Posted on April 30, 2008 by Steve Pollak
It's been a while since we checked out the Jewish bestsellers on Amazon so I thought we'd take a gander at what's selling.
As usual, the books that make it into Amazon's 'Jewish' categories can leave you scratching your head (Hamlet as the number one Jewish book?) Nevertheless, it's a worthwhile exercise just to see which books come on and off the lists.
So, without further ado, here are the results of the Amazon category listings sorted according to ‘bestselling’: Continue reading...
Posted on April 27, 2008 by Steve Pollak
The Forward published a story last week about Heshbon, an esteemed Yiddish literary journal based in Los Angeles, which will most likely fold after celebrating its 150th issue last October.
The 87-year-old editor, Moshe Shklar, told the Forward that health problems have begun to take their toll on his ability to produce the semiannual journal. In addition, there are financial considerations. It costs about $5,000 to publish each issue. Some revenue comes from the 100 or so subscribers but the journal has had to rely more and more on private donations in recent years. According to the Forward, the majority of those funds "dried up" after the death of Heshbon's major backer, Simcha Lainer.
Here's more from the Forward article:
The demise of Heshbon would deal a serious blow to the Yiddish literary landscape of L.A. and beyond. Of the more than dozen Yiddish journals once published in America, only a handful remain. Heshbon, founded in 1946 by the writers who made up the ranks of the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club, is one of the last surviving outlets for contemporary Yiddish poetry, fiction and literary criticism.
“This is like losing The Paris Review of Yiddish,” said Miriam Koral, founder and director of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language and a lecturer in Yiddish at University of California, Los Angeles. “It symbolizes the lack of continuity of a certain high form of Yiddish literacy.”
I hope the journal lives on in some form. There's certainly an opportunity to create a Web site for Heshbon (I didn't find one when I searched Google.) In fact, for the cost of producing just one of those print editions, Heshbon could have an excellent site. And, you've got to believe that there would be a lot of value in putting an archive spanning 150 issues of an esteemed Yiddish literary journal on the Web — with the English translations, of course.
It's something for the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club to think about.
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Posted on April 21, 2008 by Steve Pollak
There's a good story out there about the history of Christian-Jewish relations in a small German village called "Benheim." But, I'm not sure Mimi Schwartz captured it in her new book, "Good Neighbors, Bad Times."
Schwartz, a professor emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and the author of five books, including the 2003 collection of essays, "Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed," set out to explore the stories she heard from her father about growing up in a German village before the second World War. For most of her life, she paid little attention to her father's anecdotes. But then she learned from someone else that the local Christians rescued a Torah from the village on Kristallnacht. It was her 'a-ha' moment:
I was surprised. I never thought of ordinary Germans rescuing a Torah or anything else Jewish back then. My images were of black boots marching across the Hollywood movies I grew up watching at the Queens Midway Theater, ones full of Nazis I hated and feared. I looked at the old Torah, almost four feet in length, and wondered who grabbed it from the fire and why? And how many helped to carry it, a heavy thing, to safety? And did the neighbors see them? And were they denounced? Echoes of my father's nostalgia came back. In Benheim we all got along! But he had meant a boyhood before Hitler, not during Nazi times.
And so, Schwartz began a 12-year journey to discover more about her late father's stories. She interviewed former villagers living in New York, Baltimore and Israel and she took several trips to Germany to talk with those who never left. She also visited a few German archives to see what the documents might say. Continue reading...