Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture The End of the World as We Know It
Lenny Bruce Is Dead By Jonathan Goldstein Counterpoint, 193 pages, $13. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 at the age of 40, from a morphine overdose in his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. Like Elvis would a little more than a decade later, Bruce died in the bathroom, which is both funny…
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Culture Across the Boundaries of Language
Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature By Hana Wirth-Nesher Princeton University Press, 256 pages, $39.50. * * *| As we enter a world that will forever remain “multicultural,” the borders of our languages have become easier than ever to cross. Paradoxically, to understand all of what is said and what is written…
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Culture For This Mother and Daughter, The Family Business Is Culture
Blood might be thicker than water, as the adage goes, but paint is thicker than both. Immigrant artist Miriam Laufer, who died in 1980, was the mother of Manhattan Upper West Sider Susan Bee, and matriarch to one of the most experimental and intense artistic dynasties of Jewish New York. Besides the mother and daughter,…
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Culture The Persistence of Memory
The Last Jew By Yoram Kaniuk, translated by Barbara Harshav Grove Press, 544 pages, $26. * * *| To name a thing is to give it life. And to write is to name. As Adam, the first man, is referred to in Latin as prothoplastus, cognate to our protoplasm, tradition might call the last man…
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News Six Million Little Pieces?
Days after Oprah Winfrey’s last Book Club selection was unmasked as fraud, triggering a national conversation among literati and lay readers alike about the definition and significance of memoir, the talk show host and cultural arbiter announced her next choice: “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s seminal autobiographical account of his experience during the Holocaust. Wiesel is, of…
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News Six Million Little Pieces?
Days after Oprah Winfrey’s last Book Club selection was unmasked as fraud, triggering a national conversation among literati and lay readers alike about the definition and significance of memoir, the talk show host and cultural arbiter announced her next choice: “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s seminal autobiographical account of his experience during the Holocaust. Wiesel is, of…
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Culture Abraham’s Gambit
Stalemate By Icchokas Meras Translated by Jonas Zdanys Other Press, 176 pages, $13.95. * * *| To stalemate a game of chess is no easy thing: One has to position the king in a square in which, although he is not in check, he can only move into check and no other piece can move,…
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News Harold Pinter, Son of a Tailor and Weaver of the Absurd, Awarded a Nobel
On October 13, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature to Harold Pinter — a writer who, in the words of the official citation, “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” Until that day, the only closed room to which many in the literary world wanted…
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