Ilan Stavans
By Ilan Stavans
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Culture Tevye’s Many Daughters and Other Comparisons
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son By Sholom Aleichem, translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin Penguin Classics, 416 pages, $16.00. Finding out exactly how many daughters Tevye actually has might be a tricky business, but no more so than settling the issue of how many translations into English of “Tevye der Milhiker”…
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Culture Borges’s Zionist Bent: Newly Translated Poems
Jorge Luis Borges visited Israel twice. The first trip came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and, in particular, his positive views on Israel. Borges had been active in Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build an Argentine cultural center in Jerusalem….
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Culture Tropical Refuge
As early as 1935, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who led the Dominican Republic from 1930 through 1961, suggested that his country would welcome as many as 100,000 refugees from Europe. It might seem ironic that Trujillo, known for his repressive regime, would invite Jews to the island, promising them religious freedom, but in…
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Culture A Mother’s Life
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir By David Rieff Simon and Schuster, 192 pages, $21. David Rieff, the only son of sociologist Philip Rieff and writer Susan Sontag, has written a memoir about his mother’s death, in December 2004, of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, commonly known as MDS. Sontag, among the most…
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Culture Forverts and I
My relationship with the Forverts started in adolescence, when I first heard of it from one of my teachers at the Yidishe Schule in Mexico. He was a refugee from the war and an old-fashioned intellectual with a Sisyphus complex: His fanciful, lifelong mission was to introduce Mexican Jewish youngsters to Yiddish. In class, we…
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Culture Bruno Schulz on Stage
‘Double Edge,” the inventive and free-spirited experimental theater troupe based in Ashfield, Mass., turns 25 this year. To celebrate the improbable journey, Stacy Klein, its director, is adapting for the stage the work of Bruno Schulz, running through March 18 at La MaMa in Manhattan. Under the title “Republic of Dreams,” the performance is a…
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Culture A South-of-the-Border Search for Identity
In my view, complaints about a film misrepresenting the source on which it is based miss the point. Once a writer sells the material and agrees to no longer be involved, the product is beyond his domain. He might as well sit back and enjoy the show, just like any other spectator. A few years…
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Culture Yet Another Look At Bashevis
Isaac B. Singer: A Life By Florence Noiville Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 181 pages, $24. By now, the English-speaking world’s embrace of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer should be evident to all. Beginning in 1953, when his story “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Saul Bellow, was published…
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