Fiction
Sendak’s ChelmFriday, May 11, 2012 by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Sendak | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
After the publication of Where the Wild Things Are established Maurice Sendak as a force to be reckoned with in children's literature, he had the opportunity to illustrate Isaac Bashevis Singer's first children's book, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories.
Good Girl Gone BadMonday, October 18, 2010 by Margot Lurie | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Fifty-five years ago, a star was born: plucky, lucky Marjorie Morningstar, the "American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish." At least, that's how Time described her. Today, depending on whom you ask, Herman Wouk's 1955 novel, Marjorie Morningstar, is either the story of the romantic awakening of a blue-eyed Jewish beauty or a cautionary tale about what happens when you stray too far from your origins.
Was Dostoevsky a Scoundrel?The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), rightly known as a peerless master of psychological fiction, a fierce anti-socialist polemicist, an anti-romantic with a pulsingly romantic commitment to prophetic religion, and a dramatist of moral ideas without compare since the English poet John Milton, also happened to harbor an ugly fixation on the Jews.
Editors' Picks
The Jews of Middle Earth Jeffrey Saks, Torah Musings. "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews," wrote Tolkien, "at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue."
Uncle Joe D. G. Myers, Commonplace Blog. “If anyone who is not his nephew is entitled to call Joseph Epstein ‘Uncle Joe,’ it is I. Or at least I once was.”
Movies and Monotheism Julian Levinson, Jewish Review of Books. For fifty years, Herman Wouk had dreamed of writing a book about Moses. Now, at the age of 97, he has finally admitted defeat—in his latest novel.
Dumbing Down the Holocaust David Herman, Jewish Chronicle. Middlebrow fiction about the Holocaust not only reduces a serious subject to melodrama and kitsch but consigns the truly great literature to obscurity.
The Crypto-Jews of New Mexico Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times. Few American Jews know about world of the “crypto-Jews” described in this graphic novel. But, as one character says, “A Jewish soul is a Jewish soul.”
The Wedding Guests Have Goose Feet Damion Searls, Los Angeles Review of Books. In postwar America, I.B. Singer was the one who made it—into English, into the pages of Playboy and Esquire and the New Yorker, into big Hollywood movies, into being thought “modern.” But the identity politics that worked for Singer in the short term risk making him unread now.
Nostalgia with a Jewish Soul Diane Cole, Jewish Week. Michael Chabon’s latest novel conjures up the alternative reality of a San Francisco unspoiled by the tensions that complicate today’s relationship between Jews and African-Americans.
Amis on Evil, Amis on Levi Ron Rosenbaum, Smithsonian. Until recently the problem of understanding Hitler had bedeviled Martin Amis. Then he read a passage of Primo Levi’s.
Job the Trotskyist Isaac Bashevis Singer, New Yorker. “There is no worse lowlife than a Jewish Chekist, Yevsektsia member, or plain Communist. They spit on the truth. They’re ready to kill and torture over the least suspicion.” (Fiction; Translated by David Stromberg)
Fans or Voyeurs? Ilana Sichel, Los Angeles Review of Books. Ex-Orthodox women’s literature is becoming an unlikely subgenre of its own, but the quality of the writing is not quite keeping pace with its popularity.