Here’s something you probably didn’t know: Back in the 1990s, advertisements for a drink called Limonana featuring celebrities such as soccer player Eli Ohana were placed on Israeli buses. But customers who actually tried to buy the lemon and mint lemonade in local stores wound up disappointed. The drink didn’t exist, but had been made…
A family rumor was the genesis of David Laskin’s extraordinary new book, “The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the 20th Century.” Laskin heard from his mother who heard it from her cousin Barbara who heard it from her parents: that they were related to Lazar Kaganovich, henchman of Joseph Stalin and a perpetrator…
The Holy Days are barely behind us, and we’re already preparing for Hanukkah (the first day of which, as some have realized, coincides with American Thanksgiving this year). But between these events comes something else that should be on your calendar: Jewish Book Month. Running this year from October 26 to November 26, Jewish Book…
Some Congress members are working to ensure that Iraqi Jewish artifacts now on display in Washington are returned directly to the Iraqi Jewish community and not the government. Reps. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) are leading the bipartisan effort to return the thousands of books, photos, texts and other materials that were found…
The World of the End By Ofir Touché Gafla Translated by Mitch Ginsburg Tor Books, 368 pages, $16.98 A recent cartoon published in the New Yorker shows a group of people standing by a grave. A woman is speaking, and the caption reads, “Wherever he is, I know he’ll be upgraded.” Might the afterworld —…
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…
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