Robert Rosenberg

A Blizzard Called Love

By Robert Rosenberg

‘Halfway through dinner,” says the unnamed narrator of “Eight White Nights,” “I knew I’d replay the whole evening in reverse.” Thus begins André Aciman’s snow globe of a novel, which attempts to follow up on the success of his debut novel, “Call Me by Your Name” (Picador, 2008). In “Eight White Nights,” a young man of an uncertain age and background appears at a party on Christmas Eve at a luxury building at the corner of Riverside Drive and West 106th Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He’s come uninvited, a stranger to everyone — including himself. He doesn’t even know who is giving the party, but he is dazzled nonetheless by the bounty and wealth surrounding him, and seems to have stepped right into a fairy tale; only later does he discover that the hosts of the party are a wealthy couple called, fittingly, Hans and Gretel. Outside, a snowstorm is brewing, blanketing the streets and lending a magical and dreamlike quality to the city.Read More

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The Transformative Tale of ‘GI Jews’

By Robert Rosenberg

GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation By Deborah Dash Moore Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $25.95. * * *Contemporary Jewish thought has been shaped by the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel and the transformation of the American Jewish community from a distant, peripheral outpost into the hub of the Jewish world.Read More

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A Terrible, Awful Novel Of Great Importance

By Robert Rosenberg

Siegfried By Harry Mulisch, translated by Paul Vincent Viking Press, 180 pages, $22.95. ——-When galleys for the massive Stalin biography by Montefiore first made the rounds, I got hold of a copy for my father, thinking that the subject would interest him as a survivor of Auschwitz and a former Bundist. He’s read many, if not most,Read More

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Tragedy; Or, Yiddish in the Postwar World

By Robert Rosenberg

Foiglman By Aharon Megged, translated by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman Toby Press, 277 pages, $19.95. * * *For those readers acquainted with the torrent of novels, story collections, reportage and histories pouring out of Israel, it is hard not to be struck by the wrenching re-examination of the past that characterizes much of it. It is aRead More

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Underneath Cliches About Art, Hidden Wells of History

By Robert Rosenberg

Tales of Grabowski By John Auerbach The Toby Press, 307 pages, $19.95.

The Owl & Other Stories By John Auerbach The Toby Press, 306 pages, $19.95. * * *although it’s common for critics to dismiss the link between an author’s biography and his fiction, novelists and storytellers well know that the ties between work andRead More

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