\”Truthfully, my grandfather really was the catalyst for the journey,\” Brian Bain said in a phone conversation from Dallas, where he relocated after his New Orleans home was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. He was referring to Leonard Bain, a retired traveling hat salesman and silent film editor who was 99, in 2002, when the film was made. The elder Bain has since died at the age of 101.
Thanks to Valerie, two best friends were reunited after more than three decades apart. More importantly, Glenn and Val had found each other. Their love was intoxicating, with family and friends commenting how happy each was to have found his/her soul mate.
Perhaps what\’s at issue is my own life: I\’m a word person. For more than 20 years I\’ve made my living by writing and editing. Getting the words right is what I labor to achieve, all day every day. It\’s a struggle that often leaves me in despair.
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.
Often pictured in Christian iconography as solitary figures, lost in a unique and incommunicable holiness, Rice\’s \”holy family\” of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, by contrast, is part of a large, boisterous, affectionate Jewish clan, living a full, observant Jewish life together, full of rituals and prayers and the rhythm of the holy day feasts.
Narrated in the first person, present tense (always risky), \”Love With Noodles\” follows Gelder\’s canoodling with a string of women who enter his life just as he emerges from mourning his late beshert, Ellen. Gelder lives alone. His grown son, Eric, faces financial ruin. What\’s worse, Eric is planning to marry a non-Jew.
This chilling Jewish folk tale hails from a cycle of stories about the great 16th-century mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, in what is now northern Israel, said Howard Schwartz, a top Jewish folklorist and professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
\”The Song of Hannah\” as imagined by Etzioni-Halevy, tells the story of two women — Hannah and Peninah, Elkanah\’s other wife — and its chapters alternate between their two voices.
California purists who like to shop local, travel local and eat local will have no problem reading local. Among the season\’s offerings of new books are several impressive works by Los Angeles-based writers.
Liev Schreiber has traveled a similar road in coming to terms with his personal history, the loss of his grandfather and the mystery — the unspoken family history his grandfather embodied.
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