July 29, 2010
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
There are very few poets — if any — who have attained the level of success of Joseph Brodsky.
He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. He received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1981. He won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism in 1986 for his collection of essays, Less Than One.
One more thing: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.
Brodsky, a Russian-Jewish poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1977, often wrote about the power of literature on its audience. He seemed somewhat ambivalent about his Judaism although he included Jewish subjects in his writings. In the end, he was buried in the Episcopalian section of a Venice cemetary.
Now, we may gain more insight into Brodsky’s thinking and his feelings toward Judaism. A newly-translated book, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, is set to be published for the first time in English and it may shed more light on the poet’s writing and life.
From what I’ve read, the book has already received much acclaim in Russia. It was originally written by Lev Loseff, a professor of Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College who has already published eight collections of verse and fiction in Russian as well as numerous works of criticism.
At this point, we’ll have to sit back and wait for the book. Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life will be published in early 2011.
July 28, 2010
I win a beautiful blogger award
I am proud to announce that I’ve received a Beautiful Blogger Award from the Jewish Publication Society.
In order to collect my award, I need to reveal seven little-known things about Jewish Literary Review and then pass the award on to seven other blogs.
Here are a few things you might not know:
1. I’ve posted 188 articles over the last three years.
2. I’ve only received three angry emails from authors.
3. I love mixing Judaism with environmental awareness.
4. I belong to a Conservative shul where we daven with ArtScroll siddurs.
5. I’ll give every book 100 pages before I give up.
6. Favorite Jewish author: Philip Roth
7. Favorite Jewish book critic: Alfred Kazin
OK. Now for my seven choices to receive a Beautiful Blogger Award:
1. Jewlicious – 100 percent Kosher!
2. JewWishes – Book reviews on Jewish-related books and films, news and more.
3. The ‘My Jesus Year’ blog – Author Benyamin Cohen expands on his year-long romp through churches in the Bible Belt.
4. BeWilderblog – Author Laurel Snyder blog about children’s books, life and more.
5. The Arty Semite – The Forward’s arts and culture blog
6. The Fundermentalist – JTA blog about world of Jewish philanthropy.
7. On The Other Hand – Baltimore Jewish Times Editor (and my former boss) Neil Rubin explores the world of modern Jewry.
July 22, 2010
‘Imagining Madoff’ moves forward without Elie Wiesel
A play imagining the relationship between Elie Wiesel and Bernie Maddoff began performances this week with one important change – the character that was supposed to be Elie Wiesel was no longer referred to as “Elie Wiesel.” Instead, the character has been re-named “Solomon Galkin.”
According to The New York Times, Wielsel threatened to take legal action if the play, “Imagining Madoff,” went forward the way it was written. In the original version, the play portrays a fictionalized version of Wiesel and Madoff’s relationship, including a ‘central scene’ in which the Holocaust survivor pleads with Madoff to invest his money. There also was a scene depicting a sexually-tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp, the Times wrote. (more…)
July 19, 2010
Kafka estate case lurches forward
Franz Kafka once asked that his papers be destroyed after he died. Luckily, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, ignored that request after Kafka’s death at age 40 in 1924 following a lengthy bout with tuberculosis. Indeed, many of the author’s great works were published posthumously, including The Trial, Amerika and The Castle.
Kafka has been dead for about 86 years but we may see even more new work from him soon thanks to a treasure trove of materials recently discovered in Tel Aviv and Zurich. According to Ha’Aretz, part of the collection was inspected earlier this week for the first time as part of a legal dispute that has dragged on more than two years in a Tel Aviv court.
Here’s more from Ha’Aretz:
Among the many manuscripts is one of a well-known short story by the Jewish writer, in the author’s own hand.
The literary treasure was discovered during the course of the trial that has been under way during the past two years over the fate of the estate left behind by Max Brod, a close friend of Kafka, who also was his literary executor. The estate, which has been held in a number of safe-deposit boxes in Israel and Switzerland, is under the control of Eva Hoffe, the daughter of Brod’s secretary, Esther Hoffe, who died three years ago.
The Tel Aviv Family Court ordered the opening of four safe deposit boxes, and yesterday, in a Zurich bank, a number of Israeli lawyers, of experts on manuscripts and German literature, and a few bank clerks, showed up to verify the contents that had been kept under lock and key for decades.
Apparently, other safe deposit boxes from the estate were opened in Tel Aviv last week, according to Ha’Aretz. Ultimately, Ha’Aretz reports, the court will determine whether the estate will remain in Hoffe’s control or whether it “will be bequeathed to either German Literature Archive, in Marbach, Germany, or the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.”
