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…
Tag: American
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…
Shteyngart shines in Super Sad True Love Story
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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…
“Why I left the Old Country”
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In 1942 the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had only recently relocated from Vilna to New York City, sponsored a contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant on the theme, “Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Accomplished in America.” More than 200 autobiographical essays were submitted, written mostly…
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,…
Ozick’s ‘Quarrel & Quandary’
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Opening Quarrel and Quandary, Cynthia Ozick’s latest collection of essays, is like removing the top from a box of quality chocolates: one doesn’t know where to begin. Despite a few mysterious squiggles and shapes, most of these bonbons have delectable fillings, as one might expect from the Jewish world’s foremost belle-lettrist. However, some of these…
Adventures of a Yiddish Lecturer
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I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Levine, Philip Roth and probably numerous other Jewish writers have penned comical reminiscences about their experiences delivering lectures on various subjects to Jewish audiences. To this list we must add the relatively unknown name of Abraham Shulman. An American essayist and former contributor to the New York Daily…
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…
Jewish genealogy in Pennsylvania
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Anyone with the surname Eisen (which means ‘iron’) knows that Jews have had an historic involvement in the steel trade. From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galizianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 by Robert Perlman is a thorough local history that chronicles the rise of various Jewish communities in a sprinkling of towns in and…
An organization that redeems lost Jews
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A New York rabbinical court made a precedent-setting halakhic decision last summer that could eventually pave the way for legions of “lost” Jews to return to Judaism. The case revolves around Wendy Armstrong, a real estate professional in St. Louis, Mo., who was raised in a Christian home and attended a Methodist church as a…
