According to Don Harrán, Sarra Copia Sulam was the first Italian Jewish woman to “excel” as a public literary figure, writing in various forms and leaving a “personal imprint on them.” She was a kind of Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto. Sulam was also prominent because of her beauty and wealth (her husband was…
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), has long been underestimated by readers and fellow writers alike, despite her 80 novels which have sold a reported four billion copies. For example, the astute mystery writer P. D. James, in her newly published “Talking About Detective Fiction,” complains that Christie, with her “pasteboard characters,” has not had a “profound influence…
Open-Eyed Heart-Wide Haggadah By Debra Jill Mazer, edited by Shira Leba Batalion, designed by Margo Jennifer Akroyd Double Gemini Press, 62 pages, $32.95 In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah Commentary by Ari L. Goldman, Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Devora Publishing, 96 pages., $24.95 The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded By Yehuda Berg The Kabbalah Centre…
Tuli Kupferberg — 86 year old beat poet, musician and activist, and famed leader of the avant-folk band The Fugs — has been on the news lately. An article on him appeared in the New York Times in late January , another piece was published here, in the Forward just last week, and Tablet carried…
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time By Judith Shulevitz Random House, 217 pages, $28 ‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography….
The Prophet’s Wife By Milton Steinberg Behrman House, 384 pages, $24.95 One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and…
Blooms of Darkness By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken Books, 2010, 288 pp, $24 Aharon Appelfeld has earned an esteemed, if lonely, reputation for himself as Israel’s writer of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era. This landscape and its immediate aftermath form his near-exclusive literary topography. As a result, he is more often compared to Central European Jewish…
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim Edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Foreword by Dan Wakefield Syracuse University Press, 296 pages, $29.95 Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to…
The fourth assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery By Matt Beynon Rees Soho Crime, 336 pages, $24 When Omar Yussef arrives in Little Palestine – the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood populated by Palestinian-Americans — the aging schoolteacher first finds a headless dead body in his son’s apartment, then watches his son get arrested by an overzealous…
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England By Anthony Julius Oxford University Press, 864 pages, $45 A monumental study of English antisemitism proves an astonishing and controversial achievement. If nothing else, “Trials of the Diaspora” is an extraordinary testament to the brilliance of its author. That Anthony Julius, a top London lawyer…
The Ask By Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $25 He is the anti-hero of the American Jewish novel: bright, only not bright enough; more dreamy than driven, and possessed by insatiable, often misappropriated desires. He does not see himself as beholden to his Jewishness, but neither can he escape it. He was…
