# BORIS FISHMAN


## Posts

- [Midlife Spices](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/midlife-spices/): MIDLIFE SPICES             “We are drenched in cynicism, psychologisms, explanations, but life is still there, its essence quite beyond spin, its cycle as surely set as it always has been,” the late, great novelist and gourmand Jim Harrison once wrote. I was thinking a lot about this line last fall. I was mired in what you’d have to call – what I had made every attempt to avoid calling – a midlife crisis, that sad cliché of impulsive purchases and extramarital affairs.  I had assumed that the midlife crisis had passed from parody to fantasy, seeing as it signified enough existential […]
- [Shouldn't liberals support legacy admissions?](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/shouldnt-liberals-support-legacy-admissions/): The Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has returned the spotlight to another tilt in the playing field: Legacy admission, the process by which certain schools, especially in the Ivy League, give preferential treatment (by a factor of six, in some accounts) to applicants who are children of alumni. It’s just another way for wealthy white people who’ve grown up with privilege to continue to benefit from a non-meritocratic system, the tear-it-down side argues. The universities counter that legacy admission fosters community and encourages giving. I graduated from Princeton in 2001. I would like to propose a gentle corrective to […]
- [Dreamboat](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/dreamboat/): NB: RIP AirbnbMagazine, which commissioned this essay for a group feature on… I forget now, in 2020, right before folding. (But they paid for it! Honorable, that.) Little did they know how good the pandemic would be for the business. But that’s another story. + The Law of Wisdom (Wasted) posits that two young men backpacking through Europe for the first time will spend 5% of their time in cathedrals and the rest in less high-minded pursuits. In the summer of 2000, for my friend Kiro and me, that meant tall steins of beer, gluttonous meals, and too many 4AM […]
- [Oxygen Oracle](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/oxygen-oracle/): NB: Spec-reported for The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town, which… did not have the courtesy to reply. + In Western Montana, where wildfire smoke pollution has succeeded in doing what even winters do not – chase people indoors – Treasure Staters have been reading to make sense of the end times. Surely, it’s Revelations for some, but those after more earthbound succor have been consulting another deity: Missoula County’s Oxygen Oracle. If you don’t count body-slamming reporters (Rep. Greg Gianforte) and farming accidents (Sen. Jon Tester), Montana is as short on government poetry as any place not counting Washington […]
- [Humbert the Homeless: On Lolita as Chaste Torment, Immigrant Memoir, and True Love](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/humbert-the-homeless-on-lolita-as-chaste-torment-immigrant-memoir-and-true-love/): NB: Invited to and then, like a misbehaving lout, kicked out of an anthology from Vintage on the occasion of the book’s anniversary. Perhaps fair given that I really don’t love this book, much as I scientifically admire it. I’ve perhaps never wrestled with an essay more. (Favorite line, though: “More than a decade after I first opened it, Lolita still feels masterful merely the way that a power plant does – indispensable, intricate, and domineering, but a place to be awed by rather than enjoy. I try to build power plants myself, and they deliver energy in a different […]
- [I miss...](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/i-miss/): NB: This wasn’t written for anyone — that I couldn’t imagine even where to pitch it is a sign of the sad scarcity of venues for short-form personal essay in journalism today. Travel + Leisure was kind enough to consider it, but it was altogether too dark for them, I’m sure. + I miss the cleaning liquid in Mexico. I used to smell it no matter where I went in the country, a soapy national absolution. I miss the things about Australia, Bosnia, Laos, and Namibia that the travel magazines say I’ll find there. I miss the scent of the […]
- [Creative Suite](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/creative-suite/): You could say I moved to South Beach because of the Betsy Hotel. That may sound counterintuitive—living in the same town as your favorite hotel would seem to make staying there unnecessary. But the Betsy, a colonnaded rarity of Georgian-Floridian architecture in Art Deco South Beach, is much more than just a very lovely luxury boutique hotel. And I had never stayed at the Betsy in the traditional sense. The Betsy makes an artist residency available, free of charge, to a different writer or performer every week in tribute to Hyam Plutzik, a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in […]
- [The Soapy Subtlety of Norway's "Occupied"](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/soapy-norways-occupied/): It was when one character told another that Russian operatives had implanted a poison ampoule in her lover’s body, set to implode should she prove disloyal, that I began to feel like Occupied, the Norwegian political thriller whose third season has just started streaming on Netflix, had made the full turn to soap opera. Occupied had a brilliant premise, at once brazen and plausible: In the near future, in response to environmental crisis, Norway suspends oil and gas production, prompting a soft invasion by Russia with the EU’s blessing. Russia wants to get the fuel going again – and, as […]
- [Lucky](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/lucky/): NB: RIP Tony Hoagland. My editor at The New York Times liked it, but “Verdict from colleagues: Would love to have something more straightforward from him on impending fatherhood–or really anything. Love his voice. But this is a little too muse-y and just not right for us.” This led to “My Daughter’s America — And Mine.” See under the entry for The New York Times. + Writers are like beloved restaurants in another town: Even if you haven’t been able to visit in a while, you selfishly expect them to keep chugging, all because you might stop in one day, […]
- [Bulletin: On Hunting Pokemon in Moscow's Religious Institutions](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/bulletin-on-hunting-pokemon-in-moscows-religious-institutions/): Tablet: “Hunting Pokemons in Moscow’s religious institutions? Consider the Jewish Community Center. After the arrest of a colleague for playing the popular augmented reality game in the Orthodox Church, a Russian TV reporter wanted to see how rabbis would react. Just as you’d expect: With a heavy-shouldered shrug. Though “it would be good to turn off the phone on Shabbat,” one representative softly proposed.” [http://izrus.co.il/diasporaIL/article/2016-09-06/32713.html] Boris: Oh, Jews of Russia. As always, you feel so compelled not to antagonize your mercurial hosts, so grateful are you to have virtual creatures hunted instead of real ones — instead of yourselves! — […]
- [On Michael Chabon](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/on-michael-chabon/): NB: A certain revered and now fallen literary editor, when he was at The New Republic, assigned me to consider Chabon’s entire oeuvre from a less starry-eyed perspective than most. So I did, for a month, to the exclusion of all other paying work, as a 20-something freelancer with zero disposable income. He never replied. Ever. Maybe because he was trying to sleep with my girlfriend. + 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 […]
