Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture A Textured Trilogy of Ghetto Life
The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto By Chava Rosenfarb Translated from the Yiddish by the author, in collaboration with Goldie Morgentaler Book One: On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939 The University of Wisconsin Press, Terrace Books, 314 pages, $16.95. Book Two: From the Depths I Call You, 1940-1942…
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Culture Punky Town
Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 Edited by Brandon Stosuy New York University Press, 510 pages, $29.95 The day the Bowery birthplace of punk CBGB’s closed last month, New Yorkers could open their New York Times and read an obituary for it — an article whose most shocking…
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Culture France’s 900-page Cause Célèbre
Parisians are all in a fury, they’re reading in the streets. The newest cause célèbre of the French fall publishing season? A 900-page novel about the Holocaust, written in French by an expatriate Jewish American, 38-year-old Jonathan Littell. Titled “Les Bienveillantes,” which is said to translate, in English, to “The Well-meaning Ones” (though that’s probably…
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Culture Found in Translation: A Round-up
Language, our first barrier, now also seems our last. Babel is one bookend of human communication; today’s instantaneous transmission of Babel through a baffling array of technologies is the other. Perhaps one of the oldest occupations, after the making of towers, is translation — that utopian and often invisible task of making one word mean…
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News Schadenfreude and Suspicion After Nobel Laureate Reveals SS Past
Last week, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in advance of his new autobiography, “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel” (“Peeling the Onion”), Günter Grass — Nobel laureate, public intellectual and arguably the greatest modern novelist in German — revealed his membership in the Waffen-SS, saying that he had been inducted into the ranks of…
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Culture Women Ending Badly
Jackpot By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 224 pages, $13. Retelling By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 288 pages, $14. Readers of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” always know that Raskolnikov committed murder, but they often don’t know whether Raskolnikov knows that he committed murder. It is in this wonderful vagary, more than among any writerly tricks of…
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Culture …and Muse
Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel By Goce Smilevski Translated by Filip Korzenski Northwestern University Press, 152 pages, $16.95. * * *| A few centuries too late, it seems that Spinoza’s time has finally come. In a world in which many Jews are yet again attempting to assert a secular identity as the dialectic antipode…
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News Jerzy Ficowski, Poet and Translator
Jerzy Ficowski, a peerless advocate for the arts and letters of a decimated Polish Jewry, died in Warsaw on May 9, at the age of 82. Following World War II, during which he served in the Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Ficowski published nearly 20 volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed…
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