A few years after I learned to read, I encountered a formative image in one of Sydney Taylor’s “All of a Kind Family” books. I remember it with absolute clarity: A daughter admires her mother’s figure, unique among the Eastern European Jewish women of the Lower East Side. They tend, she thinks, to look like…
Last week, the New York Times named its “100 Notable Books of 2016.” Included in their number were many reviewed by the Forward. Those included Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here I Am,” Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow,” Affinity Konar’s “Mischling,” Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk,” Adam Kirsch’s “The People and the…
I read most of Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo” on a bus that was bringing me back to New York City after a weekend spent upstate. The wintry landscape flashing by was beautiful in a bleak way: leafless forests, gentle hills. That afternoon, as I worked my way through the second part…
Ayelet Tsabari, author of “The Best Place On Earth,” is the winner of the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Tsabari takes home $100,000 for winning the prize, which was announced Monday. The collection of short stories explores Israeli history through the eyes of Mizrahi characters. “I grew up not seeing myself and my…
A Replacement Life: A Novel By Boris Fishman Harper, 336 pages, $25.99 Like the Soviet Union, from which its main characters hail, Boris Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” is a good idea in theory, if not in execution. After his grandmother dies, aspiring writer Slava Gelman is asked by his grandfather to forge a…
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