Posted on February 24, 2008 by Steve Pollak
A few Jewish literary items from around the Web:
• In today's edition of The Independent, William Sutcliffe reviews Shalom Auslander's "Foreskin's Lament," and says that "[i]f you wish Richard Dawkins could quip like David Sedaris, then this is the misery memoir for you."
• In the Houston Jewish Herald-Voice, Yale University professor Steven B. Smith, who's latest book is "Reading Leo Strauss," says Strauss was not "the Darth Vader of American neoconservatives, the dark side of a sinister Jewish cabal of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and William Kristol, the poster child for the Bush administration’s war on Iraq."
• In The Forward, senior book critic Mark Oppenheimer takes on Richard M. Cook's "Alfred Kazin: A Biography." You should read the complete review but here's one bit from Oppenheimer's critique:
... Cook never really approaches the question of why Kazin was such an attractive beneficiary of review assignments. He was a great writer, but that is not the end of the story. Editors must always ask themselves, “Why this reviewer and not that one?” It may simply have been that Kazin’s mix of speed, avidity and competence was unmatched. Or it may have been that editors knew Kazin was that rare animal, a true appreciator. For all his life, the people around Kazin were joining camps, separating into alcoves: Trotskyite, Menshevik, anarchist, New Critic, postmodernist. Kazin knew them all, learned from them, but ultimately kept his own counsel. Insecure though he may have been, he knew what he loved (in women and books), and no one would dictate how he related to them.
• In The New York Times, novelist Stacey D’Erasmo reviewed Roberto Bolaño's "Nazi Literature in the Americas." Here's a line from D'Erasmo's review:
Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?
• In the new issue of American Jewish Life, E.B. Solomont talks to Reva Mann, author of "The Rabbi's Daughter." Mann, the granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Israel and a prominent London rabbi, spent her youth getting high on drugs and finding solace in sex. Here's more:
Among her earliest exploits, any one of them would make her late father's congregants blush: As a teenager, she took drugs, got arrested for possessing hashish, and had promiscuous sex. (In fact, she lost her virginity in the sanctuary of her father's synagogue.) In yeshiva, she had a lesbian fling with a classmate, and later, she engaged in an extramarital affair with the contractor who remodeled her kitchen, and then had a rather sordid sexual relationship with a lover whom she met in a bar after she left her husband.
Asked to identify her lowest point, Mann responds: "As a child doing drugs, that was pretty low. I think catching hepatitis from a junkie is pretty bad, and being arrested and going to jail in Jerusalem." Then she adds a final item that offers an unobstructed view that any therapist would love: "I think the lowest point was my mother's death. I didn't think I ever would recover from that pain — it was so terrible."