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Moses Hadas, a linguist and scholar of the classics who democratized the study of ancient books at Columbia University by emphasizing the value of studying them as literature, even in English translation, was born on this date in 1900. Ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hadas was fluent in Yiddish, German, ancient Hebrew, […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this article, six books published by Notting Hill: Beautiful and Impossible Things: Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde; Essays on the Self, by Virginia Woolf; Junkspace, by Rem Koolhaas; The William Hazlitt Essay Prize 2013 the Winners; A Eulogy for Nigger and Other Essays; Cyclogeography by Jon Day; Questions of Travel by William Morris. SINCE […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Till We Have Built Jerusalem, by Adina Hoffman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 352 pages. A CITY’S ARCHITECTURE is often an excellent guide to its history, politics, and vision of itself. The Haussmanian Paris we know today still speaks of the need for clean, airy streets, as well as […]
Read MoreYiddish writer Esther Kreitman, sister to the world-famous I.B. Singer and Yiddish writer I.J. Singer, died in London at age 63 on this date in 1954. Kreitman was a highly intelligent child who, as a girl, was denied education and attention in her Orthodox family. According to Faith Jones at the Jewish Women’s Archive, Kreitman “nevertheless […]
Read MoreCharles Dickens, one of the 19th century’s greatest novelists, died at the age of 58 on this date in 1870. Dickens had a complicated relationship with Jews in Great Britain. On the one hand, he created one of the most hateful Jewish characters in literary history, Oliver Twist‘s Fagin (“a very old shrivelled Jew whose […]
Read Moreby Marty Roth Discussed in this essay: A Horse Walks into a Bar, by David Grossman, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017, 208 pages. “DON’T YOU THINK my jokes are funny?” “No . . . . Your jokes are bad . . .” “Bad, as in not funny . . . Or as in, like, […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan. Random House, 2017, 264 pages. DORIT RABINYAN’S All the Rivers comes to us heavy with a back story that forces us to read this moving novel in a way we never would have under normal circumstances. It recounts the doomed love of Liat, […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee, NYRB Classics, 2017, 221 pages, and And Then, by Donald Breckenridge, David Godine, 2017, 101 pages. SEVERAL YEARS ago, my wife and I were in Venice, and in an effort to avoid the omnipresent crowds, we […]
Read Moretranslated from the Yiddish by Curt Leviant 1. OUR REBBI, Nissel the Short (he was called that, you see, on account of his small stature), was led by the nose by his assistants, who did absolutely as they pleased. If the first assistant came along and declared that the children should be dismissed early, Nissel […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Broken Mirrors, by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies, Archipelago, 2016, 500 pages, and In Praise of Defeat, by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Archipelago, 2017, 800 pages. OUR HYPOSTASIZED image of the Arab world is that of one rotted by Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. That it […]
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