One should read Israeli writers, of course — Agnon, Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret. But the more appropriate template may come from fellow Americans, writers who, by exploring the Diaspora Jew\’s relationship to Israel, have gone down this road before.
\”Absurdistan\” (Random House, $24.95), Gary Shteyngart\’s extraordinary new novel, takes us on a no-holds-barred journey from post-communist Russia to a mythical former Soviet Union state he calls Absurdistan, with stop-offs in between to his beloved New York City. Q & A session.
\”Susie Fishbein has done for Jewish cooking what [rabbi and author] Aryeh Kaplan did for beginning Judaism,\” said Rabbi Shimon Kraft of the 613 Mitzvah Store on Pico Boulevard. \”They\’re buying her cookbooks en masse. She\’s a genius at editing and putting everything all together.\”
But, for the past 15 years, the festivities have included our special friends, artist Peter Shire and his wife, Donna. It all began when we invited Peter to visit the Skirball Museum, which was then located on the campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, next to USC.
\”I never think of food as something that\’s stationary,\” Nathan said on a recent book tour stop in Los Angeles. \”Things change, neighborhoods change, food changes, we get new ingredients, people get ideas. And when you come to a country you adapt what you knew to that country.\”
Writing is said to be a lonely business, solitary in the task to fill up so many empty pages. And before I decided to try my hand at writing my autobiographical novel, \”The Other Shulman,\” I\’ll confess I had fears about such an undertaking.
Comic books aren\’t just for kids anymore. In both the United States and France, they\’ve been enjoying a popular explosion among readers of all ages.
It disturbed me to hear on U.S. public radio and read in The New York Times that Saul Bellow was to be seen as simply an American writer — which, of course, he is — and not significantly a Jewish writer.
Maybe they think they\’re doing him a favor? I think they\’re bleaching out a lot of the substance of Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89.
Lev Nussimbaum lived as though life were theater, inventing an identity, dressing the part, shifting scenes, seeking audiences everywhere. He thought he could keep rewriting the ending, believed he could talk his way out of anything including his Jewish past, but ultimately he could not.
Daniel Handler looks like a character in one of his own \”Lemony Snicket\” novels. At a breakfast interview with The Journal at a New York café, he wears a pinstriped suit with a handkerchief in the pocket — reminiscent of something the bumbling Mr. Poe might wear when he deposits the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans at the home of a relative who wants to kill them and collect their fortune. In repose and in photographs, Handler\’s face turns dole, as if, like Snicket, he is turned melancholy by the events he narrates.
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