In the recently published memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,” Lev Golinkin recounts the story of his family’s 1989 departure from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union. The Golinkins make their way to America, relying on the kindness of strangers; unsure of what they might find, they are guided largely by the…
Getty Images The Jewish literary couple that was too good to be true is no longer. Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss have legally separated, The New York Post’s Page Six reports. But according to their rep, the couple actually “split amicably about a year ago.” Foer, author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud…
One thing we know for sure is that 2014 will be a big year for young post-Soviet Jews who write in English. Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming memoir, which he did not title “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Jewness,” has already called attention to itself with a four-minute video that almost but not quite redeems the genre…
The Forward 50 is our annual look at the American Jews who made a difference in the past year. Each day, we will spotlight one of our Top 5 picks, leading up to Sunday night when the entire package — along with some very special surprises — will go live. There was no Philip Roth…
Dozens of the world’s literary stars have added their names to an Israeli writers’ petition urging the army and the Netanyahu government not to destroy Palestinian villages in the southern Hebron hills. Renowned Israeli author David Grossman penned the petition, which has now also been signed by Nobel laureates in literature J. M. Coetzee, Mario…
For most of her adult life, Beverly Akerman was a molecular genetics researcher at McGill University and the Montreal Children’s Hospital. But in 2003, after several years of feeling an underlying malaise and professional unhappiness, she decided to make a mid-life career switch. Following dreams she set aside for 20 years as a busy working…
Don’t be rushing to your local bookstore or fumbling with your Kindle to download the new book that Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel was said to have been writing along with his buddy President Barack Obama. The two are still BFF’s. But it turns out something must’ve gotten lost in the translation about the book thing….
Seminal author Philip Roth, whose novels explored modern Jewish-American life, has told a French magazine that he will write no more books because he has lost his passion for it. The author of such novels as “American Pastoral”, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and “Portnoy’s Complaint” slipped his retirement announcement into an interview…
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