Read an earlier post about this case: “The Kafka ‘treasure trove’ story goes on …“
July 7, 2010
Anthony Julius and anti-Semitism in England
There are many reasons why you should know the name Anthony Julius.
He earned the bulk of his fame for serving as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer. He’s also the author of “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form,” a well-received book on the poet’s employment of anti-Semitism in his verse.
In addition, Julius represented Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt when a Holocaust denier sued her for libel. David Irving did not like what Lipstadt wrote about him in her 1994 book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” Fortunately, Judge Charles Gray sided with Lipstadt following a trial in early 2000 and issued a judgment calling Irving, among other things, “anti-Semitic and racist.”
Julius has continued the battle against anti-Semitism and recently published a book called, “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.”
July 5, 2010
Steve Stern’s Frozen Rabbi
A rabbi found frozen in the freezer of a Memphis, Tenn., family is just the beginning of a rollicking, occasionally bizarre but satisfying plotline in Steve Stern‘s “The Frozen Rabbi.”
The teenager who finds the rabbi, 15-year-old Bernie Karp, finds himself re-discovering the past in lots of other ways throughout this book. Indeed, as novelist Ben Marcus explains in The New York Times, Stern’s book contrasts past and present Jewish life and seems to describe the downside of comfort and safety:
It’s hard to feel entirely glad for the Karps when their epic struggles come to an end in Memphis, where the family is assimilated at last. Yet along with the difficult question of just what is lost when assimilation is gained, Stern also raises the hope that even the most unwitting among us cannot fully escape the passions of our ancestors.
Overall, Marcus gave the book high marks. Over at The Washington Post’s Book World, novelist Jess Walter also liked Stern’s latest offering:
Of course, not everything Stern throws into the book (and he throws in a lot) works equally well. A few jokes are groaners, and a section from Bernie’s grandfather’s journal — translated from Yiddish as Bernie reads aloud to his quirky girlfriend — loses narrative steam and is eventually abandoned.
But this is like complaining about an extra mushroom on your kitchen-sink pizza. In all, it’s a fine performance: Stories are told, points made, conventions flayed, and the reader comes to care about what will happen to poor Bernie, earnestly seeking transcendence from a fallen prophet. Of course, as the Frozen Rabbi assures him, he shouldn’t worry; all the answers are in his book, ” ‘The Ice Sage,’ adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God . . . which it’s twenty-nine ninety-five retail.”
Lucky for you, Amazon sells Steve Stern’s “The Frozen Rabbi” for about 30 percent less.
September 10, 2009
My Jesus Year – The paperback trailer
Check out the trailer for the new paperback version of My Jesus Year, a great book written by my good friend Benyamin Cohen.
April 29, 2009
Newly translated Sholem Aleichem
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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April 23, 2009
New book on Isaac Rosenfeld
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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April 21, 2009
Israel to celebrate Amos Oz’s 70th birthday
As we approach his 70th birthday celebration, we can expect to see more and more about one of Israel’s foremost authors, Amos Oz.
He officially becomes a septuagenarian on May 4 and there will be a three-day celebration in Arad, Israel where President Shimon Peres will be in attendance on the opening night, according to Ha’Aretz. Later in the month, Ben-Gurion University will host a conference in honor of the author.
If you can’t make it to Israel for the festivities, there are two new books out that may help you feel like a true fan of Oz’s work.
First, Oz has come out with a new novella, “Rhyming Life and Death.” The New York Times’ Ethan Bonner called it a “somewhat brutal look at the life and sensibility of a literary celebrity.”
There’s also “The Amos Oz Reader,” a 400-page compendium of Oz’s work that draws from his novels as well as his nonfiction writing.
I was bored by the recent profiles of Oz I read in the Times and in Ha’Aretz (he seemed pretty bored by the interviews as well).
But, I’m always intrigued by the writing habits of authors and Ha’Aretz asked that obligatory question. Oz said he gets up at five without an alarm clock, sits down to write by six and continues writing until noon. In the afternoon, he eats and reads a bit and then goes back to his desk “to erase what I wrote in the morning,” he says.
I was surprised to learn that Oz always uses a pen for his first drafts. Here’s more from the interview in Ha’Aretz:
“I always write with a pen. I have a computer nearby, on the side, and when I’ve finished writing many drafts, I type very slowly with two fingers because I don’t know how to touch-type. I type myself because no one else can read my handwriting. But I always write with a pen for sensual reasons, the arc between the pen and fingers, and the paper, the erasures and scribbles. You can’t do that on a computer.”
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