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In Amos Oz’s “Rhyming Life and Death” it’s a sticky night in Tel Aviv, and the Author is to give a reading. Surveying the room, he begins to fashion life stories for the people attending. He takes note of a boy of about 16, moving restlessly in his chair. “He looks unhappy,” the Author thinks….
Laura and Marina are strangers. Their home in London is an island with a foreign culture, a cramped flat in Bayswater in which they are themselves outsiders. Their keepers — Laura’s mother-in-law, Marina’s grandmother, and her two sisters — are Hungarian, and speak with a heavily-accented English. Dar-link, they say. Von-darefool. Tair-ible. They host parties…
Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe By Anthony Clavane Quercus Publishing, 304 Pages Anthony Clavane’s accomplished and engaging work “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?” now out in paperback, is not about what Jews have given to English soccer, so much as what soccer has given to English…
Things I Don’t Want to Know: A Response to George Orwell’s Why I Write By Deborah Levy Notting Hill Editions In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell identified four great motives for writing, including aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. The other, he observed, was that writers are “vain and self-centred,” motivated…
Stephen Sondheim turns 83 today — a birthday always worth noting, though this time it will pass without an entire year of galas and concerts, as was the case on the composer’s 80th. Even considering the Jewish contributors to modern American musical theater — Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz…
Shalom Auslander was awarded the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize — the United Kingdom’s top prize for Jewish literature — for his debut novel, “Hope: a Tragedy”, at a February 27 event at London’s Jewish Book Week. Diana Reich, chair of the JQ-Wingate Prize judging panel, praised Auslander’s work as “bursting with raw talent, shockingly irreverent, [and]…
“Sometimes I think things I know are not true.” Avishag states this to herself, having been called into her commander’s office for almost running over a cliff during a fraught chemical attack simulation, in one of the opening episodes of Shani Boianjiu’s début novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid”. Hearing this line for…
“In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer,” A. B. Yehoshua told his audience at London’s Jewish Book Week on February 24. It is rational, he proposed, because the novelist “deals in the writing with morality” and is constantly grappling with essential questions. Politics was indeed an inescapable subject…
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