Arnon Grunberg, a 26-year-old native of Amsterdam, wrote the novel Blue Monday (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997) on a dare. It has sold 70,000 copies in Holland and been republished in various translations. Blue Monday has been compared to Roth’s Goodbye Columbus; Grunberg’s often-pixilated protagonist, also called Arnon, is a sort of Jewish Casanova who vividly…
Tag: novel
Amy Bloom’s Away
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A new sub-genre of Jewish literature seems to be emerging in which the subjects move or have moved across North America in a northwesterly direction. We saw it earlier this year in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about an alternate postwar history in which a Jewish homeland is established not in Israel but…
Montreal novel wins Jewish Book Award (2009)
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The White Space Between, the novel by Montrealer Ami Sands Brodoff that won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, focuses on Willow Ives and her mother, Jane Ives, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor formerly known as Jana Ivanova, and Willow’s need to understand the persistent gaps in her mother’s past. Much of the story…
Cary Fagan’s Valentine’s Fall
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Huddie Rosen leaves North York after high school, acquires a wife and kids and alternate world as a bluegrass musician in Prague, then revisits his former haunts in Toronto as his marriage and alternate world seem on the verge of collapse. But there’s much more to Valentine’s Fall, the latest novel by Toronto author Cary…
Kreitman’s Dance of the Demons
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“I do not know of a single woman in Yiddish literature who wrote better than she did,” Isaac Bashevis Singer once commented about the little-known novelist and story writer Esther Kreitman, whose 1936 book, The Dance of the Demons, has just been reissued by the Feminist Press of New York. In truth, Singer might have…
All Other Nights is Horn’s best yet
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Dara Horn’s third novel combines her trademark cleverness, depth of Jewish knowledge, and strong literary sensibility into a fast-paced adventure-intrigue in which Jewish characters make a significant difference in the American Civil War. Jacob Rappaport, the 19-year-old son of a New York industrialist, joins the Union Army rather than accept the poor match his father,…
Sherman, Wiseman, Michaels, Shrayer (for Chanukah)
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Anyone who cares about the state of contemporary Jewish writing should not neglect to read What the Furies Bring, a new book of essays by Toronto essayist-poet Kenneth Sherman (Porcupine’s Quill). By itself, Sherman’s choice of subject matter is compelling. His essay topics include “Yiddish and the Jewish Canon,” “Anne Frank and the Search for…
Going Gentle Into That Good Night
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The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, were the stuff of urban legend. A couple of eccentrics, they lived in a grand Fifth Avenue brownstone left to them by their parents who died when the boys were young adults. Langley, wounded by mustard gas in the First Great War, became a classic hoarder of junk from…
On Graphic Novels
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So many books, so little time. It was in the year 1859 that British literary critic David Masson noted that something astounding was happening to English literature. Two novels were being published in London each week, Masson observed, making it impossible for readers to keep up with the entirety of modern fiction. Henceforth, each person…
Stern’s Frozen Rabbi
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Fifteen-year-old Bernard Karp finds a strange heirloom in the food freezer in the basement of his family’s suburban Memphis home: a greenish block of ice containing a frozen rabbi, a Jewish Rip van Winkle lying in peaceful repose as if flash-frozen in the midst of a relaxing afternoon shluff. Confronted at the dinner table, Bernie’s…
