Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-born Jewish writer who emigrated to America in 1979 at the age of seven, spoke only Russian in his parents’ home and did not lose his Russian accent until he was a teenager. His third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, from which he is scheduled to read at the International Festival…
Category: Current & Featured
Ozick’s Foreign Bodies
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Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick’s sixth and possibly best novel, is modeled after The Ambassadors, a late novel (1903) by her idolized “Master,” Henry James, that he considered his best work. James’s novel explores what was perhaps his favourite theme: the juxtaposition of uncouth America and the more refined, cultured world of Old Europe. Ozick’s aim,…
A remembrance of J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)
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Not having published a thing in almost half a century apparently hasn’t diminished the fame of America’s most reclusive writer. J. D. Salinger died in January at the age of 91, prompting some hopeful observers to wonder whether he left a vault full of manuscripts to be published posthumously. Born in New York in 1919…
I.B. Singer: Prolific Even in Death
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In Love and Exile, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s revealing autobiographical trilogy, he describes an early story, “In the World of Chaos,” that was never published. Its hero “was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead,” Singer recounted. “He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be…
The immortal Abraham Cahan
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“Dis a choych?” These three little words, which appear in Abraham Cahan’s sparkling story The Imported Bridegroom (1898), may be among the most sublimely ironic utterances in all of modern Jewish literature. The story opens with the unmarried Flora idly reading Little Dorrit as her wealthy father, Asriel Stroon, prepares to visit Pravly, his childhood…
The Origin of Ivanhoe’s Rebecca
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Scottish novelist Walter Scott’s portraits of the Jew Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca in his classic medieval romance Ivanhoe (1819) provides English literature with its strongest positive counterbalance to the stereotypical conception of the Jew as a dark misanthropic being along the lines of Shakespeare’s Shylock. Thackeray, who grew up with Ivanhoe, described…
Going Gentle Into That Good Night
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The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, were the stuff of urban legend. A couple of eccentrics, they lived in a grand Fifth Avenue brownstone left to them by their parents who died when the boys were young adults. Langley, wounded by mustard gas in the First Great War, became a classic hoarder of junk from…
Harry Bernstein’s ‘Invisible Wall’
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Harry Bernstein was 96 years old when his memoir, “The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers,” was published to great critical acclaim two years ago. Last year he followed up his success with a second memoir, “The Dream,” which similarly has attracted much favourable attention and legions of readers. This year, at 98,…
Stern’s Frozen Rabbi
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Fifteen-year-old Bernard Karp finds a strange heirloom in the food freezer in the basement of his family’s suburban Memphis home: a greenish block of ice containing a frozen rabbi, a Jewish Rip van Winkle lying in peaceful repose as if flash-frozen in the midst of a relaxing afternoon shluff. Confronted at the dinner table, Bernie’s…
On ‘Max And The Cats’
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Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar, who died earlier this year at the age of 73, was a proponent of “magic realism,” a category of fiction prevalent among South American writers and especially evident in two of Scliar’s best known novels, Max And The Cats (1981) and The Centaur In The Garden (1984). As it happens, the…