- [The Bazaar and the Monastery, or Being on Book Tour](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/the-bazaar-and-the-monastery-or-being-on-book-tour/): The current issue of The Paris Review has a scoop to rival a sit-down with Pynchon: The first in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, in which the notoriously reclusive author explains her anonymity: “This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art,” she says. “The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero.” The sentiment is familiar to anyone who’s spent a little time among authors. Art has been commodified. In today’s pitiless marketplace, it isn’t enough for authors to write — they must also flog their books like door-to-door salesmen. It’s all right if […]
- [A Walker In His City](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/a-walker-in-his-city/): NB: Solicited and then gently unhanded by The New York Times Magazine for reasons too convoluted to get into! + My father and I are so alike-looking that cashiers turning to us in a checkout line always know we’re together. The list of other convergences is too brief: He showed me a great deal of love, so I learned to believe in it. Otherwise, he’s private, and I am confessional. I’m turbulent, and he’s steady. I trust, and he doubts. I risk, and he shakes his head. This might be no crisis in an American family, but in a Russian, […]
- [The Empties](https://borisfishman.com/new_york_times/the-empties/): In 1988, when my family declared its desire to emigrate, our homeland imposed a brutal discouragement: No person could leave with more than several hundred dollars’ worth of possessions on hand. (What would you take? My mother tried to bring her wedding ring, but it was seized at customs.) In the Soviet Union, we were secretly wealthy, but we arrived in Brooklyn as paupers. We patrolled curbsides, washed floors for $3 an hour and reused paper towels. I was 10 years old, and I helped how I could. It’s an old story for immigrant kids: You learn English faster than […]
- [Looking for Malamud](https://borisfishman.com/uncategorized/looking-for-malamud/): A young novelist explores the anxieties of influence It’s very hard to persuade a friend watching the clock in an office in Midtown Manhattan that at your artist colony in southeastern Wyoming, you — who are eating food made by a country-club chef, sleeping in a free bed, writing in a handsome studio, and taking walks in a landscape of religious beauty — have it the rougher. You are 2,000 miles from home, and almost as many — or so it feels — from the nearest human settlement, not that very many kindred spirits inhabit its churches and bars. You […]
- [Love Among the Ruins](https://borisfishman.com/forward/love-among-the-ruins/): What Gabriel Garcia Marquez taught me It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But I had a secret weapon: the work of her countryman Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died yesterday (on this earth, at least) at 87. That I would try to seduce this ethereal creature was as fantastical a proposition as any of the things that went on […]
- [Believers](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/believers/): Falling in love, falling out of love, and finding something greater than both We met cute, real-life edition: Three years older, she was in the exit lane of a failing young marriage, and, being 24, I was struggling to distinguish my rear end from my elbow. I was moderating a talk uptown, and she was an editor looking for new writers. In the post-event scrum, I barely noticed her. But when we had lunch in Bryant Park a month later, I realized that she possessed that rarest of qualities: She was not only beautiful and smart; she was interesting. For […]
- [The Stranger](https://borisfishman.com/tablet/the-stranger/): A 24-year-old Jewish Upper West Sider helps run the most important Arab-American organization in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to 35,000 Arabs.
- [Pockets Still Empty, But Now They Are Deeper](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/pockets-still-empty-but-now-they-are-deeper/): The last time we had been in this part of Europe together was 23 years before, when we arrived in Italy as stateless refugees.
- [The Double](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/the-double/): It started in the summer of 2008. The Multnomah County library in Portland, Ore., wanted me to return its Russian translation of Stephen Hunter’s thriller “Dirty White Boys.”
- [A Pilgrim in Provincetown—Four Centuries Later ](https://borisfishman.com/wall-street-journal/a-pilgrim-in-provincetown%e2%80%94four-centuries-later/): My family, refugees from the Soviet Union, arrived in the United States on Thanksgiving Eve 1988. This year, I celebrated the holiday a mile from the spot where the Pilgrims first touched American soil, 368 years and two days before my family landed at JFK.
- [Old Ways](https://borisfishman.com/tablet/old-ways/): ...The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake.    So I did.
- [Under the Chuppah](https://borisfishman.com/tablet/under-the-chuppah/): My family practices a kind of compensatory Judaism... Their support for Israel borders on the fanatical: Next fall, my 57-year-old father will use his two weeks of vacation to volunteer in the mess halls and warehouses of the Israeli Army; my mother has kept her menorah lit well into January. (It can’t hurt.) My parents are like the animists of Brazil or New Orleans: Their blend of the pagan and Abrahamic disturbs only the purists on either side of the fence.    I am a purist. 
- [Dispatch | Cooke City, Montana](https://borisfishman.com/nytimes-magazine-travel/697/): “You’re going to Cooke City?” an acquaintance in Livingston, in south-central Montana, asked. “That’s where all the varmints hide out!”
- [‘Oy! Such a Home’](https://borisfishman.com/tablet/%e2%80%98oy-such-a-home%e2%80%99-2/): The hyperactive Jewishness of New York has never been a relief to me. 
- [Now Grooming | A Shave and a Haircut, New Orleans Style](https://borisfishman.com/nytimes-magazine-travel/now-grooming-a-shave-and-a-haircut-new-orleans-style/): Unlike many immigrant parents, Olga Rivera, who moved from Guatemala to New Orleans in 1965, wanted her son Cesar to become one thing and one thing only — a barber. Cesar, growing up amid the culinary splendors of the Big Easy, wanted to be a chef.    Mothers know best...
- [Dispatch: Northern New Mexico](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/dispatch-northern-new-mexico/): “Fifth Sunday in a row,” the ski instructor in the blue staff jacket said, shaking his head and pointing at the fine powder descending peaceably all around us. “There’s 90 inches of snow at the top of that mountain.”
- [Trading Places](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/trading-places/): The mayor of a drill-town in Texas tries to persuade an economically battered corner of upstate New York with recently discovered gas reserves to stay away from drilling. 
- [Dispatch | New Orleans](https://borisfishman.com/nytimes-magazine-travel/dispatch-new-orleans/): “Ten to six, Saints — second quarter,” our server at Elizabeth’s said by way of greeting. “I’ll be right back with your menus.” A lady of a certain age, she wore construction boots, cargo shorts and an oversize Saints T-shirt beneath a pixie crop of salt-and-pepper hair.
- [Give My Regards To Your Lovely Spouse](https://borisfishman.com/london-review-of-books/give-my-regards-to-your-lovely-spouse/): This review is available in PDF Format. Click here to download it.
- [A Dirty Apron](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/a-dirty-apron/): 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.)
- [Modern Love](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/modern-love/): Can a cat teach a self-absorbed guy about parenthood?
- [Undercover Mother](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/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 gone to heaven. Two days earlier, a perfectly suburban couple were arrested on charges of treason. It’s that time in the annals of the cold war: every week brings news of spy rings and espionage. So one day Peter, Anna’s irascible older brother, asks: What […]
- [Homeward Bound](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/homeward-bound/): The son of an American film icon heads back to his father's Siberia.
