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Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • New find! An English-language podcast on Israeli literature in translation.
  • Awaiting my attention: the latest issue of Lilith magazine.
  • “In honoring [Patrick] Modiano, the Nobel jury has embraced a tortuously and very specifically French-Jewish itinerary of belonging.” (Clémence Boulouque for Tablet)
  • “An outsider reading this extensively researched review of the way women are treated in the modern Jewish State might think that the author was describing Alabama of the 1950s.” (Ellis Shuman in a review of Elana Maryles Sztokman’s The War on Women in Israel.)
  • Guess who’s hosting the next Jewish Book Carnival? Fig Tree Books! Want to join in? Read this.

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Words of the Week

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    “Like all people without land or roots, I am obsessed by my prehistory. And my prehistory is the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation. I always felt, for obscure familial reasons, that I was born of this nightmare.”

    Source: 2014 Nobel Prize literature winner Patrick Modiano, quoted by Benjamin Ivry in The Forward

    PatrickModianoJackets

    (I have “borrowed” the accompanying image from the New York Public Library. I hope they won’t mind!)

    Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • A bit about the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature: Patrick Modiano.
  • And a bit about a project I’m involved with over at Fig Tree Books (I have to tell you–the response has been overwhelming!)
  • Adam Kirsch on new “Holocaust novels” by Howard Jacobson and Martin Amis.
  • A hearty Mazal Tov to the latest winners of the Moment Magazine/Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.
  • And another award-winning writer–a young one–gives “a shout-out to Betty Friedan.”

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Words of the Week: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

    by Erika Dreifus on
    3

    Saint-Exupery-Lettre-a-un-otage
    Toi si Français, je te sens deux fois en péril de mort, parce que Français, et parce que juif.

    (My attempt at a translation: You who are so French, I sense that you are doubly in mortal danger, because you are a Frenchman, and because you are a Jew.)

    Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage (“Letter to a Hostage”), first published in 1943. (My copy lists a 1944 copyright.)

    There’s more about this text, and Saint-Exupéry’s friendship with Léon Werth, the titular though never-named hostage, in Stacy Schiff’s Saint-Exupéry biography. (Werth is the same friend to whom Saint-Exupéry dedicated Le Petit Prince.) I am currently awaiting the arrival of one of Werth‘s works about the wartime period, 33 Jours.

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • Rabbi David Wolpe: “I’m often asked to recommend books. Here are five unique and powerful modern works that you may have missed or forgotten. These works will enrich, elevate and educate any Jew, indeed any human being.”
  • Moment magazine is looking for a part-time online editor.
  • Fathom shares an interview with Sayed Kashua, “one of the [Israel]’s most successful writers.” (A lot to think about here–but I admit getting stuck with the suggestion that Gaza is currently “occupied” by Israel.)
  • I’ve got other plans, but if I were free to attend, I’d be interested in hearing Ruth Wisse speak about Jacob Glatstein at YIVO on March 4.
  • “As I discovered while conducting dissertation research on this topic, the ‘belle Juive’ (beautiful Jewess) trope was to early 19th-century French literature something like what the ‘shiksa’ would become for American Jewish writers: an exotic object of desire, but also someone one might marry to affirm progressive, universalist ideals.” Phoebe Maltz Bovy offers some interesting thoughts on “the intermarriage script.”

    • Shabbat shalom.