Lilith–Spring 2009
All of the characters in the connected stories by Danit Brown in Ask for a Convertible (Pantheon Books, $22.95) struggle to find an identity and a home for themselves. Chief among them is Osnat Greenberg, a hybrid Israeli-American whose dry and often hilarious voice guides us through most of this debut collection.
Osnat is 13 [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Book Reviews’
June 15, 2009
Inherited Ambivalence
June 9, 2009
The sin of unrequited love
Haaretz–June 5, 2009
The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (translated from the Hebrew, “She’ahava Nafshi,” by Dalya Bilu)
Melville House Publishing, 331 pages, $16.95 (paperback)
For the narrator and protagonist of Israeli writer Gail Hareven’s novel “The Confessions of Noa Weber,” life begins at 17. Her childhood, she tells us in the first pages, is “too [...]
March 6, 2009
A View from the Bridge
Haaretz–March 6, 2009
Crossing the Hudson
by Peter Stephan Jungk (translated from the German by David Dollenmayer)
Handsel Books, 219 pages, $14.95 (paperback)
Picture an overbearing Jewish mother screaming at the guy behind the counter of a car rental agency at Kennedy Airport in New York, while her embarrassed son cowers at her side. We’ve read scenarios like this [...]
January 6, 2009
Baring Body and Soul in Boro Park
Haaretz–January 6, 2009
Sima’s Undergarments for Women
by Ilana Stanger-Ross,
Overlook Press, 319 pages, $24.95
As the owner of a Brooklyn bra shop, Sima Goldner has seen breasts of all kinds– old and young, small and large, breasts with stretch marks, breasts pained by breastfeeding, even the scars left over by breasts that have been removed. But she has [...]
November 27, 2008
Of Giants’ Robes and Dwarvish Thieves
The Forward–November 26, 2008
The Clothes on Their Backs
By Linda Grant
Scribner, 304 pages, $27.50 (hardcover), $14 (trade paperback).
Toward the end of Philip Roth’s poignant story “Eli the Fanatic,” Eli, exhausted by his fruitless efforts to get a Hasidic yeshiva to leave his nicely acculturated Jewish neighborhood, decides to adopt a different strategy. He wraps his Brooks [...]
November 4, 2008
The Art of War
Forward–October 2, 2008
Two years ago in the midst of the Second Lebanon War, the popular French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy, was sent to Israel by the New York Times Magazine to “ponder, discuss and travel” as the title of his piece suggested. The result, an essay defending the country’s military confrontation against vociferous critics, was [...]
September 4, 2008
Kill Brill
The Jerusalem Post–September 4, 2008
“Man In the Dark”
Paul Auster
Henry Holt
192 pages; $23
It is not hard to imagine why an author these days would want to invent a world where history plays out differently. No shortage of writers have recently found themselves tempted by this conceit (Philip Roth and Michael Chabon to name just a [...]
July 3, 2008
Assimilating Questions
The Jerusalem Post–July 3, 2008
“All the Sad Young Literary Men”
By Keith Gessen
Viking
256 pages; $24.95
It is 2000, the votes for the president of the United States have been counted, and discounted, sending half the nation into a period of despair. Meanwhile across the Atlantic a second Palestinian uprising is shaking the already uncertain ground of the [...]
May 22, 2008
Israel Mission Impossible
The Jerusalem Post–May 22, 2008
Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government
By Gregory Levey
Free Press
288 pages; $24
Just minutes before an important vote at the United Nations on a resolution he hasn’t the slightest clue about, representing a country of which he isn’t a citizen, 25-year-old Gregory Levey begins to [...]
