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Tag Archives: memoir
Michel de Montaigne
Writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem on this date in 1533, was a major figure in the French Renaissance. His mother was Jewish, but converted to Protestantism, while his maternal grandfather was a crypto-Jew whose family converted to Catholicism. It is thought that there were conversos on his father’s side as well. Montaigne heard and […]
Read MoreThe Child Bride
by Rebecca Boroson IN 1905, when my grandfather was a divorced man who had cut off his payess and left his shtetl to live as a freethinker, he went to see a farmer who had three marriageable daughters. The daughters, whose mother had died in childbirth, were growing up wild, and the farmer was rumored […]
Read MoreOn Being a “Jewess”
by Rebecca Boroson TWO MEN WANTED ME, when I was young, for being something I was not. I was reminded of this recently, when one sent me my portrait, which I never knew he had painted more than fifty years ago. He titled it “Jewess.” The other man, tall, blond, blue-eyed, of German descent and […]
Read MoreZemirovsky’s Flight from the Juif
ASSIMILATION AND DISSIMULATION by Zelda Gamson Discussed in this essay: The Nemirovsky Question: The Life, Death and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France, by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Yale University Press, 2016, 376 pages. from the Autumn 2017 issue of Jewish Currents THE LIFE could have made a good novel, and she might even have […]
Read MoreTurkish Delight
THE SEPHARDIC IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN FICTION by Sarah Aroeste From the Autumn 2017 issue of Jewish Currents Discussed in this essay: His Hundred Years, A Tale by Shalach Manot. Albion-Andalus Books, 2016, 208 pages. IT IS WITH BOTH pride and curiosity that I spent my childhood years staring daily at a photograph of my grandfather as […]
Read MoreThe Uncivil Servant: Diaries of Doomed Writers
by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922 by Marina Tsetaeva, translated by Jamey Gambrell. NYRB Classics, 2017, 248 pages; and The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia, translated by Robert Croll. Restless Books, 2017, 448 pages. MARINA TSETAEVA (1892-1941) was part of the remarkable generation of Russian poets who had […]
Read MoreThe Uncivil Servant: Longer than the Jews Wandered in the Wilderness . . .
by Mitchell Abidor WHEN JOSE ALTUVE of the Houston Astros threw out Corey Seager of the Dodgers around midnight on November 1-2, bringing the Astros the first World Series championship in their history, I expected to cheer and well up with tears of joy. I have loved the Astros since their founding as the Colt […]
Read MoreClancy Sigal’s 20th-Century Road Trip
by Marty Roth “He was a romantic man, Clancy. The Left was then romantic, heroic, monitored by the ghosts of heroes and heroines.” —Doris Lessing THE ROLLER COASTER that was Clancy Sigal’s life and career has shut down, the lights turned off. What is still worth savoring? Although he was celebrated as a legendary figure […]
Read MoreDavid Rakoff’s American Life
David Rakoff, a Canadian-born gay writer who was a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “This American Life” and published three bestselling volumes of essays, died at 47 on this date in 2012. Rakoff’s grandparents fled Latvia and Lithuania for South Africa at the turn of the 20th century; his parents left South Africa in 1961 and moved […]
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