Modern Love
Can a cat teach a self-absorbed guy about parenthood?
Undercover Mother
The setting is the English countryside in the early 1960s. The time is winter — what seems like eternal winter. Little Anna Wyatt’s mother, a German war refugee, leaves the house one morning, never to return. There’s been an accident, a neighbor explains — something about the car, the fog. Mummy, Anna eventually understands, has …
Homeward Bound
The son of an American film icon heads back to his father’s Siberia.
Wartime Rations
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 screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood. (They should just get it over with …
Mexico’s Cultural Revolution
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 inn owned by Fernández’s family on the outskirts of Xalapa, the state capital of Veracruz. …
Paid in Persimmons
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 we first encountered life abroad—a baptismal Pepsi, automatic sliding doors. Then Rome and the charmed …
Double Lives
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.
Review: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
The reviewer who makes a stink about Michael Chabon’s fiction is a bit like that kid at the birthday party who insists, to the fury of his classmates, on calling out the magician’s ruse, or the high-school crank who keeps yelling that the prom queen throttles kittens for leisure. Nobody wants to know. Book reviewers – not a tribe distinguished by the impulse to gratuitous charity – have mostly fallen over themselves in mouth-agape wonder at Chabon’s talent.
A Cigarette and a Window
This review is available in PDF Format. Click here to download it.
The Man Who Would Be King
Thirty years ago, Leslie Epstein raised hackles with his fictional take on the Lodz ghetto A Jewish policeman and a German soldier direct pedestrian traffic in the Lodz ghetto. The sign reads: Jewish residential area, entrance is forbidden. (Photo: Paul Mix, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) More than six decades later, Theodor …