Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
Category: Current & Featured
Zangwill’s ‘Melting Pot’ a Century Later
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One hundred years ago, in September 1908, British writer Israel Zangwill’s influential play The Melting Pot premiered in New York, simultaneously winning widespread popular acclaim and sweeping pans from the critics. When Theodore Roosevelt saw it, he leaned over the edge of his presidential box and exclaimed “That’s all right!” in great apparent satisfaction. But…
How do I love thee, New Yorker? Let me count the ways
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Since I first started writing professionally nearly 35 years ago, I’ve always held the dream of getting published in the New Yorker. So far, it hasn’t happened. As the saying goes, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? In the meantime, I’ve read many interesting books about the celebrated Manhattan-based…
‘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…
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…
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…
