Mark Oppenheimer
By Mark Oppenheimer
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Culture Jewish Noir
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 432 pages, $26.95. On January 1, 2008, sovereignty over the Federal District of Sitka, the Jewish homeland in Alaska, “a crooked parenthesis of rocky shoreline running along the western edges of Baranof and Chichagof islands,” will revert to American control. When that happens, the Sitka District Police…
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Culture When Reality Overwhelms Creativity
Awake in the Dark By Shira Nayman Scribner, 304 pages, $24. ‘Awake in the Dark,” Shira Nayman’s collection of short stories about American children of Holocaust survivors, is being launched into the chain stores with the highest of book-club hopes. The publisher’s press release features praise from Ursula Hegi (“brilliant and mystical stories”), and printed…
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Culture Climbing the Family Tree
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million By Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins, 528 pages, $27.95. Although he had begun teaching himself ancient Greek when he was 10, Daniel Mendelsohn was not interested in the Hebrew he had to memorize for his bar mitzvah in 1973, nor in the Jewish faith that the Hebrew conveyed….
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Culture Searching for Answers, After the Fire
Triangle By Katharine Weber Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. * * *| ‘Triangle” is a prose cousin of certain one-act plays, those taut dramatic exercises in which just a few characters, engaging in conversation, conjure grand notions. (Think of “No Exit,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Doubt.”) At its best, Katharine Weber’s new novel has…
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Culture A Daughter’s-eye View of a Man Who Was a Hero to Many
My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud By Janna Malamud Smith Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $24. * * *| Perhaps it was silly of me to imagine a tame, tender, avuncular Bernard Malamud. But from the little I knew of his biography — and there is no biography of him, though an…
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Culture Retracing a Living Legend’s First Steps
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories, 1959-1962 Library of America, 913 pages, $35. Philip Roth: Novels, 1967-1972 Library of America, 672 pages, $35. * * *| One interesting way to pass the time is to spend an hour rereading old reviews of Philip Roth’s books. You read them and quickly discover that for as long as…
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Culture A Laureate and the King Who Shared His Love of Verse
Unlike recent series of brief books by famous authors about famous subjects — including Penguin Lives, Eminent Lives and American Presidents — the new Jewish Encounters series is not a collection of biographies alone. While many of the planned books are about people — Seth Lipsky will write about Abraham Cahan, Jonathan Wilson about Marc…
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Culture A Literary Easterner With a Hollywood Muse
The Golden West: Hollywood Stories By Daniel Fuchs David R. Godine/Black Sparrow Books, 272 pages, $24.95. * * *| In his introduction to “The Golden West,” a new collection of Daniel Fuchs’s writings about California, John Updike places Fuchs in the company of similarly gifted fiction writers who did lucrative stints as screenwriters in Hollywood….
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