He escaped one ghetto only to find himself imprisoned in another
Santiago Amigorena's novel imagines his grandfather's life in Argentina and the one he left behind in Poland
Santiago Amigorena's novel imagines his grandfather's life in Argentina and the one he left behind in Poland
Our favorite new releases, plus a trip to New York's antiquarian book fair
Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
Midway through “Evening,” Nessa Rapoport’s second novel, two teenage sisters stand in the bathroom, squabbling. Eve is readying herself for a date with Laurie, an older boy who happens to be a friend of her sister, Tam, and Tam is scolding her: For the steam with which she’s filled their bathroom, the perfume she’s sprayed…
Author’s Note: The following is the first of an eight-part series. It is a work of thinly-veiled fiction. Which means that it is more true than most of what you’ll read on the subject, even if it’s not always, you know, totally technically factual. There’s a good chance you know him. If you’ve been to…
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. As soon as they settled at their table, Leah looked at him and asked: “What’s your father’s relationship with God?” She sat facing him in some colorful thing, something fuzzy it seemed. His eyes roamed the room and then settled back on his tea…
For Herman Wouk, who turned 102 in May, the “main task” of his life has been using his novels to teach readers about history. “To, so far as I could, fix down in literature what happened in World War II and the Holocaust,” he told CBS Sunday Morning. “That was my main task.” Wouk, who…
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. And so after some perfunctory small talk, an appointment was arranged. Yankel would meet with someone called Leah Spielman (he scribbled this into his small appointment book), daughter of Abe and Helen Spielman, refugees from the Old World, now living in Flatbush. “Appointment”…
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