Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
After the well-deserved hosannas of praise for the centenary, and subsequent dignified mourning for the demise, of the great French Jewish anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, a backlash seemed inevitable. On October 7, “Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory,” by Patrick Wilcken, presented as the “definitive account of the life, work, and legacy,” was published by…
The story goes that a certain heathen approached the Jewish sage Shammai and asked to be converted, on the condition that he is taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Indignant at receiving such a ludicrous request, Shammai chased the man away. Undeterred, the heathen then approached the sage Hillel with the same…
The American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 at age 92, was a longtime fixture at Columbia University, where he invented such now-standard terms as “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as well as the concept of a “focus group.” A thoughtful new study, out on September 14 from Columbia University Press, “Robert K….
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
Edmund de Waal, a British artist and the son of a clergyman of the Church of England, knew he was missing a vital part of himself, but he wasn’t sure what it was. A middle-aged married father of three, he had spent his adult life ensconced in his London studio, where he made thousands of…
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story By M.M. Silver Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller By Ira Nadel University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to…
When They Come for Us, We?ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry By Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 608 pages, $30 It is easy enough to understand why Gal Beckerman chose the somewhat melodramatic title, ?When They Come for Us, We?ll be Gone,? for his masterful and highly readable history of the…
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends By Tom Segev Doubleday, 448 pages, $32.50 When I was contributing to Simon Wiesenthal?s obituary in 2005 for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, I learned something that surprised me: The legendary Nazi-hunter didn?t personally hunt down a lot of Nazis. Sure, Wiesenthal helped capture some Nazis and their collaborators, and…
To the End of the Land By David Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf, 582 pages, $27.95 There is a moment in David Grossman?s novel, ?See Under: Love,? when an Israeli son of Holocaust survivors gazes at his own sleeping child and remarks to his beaming wife: ??It?s a good thing he can sleep through all the…
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן וועגן דעם ערשטן מאָל וואָס משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָ האָט געטראָגן אַ יאַרמלקע אויף דער באַן.
הײַיאָר האָט מען אָפּגעגעבן כּבֿוד די ייִדישע פּאַרשױנען פֿונעם פֿאָלקלאָר פֿון דער אָרטיקער קהילה.
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