By Shoshana Olidort
Peter Orner’s ‘Love and Shame and Love’ is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction.
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By Shoshana Olidort
A mother and son are on the run at the start of Aharon Appelfeld’s new novel. The survivor and chronicler of Jewish suffering continues his exploration of the depths of human tragedy.
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By Shoshana Olidort
Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure these box-office hits and bestsellers help to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, but at what cost? There is something grotesque about the dramatization of the Shoah, and one wonders when commemoration becomes desecration.
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By Shoshana Olidort
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in New York City at the turn of the century, Whitman was an iconic figure — a poet and even a prophet.
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By Shoshana Olidort
Avi Steinberg’s memoir of his time as a prison librarian is a catalog of juxtapositions. The product of a suburban modern Orthodox community and a graduate of Harvard, Steinberg seems an unlikely candidate for a rough Boston prison, where his primary companions are convicted criminals, among them addicts, pimps and rapists. Indeed, when he tells a former teacher, a rabbi, about the job, the rabbi is incredulous: Why would a good Jewish boy waste his time working in a prison? Yet it is precisely out of this strange meeting of worlds that Steinberg emerges as a thoughtful and gifted debut author.Read More
