The Filter

Missing Person
“Where could Nava have gone, and why hadn’t she been waiting for him at lunchtime as always?” The New Yorker runs a story by Amos Oz about a man whose wife disappears.

The Filter

Strong Influence
Zalmen Mlotek, the executive director of the National Yiddish Theater, plays the piano and talks with the BBC about how “Yiddish songs came into the American milieu” and were performed by Cab Calloway and the Gershwins.

The Filter

Forgotten Man
Frances Dinkelspiel’s Towers of Gold is a “carefully researched and superbly written memoir of her virtually forgotten great-great-grandfather” Isaias Hellman. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1859 as a teenager from Bavaria and went on to become the city's first legit banker and the founder of its first synagogue. The author talks about her ancestor here.

Nothing Sacred

Out of the Closet
Gus Van Sant's astonishingly powerful biopic Milk opens today. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk, the San Francisco politician and gay-rights activist who was assassinated 30 years ago, is sensitive, nuanced, and far more charming than you might expect. Dustin Lance Black's screenplay addresses Milk's Long Island Jewish origins without fanfare: when he moves to San Francisco and decides to open a store in the Castro, he tells his lover that such a bourgeois endeavor...

The Filter

Twice-Told Tales
With the two interlacing narratives in his novel Friendly Fire: A Duet, A.B. Yehoshua hints “at the growing split in Israeli life, as exemplified by the self-absorbed, comfortable existence of Tel Avivians, protected by the separation barrier… [from] festering conflict a few miles away,” says Ethan Bronner.  Haaretz writes that Yehoshua “weaves broader and narrower swatches of a seemingly straightforward story into an almost seamless tapestry filled with weighty symbolism.” On Nextbook, Adam Kirsch shared his thoughts.

The Filter

%@&*! at Home
The Times of London gets inside Art Spiegelman’s apartment, where “ashtrays overflow with pencil-shavings, back issues of Tales of the Incredible and Humbug line the shelves, and early newspaper 'funnies' cover the walls,” to talk with him about Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. Leonard Lopate chats him up as well.  

The Filter

The Beloved Bagel
In the New York Times Dining section, Maria Balinska talks about her new book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread. She thinks it originated as a "cousin of the pretzel" and that lately (thanks, Lender's), "Lots of things have happened to bagels that have very little to do with bagels." Last month, Scott Saul took a bite for Nextbook.

The Schlockford Files

Nearer to Me Than to Thee
Once upon a time, during college, a friend of mine house-sat at her cousin’s super cool artsy loft. A bunch of us visited one evening and sat around the place, basking in our proximity to greatness. Well, proximity by association anyway on account of the cool pad belonged to a one-time girlfriend of Bob Dylan, made extra famous by her appearance on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Six degrees of separation?...

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