Notes from Around the Web: Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

Many apologies for missing last week’s lit-links post. And fair warning: I’m unlikely to post next Friday as well: I’ll be away at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. But don’t worry: I shall return!

  • The New Vilna Review presents an informative interview with Carol Hupping of the Jewish Publication Society, digging into the JPS’s past, present, and future.
  • Having recently gone to see the Hannah Senesh exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, I appreciated Elissa Strauss’s post about it for The Forward’s Sisterhood blog.
  • Fiction Writers Review has posted an exceedingly interesting interview with Jacob Paul, author of Sarah/Sara, which I reviewed (also for FWR) last year.
  • I’ve been noticing a growing cluster of Holocaust-related books authored by grandchildren of those who lived under Nazism. Among the latest (in addition, of course, to my own Quiet Americans, which was officially released last week) is Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love. Subtitled “A Memoir,” Adorjan’s book is, in the words of Jewish Journal’s reviewer Elaine Margolin, “an imaginative piece of work that blends fact and fantasy.”
  • And on a related note: Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured a piece on Ferdinand von Schirach’s Crime (translated by Carol Brown Janeway): “To say that Germans and guilt have a special relationship would be to dive into the deep end of platitude, but in von Schirach’s case it’s difficult not to raise the issue, and not only because he’s titled his preface ‘Guilt.’ His grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth for most of the 1930s and later the wartime governor of Vienna, was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.” Tbr, to be sure.
  • Finally, I hope that you’re following my virtual book tour for my new short-story collection, Quiet Americans. Several of the “stops” feature material of Jewish literary interest. Check out the itinerary (with brief content descriptions) here. (Plus, some really lovely reviews have been coming in.)
  • Shabbat shalom!