Yevgeniya Traps
By Yevgeniya Traps
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Culture The Year of the Former Soviet Author
In the recently published memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,” Lev Golinkin recounts the story of his family’s 1989 departure from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union. The Golinkins make their way to America, relying on the kindness of strangers; unsure of what they might find, they are guided largely by the…
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Culture Some of Martin Amis’s Best Friends Are Jews. Really.
● The Zone of interest By Martin Amis Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95 Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest,” which is set in post-Wannsee Auschwitz, is dedicated “[t]o those who survived and to those who did not; to the memory of Primo Levi… and to the memory of Paul Celan.” The dedication continues: “to…
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Culture Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Author
● Not that Kind of Girl By Lena Dunham Random House, 265 Pages, $28 I like Lena Dunham. I liked “Delusional Downtown Divas,” her web series for Index Magazine. I liked “Tiny Furniture,” her 2010 film. And I like “Girls” (except for that one episode at the end of the first season when Jessa married…
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Culture The Soviet Pastoral of David Bezmozgis
● THE BETRAYERS By David Bezmozgis Little, Brown, 240 pages, $26 David Bezmozgis’s slim new novel, “The Betrayers,” seems at first deceptively simple, then, at second glance, deceptively complex. Set against a historical and political background that becomes too heavy a burden to bear on its slender scaffolding, it is the story of a noble…
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Culture When Anya Ulinich Plays the Dating Game
● Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel By Anya Ulinich Penguin Books, 362 pages, $18 If the title of Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel,” sounds familiar, you are probably thinking of Bernard Malamud’s story “The Magic Barrel,” which concerns one Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student who, on the verge of ordination, must find a…
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Culture A New Literary Take On Soviet-Jewish Immigration
In this year, the year of the Soviet American Jew, when it seems like every man, woman and child who hails from the good old USSR and owns a writing implement has detailed his or her experience, fictionally or otherwise, let us praise Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose new novel “Panic in a Suitcase” makes something unexpectedly…
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Culture How the Forger of Brighton Beach Duped The Claims Conference
A Replacement Life: A Novel By Boris Fishman Harper, 336 pages, $25.99 Like the Soviet Union, from which its main characters hail, Boris Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” is a good idea in theory, if not in execution. After his grandmother dies, aspiring writer Slava Gelman is asked by his grandfather to forge a…
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Culture The Cross-Dressing Racecar Driver Who Aided the Nazis (It’s Mostly True!)
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 By Francine Prose Harper, 448 pages, $26.99 The plot of Francine Prose’s new novel, “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” sounds, in an admittedly reductive summary, slightly preposterous: A cross-dressing French lesbian racecar driver collaborates with the Nazis, revealing where the Maginot Line ends, thus enabling the…
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