There is that moment, when you’ve said or done something that possibly you will regret, but can’t be certain. Such were the seconds which followed the thin metallic thump of my envelope addressed to Saul Bellow as it briefly slid and fell to the bottom of my neighborhood mailbox. Years of musing about this letter…
1 45,635 Jews live in Minnesota. 2 The first Jews settled in Minnesota in 1849, nine years before the state joined the union in May, 1858. 3 Floyd Bjørnstjerne Olson, a member of Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party, was Minnesota’s Governor from 1931-1936. When he was growing up, Olson served as his neighbor’s Shabbos goy and…
At a coffee shop in northeast Minneapolis, a short walk from his home, Adam Levy turns over his left forearm to show the spider tattoo that his son Daniel designed. It’s from the day he and Daniel got tattoos together, a father-son outing that left him with this souvenir. Levy is the front man for…
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
The stamp of Sephardic Jews on Seattle is strong, from Benaroya Hall, where the Seattle Symphony plays, to the real estate holdings of the Alhadeff family, best known for the now-closed Longacres race track. But the ink of Sephardic influence is fading from Pike Place Market. The oldest operating market in the country, the biggest…
1) 297,885 Jews live in Illinois. 2) The first recorded Jewish resident in Illinois was John Hays who lived in Cahokia, near the Missouri border. He was a farmer, trader, and soldier, and served as St. Clair County’s postmaster until 1798, when he was appointed sheriff. 3) Music entrepreneur Sol Bloom developed the Midway Plaisance,…
Compulsion By Meyer Levin Fig Tree Books, 480 pages, $15.95 Why, in 2015, should we be interested in a novel that was written 60 years ago? Moreover, why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago? When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one…
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