Lev Raphael
By Lev Raphael
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Culture How I discovered a connection to my mother that I never expected to find
He knew his mother survived the Vilna Ghetto, but a trip to Belgium taught the author a good deal more
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Culture A Tale of Two Trains
I am on a train heading into Magdeburg in eastern Germany, an hour or so from Berlin. Sixty-one years ago, my late mother was on a train headed for Magdeburg. Hers didn’t have a dining car or changing electronic displays updating the train’s speed and distance from its next station. She was one of hundreds…
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Culture FALL BOOKS
Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew By Neal Karlen Touchstone, 224 pages, $23. ——— Self-hatred can be fun — for other people, that is. That’s what Neal Karlen learned in college. He could use his profound Jewish self-loathing as a way of attracting mass quantities of shiksas at parties. While guitar-playing non-Jewish…
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Culture This Tale of Mystery Begins With a Corpse –– But Ends With a Twist
Lev Raphael’s latest novel, “The German Money,” is a Book Sense 76 pick. The Outcast Dove By Sharan Newman Forge, 429 pp, $25.95. —- In mysteries it’s a cliché to introduce a corpse on the first page. In her new book, Sharan Newman seems to drearily fulfill that expectation, offering us a dead body in…
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News What’s in a Name? If it’s ‘Grubman,’ A Whole Identity
Swagbelly By D.J. Levien Plume, 240 pages, $13. * * *| Elliott Grubman, the protagonist in screenwriter D.J. Levien’s new novel, is a man split down the middle, and it’s all there in his oxymoronic name. Look at that prissy “Elliott,” a name — like Howard — that brands many post-Holocaust American Jewish men with…
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News The Boring Details of Real-Life Portnoys
The Body of Brooklyn By David Lazar University of Iowa Press, 163 pages, $24.95. * * *| If you thought Philip Roth’s Portnoys were emotionally claustrophobic, essayist David Lazar’s real-life family almost has them beat. Not only did his mother seem to know when he was masturbating, as if she had some kind of sexual…
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News Mysterious Characters
I once heard gay mystery novelist Michael Nava say that he found that some of his most devoted fans were straight, and they read his work because they love to see the world through a different perspective. It turns out that readers of “crime fiction” — a British term for mysteries that is gaining popularity…
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