Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture Survival Ode: Fred Wander’s Wartime Story
The Seventh Well By Fred Wander Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann W.W. Norton, 192 pages, $23.95. Fritz Rosenblatt was born in 1917 to Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Vienna, and died as Fred Wander in Vienna in 2006; his adopted surname was meant to describe the years in between. He spent his adolescence revisiting the…
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Culture R.B. Kitaj’s Final Draft
Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses By R.B. Kitaj Yale University Press, 160 pages, with 41 black-and-white illustrations, $26. Mysticism is what happens when superstition is given a system. But when system and superstition become combined in mystical art — or in writing about such art — the…
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Culture Tracing Galicia: A Talk With Omer Bartov
The great and yet never autonomous province of Galicia was a bridge to the East from Europe. Today, Galicia is centered in Ukraine, with a significant portion partitioned into neighboring Poland. The proper name of this phantom land was once “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria,” named after its principal Ukrainian, or Ruthenian, cities. At…
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Culture Star-Crossed Sabras
If You Awaken Love By Emuna Elon Translated by David Hazony The Toby Press, 229 pages, $14.95. Adolescence is the age of fanaticism. It is the age at which we first fall in love. It is the age at which our politics, and our tastes in God and in art, have often become the most…
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Culture The Formalist’s Formalist: On Viktor Shklovsky
Zoo, or Letters Not About Love Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 164 pages, $11.95. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 304 pages, $13.95. Third Factory Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 125 pages, $12.95. Knight’s Move Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 184 pages, $13.95….
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Culture Bridging Body and Soul
Bearing the Body By Ehud Havazelet Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $24. The revelation buried within Ehud Havazelet’s first novel, “Bearing the Body,” is welcome and rare: Upon first opening its covers, the thought occurs that this novel, as a body of work, must have been borne of a heavy labor (Havazelet’s last book…
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Culture A Life Torn Between Myth and Fact
Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life By Philip Davis Oxford University Press, 400 pages, $34.95. A writer both of the real and of great fantasy, Bernard Malamud was a man whose biography can be read in those two not necessarily contradictory ways: Realistically, he was a stooped, myopic, Brooklyn-born professor of literature who wrote various and…
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Culture Reviving the Reputation of a Man of One Book
Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski Edited by Tadeusz Drewnowski, translated from the Polish by Alicia Nitecki Northwestern University Press, 384 pages, $35. Before the war destroyed a particular pretentiousness of European literature, there was a favored Latin phrase (some say taken from Augustine, others say from Aquinas) often used to describe a believer’s…
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