Steven G. Kellman
By Steven G. Kellman
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Culture Disturbingly bigoted and irredeemably misogynistic? How will future readers view Philip Roth?
The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography By Jacques Berlinerblau University of Virginia Press, 208 pp, $29.95 According to an old joke, the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick Tonto find themselves surrounded. “We are going to die,” the Lone Ranger says, to which Tonto replies: “What do you mean ‘we?’” Though…
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Culture In search of a story of Jewish Vienna, a daughter becomes a detective
Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind By Julie Metz Atria Books, 320 pp, $28 Intended as satire, “The City Without Jews” ended up as prophecy. Published in 1922, the novel imagines an antisemitic Austrian government mobilizing hundreds of boxcars to deport all of Vienna’s Jews….
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Culture In a historical time-bomb, echoes of Kafka and portents of Hitchcock
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Translated from German by Philip Boehm Metropolitan Books, 288 pp, $24.99 Unable to remember the phone number of the “friend” who offered to buy his house for an extortionist trifle, Otto Silbermann reflects that: “All misfortune stems from forgetfulness.” In “The Passenger,” Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, attempts to…
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Culture Heschel, Lipstadt, Wisse and Schneerson are here — but is that enough?
The New Jewish Canon: Ideas & Debates 1980-2015 Edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin Academic Studies Press, 492 pp, $39.95 What might now be called “the old Jewish canon” would consist of the Tanakh, Mishnah, and Gemara, as well as a few other widely studied texts such as “The Guide for the Perplexed”…
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Culture Ellis Island reminds us that immigrants were once welcome in America
Ellis Island: A People’s History By Małgorzata Szejnert Translated from Polish by Sean Gasper Bye Scribe, 384 pages, $28 Between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island processed 12 million newcomers. About 40 percent of today’s Americans are descended from the men, women, and children who passed through the country’s principal immigration absorption center. If the United…
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Culture A daughter of Vienna returns to a traumatic past — and finds her home
I Belong to Vienna: A Jewish Family’s Story of Exile and Return By Anna Goldenberg Translated from German by Alta L. Price New Vessel Press, 207 pp, $16.95 Burdened by the legacy of trauma, children of Holocaust survivors such as Eva Hoffman, Thane Rosenbaum and Art Spiegelman face the challenge of penetrating their parents’ obdurate…
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Culture Meticulous In Literature, Messy In Life — The Real Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 By Zachary Leader Knopf, 784 pp, $40 By Steven G. Kellman In 1998, when the Modern Library polled readers to determine the 100 best novels in English, two books by Saul Bellow — “Henderson the Rain King” and “The Adventures of Augie March” — made the…
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Culture Seymour Hersh’s Rise From Dry Cleaner To America’s Supersnoop
Reporter: A Memoir By Seymour M. Hersh Knopf, 352 pp, $27.95 The exploits of Lowell Bergman, Carl Bernstein, David Corn, Michael Isikoff, Lucy Komisar, Sydney Schanberg, and I.F. Stone might lead one to conclude that investigative journalism is as Jewish a profession as stand-up comedy and matzoh baking. Dubbed “a national treasure” by David Halberstam,…
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