- [Wartime Rations](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/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 and put the man in the movies already.) He takes his morning orange juice next to Amanda Peet. And he’s still in his 30s. See what I mean? Benioff’s new novel reveals why there are so many Russians — not oligarchs or prostitutes, but soldiers […]
- [Mexico’s Cultural Revolution](https://borisfishman.com/nytimes-magazine-travel/mexico%e2%80%99s-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. When he’s not balancing budgets, Fernández, a representative in the legislature, oversees the menu. Thanksgiving in Xalapa — I wouldn’t have thought twice about it in the “gringo ghettos” of San Miguel de Allende or Ajijic. But Xalapa is in the mountains, about five hours […]
- [Paid in Persimmons](https://borisfishman.com/departures/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 seaside town of Ladispoli. Our subsidy from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society provided enough to rent a small villa with a garden and a ceramic tile floor that cooled sand-scalded feet after a morning on the beach. By mid-October leaves blanketed the ground, and one […]
- [Double Lives](https://borisfishman.com/boston-college-magazine/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](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/review-the-yiddish-policemens-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](https://borisfishman.com/the-new-republic/a-cigarette-and-a-window/): This review is available in PDF Format. Click here to download it.
- [The Man Who Would Be King](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/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 Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” still dominates arguments about the proper means of Holocaust commemoration. Take last year’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn’s affecting memoir of his research into the lives and deaths of […]
- [Natural Woman](https://borisfishman.com/vogue/natural-woman/): 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, humiliated, livid, beseeching, and manic with fear. She stole the show. The English actress does it again in this month’s The Pursuit of Happyness, a devastating story about a San Francisco family in which she plays a woman so aggrieved by the failure of her husband (played by Will Smith) to do his part for the family that […]
- [Politborough](https://borisfishman.com/the-new-republic/glasnost-grows-in-brooklyn/): 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 from Brooklyn, suggested that Moscow had a man in the race — that is, his opponent, Alec Brook-Krasny, who supports dialogue with the Kremlin. Although Moscow’s backing of the 48-year-old former head of an umbrella group of Russian-Jewish organizations was never substantiated, the Kagan campaign’s accusation galvanized the electorate. The 46th includes most of Brighton Beach, a two-square-mile Brooklyn […]
- [Mixed Messages](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/mixed-messages/): 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 University of Toronto, presents a less dispiriting narrative. In researching the book, she interviewed more than 200 Jews who lived through the first decades of the Soviet Union and found that they often had a very different relationship to Soviet ideology. The Soviets banished religion, but, in the 1920s and 30s, they actually fostered secular Yiddish culture as a […]
- [After Katrina](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/after-katrina/): On 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina, I had felt the empathy of a guest in America. Then I was assigned to edit the Senate's official report on Katrina. 
- [The News From Siberia](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/the-peoples-act-of-love-by-james-meek/): 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 fishing for public sympathy closer to home, knew exactly what he was doing: there’s no event in Russian history that has been more romanticized. In fact, few experiences have been as seminal to the Russian sense of national — and especially literary — identity as exile, often to a remote penal colony. (Siberia made Dostoyevsky into a Christian and forever […]
- [Blithe Spirit](https://borisfishman.com/vogue/blithe-spirit/): 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 jeans, striped tee, and pigtails — and is working through a piece of chocolate cake with disarming abandon. “I look like Oliver Twist,” she says, laughing. The 32-year-old Headey, who was plucked from a London theater stage by a casting agent at seventeen, has produced an eclectic series of widely admired performances without losing her Yorkshire lack of pretension. […]
- [Forged Reunions](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/forged-reunions/): A picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile In “Roots,” the new film by Pavel Lounguine, a Ukrainian conman named Edik lures several wealthy North Americans on a heritage tour to their ancestral shtetl of Golutvin. The film, which will screen at the New York Jewish Film Festival opening today, could have been paired with last fall’s adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated. But Everything Is Illuminated was an earnest homage in the name of an eternally guilt-burdened American Jewry. Roots is a farce. Golutvin, like Everything ‘s Trachimbrod, no longer exists, having been wiped out by the Nazis. […]
- [Ghetto Music](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/ghetto-music/): When Italians fell for klezmer, Francesco Spagnolo tuned them in to the forgotten sounds of their own people. Audio Interview by Boris Fishman. Listen courtesy of Nextbook.
- [Urban Tactics: Marlboro Men](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-the-city/urban-tactics-marlboro-men/): ON wintry nights in Manhattan, little bands of smokers huddle under restaurant awnings, shivering as they struggle to light their cigarettes in the icy wind. You will not find them outside many of the Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach. Here, smokers simply stay inside. They may wait a bit longer before lighting up, and they may have to crush a few cigarettes into their appetizer plates before the waiters reluctantly break out the ashtrays, but the evening still ends in a smoky haze. As the journalist Alexander Grant wrote in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the city’s main Russian-language daily, in 2003, […]
- [White on Black](https://borisfishman.com/words-without-borders/white-on-black/): In 1968, Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of the Spanish Community Party, severed ties with a willful daughter, who had just given birth to a toddler with cerebral palsy in Moscow. The Kremlin covered for Gallego’s callousness and informed his daughter that the boy, who was being held in a special hospital, had died. This illustrious, troubled pedigree and diplomatic intrigue are nowhere to be found in that boy’s memoir of having grown up, amid inconceivable humiliation and want, in a succession of Soviet orphanages and old-age homes where he was anonymously registered after his official “death.” Gallego’s very first line […]
- [Going to Oaxaca](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-travel/going-to-oaxaca/): WHY GO NOW Equally cosmopolitan, but far more tranquil than Mexico City, Oaxaca is fast becoming the artistic capital of Mexico, drawing artists from around the country while shepherding its own to acclaim. It’s difficult to find a block in the Centro Histórico without an art gallery, many of them showcases for striking abstract and expressionist works, as well as indigenous folk art, including weavings, local black pottery and other handicrafts. The area’s vibrant culture informs Oaxaca’s menus as well. Several recently opened restaurants have been using native ingredients like pumpkin blossoms and cactus paddles to invigorate international trends. The […]
- [Spelling Errors](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/spelling-errors/): How Bee Season lost its sting on the screen The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that he doesn’t seem very Jewish. Neither, for that matter, does Juliette Binoche, the magnificent French actress who plays Miriam, Saul’s silently suffering wife with a secret sideline in petty larceny. Of course, there’s no reason Gere and Binoche couldn’t inhabit Jewish characters. Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood did it in Marjorie Morningstar half a century ago, when American-Jewish life was […]
- [Five Years After Intifada, Leisure Tourists Are Starting to Walk Among the Pilgrims](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-travel/five-years-after-intifada-leisure-tourists-are-starting-to-walk-among-the-pilgrims/): After the Palestinian intifada began in the fall of 2000, traveling to Israel became a statement of sorts. The Israeli tourism industry came to survive on a demographically narrowed but ideologically committed clientele: Christian pilgrims and American Jews. Leisure travel slowed to a trickle, with the overall number of visitors falling from a high of 2.8 million in 2000 to less than a million in 2002, according to the Israel Ministry of Tourism. But after half a decade of empty hotel rooms, Israel seems to be drawing diverse crowds once again. “More and more people are thinking of it as […]
- [Wedding the Personal and Political](https://borisfishman.com/forward/wedding-the-personal-and-political/): Politics so comprehensively saturates Israeli life that even the most apolitical Israeli film ends up invoking it, if only by assiduous omission. In "The Syrian Bride," opening November 16 in New York, Israeli director Eran Riklis not only acknowledges the elephant in the room but also gives it central billing. Ironically, he ends up with one of the most apolitical Israeli films in recent years.
