After World War II, when my grandfather returned to Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus, his parents suggested he become an electrician. He refused and became a barber instead. “I wanted to work in a clean smock, not a dirty one,” he said. (Barbers in the Soviet Union wore smocks.)
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
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
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.
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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
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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 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.
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