Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture Heinrich Heine’s Excellent Adventure
Travel Pictures By Heinrich Heine Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman Archipelago Books, 375 pages, $17. At the age of 27 and already a failure at the textile business, Heinrich Heine abandoned his law studies, first at Bonn and then at Göttingen, to hike around the Harz Mountains for three weeks. This excursion, like…
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Culture Love Stinks
Love Today By Maxim Biller, translated from the German by Anthea Bell Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23. Though he’ll never be as famous here as he is in Germany, the following should be said: Maxim Biller is a bad writer. One wonders which is more incompetent, his prose or his soul. Blurb that on…
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Culture In Brief
Complete Minimal Poems By Aram Saroyan Ugly Duckling Presse, 280 pages, $20. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and so poetry needed to be created, too, to describe those two entities and their interaction. And Aram Saroyan arose and said, “Let there be lighght,” and there was, and Congress saw that…
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Culture Journeying to the Other Side
Steve Stern writes a century too late and in the wrong language, and he does so freshly and well. His novels and stories and now a novella, “The North of God” (Melville House), transmute European Yiddish into an American idiom, bridging New World exuberance — or at least that of Stern’s native Memphis, Tenn. —…
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Culture As Darkness Fell: Understanding Carlo Levi’s Political Evolution
Fear of Freedom: With the Essay “Fear of Painting” By Carlo Levi Translated from the Italian by Adolphe Gourevitch and Stanislao G. Pugliese Columbia University Press, 176 pages, $18.95. Carlo Levi was a Renaissance Man without a Renaissance: A painter, a writer of essays and fiction, a physician and politician (in the order of his…
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Culture The Ambivalent Reporter
The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe By Paul Reitter The University of Chicago Press, 256 pages, $35. Modern journalism, especially as practiced in America, utilizes what is perhaps the most stifling literary form ever conceived outside of metric poetry. In our daily papers we have reduced our attempts at instantaneous history…
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Culture A Tree Named Jerusalem
Descartes’ Loneliness By Allen Grossman New Directions, 70 pages, $16.95. Jerusalem is a grave of poets. Name two who are buried there: the poet Dennis Silk is buried there. He lived with a dressmaker’s dummy, in a cave, on the Hill of Evil Counsel due South of Zion Mount. She bore him children after her…
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Culture Left Behind: A New Book Explores the History of Abandoned Wives
l Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives By Bluma Goldstein University of California Press, 235 pages, $39.95. We would do well to remember that when we say “according to the rabbis,” we are historically saying “according to men.” According to the male rabbis who wrote the Talmud and who, for European generations, were the…
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