Ilan Stavans
By Ilan Stavans
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Culture The Importance of Writing About Writing
A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World By Morris Dickstein Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $26.95. * * *| Why write about literature? The answer isn’t money, fame or love. Nor is it immortality, because criticism — a few exceptions notwithstanding — seldom lasts. So why? The question is posed and answered…
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Culture The Story of an Icon, Still Not Told
Why isn’t Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer an international icon? In the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and César Chávez, Meyer found resourcefulness in the crossroads where politics and religion meet. An American born in 1928 and a graduate of Dartmouth College, he and his wife, Naomi, moved to Argentina in…
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Culture I Found It at the Movies
In 1965, Pauline Kael published “I Lost It at the Movies,” an anthology of her reviews and essays for The New Yorker. As I look back, her title should be inverted to define my own experience: I Found It at the Movies. I owe my passion for films to my father. He is a devotee…
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Culture FALL BOOKS
Letters 1928-1946: Isaiah Berlin Edited by Henry Hardy Cambridge University Press, 755 pages, $40. ——- A couple of years ago, while visiting the offices of The Atlantic Monthly, I commented on my admiration of Isaiah Berlin to a friend of mine, Cullen Murphy, the magazine’s executive editor. Few modern thinkers strike me as being as…
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Culture Ladino and Yiddish –– Those Tools of Modernity
Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires By Sarah Abrevaya Stein Indiana University Press, 310 pages, $75 —– I’m thrilled to review this book by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, but not because it is well written. It is unnervingly…
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Culture Deconstructing Bashevis
Addicts, everyone knows, are difficult to satisfy: They don’t want more of the same, but they are ready to test limits, to be exigent in their rewards. Since the first moment I encountered the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer — in Spanish translations in the 1970s — I have been a confessed addict. He struck…
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Culture From the Silence of a Prison Cell in Uruguay
‘Silence is the real crime against humanity,” states Mauricio Rosencof in his wrenching autobiographical novel, “The Letters That Never Came.” He ought to know: Rosencof, who was accused of being a subversive and attempting against Uruguayan sovereignty, spent 13 years in prison before regaining his freedom in 1985, with the return of the democracy to…
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News So We’re All Sephardim Now? Not Exactly
Sepharad By Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden Harcourt, 384 pages, $27. * * *| There is something utterly annoying, even infuriating, about “Sepharad,” the second novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina — a Spaniard born in 1956 — to be translated into English. Originally written in Madrid in 2000, “Sepharad”…
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