Quick: can you name two prominent authors who made stunning literary debuts while still in their early 20s, each with an effervescent and picaresque first novel that contains a set of smaller stories within the novelistic framework? Hint: one is contemporary Jewish-American, the other British Victorian. Hailed by the New York-based Forward newspaper as one…
A compelling short story anthology, Found Treasures: Stories By Yiddish Women Writers (Second Story Press, 1994) has sold more than 5,000 copies and has thus attained the status of a Canadian bestseller. The book has gone into a second printing and, according to co-editor Frieda Forman of Toronto, has been picked up as an alternate…
In Love and Exile, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s revealing autobiographical trilogy, he describes an early story, “In the World of Chaos,” that was never published. Its hero “was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead,” Singer recounted. “He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be…
Seven years after the death of Isaac Bashevis Singer and 20 years after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, the literary world has produced three significant new books by and about the man who is one of the most important and popular Jewish writers of modern times. The last few months have seen the…
Call It Sleep — what else might one call the hiatus of 60 years that Henry Roth took between publication of his first now-classic novel Call It Sleep (1934) and his next, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994)? Now sleeping the sleep of the eternal, Roth left us with six semi-autobiographical novels that…
“Dis a choych?” These three little words, which appear in Abraham Cahan’s sparkling story The Imported Bridegroom (1898), may be among the most sublimely ironic utterances in all of modern Jewish literature. The story opens with the unmarried Flora idly reading Little Dorrit as her wealthy father, Asriel Stroon, prepares to visit Pravly, his childhood…
It is sometimes said that heredity is destiny — a phrase with some apparent truth in The Journeys of David Toback, an old (Yiddish) diary edited (in English) by Carole Malkin and published by Schocken Books. For David Toback, who became bar-mitvahed in a dirt-poor Ukrainian village in 1888, the pair of tefillin that his…
It’s easy to see why Cynthia Ozick called this first novel by New York writer Jonathan Rosen “the work of a natural master.” For one thing, Rosen writes like an angel. For another, his main characters exude a gentleness and emotional sensitivity that is rarely caught on the page. In this deeply insightful psychological detective…
Many astute readers consider Chaim Potok, the New York-born, rabbinically-trained author who died last July, as being categorically unlike most other notable Jewish scribes of his generation because his books open a unique window into the Orthodox Jewish world. While acclaimed American writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth tended to write…
American writer Erica Jong, best known for her sexually explicit 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying, flew into town peddling her seventh novel, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (HarperCollins, 1997), a four-generational family saga stretching between Russia circa 1880 and America in 2005. “I was never much interested in my roots until I…
