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characters
A New Blend of Chick-Lit Sleuth
Susan Josephs
April 21, 2005
Like her protagonist Sophie Katz, Kyra Davis has skin the color of a \”well-brewed latte.\” That\’s why she has spent a large portion of her life fielding comments about her ethnicity.
There was her supervisor at a clothing store, for example, who asked about her Star of David necklace, since how could Davis be Jewish when she looks black? Or all the times people have assumed she\’s Puerto Rican and lecture her on taking pride in one\’s heritage when they discover she can\’t speak Spanish.
\”Occasionally, when people ask me where I\’m from, I\’ll make up some country in Africa and act really offended if they say they never heard of it,\” Davis said.
A Skittish Homage to Cynthia Ozick
Daniel Asa Rose
October 21, 2004
Confession: It\’s not Virginia Woolf I\’m afraid of — it\’s Cynthia Ozick. Even though she blurbed my last book (disclosure, disclosure) and once recommended me for a fellowship I didn\’t get (thanks for the memories, Mr. Guggenheim), still I\’m afraid of her. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.
‘First’ an Atypical New York Story
Sandee Brawarsky
October 21, 2004
A brother announces to his sister that another sister has vanished, as \”The First Desire\” (Pantheon) opens. Nancy Reisman\’s highly-praised novel is unusual in many ways, from its premise to the quality of writing to its setting. She follows the lives of the Cohen family, from the Depression to the years following World War II, not on the Lower East Side or in Brooklyn, but in a stately neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y.
Sentence by sentence, this is an exquisite story of family. Reisman writes with assuredness and tenderness, as the story unfolds serially from five perspectives: three of the four Cohen sisters, the brother and their father\’s mistress.
Little Miss Shmutzy
Gaby Wenig
July 8, 2004
Anne-Marie Baila Asner decided that she was going to reinvigorate Yiddish by writing and illustrating cute, brightly colored children\’s books that would help people develop an affinity for the language.
Curtain to Rise on Women’s Conflicts
Naomi Pfefferman
February 26, 2004
In a rehearsal room at the Odyssey Theatre, Colette Freedman propped her electric-blue high tops on a chair and good naturedly laughed at herself. \”I\’m truly flawed,\” the 30-ish actress-playwright said. \”I am totally a hypocrite.\”\n\nWell, not totally. While her \”Deconstructing the Torah,\” an evening of one-acts, skewers part of herself, it mostly dissects conflicts faced by Freedman and other modern Jewish women.
A Happy Ending Even for an Indie
Naomi Pfefferman
November 13, 2003
One week after her 1998 wedding, New York actress Isabel Rose packed up her belongings and moved with her husband to London.
Good Timing Lands Luck in Director’s Lap
George Robinson
September 18, 2003
Greg Pritikin\’s film takes place in a sort of every-suburb America of tract houses with manicured lawns and two-car garages, and is utterly devoid of anything to place it in historical time.
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