Jewish Literary Links
- Fans of Max Gross’s The Lost Shtetl will enjoy this new interview with the author for the Brooklyn Public Library in which Gross “reveals—with amiable candor—his inspiration, the shtetl’s Brooklyn connections, and why he could never leave New York’s modern urbanity.”
- “The Yiddish short story writer and poet Fradl Shtok was long known for all the wrong reasons….Now, a wonderful new translation, From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories, by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter, makes a persuasive case that Shtok should be far better known for all the right reasons, namely her incredible Yiddish stories.” A fascinating review by Aviya Kushner for Los Angeles Review of Books.
- “The poet Iossif Ventouras is now the only living Jewish male born in Crete,” and Mark Glanville’s review of a new English translation of Ventouras’s poetry (for reasons made clear in the review, I’m not crediting a single translator here) in the latest issue of Jewish Review of Books has made me extremely eager to get my hands on a copy. (Which is apparently not so easy!)
- In which JTA’s Cnaan Liphshiz covers The Postcard, “an award-winning French-language bestseller published last year. The work of auto-fiction examines how the traumas of the Holocaust are playing out in the minds of French Jews today, as many of them question their future due to rising antisemitism.” (This one does not appear to have been translated yet. Am I up to the challenge of reading a 500-page book in French when I still haven’t read Jennifer Croft’s English translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob? Unclear.)
- And Publishers Weekly‘s Emma Wenner offers an update from the world of Jewish kidlit with an article on PJ Library and the PJ Publishing imprint.
Shabbat shalom.
