Eighty years ago, as Yiddish writer and playwright Sholem Asch celebrated his 50th birthday in 1930, he seemed to be riding on top of the world. His newest book, Fam Mabul, was a critical and popular success among Yiddish readers– it would soon become vastly more popular in its English translation as Three Cities —…
Category: Biography
The Strange Case of Ben Hecht
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Eighty years ago this summer, in June 1931, New York publisher Covici Friede announced that A Jew in Love, a new novel by Ben Hecht (1894-1964), had been banned in Canada and in bookstores in Boston and other American cities. Anyone who opened the book — the front page of which described the Jewish protagonist…
Bin Laden’s long career of evil
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If you have trouble sleeping, don’t read Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War On America. The book, an in-depth study of the criminal mastermind who tops the world’s most wanted list, was written by Yossef Bodansky, a former consultant to the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. It first appeared two years ago and…
Stewart Bell: Keeping tabs on terrorists
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A new book on Canada’s role as a haven for international terrorism provides alarming details on how border and immigration authorities here have repeatedly slipped up and allowed known Middle Eastern and other terrorists to enter the country and even attain citizenship. In his new book Cold Terror, author Stewart Bell documents how the country’s…
Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Hotel
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“Harpo Marx, having played a mute in all his films, was probably the most articulate of all the Marx brothers,” declares Barbara McGurn as we sit in the Oak Room of New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, awaiting the entrance of cabaret performer K.T. Sullivan. The next moment McGurn, who is equal parts literary scholar and…
The Forgotten Fannie Hurst
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In her day Fannie Hurst was one of America’s highest-paid authors, but ask any bookstore clerk today for one of her 18 novels, such as the bestselling Imitation of Life, and chances are you’ll receive only a blank stare. Between 1914 and 1930, Fannie Hurst’s phenomenal literary career blazed meteorically across the pages of popular…
‘Garden of Beasts’ is chilling non-fiction
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William E. Dodd, the United States’ newly appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, was a Jeffersonian democrat, a history professor working on a volume on the old American South, and a Sunday farmer with old-fashioned values who seemed so out of step with his new posting that one magazine called him “a square academic peg…
Close Up: Cecil B. DeMille
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Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf, a 508-page hardcover biography by Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber, 2008) covers the life and career of the legendary American film director from his birth in 1881 to his death in 1958, two years after he completed his last and most famous film, The Ten Commandments. DeMille always…
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…
Russian Dance: true romance in Stalinist Moscow
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One evening in 1928, a Russian-Jewish physician and his wife, Marc and Katya Cheftel, attended a large and fancy dinner party at the Manhattan home of the renowned concert-hall impresario Max Rabinoff and his petite wife Bluet, who was equally known for her beauty, wit and charm. Although Rabinoff had made a fortune as a…
