translated by S. Morris Engel Persea Books, 176 pages, $14.00 Between his 1939 book of Yiddish poetry, “Yung Grin Mai” (“Young Green May”) and his caustic novella, “A Cat in the Ghetto,” lay the Holocaust: Skaryýsko-Kamienna, where Rachmil Bryks was born in 1912; Lodz, to which he was…
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Culture Galactic Talmudist: The Pebble That Started It All, Rolls Again
Between 1950 and 1969, Isaac Asimov became a publishing industry unto himself. From “Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan,” to “Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts” and “Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor,” he was celebrated as much for his success and prolificity as for his wit, curiosity and erudition. Photographers asked him to pose with his many…
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Culture Heard it Through the Grapevine
Rogov’s Guide to Israeli Wines 2009 By Daniel Rogov The Toby Press, 400 pages, $19.95. As far as we know, Thucydides was the first to judge a society by its knowledge or ignorance of the fruit-bearing vine. Classifying a civilization according to its cultivation of grapes and olives, the father of the historiographical essay saw…
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Culture Every Word of Oscar-winning Oscar
**The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II ** By Oscar Hammerstein II Edited by Amy Asch Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $65. Strange as it is, “The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II” is, like its subject — and unlike its hero — a musical in its own right. Physically Broadway-sized (11.6 by 10.8 and…
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Culture Touring America’s Retirement Communities
Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias By Andrew D. Blechman Atlantic Monthly Press, 256 pages, $25. Del Webb’s Sun Cities in the Arizona desert; The Villages north of Orlando, Fla.; a new Catholic-themed town called Ave Maria: Home to nearly 12 million people, these are America’s largest and most popular gated retirement communities, or, as…
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Culture Israel, in Polyethylene and Concrete
The Girl on the FridgeBy Etgar Keret Translated from the Hebrew by MiriamShlesinger and Sondra Silverston Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $12. Since its rebirth as a modern language, Hebrew has undergone a metamorphosis, from the closed but immensely rich language of sacred literature — with all the references and reverences and books within…
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