- [Balkanized](https://borisfishman.com/brooklynite/balkanized/): Why local musicians dig Europe’s most strife-ridden region It was an eclectic gathering even by New York standards. In one corner, an elegant gentleman in his sixties dressed in jeans and suspenders. To his right, a teenager costumed as a toy soldier. Further on: a woman brandishing a Phantom of the Opera-style mask, a 16-year-old in a natty suit with spats and a walking cane, and faces framed by Mohawks and multiple piercings. A ringmaster gave the command to several confederates onstage, and, to the kinetic sound of trumpet and saxophone, the belt of dancers buckled in a circular motion […]
- [Airing the Family's (Blood-stained) Laundry](https://borisfishman.com/forward/airing-the-familys-blood-stained-laundry/): As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his family’s well-meaning concealments, Eric didn’t know that the man was talking about his uncle. Ten years later, Harold’s name came up again while Konigsberg was working on a magazine assignment about the mob. At his father’s insistence, Konigsberg dropped the story. “I was always close to my parents and had few qualms about heeding direction from them,” […]
- [Burgher King](https://borisfishman.com/the-new-republic/burgher-king/): Richard Stern is the best American fiction writer of whom you have never heard. After more than five decades of dogged obscurity — despite nine novels, five story collections, a half-dozen non-fictional “miscellanies,” and a memoir — he has become “famous for not being famous,” in a reviewer’s apt phrase, a “has-been without ever having been a been,” in Stern’s own. He has been gracious about oblivion the way other writers are gracious about fame. Fiction-writing is unremunerative toil, but such nullity — the search engine LexisNexis calls up only three reviews of Almonds to Zhoof, Stern’s recently released collected […]
- [In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo](https://borisfishman.com/forward/in-a-corner-of-austria-a-curator-plays-with-a-taboo/): The far-western Austrian market town of Hohenems (population 14,000) is a good place to take in a chamber orchestra during one of many regional summer music festivals or to learn about water-driven mill technology, once a mainstay of the town’s economy. Less predictably, it’s also the location of one of Europe’s most innovative Jewish museums. The director of the Judisches Museum Hohenems (pronounced HOE-nems), Hanno Loewy, doubles as the town’s sole Jewish inhabitant. (Hohenems’s 300-year-old Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust.) Since arriving from Germany last year, Loewy has transformed this provincial museum with a series of provocative, richly […]
- [An Interview with Wladimir Kaminer](https://borisfishman.com/words-without-borders/an-interview-with-wladimir-kaminer/): Boris Fishman interviewed Wladimir Kaminer September 3, 2003. Translated by Boris Fishman. Boris Fishman: Did you start writing before emigrating to Germany? What did you do in the Soviet Union? Wladimir Kaminer: In the Soviet Union, I graduated from music school, with a concentration in music for theatre and television. I worked for a year, then went into the army, got out in 1989. By then, perestroika was in full swing, and many of my colleagues were rushing to take advantage of the increased freedom of movement by going to work in other countries, to acquaint themselves with the world. […]
- [New Frontier: Pell James](https://borisfishman.com/vogue/new-frontier-pell-james/): Pell James leaps to stardom with a lead role in “The King.” Her feet tucked beneath her in a plush armchair at New York’s SoHo Grand, 28-year-old actress Pell James could pass for a teenager. In “The King,” a forthcoming drama about an illicit romance between half-siblings in Southern Baptist country, she is riveting as Malerie, a sixteen-year-old preacher’s daughter transformed by her encounter with her father’s illegitimate son (played by Gael Garcia Bernal). But she hardly needs a whole picture to make an impression. In Jim Jarmusch’s Cannes Grand Prix winner “Broken Flowers,” James’ luminous cameo — she sells […]
- [The Philly Factor](https://borisfishman.com/departures/the-philly-factor/): A destination restaurant in West Philadelphia? It’s true — though you might miss it if your cabbie is driving too fast. Marigold Kitchen occupies the ground floor of a three-story Victorian that looks like every other house on the street (in fact, the place still boards lodgers). But the relative anonymity has helped turn Marigold into a cult favorite. Thirty-one-year-old Steven Cook specializes in creating high from low: Spanish mackerel transforms a piece of humble watermelon. A grilled Gruyere-and-caramelized-onion sandwich accompanied by a fried egg is elevated to extravagance by a bacony potato foam both savory and weightless. Cook’s pastry […]
- [The Anti-Collector](https://borisfishman.com/nytimes-magazine/the-anti-collector/): Earlier this year, as England marked Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27, an advertisement appeared on the Labour Party Web site likening Michael Howard, the Jewish leader of the opposition Conservative Party, to Fagin, the iconic stereotype of the miserly, conniving Jew in Charles Dickens’s ”Oliver Twist.” For the Anglo-Jewish community, it was a familiar coincidence. Two years before, the Jan. 27th issue of The Independent, the left-of-center British newspaper, carried a cartoon of a disrobed Ariel Sharon devouring a blood-soaked Palestinian child under the words: ”What’s wrong . . . you never seen a politician kissing babies before?” The […]
- [New York Diarist: Ambassadors At Large](https://borisfishman.com/the-new-republic/new-york-diarist/): The battle for Iraqi hearts and minds continues, and, several weeks ago, the battlefield was a conference room in New York at the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the Fulbright grant program. After a 14-year interruption, exchanges with Iraq resumed in early 2004; the second annual class of Iraqi grant recipients had just arrived for an orientation session before scattering across the country for a semester of language study. One of their handlers, a State Department public affairs adviser, explained their mission: to work toward their masters degrees, which are the academic purpose of the two-year program; to […]
- [Coming of Age in the Burbs](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/thirteen-and-a-day/): The bar or bat mitzvah is a religious ceremony that initiates a Jewish boy or girl into adulthood. But you already knew that. You watched Krusty the Klown have a belated bar mitzvah on ”The Simpsons,” and you remember that Samantha arranged a bat mitzvah after-party on ”Sex and the City.” B’nai mitzvah — the Hebrew plural term — are ubiquitous in America, even though the Torah doesn’t mention the rite, which appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages and didn’t become an important part of Jewish American social life until after World War II. Why then, asks the journalist […]
- [Brave New World Music](https://borisfishman.com/forward/brave-new-world-music/): Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that “Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands” — and pitch them into the trash. Don’t sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based brass-band/hip-hop/electronica-fusion ensemble, whose self-titled debut album will be released by JDub Records in September. World music began to coalesce into a genre, centered primarily on Third World artists, after a group of British music executives and aficionados contrived the term during a meeting in 1987. […]
- [Back From the Shadows ](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/back-from-the-shadows/): Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled “At the Depot,” to I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson boarded a train for Warsaw, where he sought out Peretz and regaled him with the story in person. Peretz was impressed. Bergelson did not lack for confidence. Born into a wealthy family in rural Ukraine, he spent his youth studying Hebrew religious works and Russian […]
