Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist By Jay A. Gertzman University Press of Florida, 416 pages, $74.95 Biographies of book publishers are scarce, though the possibility of one or another is frequently announced, never to appear. Their lives, I once conjectured, had too many uncomfortable secrets that couldn’t be revealed, even after they’ve died. Consider that no…
‘Yudl’: And Selected Short Stories By Layle Silbert Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $17.95 Layle Silbert’s “Yudl” opens with the protagonist, an immigrant Jew with a thick accent and heavy socialist leanings, inspecting a building that appears incomplete. “With its empty unglassed windows,” the three-story-high, red brick building “could be a new building not yet…
The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never. The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,”…
Back in high school, I was friends with the Salinger boys, but I wasn’t really one of them. As I recall it now, there were three: John, Thom and Barnaby (I’ve changed two of their names and I’ve left one the same, for reasons you’ll probably figure out later). You could recognize the Salinger boys…
The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, Larry N. Mayer grew up in the Bronx, NY. His first book, “Who Will Say Kaddish?: A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland” was published by Syracuse University Press in 2002. He has worked with at-risk high school students for over fifteen years, and wrote about his experiences…
On my first trip to Israel, just hours after I landed in Tel Aviv, my Israeli cousin Benny told me that he had nearly 300 family letters dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I had come to Israel to research a book about the family that Benny and I have in common, and this…
Those of you who have strayed through antiquarian bookshops will have, on occasion, chanced upon particularly unique-looking books. Perhaps a volume bound and covered in leather or vellum, as likely or not adorned with ornate designs or engravings. Maybe the cover has been embossed with an ancient typeface? These books might have special features such…
Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers,” is about seven of the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. It is their story and Israel’s story in the years that unfolded. In this excerpt, the first of two being published by the Forward, two of those paratroopers, Hanan Porat and Yoel…
Earlier this month, my social media feeds were full of comments about the recent Pew Study, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. Even more than the actual study though, it was the New York Times article about the findings that generated the most conversation, with its telling headline, “Poll Shows Major Shift in Identity of U.S….
In her latest book, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” American historian Wendy Lower takes on an under-examined aspect of Holocaust scholarship: What role did ordinary women have in perpetrating the horrors of the Third Reich? The book, for the most part, takes place not on actual killing fields, but in the…
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, I knew that Philip Roth had not won. A colleague condescended: “I never liked Roth,” a put-down to me, a Miltonist and teacher of Renaissance literature, who really doesn’t know better. A couple of decades ago, someone would have mentioned the more elegant, supposedly more disciplined and…
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