Dara Horn

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Don’t Be a Shmuck All Your Life

By Dara Horn

Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book “Born To Kvetch,” is the “Sneaky Chef” of contemporary Jewish culture. Like the cookbook author who advises parents to slip puréed broccoli into the brownie batter, Wex writes books that look and read like snacks, but he hides scholarly vegetables between the covers. Few people who buy Wex’s latest work, cheerily titled “How To Be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck),” will suspect that they are about to read a book-length commentary on the Mishnah, and they probably wouldn’t have bought it if they had known. But Wex makes all this go down easy, for that is what he does best.Read More

Sholom Aleichem: Finding Freedom in America

By Dara Horn

‘Wandering Stars,” Yiddish master Sholom Aleichem’s comic novel about the Yiddish theater, has just been published in a new translation by Aliza Shevrin. The novel tells the story of Leibl and Reizel, two talented teenagers who flee their backwater shtetl with the help of a traveling Yiddish theater troupe. Sweethearts separated by corrupt theater companies, they each achieve their own successes in European cities and eventually in New York. But while Leibl devotes his talents to the Yiddish stage, Reizel becomes a star of the gentile theater — and always remains one city beyond his reach.Read More

Sholom Aleichem: A Star Shines Brightly

By Dara Horn

“Wandering Stars,” a new translation of which will be released in February, is one of several novels by Sholom Aleichem that directly address the peculiar challenges of the Jewish artist.Read More

What We Have Lost: Reading a New Translation of Der Nister’s Yiddish Masterpiece

By Dara Horn

While giving a lecture in Central Oregon recently about my novel “The World To Come,” whose story incorporates the works of many Yiddish writers, I was asked a remarkable question by someone in the very non-Jewish audience: “What do we lose by not reading Yiddish literature?”Read More

Kafka, Divided and Onstage

By Dara Horn

It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick someone, well, happier? — but rather a matter of Kafka’s work itself. Jewish readers cannot help but hear the echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in “In the Penal Colony,” or those of the blood libel in “The Trial”; such readers see in Kafka’s famous cockroach a horrifying caricature of the way others have so often seen them — and worse, the way they sometimes see themselves. Nor is this awareness mere suspicion. Though none of his published works mention it explicitly, Kafka’s private letters and diaries reveal an interest in Jewish identity verging on obsession.Read More


 

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