- [The Entertainer](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-the-city/the-entertainer/): FOR those lacking cab-ride entertainment since television screens were discontinued in taxis in 2003, there is hope. It comes in the form of Oleg Roitman, aka the Human Computer, an immigrant cabdriver from Ukraine who regales fares with a flashy sleight of mind: Give Mr. Roitman any date – say, your birthday – and within a second, he will tell you what day of the week it was. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Mr. Roitman demonstrated his skill to a passenger named Mary, who was going to Whole Foods at Union Square. In a thick Russian accent, Mr. Roitman directed […]
- [Made of Provocations](https://borisfishman.com/jerusalemreport/made-of-provocations/): Is it possible to skillfully fictionalize a tragedy like the 9/11 attacks before its wounds have healed? How to dramatize an event whose facts are so unyielding, and whose details have been worked over by an unprecedented number of media outlets with unprecedented access to your attention? How to say something fresh when your audience already knows everything? Jonathan Safran Foer suggests a daring approach in his second novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” the story of Oskar Schell, a precocious 9-year-old New York City boy coping with his father’s death in the attacks. As in his debut, “Everything is […]
- [Mexican Soap Brings Out Tribe Long Hidden](https://borisfishman.com/forward/mexican-soap-brings-out-tribe-long-hidden/): Nico loves Lupita, his classmate at an exclusive Mexican boarding school. Joel and Yoli, Nico’s parents, disapprove. Nico has dumped Karen to be with Lupita, and Yoli worries that Joel’s business partnership with Karen’s father will suffer. The stress drives Joel to a heart attack. Soon after his recovery, Nico brings Lupita home. The encounter with his parents goes poorly and Nico storms from the house, Joel giving chase in vain. For a Mexican soap opera, the melodrama is typical. Nico’s family, however, is not. The Hubers, who have a significant part in the enormously popular Mexican telenovela “Rebelde” (“Rebel”), […]
- [Jewel in the Crown](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/jewel-in-the-crown/): For three centuries, Salonica was a vibrant hub of Ottoman life. The northern Greek city of Salonica—Thessaloniki to the Greeks—passed through Roman and Byzantine hands before falling to the Ottomans in 1430, which is the starting point of Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, a chronicle 20 years in the making. At the geographical heart of the Ottoman Empire, Salonica was among its largest ports and most vital economic centers until the 18th century, when several episodes of the plague, along with a shift of trade routes to the rising Turkish port of Izmir, damaged the […]
- [Bloc Party](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/bloc-party/): Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, ”Snow White and Russian Red,” is a blustery romp through the disaffected world of post-Communist Polish youth. Stranded in a country that’s no longer Communist but isn’t yet integrated into the West, young Poles compensate for their sense of political and economic abandonment with drugs and sex. Maslowska describes their disdainful ennui in free-associative and occasionally absurdist language. The book’s literary pedigree seems obvious. When ”Snow White and Russian Red” first appeared in 2002, European reviewers celebrated its experimental style and drew comparisons to ”The Catcher in the Rye,” ”Trainspotting” and the junkspeak of ”Naked Lunch.” […]
- [Pirates by the Sea](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-the-city/pirates-by-the-sea/): LAST Sunday, as photographers gathered in front of the Millennium Theater on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn, a muscular man in a bulletproof vest dramatically hoisted a cardboard box full of ostensibly illegal DVD copies of the Russian-American spy thriller ”Nelegal” (”Illegal”), a film that was having its U.S. premiere that night. ”Oleg, your hat, put on your hat,” urged an associate in a leather jacket and suede loafers. Oleg obliged, pulling from one of his pockets a baseball cap stenciled with the letters ”F.B.I.” Turning toward the photographers, the duo hammed it up. Appearances notwithstanding, no law enforcement agents […]
- [Discovering Jewish Roots on Caribbean Soil](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-travel/discovering-jewish-roots-on-caribbean-soil/): When Lisa Hock’s son Corey was about to turn 13 and she began looking for an alternative to the routine and occasional excess of banquet-hall bar mitzvahs in Toronto, her hometown, she hardly imagined that he would end up reciting the blessings while shuffling through sand on a Caribbean island. But Corey wasn’t on the beach; his bar mitzvah took place at the United Netherlands Portuguese Congregation Mikve Israel-Emanuel in Willemstad, Curacao, the island north of Venezuela that is an autonomous part of the Netherlands and home to the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. There, the blanket […]
- [Austrophobia](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/austrophobia/): Sam Apple encounters a shepherd who sings in Yiddish—and forces him to question his deepest fear. In Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past With Its Last Wandering Shepherd, author Sam Apple—an editor at the literary sex magazine Nerve—chronicles his travels with Hans Breuer, a wandering shepherd who is also an accomplished Yiddish folksinger. The child of a marriage that was religiously mixed (his father was an assimilated Jew) but ideologically united (both parents were Communists), Breuer, 50, spent his youth battling Austria’s unrepentant accommodation of ex-Nazis. He continues to this day, his unlikely instrument a repertoire […]
- [Reorientation](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/reorientation/): Tom Reiss on the mysterious Byronic figure from Baku who posed as a Muslim prince. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life tells the story of Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905 in Baku, then a cosmopolitan boomtown in the Caucasus. The Bolshevik Revolution rendered Nussimbaum—who became enchanted by the region’s inclusive approach to Islam and would soon restyle himself Essad Bey—a penniless refugee, and he carried the Orient of his imagination as he was chased around Europe by war and political upheaval. Nussimbaum kept reinventing himself: He became a literary sensation in Fascist Europe, posing in […]
- [Marginal Contributions](https://borisfishman.com/bostonglobe/marginal-contributions/): Recently I purchased online a used copy of “The Rise of David Levinsky,” Abraham Cahan’s epic 1917 tale of a penniless immigrant’s dubious evolution into a spiritually vacant New York tycoon. It turned out to be infested with notes made by a previous reader. I huffed my way through 200 pages of fatuous marginalia — “Giving $ doesn’t make you happy” — until my predecessor. . . suddenly vanished. “Where did she go?” I wondered anxiously. Maybe she skimmed? But how could she, in this critical section of Levinsky’s transformation? And then, on page 339, she reappeared. Though her analytical […]
- [A Novel Ending](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/a-novel-ending/): Liev Schreiber pulls a switch on Everything Is Illuminated. download the artist selects The clever subversion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, which described a young American Jew’s search through Ukraine for a woman who may have saved his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust, was that the American’s “self-discovery” tour was actually more revealing for his Ukrainian guides: young Alex confronts Ukraine’s legacy of anti-Semitism and Alex’s grandfather owns up to his contribution to it during the war. The cinematic version of the book, directed by the stage and film actor Liev Schreiber and out in theaters […]
