Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture An Oracle of Humanism’s Survival
If the number, variety and talent of a country’s writers should be apportioned to that country’s population or size, then small Hungary is operating at an incredible surplus. But if the number, variety and talent of a country’s writers should be apportioned, instead, to the trauma suffered by that country — adjusted to the number…
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Culture An Offering To the Priests Of Yiddish
The Cross and Other Jewish Stories Lamed Shapiro Yale University Press, 226 pages, $30. At the end of “White Challah,” one of 16 stories included in Lamed Shapiro’s posthumous and definitive “The Cross, and Other Jewish Stories,” the aftermath of a pogrom is described in the following manner: “Pillars of smoke and pillars of flame…
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Culture Easy Reading for the Serious Music Set
Overture By Yael Goldstein Doubleday, 304 pages, $24.95. Golden-brown and beautiful, curvy in all the right places: a generous bottom, a bounteous top; the waist nicely pinched. Her measurements: 355 millimeters for the length of her back, 130 millimeters for the length of her neck. Ebony and ivory. What a body. And that’s just the…
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Culture Speaks British, Acts Yiddish
Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $26. Tabula rasa — meaning a blank slate, or a clean start — is, both as term and as concept, irreparably Latin, foreign and so forbidden to us, whether by God, history… or British novelist Howard Jacobson. And not just because we are “Jew Jew…
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News Bagpipers and Babushkas Mourn Fallen Cop
On Sunday morning, March 18, Kings Highway in southern Brooklyn terminated in a thick blue line. At the intersection of Flatbush and Flatlands Avenues, in front of the modest I.J. Morris funeral home, more than 1,000 of New York’s finest gathered to remember and honor one of their own. The previous Wednesday, auxiliary police officer…
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Culture Kissing and Telling
The Great Kisser By David Evanier Rager Media, Inc. 179 pages, $24.95 Though David Evanier should best be known as a writer of stories that feign to punch and kick in the upstart manner of their Chosen People, he also traffics in the ethnicities of others, having authored nonfiction volumes on singers Bobby Darin and…
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Culture Paying Tribute to a Living Legend
Novelist, story-writer and memoirist Jakov Lind turns 80 on February 10. No longer a refugee and no longer writing, for the past decade he’s been unwillingly rooted in London, slowly dying from a motor neuron disease. He is scandalously under-read in his native Austria, and ignobly neglected, too, in the countries of his second written…
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Culture Early Hitler, Late Mailer
The Castle in the Forest By Norman Mailer Random House, 496 pages, $27.95. What to say about what might be Norman Mailer’s last novel, except to voice hope for a novel that might’ve been better? Or maybe to ask the gods to give him more time — another year or two, or 10 — to…
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