This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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Books S. An-sky: More Than Just ‘The Dybbuk’
Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions Eugene M. Avrutin, ed. Brandeis University Press University Press of New England 2009; 228 pages $39.95 For frenziedly creative polymaths, the French may have Jean Cocteau, but the Jews have Belarus-born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, who wrote poems, fiction, ethnography and plays under the pen name…
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Books Double Trouble: Two Newish Novels Sport Eerily Similar Covers
Here’s a situation that harkens back to flipping through children’s magazines in my pediatrician’s office waiting room: What’s the difference between these two pictures? Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “I’m So Happy For You” (Back Bay Books, July 2009) and Laurie Graff’s “The Shiksa Syndrome” (Broadway Books, October, 2008) may have hit shelves more than a year apart,…
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Books Kindling Desire
The only meaning listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun “kindle” is: “The young (of any animal), a young one.” And, despite Amazon’s best efforts, it’s still much easier to find out that information on my phone or my PC than it is on their own Kindle. For those who haven’t yet been…
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Books Chagall’s Political Art
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to…
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Books Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein *Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75. * In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in…
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Books Women’s Work
Each month, a handful of New York feminists, who are also students of Yiddish, get together in each other’s homes to read the work of Yiddish women writers. Several writers, a couple of filmmakers and librarians, a culinary scholar and a singer/songwriter form the core of the group. Our population, however, expands and contracts, following…
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Books The Poetry of Language
There are many bilingual Jewish books in which the two languages are dependent on each other. The Gemara is a mostly Aramaic reworking of the Hebrew-language Mishnah. The stories of Reb Nachman of Breslov were told in Yiddish, but their first written versions were in Hebrew. The majority of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work is now…
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Books Kids Lit: More Yiddish Books Begin To Sprout
Let’s say you’re raising your children in Yiddish and you want to buy them some books. What do you do? If you walk into the children’s section of any bookstore, you’ll be deluged with a huge number of engaging, beautifully illustrated books, from board books to chapter books to beautifully rendered pop-ups. But none of…
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