JRB | Fiction
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Upon Such Sacrifices: King Lear and the Binding of Isaac
How Shakespeare helps us think about the akedah, and vice versa.
Before the Big Bang
Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is quite sure he knows how the universe began. Novelist Alan Lightman takes a wild narrative guess. But where does the Kabbalah stand?
Joseph Roth: Grieving for a Lost Empire
Always in flight, one of the world’s permanent transients, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was a one-man diaspora. A drunk and a fantasist, he was also a marvelous writer whose work was bedizened with metaphor, laced with simile.
Cynthia Ozick: Or, Immortality
Ozick is as marvelously demanding, harrumphing, and uncompromising as she has always been.
Live Wire
Bellow’s not so innocent knock in The Adventures of Augie March is generally taken as the moment when Jews barged into American literature without apology.
The Jewbird
It is in his stories, rather than his novels, that Malamud emerged as a unique writer. A new series brings new exposure to both.
The Hunter
James Salter has been justly celebrated as a composer of gorgeous prose, and his new late-life novel All That Is confirms his reputation as a writer’s writer. How much of his artistic vision is predicated on being James Salter rather than James Horowitz?
Brave New Golems
As monsters go, golems are pretty boring. Mute, crudely fashioned household servants and protectors, in essence they’re not much different from the brooms in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” story.
Coming with a Lampoon
Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—his latest one by a giant step.
Who Owns Margot?
What if Anne Frank’s sister had survived Bergen-Belsen? Interesting, but . . .
Appelfeld in Bloom
Israeli author Aharon Applefeld sifts through memories to understand the traumas of his past.
The Rebbe and the Yak
What do you do when your ancestor appears to you in a dream saying that he is trapped inside the body of a Tibetan yak? If you’re the Ustiler Rebbe in Haim Be’er’s new novel, you go to Tibet to find him, of course.
Distant Cousins
None of these four novels by American Jewish writers is fully at home in Israel—they’re more like Mars orbiters than rovers.
Suggested Reading
Chopped Herring and the Making of the American Kosher Certification System
In 1986, the discovery of non-kosher vinegar in a classic Jewish delicacy led to a revolution in kosher supervision.
Moses and Hellenism
In a provocative new work recently published in German, Bernd Witte proposes nothing less than an “alternative history of German culture,” as the subtitle of his finely wrought work of scholarship tells us. Moses and Homer: Greeks, Jews, Germans is a historical and cultural argument animated by powerful indignation. This history, he insists, has yet to be fully confronted.
The Other Bernstein
Late August 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth and the first Yahrzeit of his brother, Burton, who wrote an incredible family memoir.
The Ubiquitous Gabirol
Solomon ibn Gabirol plunges into poetry, writes S. Y. Agnon, medabek atzmo be-charuz: glued to his craft, beading words with devotion.
