Boris Fishman

Wartime Rations

Boris — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:43:03 +0000

I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” — for which Benioff was asked to write the…

Mexico’s Cultural Revolution

Boris — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:45:43 +0000

You’re going to be part of an experiment tonight,” Justo Fernández Garibay said. “We couldn’t find chestnuts for the stuffing, so we’re using macadamia nuts.” I was about to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner at the Posada Coatepec, a beautiful…

Paid in Persimmons

Boris — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:59:40 +0000

In the seventies and eighties, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left the USSR for Israel and the United States. My family, like so many others, emigrated via Austria and Italy, where our paperwork was processed. Vienna was the place…

Double lives

Boris — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:50:18 +0000

In 2000, during a summer in Moscow, I took a commuter train to the nearby village of Peredelkino, the retreat of the Soviet literary elite. Several prominent Russian writers still have homes there, but Peredelkino owes its allure mainly to Soviet times, when the craft that its residents practiced mattered so much that those who transgressed official boundaries in their exercise of it could be killed for their words.

The Man Who Would Be King

Boris — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:14:05 +0000

Thirty years ago, Leslie Epstein raised hackles with his fictional take on the Lodz ghetto

More than six decades later, Theodor Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” still dominates arguments about the proper means of Holocaust commemoration.…

Natural Woman

Boris — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:52:33 +0000

With her latest role, Thandie Newton continues her run of intimate, mesmerizing performances.

Anyone who saw Thandie Newton in Crash (2005), the race-relations drama thick with A-listers, surely noticed little else. In fifteen minutes of screen time, Newton was by turns taunting,…

Politborough

Boris — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:16:11 +0000

Glasnost Grows In Brooklyn

One sign that this year’s race for the 46th Assembly District of New York was a little different than usual was the alleged involvement of the Kremlin. Ari Kagan, a 39-year-old journalist running for the state seat…

Mixed Messages

Boris — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:57:41 +0000

Anna Shternshis reveals how Soviet propaganda forged a new brand of Jewish identity

Histories of Soviet Jewry have usually told stories of oppression and resistance. In Soviet and Kosher, Anna Shternshis, a Moscow-born professor of Yiddish language and literature at the…

The News From Siberia

Boris — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:00:47 +0000

WESTERNERS hardly paid attention when the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky thanked the Russian government for jailing him in the part of Siberia where the Decembrists were exiled, after a failed uprising against the czar in 1825. But Khodorkovsky, who was…

Blithe Spirit

Boris — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 17:00:24 +0000

Actress Lena Headey brings her irrepressible charm to a romantic comedy with a twist.

After four hours of modeling “frock coats and frilly dresses” for a photo shoot, the British actress Lena Headey has returned to her natural state — torn…