- [Orange Alert](https://borisfishman.com/bostonglobe/orange-alert/): The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, scheduled to begin tomorrow, has provoked ferocious opposition from those who view it as a concession to Palestinian terrorism. There have been periodic warnings of civil war, but, as of press time, the only war to break out in Israel has been between colors: anti-disengagement forces are orange, whereas the government’s supporters are blue, after the Israeli flag. These days, especially after the resounding success of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, color-coding is de rigueur for fledgling political movements. Earlier this year, Kuwaiti advocates of women’s suffrage marched in blue. Mongolian reformers are […]
- [That Tree by the Menorah](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-the-city/that-tree-by-the-menorah/): MILA GORBATOFF, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who fled the rampant anti-Semitism in Ukraine in 1988, lights a menorah every Hanukkah to commemorate her bond to a previously forbidden faith and the new freedoms that made it possible. After Hanukkah ends, another fixture of the holiday landscape appears in the living room of her apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, this one recalling everything she left behind: a Christmas tree. She wouldn’t call it that, though. Instead, she says: ”It’s a New Year’s tree.” The designation is a bequest of her homeland. Dismissive of religion as obscurantist escapism, Soviet authorities gave year-end celebrations […]
- [Dustup Offers Rare Peek At Trade in Hate Art](https://borisfishman.com/forward/dustup-offers-rare-peek-at-trade-in-hate-art/): At a recent festival of Russian culture, some of the art stayed in the closet. Several images slated for exhibit during the Russian Nights Festival, which passed through New York last month, were removed by proprietors of the exhibition space, a luxury retail and residential complex across from the New York Stock Exchange, because of antisemitic content. The pieces, which are part of a privately owned collection of pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era propaganda posters, deploy the well-worn iconography of anti-Zionist propaganda: An Israeli soldier holds a bayonet to a bowed Arab inside a detention camp; the exhaust from two Israeli warplanes […]
- ['Where Is Home, If the Place You Come From No Longer Exists?'](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-the-city/where-is-home-if-the-place-you-come-from-no-longer-exists/): What does it mean to be from a place that is no longer on the map? My homeland, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in late 1991, a scant three years after my family had managed to escape its anti-Semitism and lack of opportunity. As an immigrant in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a funny haircut and even funnier clothes, I tended to worry more about fitting in than the place where those clothes had come from. By the time I became curious, that place was gone. I looked for it in books. I looked for it in college, where, to the dismay of […]
- [The Ancestral Faith, With a Side of Salami](https://borisfishman.com/forward/the-ancestral-faith-with-a-side-of-salami/): For novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose family fled Soviet antisemitism for the United States in 1979, the problem with American Judaism came down to one thing: salami. “One of my most moving memories from childhood is going to Hebrew school in Queens, where they wouldn’t allow meat products, and sneaking in this pork salami,” Shteyngart said recently in an interview with the Forward. “And it wasn’t just me, it was other Russians, going to the bathroom, away from the prying eyes of the mullahs, and eating this wonderful salami. Everyone had to eat dairy lunches, like challah with cream cheese, and […]
- [The Return](https://borisfishman.com/forward/the-return/): A year ago, Max Berlin was planning on becoming a journalist after graduating from Hunter College in New York City. A thoughtful young man who had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1992, Berlin, 21, had founded a newspaper at Hunter and was in the process of seeking out experienced reporters for insight into the trade. But what he learned about the profession worried him. He couldn’t imagine reconciling its unpredictable demands for time and mobility with the other emerging passion of his life: Orthodox Judaism. A devout worshipper and a religious student, Berlin is part of a sizable minority of […]
- [A Prize Novel Full of Truths That Stretch Believability](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-arts/a-prize-novel-full-of-truths-that-stretch-believability/): In March 1985 at a Soviet orphanage, a severely disabled Russian teenager improbably named Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego was watching television as Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the newly anointed Soviet leader, received well-wishers from abroad. Among them was Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of Spanish Communism. “Not your grandfather, is it?” someone in the room quipped. “If he was, I wouldn’t be slurping this swill with you here,” the young man snapped back. Except that, as Mr. Gonzalez Gallego would soon learn, he was. That extraordinary pedigree provides the unspoken backdrop for “White on Black,” his autobiographical novel about growing up disabled […]
- [Laughter in the Dark](https://borisfishman.com/the-nation/laughter-in-the-dark/): Stalin has had a rough time at the hands of Russian novelists in recent years. Though polls continue to show he is venerated by nearly half of his countrymen, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, in his 1999 novel Blue Lard, coupled him — Stalin out front — with the whistleblower who denounced his personality cult, Nikita Khrushchev, a flourish that earned Sorokin a court date on charges of distributing pornography. Now comes Monumental Propaganda, the latest work from renowned emigre satirist Vladimir Voinovich. His Stalin is made of iron, and his erection atop a pedestal in the provincial city of […]
- [Mommie Dearest](https://borisfishman.com/nextbook-inc/mommie-dearest/): Russia may torment Pavel Lounguine, but the filmmaker can’t help himself. He keeps returning to explore their messy relationship. Born in Moscow in 1949, Pavel Lounguine worked as a screenwriter on the trifling fare a Soviet artist resorted to if he wished to refrain from ideological bombast: "children’s films or comedies, or horses—you know, Russian cowboy films," as he once put it. Then, during perestroika, he wrote a script about the uneasy friendship between an alcoholic Jewish saxophone player and a working-class ethnic Russian taxi driver in Moscow. Taxi Blues, made with French backing, won the first-time director an award […]
- [Letter from Paris: Holocaust Memorial Performs a Strained Balancing Act](https://borisfishman.com/forward/letter-from-paris/): PARIS — On Tuesday, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated France’s official Holocaust Memorial and “renew[ed] our country’s promise never to forget what it proved unable to avoid.” The memorial’s patrons — the French government, a supporting foundation and the Jewish community, among others — intend the museum as “Europe’s institution of reference for the Holocaust,” a counterpart to “Washington’s Holocaust Museum and Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem.” “This is the oldest Shoah-oriented organization in the world,” Eric de Rothschild, the financial baron who serves as the memorial’s president, said after a preview press conference last week, referring to the memorial’s origins as […]
- [A Margin of Freedom](https://borisfishman.com/otherarticles/a-margin-of-freedom/): A dispatch from Iraqi Kurdistan six months after the American invasion, after being smuggled across the Turkish-Iraqi border. America was cozying up to some strange bedfellows. 
