Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

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

  • Coming in 2016: a new book by Jeffrey Goldberg, on “the Middle East through the prism of President Obama’s years in power.”
  • On my more immediate TBR list: Stuart Rojstaczer’s The Mathematician’s Shiva. According to this Jewlicious post, it’s a novel that “mixes Jewish family life, comedy, academia, mystery, greed, chaos shiva, lust and math.”
  • Matthue Roth on Heinrich Heine’s “love song to cholent.”
  • On the Moment blog, Linda Tucker reviews Rabbi David Wolpe’s new book on the biblical David.
  • If you still don’t have enough books on your own TBR list, you’ll find a few more in Sandee Brawarsky’s fall books preview for The Jewish Week. (Coming soon: a similar overview piece by yours truly, elsewhere. Stay tuned!)
  • Shabbat shalom.

    Friday Finds for Writers

    Treasure ChestWriting-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend.

  • I’m sorry that I missed Monday’s online chat with Karen Joy Fowler about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but grateful for the report and archived discussion. (I *loved* the book.)
  • Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer passed away this week. The Literary Saloon rounds up some obituaries and a link to Gordimer’s “Art of Fiction” interview in The Paris Review.
  • “It’s fair to say that there is precisely zero anticipation in the larger world for the book, with the possible exception of my mother, who is my biggest booster….” So writes John Warner about his forthcoming story collection Tough Day for the Army. Frankly, after reading this essay, I’m with Warner mère–I’m anticipating the book eagerly.
  • From the department of social media: Becky Gaylord’s “12 Most Basic Ways for Beginners to Rock Twitter.” (h/t @TweetSmarter)
  • I bookmarked this piece listing memorable quotations from Maya Angelou several weeks ago–I keep thinking, especially, about this line.
  • Have a great weekend, everyone!

    Words of the Week: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

    Saint-Exupery-Lettre-a-un-otage
    Toi si Français, je te sens deux fois en péril de mort, parce que Français, et parce que juif.

    (My attempt at a translation: You who are so French, I sense that you are doubly in mortal danger, because you are a Frenchman, and because you are a Jew.)

    Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage (“Letter to a Hostage”), first published in 1943. (My copy lists a 1944 copyright.)

    There’s more about this text, and Saint-Exupéry’s friendship with Léon Werth, the titular though never-named hostage, in Stacy Schiff’s Saint-Exupéry biography. (Werth is the same friend to whom Saint-Exupéry dedicated Le Petit Prince.) I am currently awaiting the arrival of one of Werth‘s works about the wartime period, 33 Jours.

    Sunday Sentence

    Doll PalaceIn which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks us to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

    Her husband was going on about family and tests and prevention and the passing of time, life’s great eraser, to make way for a future that included healthy children, unafflicted children, a future that would render Jack an unfortunate memory in an otherwise perfectly wonderful life, one worth envying, I assure you.

    Source: “Jew,” a story in Sara Lippmann’s forthcoming collection Doll Palace (Dock Street Press)

    Okay, so here again I have to break the “rules” and comment. I haven’t made a whole lot of new “writer friends” here in New York since my move from Massachusetts seven years ago, but Sara Lippmann is one, and she’s a treasure. Not only is Sara an incredibly talented writer, but she is also an incredibly generous and gracious person. I’m so lucky to have friends like Sara in my life.

    And we are all lucky that this collection is coming in a few months. I’ve pre-ordered a copy (you can, too!), but I’m also reading a digital galley to prepare for a Q&A with Sara. I am only halfway through the collection, and let me tell you, it was not easy to pick just one “best” sentence to share. I’ve read several of Sara’s stories as they’ve appeared individually, but this one I’d missed. It was published originally in Slice (as “The Stranger”) and republished in The Raleigh Quarterly (as “Jew”).