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.

  • Atar Hadari explains why we read the book of Ruth on Shavuot.
  • “The Rabbi’s Wife”: a short story by Robin Black.
  • In “Ex-Hasidic Writers Go Off the Path and Onto the Page,” Ezra Glinter explores “How OTD Literature Became Its Own Literary Genre.” (See the article for a definition of “OTD”.)
  • On my agenda: listening to this podcast featuring George Prochnik, talking about his new biography, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
  • Judith Thurman reports on Philip Roth’s honorary degree from JTS.

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: A New Review and a Lesson Re-Learned

    by Erika Dreifus on
    7

    BNScreenshotLast week brought the publication of my first piece for The Barnes & Noble Review: a review of Anthony Doerr’s oh-so-impressive new novel All the Light We Cannot See. I’m really proud of this review and happy to share it.

    Something interesting happened with this assignment that I thought I’d mention here as a sort of how-to reminder.

    If you’re a reviewer and/or familiar with the galley versions that are circulated to reviewers and other early readers ahead of publication, you may have noticed these cautionary words that often accompany them: (more…)

    Sunday Sentence

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

    Okay, “commentary alert”! This week, I had to choose two sentences. They’re both from the same piece.

    Just as it is considered a breach of prison etiquette for visitors to ask the incarcerated what brought them, say, to Cayuga Correctional Facility, the rules for casual social exchange in the weeks from mid-May to late June ought to require that no one ever ask anyone with a day job what she is doing “for the summer.”

    and

    It is that summer supplies energy to whole new channels of resentment: toward the painter who has secured the three-week fellowship at Yaddo; toward the academic who is teaching a course at the University of Edinburgh; toward the psychotherapist who is decamping to Wellfleet; toward the inveterate bohemian who has sublet her Chelsea apartment to a group of professional clowns so that she can travel with her daughter through Patagonia.

    The source of these insightful sentences? Ginia Bellafante, writing for The New York Times. My only quibble is the piece’s title: “Sympathy for the Working Mother.” (One need not be a mother to identify with and applaud these particular lines! I daresay many of my fellow writers-with-day-jobs, regardless of parenting status, may share these feelings.)

    Happy Summer, whatever your plans may (or may not) be!
    Happy Summer, whatever your plans may (or may not) be!