Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture The Mongrel’s Lament
In late 2001, an attacked America prepares once again to defend a free world, mainland Europe mires in decadence and, in Alessandro Piperno’s debut novel, “The Worst Intentions”(Europa Editions), Daniel Sonnino makes a youthful attempt to reconcile the peoples of his past: Jewish, Catholic, Italian. Born of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Sonnino…
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Culture Neither and Both
l An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry Volume 1: 1801-1953 Volume 2: 1953-2001 Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer M.E. Sharpe, 1,376 pages, $225. The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary…
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Culture Remembering Poet and Translator Michael Hamburger
Michael Hamburger, poet and translator, died June 7 at the age of 83. He was born Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger, in Berlin in 1924, to Richard Hamburger, a Jewish pediatrician, and Lili Hamburg, a Polish Quaker, daughter of an eminent family of bankers. In 1933, when Hitler assumed the chancellorship, the Hamburgers left first for…
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Culture A Catalog of Defiance
Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust Edited by David Engel, Eva Fogelman, et al. Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 146 pages, $22.95. ‘Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” a catalog published to accompany an exhibition of the same title that recently opened at New York’s…
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Culture A Forgotten Writer’s Paradise Of Prose and Poetry
From Man to Man By Moishe Nadir Translated by Harvey Fink Windshift Press, 130 pages, $16.95. Before we begin to speak of the revolutionary work of Yiddish American writer Moishe Nadir, we should first speak of the revolution in publishing technology and arts economics that has finally allowed a translated volume of his to be…
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Culture Writing in Four Dimensions
Avram Davidson was a midcentury, American writer of fantastic fiction whose imagination would inherit the galaxy, and more. His stories and novels of time travel and alternate universes transcended almost everything earthly, even as their author was bound to poverty and mainstream neglect. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called Davidson the genre’s “most explicit literary…
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News Making It Our Own
Late in Naso, this week’s portion from the Book of Numbers, we find Judaism’s most famous blessing. Beginning at verse 6:22, we read the following, in the version of King James: And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of…
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Culture S. Yizhar’s Birth of a Nation
Preliminaries By S. Yizhar Translated by Nicholas de Lange The Toby Press, 312 pages, $24.95. A memoir of an extraordinary life written in an ordinary manner is no great memoir. A memoir of an ordinary life written in an extraordinary manner is no great memoir, either. But what of a memoir of an extraordinary life…
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