Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Great Tales from the Treasury of Yiddish Folk Literature (Overlook Press) presents an intriguing collection of obscure Yiddish folk tales, translated for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel and spanning more than four centuries. The collection begins with the midrashic “Song of Isaac,” written by an anonymous author about 1510, and concludes…
Category: Literary
‘The Dickens of the Jewish world’
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As if paying respects to a beloved head of state, a vast crowd exceeding 100,000 in number lined the route of the funeral procession for Sholom Aleichem when he died at age 57 in New York City in May 1916, just over 80 years ago. Among Yiddish writers, Sholem Aleichem ranked among the three most…
Talking politics with A. B. Yehoshua
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Like a latter-day prophet of Israel, the distinguished Jerusalem-born novelist A.B. Yehoshua utters a variety of lamentations — mostly of a political nature — and explains that “it is the task of the intellectual to say what he thinks.” His biggest lament seems centered around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accuses of poisoning…
Nathan Shaham’s Rosendorf Quartet
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Israeli author Nathan Shaham, who gave separate English and Hebrew readings from his 1987 novel The Rosendorf Quartet in Toronto recently, is amazed that the book has become a bestseller, won prestigious literary prizes, and been translated into several languages, including Chinese and Russian. “I never tried to have this book published abroad,” said the…
Biblical novel set in 1st century
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Andrew Sanders, a resident of both Toronto and Haifa, is the author of a new work of historical fiction, Hanina My Son: A Novel of the First Century (Gefen, 2001), which has already appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. Hanina My Son is set during a time of fighting between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the…
Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers
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Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
Troupe of Israeli characters trapped in low farce
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Set in modern Israel, Orly Castel-Bloom’s latest novel Human Parts (translation by Dalyu Bilu, Key Porter Books) follows a troupe of characters around their ordinary lives as the nation struggles with an assortment of blights and curses that almost seem like divine punishments. In Castel-Bloom’s version of Israel, as in real life, there’s a grueling…
Appelfeld’s ‘Age of Wonders’
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Addressing the question “Is it possible to write fiction about the Holocaust?”, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld told a large gathering in Toronto recently that man’s nature compels him “to express not only his joy but also his pain” and that concentration camp inmates sometimes sang songs that “were as mighty as the suffering from which…
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…
Jonathan Rosen: Eve’s Apple
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It’s easy to see why Cynthia Ozick called this first novel by New York writer Jonathan Rosen “the work of a natural master.” For one thing, Rosen writes like an angel. For another, his main characters exude a gentleness and emotional sensitivity that is rarely caught on the page. In this deeply insightful psychological detective…
