Yevgeniya Traps
By Yevgeniya Traps
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Culture Ab Cahan’s Ghost Returns in Cartoon Form
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
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Culture Snow Is Both Signal and Static for Artist Kon Trubkovich
The idea behind Moscow-born Jewish artist Kon Trubkovich’s upcoming show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York is at once simple and complicated, which is often, and certainly in this case, a good thing for an idea. The idea, as described in Trubkovich’s excitable but considered delivery, “is basically snow.” In practice, this translates to…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Does Not Have a Self-Esteem Problem
You might suppose, should you have any familiarity with the writings of Gary Shteyngart, which are widely (and not inaccurately) assumed to be autobiographical, that the author has a bit of a self-loathing problem. Many people do: Papa Shteyngart, for example, frequently exhorts his “Little Son,” “Don’t write like a self-hating Jew.” Papa and Mama…
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Culture No One Cared About Sex Education in Soviet Russia
● The Scent of Pine By Lara Vapnyar Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25 Twist endings must be well-beloved, so often are they deployed today. (Here’s a twist: Let things be what they are.) To be fair, late-in-the-game surprises, especially when things add up, more or less, are mostly a reviewing annoyance, forcing a reckoning…
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Culture How Ileana Sonnabend Became MoMA’s Ambassador of the New
It sounds like the beginning of a riddle, or the setup for a logic problem. How to reconcile these two facts: (1) Ileana Sonnabend was not an artist; (2) the Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small but significant show to Ileana Sonnabend and anointing her “ambassador for the new.” Actually, the distance between…
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Culture How 2013 Became the Year of Bernie Madoff
Here is a corollary to Marx’s great insight that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, itself a clarification of Hegel’s sense that people and events recur: Scandal, too, will repeat itself; first as laboriously documented news, then as thinly veiled fiction. Consider the case of Bernard “Bernie” Madoff: Even the name seems…
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Culture Philip Roth Isn’t a Misogynist. Really.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books By Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $27 Now that Philip Roth has quit (or “quit,” depending on the degree to which you find his retirement announcement believable) writing, the oeuvre assessments have begun. One of the first is Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound.” Subtitled…
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Culture Avoiding the Siberia of Capitalism, a Life Without Music
You Must Go and Win By Alina Simone Faber and Faber, Inc., 256 pages, $14 I ask for your indulgence while I broadly generalize about young immigrants brought to this country from the former Soviet Union as children, American raised, if not, strictly speaking, eligible for the presidency: There are only two kinds. The first…
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