Posted on September 10, 2009 by Steve Pollak
Check out the trailer for the new paperback version of My Jesus Year, a great book written by my good friend Benyamin Cohen.
Posted on April 29, 2009 by Steve Pollak
This week's edition of The New Yorker had a brief item about "Wandering Stars," a novel by Shalom Aleichem that previously was available only as an abridged version.
Here's more:
Best known for his stories of Tevye the Milkman, a character later
brought to Broadway in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Sholem Aleichem was a
Russian humorist sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” In
this romantic epic, previously available only in an abridgment, two
lovers are enraptured when the Shchupak-Murovchik Yiddish theatre
troupe arrives in their impoverished town, and they resolve to escape
shtetl life and run off with the actors. Their gruelling journey takes
them across continents and ends on New York’s Lower East Side,
capturing, with whimsy and pathos, the experience of the Jewish
diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century. As one of the
lovers tells the other the night they first meet, “Stars do not fall,
stars wander.”
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Posted on April 23, 2009 by Steve Pollak
A new book on Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein's "Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing," suggests that the late writer may have accomplished more than what the critics have given him credit for.
Yes, he died at the age of 38, having written just one critically acclaimed novel, "Passage from Home," and never reached the great heights of his buddy, Saul Bellow. But he still did a lot of noteworthy things in his 38 years on this earth.
At least, that's what Saul Rosenberg says in his review of the book for the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that
the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he
was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he
entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth
would have it.
As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe
faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on
rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews
and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off
from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner
has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every
subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every
review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should
be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would
later lament his "failure."
Even so, the question remains: why didn't Rosenfeld produce more during his lifetime? Writing a review of "Rosenfeld's Lives," in the Forward, Glenn C. Altschuler takes us through some of the reasons why:
Was it his bohemian proclivity to live in the moment at the expense
of all that is lasting? Was it his skeptical stance toward rationalism
and science, which rendered his work abstract, vague and metaphysical?
Was it his attachment to the wacky sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich?
Zipperstein
isn’t all that certain. In his journal, Rosenfeld addressed his
inadequacies: his failures as a husband and father; his intractable
childhood phobias; his fears of homosexuality — and the toll they took
on his writing. And yet, Zipperstein acknowledges, it’s by no means
clear “how truthful, or better said, how truthfully characteristic
journal entries are.” As vessels of angst, discontent, depression and
self-loathing, journals, Cynthia Ozick has observed, “are notoriously
fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power
flourishes elsewhere.”
So, we may never know why but Zimmerman receives kudos from Rosenberg for his handling of Rosenfeld's life in this first full biography of the writer:
Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of
Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us
with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of
Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps
recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take
precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of
attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his
death, half again as long as he lived.
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