Saul Austerlitz
By Saul Austerlitz
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Culture Two Israels, Unspooled
If a country’s movies are a barometer of its emotions (and they often are), the 59th year of the State of Israel has been a bummer. In the aftermath of a disastrous incursion into Lebanon, saddled with a do-nothing government, Israelis of all stripes are dismayed by their current state of affairs. And the movies…
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Culture Losing an Exclamation Point, and Then Some
For Zionists of a certain age and temperament, no home was complete without a prominently placed copy of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s “O Jerusalem!” A secular Bible of sorts, Collins and Lapierre’s popular-historical chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel testified to the essential rightness of the Jewish cause, even as it…
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Culture Sebald in Israel
Snapshots By Michal Govrin Riverhead, 336 pages, $26.95. For contemporary novelists, using the scrapbook model — incorporating photographs and drawings along with text — is bound to raise comparisons with the beloved German novelist W.G. Sebald. The author, who died tragically young in 2001, revitalized the novel by loosening its bonds, rendering it less stiff…
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Culture Reshuffling History’s Deck
Farthing By Jo Walton Tor Books, 320 pages, $25.95. The alternative-history novel — in which the now-familiar progression of events is rendered unfamiliar by rips in the fabric of the past — fulfills an essential need to which only literature, or another of the arts, is capable of administering. Considering that the world is the…
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Culture Two Soldiers, Lonely Together
For some young Israelis, the idea of army service still holds romantic possibility: serving one’s country with the promise of adventure, and the opportunity to discover one’s self far from home. The reality is often quite different, with drudgery and endless repetition of dull tasks the markers of another day in the Israel Defense Forces….
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Culture The Bloody History Of a Disastrous Libel
Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 By Ronald Florence Other Press, 272 pages, $15.95. ‘It is obvious to me… that you killed him to take his blood and that that’s your custom. Don’t you know about the expulsion from Spain and other expulsions, and about the thousands of Jews killed because of this issue?…
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Culture Golem Meets ‘Taxi Driver’ in New Novel
Golem Song By Marc Estrin Unbridled Books, 320 pages, $15.95. For Rabbi Loew, the legendary maker of the original Prague-based golem, his creation was a photographic negative of the studious, passive Jew: muscular rather than atrophied; doltish rather than learned; a man of action, not of words. For Alan Krieger, antihero of Marc Estrin’s novel…
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Culture The Reel Deal
Annette Insdorf can hardly believe it has been 20 years since she launched her popular cinematic interview series, “Reel Pieces,” and so she is consequently in the mood to reminisce. For the Columbia University professor who is also a film scholar and a master interviewer, the occasion of her series’ anniversary offers the opportunity to…
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