- [Young People's Guide](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-book-review/young-peoples-guide/): The emotional landscape of childhood, with its naïveté and surprise, is so difficult to reclaim that its greatest chroniclers – Lewis Carroll in ”Alice in Wonderland,” Boris Pasternak in ”Liuvers’s Childhood” — have often resorted to fantasy or abstraction. In her first collection, ”There Are Jews in My House,” where all but one of the six stories are written from the perspective of a child from the former Soviet Union, Lara Vapnyar instead chooses a devout hyperrealism. In chaste, almost artless prose, she conjures up the inchoate lives of children grappling to make sense of the adults all around them. […]
- [The Flaunted Necklace](https://borisfishman.com/forward/the-flaunted-necklace/): How Tolerance and Terror Marked the Evolving Fate of Jews Under Muslim Rule Last year, a friend and I visited the Jewish cemetery in Fez during a trip to Morocco. The place had the serenity of a shrine, and it was: By our count, no Jew had died in Fez since 1954, mostly because virtually no Jew has lived in Fez since then. By the time of our visit, the onetime community of 16,000 had dwindled to 150, owing primarily to immigration to Israel. Striding purposefully down the wide lanes separating the aboveground graves was 66-year-old Edmond Gabay, the director […]
- [Diplomatic Immunity:  Not Lost in Translation](https://borisfishman.com/new-yorker/diplomatic-immunity-not-lost-in-translation/): The effects of globalization notwithstanding, cheek-kissing protocol remains something of a mystery, resolved with regional pique depending on whom you meet and where you go: the Americans do it once, the Europeans twice, and the Brazilians as many times as you’ll let them. The other day at the Pierre Hotel, Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who ended the Cold War, was in an elevator administering an impromptu lesson in how newly cosmopolitan Russia deals with the question. All but one of the seven men in the elevator were Russian: Pavel Palazhchenko, his translator and adviser; a bodyguard; and several aides. Even […]
- [Its Freedoms No Longer New, Russian Cinema Matures](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-arts/its-freedoms-no-longer-new-russian-cinema-matures/): At first glance the new Russian film “Bimmer,” about four car thieves who run afoul of gangsters in Moscow, is a routine exercise in mafia chic, post-Soviet style: leather jackets, flashy cars, copious blood. Such films have appeared regularly on Russian movie screens in the last decade, in progressively emptier theaters. In their obsession with newly permissible content — capturing on screen the illicit world of prostitutes and gangsters that emerged from the shadows after the collapse of Communism — their directors neglected just about everything else. The cinematography was uninventive, the dialogue overheated, the conceits prosaic. “Bimmer,” whose title […]
- ['Theirs is the Islam we can learn from'](https://borisfishman.com/the-record/theirs-is-the-islam-we-can-learn-from/): I WAS IN CASABLANCA at this time last year, finishing a two-week trek through Morocco. The enormous mosque built by the late King Hassan II on a promontory overlooking the Atlantic Ocean — the second largest in the world after Mecca, so as not to offend religious authorities there — rose so high I had to take three photographs to capture all of it. A friend and I ate noodles sauteed in mango juice at a dusty restaurant called Marignan on Boulevard Mohammed V. We were the only diners, which made it difficult to inconspicuously pilfer all the toilet paper […]
- [Investors Toast Putin in New York](https://borisfishman.com/moscowtimes/investors-toast-putin-in-new-york/): NEW YORK — President Vladimir Putin and his economic team were the heroes of the day at the seventh annual forum on Investing in Russia & CIS, hosted by Sachs Associates and Bloomberg at the Plaza Hotel last Thursday. In formal presentations and private conversations in the lavish reception rooms, conference participants agreed that Putin’s stewardship has fostered unprecedented political stability and enabled significant macroeconomic reform in Russia. “There is a sense of Russia truly coming of age,” said former U.S. Ambassador James Collins, now a senior advisor at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. “They’ve always known how to […]
- [Morocco Journal](https://borisfishman.com/the-american-scholar/morocco-journal/): April. I have heard it from dozens of alumni, but privately insisted that it would be different for me. Still, by about the eighth month after university, I am forced to concede that the mystery that hung beyond the horizon of graduation has unceremoniously dissipated into a spiritless routine — rise, commute from the suburbs to New York City, work long hours, mourn tiny paycheck, commute again, go to bed. Desperate for an experience radically unlike life in midtown Manhattan, I book tickets to Morocco along with Vance, a college friend currently in Russia on a Fulbright grant. I am […]
- [A Suburban Street Straight Up Into the Sky?](https://borisfishman.com/new-york-times-arts/a-suburban-street-straight-up-into-the-sky/): There has been much talk of cities in the sky since the recent unveiling of nine designs for the reconstruction at ground zero in Manhattan. Some of the plans envisioned gardens and theaters hoisted 50 stories in the air. The architects hailed the proposals as a new kind of urbanism. In fact, the idea of a metropolis vaulted hundreds of feet into the air has beguiled fabulists for nearly 100 years. In the early 20th century, experiments by the Russian avant-garde yielded fanciful visions of airborne cities whose economy of space embodied the Communist faith in the perfectibility of man […]
- [For Your Ears Only](https://borisfishman.com/harpers/for-your-ears-only/): The following lyrics are from Their Difficult Work Is Called Spying, a compilation of songs beloved by the Russian secret police. The CD was compiled last winter for the exclusive enjoyment of the Foreign Intelligence Service on the occasion of its eightieth anniversary. Translated from the Russian by Boris Fishman The Nation’s Spies We are the spies of our glorious nation, We take pride in our great state. Charged with the safety of our land, We’ve shrouded history in glory. Beyond its vast frontiers We faithfully maintain our vow. What we do on invisible battlefields, Russia, only you will ever […]

## Pages

- [Editorial Services](https://borisfishman.com/editorial-services/): Editorial Services Boris is available to help with fiction (novels, short stories, etc.), nonfiction (memoirs, personal essays, narrative journalism etc.), speeches, ghostwriting, and other editorial projects at any stage of completion, from conceptualization to developmental editing to broad reads to line edits. Questions? Write Boris at contact@borisfishman.com. Sample pricing. Contact Boris for an individual quote. HOURLY$200/hour. Flat fees available for longer projects. BROAD READ of 300-page manuscript (double-spaced)$2,000, pro-rated for shorter or longer2+ single-spaced pages of high-level critique plus one-hour Zoom consultation. CLOSE READ of 300-page manuscript (double-spaced)$5,000, pro-rated for shorter or longer6+ single-spaced pages of detailed critique, substantial line notes […]
- [BOOKS](https://borisfishman.com/books/): THE UNWANTED COMING MARCH 25, 2025 Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their unnamed country. Even as their fellow “minority-sect” neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George’s loyal work teaching “dominant-sect” poetry has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: George’s university informs him that he is no longer safe—or so he tells Susanna. Without money or allies, he insists, it is time for the family to run. Embarking on a harrowing trip through refugee camps and across the sea, George and Susanna make terrible sacrifices and […]
- [Home](https://borisfishman.com/): SHORT BIO Boris Fishman is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year; the memoir Savage Feast; and the new novel The Unwanted (March 2025), all from HarperCollins. He has taught at Princeton and the University of Montana, and is now a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Austin. He also writes about wine. RECENT WRITING A Free Press essay about being a liberal who teaches at a conservative university. A […]
