Every Friday, the My Machberet blog presents an array of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.
If you haven’t yet caught Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s beautiful piece about her first foray to Fiddler on the Roof (in the form of the magnificent Yiddish production here in New York that I have had the great good fortune to attend, too), please go and read it now. The rest of this post will be here when you return.
A hearty mazal tov to Bari Weiss, who has recently signed a two-book deal; the first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, will be out in September (and yes, I have pre-ordered it).
“Not Just Russians, Not Just Jews: On New Works by Irina Reyn, Boris Fishman, and David Bezmozgis”—a review-essay by Maggie Levantovskaya and Sasha Senderovich for Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Françoise Frenkel’s rediscovered Holocaust memoir No Place to Lay One’s Head [translated by Stephanie Smee] won the £4,000 (about $5,300) JQ Wingate Literary Prize, which is ‘awarded to the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader.'” Read more from Shelf Awareness.
Finally, the current (March) issue of The Practicing Writer newsletter features a short article on Jacob Dinezon (1851-1919), “literary citizen” extraordinaire.
Shabbat shalom.