Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

by Erika Dreifus on
2

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

  • Happening May 11-13 at Bar-Ilan University: International Creative Writing Conference – Second Site: Displacement, Revelation. Free and open to the public. (via Israel Association of Writers in English)
  • Happening next Tuesday (May 6) here in New York: “Love in a Time of Conflict: Contemporary Fiction Set in Jerusalem,” billed as “an evening of readings and discussion with two award-winning authors, Ruchama King Feuerman and Yael Unterman.” NB: “Entrance $25 (min.)—$35 (recommended).” Fee includes signed copy of both books.
  • Writing contest for high-schoolers. “The Norman E. Alexander Award for Excellence in Jewish Student Writing is seeking essays on the American Jew the writer most admires and who has made significant contributions to humanitarian causes, social justice, medicine or science. The contest subject relates to the 2014 theme of American Jewish Heritage Month, ‘American Jews and Tikkun Olam, Healing the World.'”
  • “JTA, the global Jewish news service, is looking to hire summer and fall editorial interns in our New York City office. The editorial interns will perform various editorial tasks, including writing and reporting news and feature articles, as well as work related to our website and newsletter products.” This is a paid opportunity.
  • Rebecca Klempner interviews Tzvia Ehrlich-Klein, author of I Live with My Mommy, “a new, groundbreaking picture book [that] for the first time focuses on growing up in a single-parent, Orthodox Jewish home.”

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: Where to Read (and Publish) Literary Humor?

    by Erika Dreifus on
    4

    laughingSo, this past week brought a minor milestone to my writing life: my first submission to The New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmurs” department.

    I would call the piece that I submitted an example of “literary humor.” I would do so because I can’t quite figure out a better label for it: it’s a short (450-word) piece that essentially brings a 19th-century novel’s character into the present. That’s about all I want to say about it right now.

    I submitted the piece via the magazine’s online submission manager, and quickly received an auto-response acknowledging receipt and stating that I “should receive a reply within three months.”

    In the meantime, I’m trying to build a list of other possible homes for this piece. You know, just in case The New Yorker declines to publish it. (more…)

    Words of the Week: Bernard Malamud

    by Erika Dreifus on
    2

    Malamud“I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel. Nevertheless, Jews like rabbis Kahane and Korff set my teeth on edge. Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.”

    Source: Bernard Malamud’s 1974 “Art of Fiction” interview in The Paris Review. (Thanks to Kyle Minor for bringing this to my attention on Twitter this past weekend, which marked the 100th anniversary of Malamud’s birth.)