- [Savage Feast](https://borisfishman.com/savage-feast/): Savage Feast The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle. A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that […]
- [Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo](https://borisfishman.com/rodeo/): About Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with “a devil in [her] head” about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life. Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father’s second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Max — adopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alex’s view that “adopted […]
- [Foreign Editions](https://borisfishman.com/foreign-editions/): Foreign Editions Press Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo UK Pushkin Press/One Order United Kingdom “Begins with the unexpected and ends with the enigmatic.” A wonderfully astute review from the Telegraph. A profile in another kind of Telegraph. Now if reviews like this could just come around more often! “Blessed with one of the most intriguing, eye-catching, purchase-inviting titles conceivable, this is an extraordinary book, worthy of joining the pantheon of American literature, examining what it is to have be uprooted from another culture to become American. As with the best, richest works of fiction, this novel speaks to the […]
- [A Replacement Life](https://borisfishman.com/replacementlife/): About a replacement life (Or read an excerpt) A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York. Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has – as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? […]
- [Events](https://borisfishman.com/events/): READINGS & TALKS 2025 The Unwanted (East Coast launch) Words (Maplewood, NJ) March 30, 2025 – 2PM The Unwanted (Texas launch) Book People (Austin, TX) April 8, 2025 – 7PM PAST EVENTS 2022 The Business of Writing: Featuring Dina Nayeri, Rumaan Alam, and Boris Fishman Periplus Collective (online) “Homelands and Diasporas: Russian Jews on Three Continents” at Dartmouth College (online) 2021 Book YaYa (online) Center for Brooklyn History (online) Brooklyn, NY Gastro Jews Food Series (online) Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte Charlotte, NC 2020 “Let’s Talk”: Book Series + Cooking Demo (online) The Shalhevet Institute Los Angeles, CA Author Panel […]
- [JOURNALISM](https://borisfishman.com/journalism/): JOURNALISM Nov. 25, 2024Forbidden Sips of the Ukrainian Dom Pérignon Oct. 27, 2003Diplomatic Immunity: Not Lost in Translation Jan. 4 | Guest EssayWant to Feel Better? Just Dance. Jan. 7 | Opinions PodcastThere’s More to Wine Than Just a Cancer Warning Jan. 7 | Book ReviewA Novel Unearths the Dark Secrets in a Ukrainian Coal Mine Oct. 26, 2024 | OpinionYou’ll Have to Take My Glass From My Cold, Wine-Stained Hand July 6, 2024 | Book ReviewIn “Russian Gothic,” a Veteran’s Paranoia and Delirium Reflect a Nation’s Sep. 3, 2022 | OpinionThe Post-Colonoscopy Male Friendship Test Nov. 16, 2021 | […]
- [Wild East](https://borisfishman.com/wildeast/): < Back to Other Writing Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier Edited by Boris Fishman Reviews The New Yorker This timely anthology delivers on the promise of its title with rowdy, vodka-soaked tales of people run amok in the ruins of the Soviet empire. The writers-both natives of the Eastern bloc and Western travellers-plumb the cynicism and the hopes of places where a straitlaced missionary may quickly end up in “three fistfights, two of them with children,” and a melancholy financier dodges assassins between snorts of cocaine. Vodka is ubiquitous, and one story, a Gogolesque fable, involves a small-town […]
- [Contact](https://borisfishman.com/contact/): Contact Boris Fishman: For book-related inquiries and speaking engagements: Email: contact [ at ] borisfishman.com Headshot: Download Author Headshot – Photo credit: Stephanie Kaltsas Follow on Instagram Agent: Henry Dunow Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, Inc. 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1103 New York, NY 10011 Email: henry [ at ] dclagency.com Phone: 212-645-7606 For publicity questions: Maya Rutherford Baran  Sr. Director, Publicity HarperCollins Publishers 195 Broadway, 22nd Floor New York, NY 10007 Email: maya.baran [ at ] harpercollins.com Phone: 212-207-7398 Jacket Design: Milan Bozic Web Design: Sarah Ferone Illustration + Design
- [ABOUT](https://borisfishman.com/about/): ABOUT THE AUTHOR Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, all from HarperCollins. HarperCollins will publish his new novel, The Unwanted, about a family in flight from civil war in an unnamed country, on March 25, 2025. His reporting, […]
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- [Metro Blues, or How I Came to America](https://borisfishman.com/subway/): < Back to Other Writing Publishers Weekly Here is a delightful collection of New York stories by veteran straphangers—both known and unknown—dedicated to that amazing underground network. Along with expected accounts of the unsavory run-ins with weirdoes and stink bombs during the usual subway commute (e.g., Daniels Parseliti’s “Porno Man and I Versus the Feminist Avenger and Displaced Anger Man”), many of these authors offer poignant memories of riding the trains over the years, such as Jonathan Lethem’s account of haunting the eponymous station in “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” as a white, liberal-middle-class kid immersed in a fringe area of crime and […]
- [Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared](https://borisfishman.com/katrina/): < Back to Other Writing Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared Introduction by Boris Fishman In the early morning of Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore in southern Louisiana, changing American history. Since September 11, 2001, when two American cities suffered devastating attacks, the United States had been working to better protect itself. Almost four years and billions of dollars later, Katrina destroyed an entire region, killing more than 1,500, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and ravaging one of America’s most storied cities. Katrina revealed that this country remains ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophe. More should have […]
- [Russia: Beyond Utopia](https://borisfishman.com/russia/): < Back to Other Writing Russia: Beyond Utopia Foreword by Boris Fishman The stairway is built of plain, dark wood, and the walls are an artless white, but the stained-glass window is a clamor of color and conviction. Instead of passively inviting us to gaze through, it marches toward us, steel-faced Bolsheviks clutching bayonets and brandishing rifles as they depart to conquer the world in a fury of red banners. Like many of the photographs in Andrew Moore’s Russia: Beyond Utopia, this image from a forgotten corner of the Siberian city of Irkutsk (plate #097) bittersweetly radiates a future Soviet […]
- [News & Press](https://borisfishman.com/news/): NEWS & PRESS THE UNWANTED The Unwanted is a 2025 Booklist Editor’s Choice List selection. “Complicity Becomes Us:” A review of The Unwanted in the Los Angeles Review of Books “On Balancing Passion and Practicality”: An interview with Diana Ruzova of The Creative Independent. “It always works the same way when the people in power don’t protect the people without power. They all tell the same lies, they all use the same pretexts to protect their power, they all demonize dissenters in the same way. It’s the same story everywhere.” An interview with Sasha Vasilyuk in the Los Angeles Review of […]
- [Miscellany](https://borisfishman.com/miscellany/): Chekhov: Stories For Our Time Introduction by Boris Fishman The Master & Margarita Foreword by Boris Fishman Russia: Beyond Utopia Photographs by Andrew Moore Foreword by Boris Fishman     Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared U. S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Boris Fishman, Minority Report Editor     The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York Metro Blues, or How I Came to America, by Boris Fishman Publishers Weekly Here is a delightful collection of New York stories by veteran straphangers—both known and unknown—dedicated to that amazing underground network. Along with expected accounts of […]


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