Dara Horn
By Dara Horn
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Opinion Holding Hands Across Time From Sinai to Gettysburg and Today
In 2009, when I published “All Other Nights,” a novel about Jewish spies in the Civil War, I was invited to speak at Temple Ohev Sholom in Harrisburg, Pa. I arrived to discover 19th-century military tents in the social hall, populated by Civil War re-enactors in period dress. But as I enjoyed the reception’s matzo…
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Culture Wearing Europe’s Tattoo
Foreign Bodies By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $26 Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition. From ancient times,…
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Culture Don’t Be a Shmuck All Your Life
How To Be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck) By Michael Wex HarperCollins, 224 pages, $24.99. Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book “Born To Kvetch,” is the “Sneaky Chef” of contemporary Jewish culture. Like the cookbook author who advises parents to slip puréed broccoli into the brownie batter, Wex writes books that look and…
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Books Sholom Aleichem: Finding Freedom in America
‘Wandering Stars,” Yiddish master Sholom Aleichem’s comic novel about the Yiddish theater, has just been published in a new translation by Aliza Shevrin. The novel tells the story of Leibl and Reizel, two talented teenagers who flee their backwater shtetl with the help of a traveling Yiddish theater troupe. Sweethearts separated by corrupt theater companies,…
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Culture Sholom Aleichem: A Star Shines Brightly
To read an excerpt from a new translation of “Wandering Stars,” click here. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sholom Aleichem. To celebrate the occasion, a number of events have been planned, and several new translations of his work will be released. On February 9, “Wandering Stars,” his novel about the…
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Culture What We Have Lost: Reading a New Translation of Der Nister’s Yiddish Masterpiece
While giving a lecture in Central Oregon recently about my novel “The World To Come,” whose story incorporates the works of many Yiddish writers, I was asked a remarkable question by someone in the very non-Jewish audience: “What do we lose by not reading Yiddish literature?” The question disturbed me. In its challenge to the…
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Culture Kafka, Divided and Onstage
It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick…
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Culture From ‘The World To Come’
Each month, in coordination with our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. This month, we will feature readings by Dara Horn and Aviya Kushner (for full details, please see sidebar). Below, please find an excerpt from Horn’s new novel, “The World…
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