Shoshana Olidort
By Shoshana Olidort
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Culture Tracing an Adoptee’s Novel Past
By Blood By Ellen Ullman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 387 pages, $27 “I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.” It’s a line Ellen Ullman says she has repeated to herself many times, as an adopted person, and one she likes so much that she put it in the mouth of the central character in…
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The Schmooze Historic Yiddish Newspaper Now Online
For Yiddish enthusiasts — among them academics, writers, and history buffs — it may seem that there is a perpetual dearth of good news. It would be silly to try and argue against such negativity — after all the evil eye is always watching. Still, even the darkest among us finds comfort in the rare…
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Culture Making a Killing From Communication
The Flame Alphabet By Ben Marcus Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95 In the beginning, there was language and also a tree of knowledge. Then human beings got wind of all that, and things started to come undone. We in the digital age are constantly bemoaning the breakdown of real communication and the impending demise of the…
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Culture Chicago’s Love And Shame
Love and Shame and Love By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 448 pages, $24.99 Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love” is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff…
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The Schmooze A Speakeasy Grows in Brooklyn
In the 1920s, at the height of Prohibition, underground saloons called speakeasies proliferated around the country. They got their name — according to an 1891 New York Times article — from one Kate Hester, who ran such a saloon in her Pennsylvania home, and who was known for telling her customers to “speak easy” when…
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Books Q&A: Sara Y. Aharon on Jews of Afghanistan
“From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States” by Sara Y. Aharon tells the story of Afghanistan’s Jewish community and its resettlement in the United States. The American Sephardi Federation held a book launch party November 3 at the Center for Jewish History. Before the event, Aharon, whose…
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Culture Bearing Silent Witness
Until the Dawn’s Light By Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Jeffrey M. Green Schocken Books, 240 pages, $26 ‘Until the Dawn’s Light” opens with a mother and son on the run. What they are escaping, as they travel by train from city to city across Europe, is revealed only just before the novel’s end. But there’s…
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Culture Fictionalizing the Holocaust
The Emperor of Lies By Steve Sem-Sandberg Translated by Sarah Death Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 664 pages, $30 Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure…
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