by Lawrence Bush on February 11, 2012
Judy Blume, who redefined the terms of acceptable discourse in children’s literature on her way to selling eighty million copies of her books and seeing them translated into thirty-one languages, was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on this date in 1938. Her best-known works include Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which deals with menstruation and religious uncertainty, and features a “half-Jewish” kid; Blubber, which reckons with bullying; Just as Long as We’re Together, which deals with divorce; and Forever, about teen sex. Her three novels for adults — Summer Sisters, Smart Women, and Wifey— have all been bestellers. Blume has faced censorship more than almost any American author and is active on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. In 2004, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Her other honors include the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association, and the Living Legends Award of the Library of Congress. Blume has received many thousands of letters from her young readers. “What has changed,” she wrote twelve years ago in Newsweek, “are the numbers of letters about family violence, incest and other abuses. There are letters expressing such hopelessness and despair they leave me in tears.”
“My mother, who went to high school with Philip Roth’s mother, met Mrs. Roth on the street. Mrs. Roth had some advice for her. ‘When they ask how she knows those things, you say, I don’t know, but not from me!’ I’m sure my mother used that line more than once.” —Judy Blume
by Lawrence Bush on November 10, 2011
Historical novelist Howard Fast was born in New York on this date in 1914. His most compelling novels included Citizen Tom Paine (1943), Freedom Road (1944, about slavery and Reconstruction), My Glorious Brothers (1948, about the Maccabean struggle), and Spartacus (1951), which he began to write while in jail for refusing to give testimony to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Although Fast was a best-selling author by then, he had to self-publish Spartacus, only to see it made into a smash hit film a decade later. An active Communist, Fast was a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. He also wrote numerous novels under the pen-name E.V. Cunningham and other books under the names Behn Boruch, Walter Ericson, and Simon Kent. Thousands of young Americans awoke to the drama of freedom struggle in their own country through the creative writing of Howard Fast.
“In the Party I found ambition, narrowness, and hatred; I also found love and dedication and high courage and integrity — and some of the noblest human beings I have ever known.” —Howard Fast
by Lawrence Bush on July 30, 2011
Primo Levi was born in Turin on this date in 1919. He trained and worked as a chemist before joining an Italian partisan group in 1943. When the group was arrested, Levi expected to be shot, but saved his life by confessing to being Jewish – which landed him in an internment camp and then, by February, 1944, in Auschwitz. He spent eleven months there. In 1947, his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man, was published, launching years of literary output that included a novel and books of short stories, poems, and essays, including The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, and If Not Now When? Levi was a major literary figure in Italy and his works were translated into many languages, but he was not published in Israel until after his death, possibly as a suicide, in 1987.
“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.” -Primo Levi
by Lawrence Bush on July 26, 2011
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1978), was born in a village near Warsaw on this date in 1904. His father was a hasidic rabbi. Singer emigrated to the U.S. in 1935 and began a long if late-starting literary career with the Jewish Forward in 1945, after the death of his elder writer-brother, I. J. Singer (their sister, Esther Kreitman, who died in 1954, was also a writer). Isaac Bashevis (his middle name means “Bathsheba’s,” after his mother) wrote sexually charged, mystically tinged stories and novels that were quite different in content from the humanistic writings of the classic Yiddish writers. He was politically conservative and famously vegetarian. “When a human kills an animal for food,” he wrote, “he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God?”
“Jews are a people that can’t sleep and won’t let anybody else.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer
Judy Blume, who redefined the terms of acceptable discourse in children’s literature on her way to selling eighty million copies of her books and seeing them translated into thirty-one languages, was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on this date in 1938. Her best-known works include Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which deals with menstruation and religious uncertainty, and features a “half-Jewish” kid; Blubber, which reckons with bullying; Just as Long as We’re Together, which deals with divorce; and Forever, about teen sex. Her three novels for adults — Summer Sisters, Smart Women, and Wifey— have all been bestellers. Blume has faced censorship more than almost any American author and is active on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. In 2004, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Her other honors include the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association, and the Living Legends Award of the Library of Congress. Blume has received many thousands of letters from her young readers. “What has changed,” she wrote twelve years ago in Newsweek, “are the numbers of letters about family violence, incest and other abuses. There are letters expressing such hopelessness and despair they leave me in tears.”
