Forward 50 2014
“What’s funny is that I’m not self-hating at all. I like myself quite a bit,” Gary Shteyngart, 42, told the Forward’s Yevgeniya Traps earlier this year. Luckily, despite the self-loathing that the author, humorist and star of book trailers (featuring his former student James Franco) affects in his comic persona, Shteyngart is not alone in…
Jonathan Eig is The New York Times best-selling author of “Luckiest Man,” “Opening Day,” “Get Capone,” and now, “The Birth of the Pill,” about the race to produce the birth control pill. Before writing books, Eig worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Chicago magazine, The Dallas Morning News and the Times-Picayune. He…
Nora Goodman, the troubled heroine of Diane Lawson’s thriller “A Tightly Raveled Mind,” (read our interview with the author here) might call herself a disciple of Freud. But she follows a long line of Jewish women in crime fiction, from Orthodox mothers to Miami Beach beauticians to wisecracking lawyers. Here are six of our favorite…
When San Antonio psychotherapist Dr. Nora Goodman’s patients start dropping dead, police tell her it’s a coincidence. But the good Dr. Goodman refuses to buy it, and hires a private detective to help figure out if someone’s targeting her practice. Could it be her despised ex-husband, a disturbed patient, or something more nefarious? Author Diane…
When he was 9 years old, Norman Lear had a life-defining epiphany. He was at home one evening, fooling around with a crystal radio set he’d gotten as a gift, when he managed to tune into a broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest. “At 9 I learned that people disliked…
● Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters Edited by Dominic McHugh Oxford University Press, 336 Pages, $39.95 Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French…
In my parents’ basement I found a box of my grandfather’s, marked “C.J. Wildman, personal”; inside it I discovered another, smaller file box labeled “Patient Correspondence, A–G.” The letters were not from patients; they were from the life he left behind in Vienna when he fled the Nazis: half-siblings, cousins, friends — and a girlfriend….
Hugh Roth is the younger son of Henry Roth, author of “Call It Sleep” and “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” Growing up, Hugh worked on his father’s waterfowl farm in Augusta, Maine, in the 1950s. After some decades in and around New York, he now lives on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Rockland,…
● 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…
Regina Kolitz // Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Publisher Heinrich H. Glanz created the Juedisch-Politische Bibliothek [Jewish-Political] series of books in Vienna before it was “confiscated” after Nazi Anschluss in 1938. After emigrating to…
● 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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