FROM THE FILTER
Bookworms
The
Jerusalem Post reports on the city's International Writers Festival.
Jonathan Safran Foer called his first two books—about the Holocaust and September 11—"not choices but necessities," while
Etgar Keret lamented that growing up, "We learned all about the Holocaust but
didn't learn that Kafka was a Jew."
05.16.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK
Art and Science
Rivka Galchen's father, an Israeli immigrant, encouraged her to go to med school before pursuing her real passion: "He sort of felt like, you know,
Primo Levi's a chemist, and then he writes something." Perhaps this step helped make her "a bold, curious
techno-utopian," who, according to
The NY Observer, is an heir to Pynchon.
05.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK
Buried Treasure
Florence Wolfson's 70-year-old diary—which Lily Koppel
found in a dumpster—"captured the passions and ambitions of an
intensely creative young Jewish woman." Koppel's own book,
The Red Leather Diary, gives this source material a "
lovely shine," writes Alana Newhouse.
05.12.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK
Familiar Territory
Unlike many of the scholars committed to reviving Yiddish, performer and archivist Mendy Cahan, founder of Israel's
YUNG YiDiSH Centre, was raised with the language. "His life replicates in a nutshell the process of modernization that affected an entire people and produced that
powerful amalgam of Hasidic themes and cosmopolitan disenchantment that is Yiddish literature," says
Haaretz.
05.09.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK
In His Own Words
The Times Literary Supplement explores the concept of intertextuality in a review of
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Contributors see
Levi as "a double agent, engaged in 'ironic rewriting of divine utterances in
secular terms.'"
05.08.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK
The Rise and Fall—and Rise—of “Jewess”
What May Be Highly Relevant
Truth or Dare
Radical Riff
Outsider in the Promised Land
