Shoshana Olidort
By Shoshana Olidort
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Culture Wrestling With Faith in the Land of Oz
● JEWS AND WORDS By Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger Yale University Press, 248 pages, $25 In the epilogue to “Jews and Words,” the authors raise the age-old question “Who is a Jew?” to which they respond, “Whoever is wrestling with the question ‘Who is a Jew?’” It is not an original answer, but it’s…
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The Schmooze POEM: Friday Late Morning Montage
baby: in bassinet, breathing loud, me: on the couch breasts filling up, heavy with milk toddler’s sweater thrown over his chair, on the floor: toys, a towel, a Ziploc bag on the ottoman: blue-and-white polka-dotted boppy — a nursing pillow on the sofa: baby-wearing wrap outside: the rain, in the dining corner: shades are still…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Backseat Mama’
my son consigns me to a knife-less table-setting he explains: “mama doesn’t get a knife, she sat in the backseat” — in the car — it’s true: my husband at the wheel, his mother, visiting from revolution-ravaged Ukraine at his side I’m the only one small enough (even post-birth) to fit between two carseats surprisingly…
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Culture Rivka Galchen’s Short Stories Transport Readers Into Magical Worlds
● American Innovations By Rivka Galchen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $24 The stories in Rivka Galchen’s “American Innovations,” aren’t all fantastical — although a fair number include elements of magic realism and science fiction — but even the most realistic stories in this collection have a kind of magical quality about them that…
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Culture She Was a Novelist, Chicago-Born
‘Yudl’: And Selected Short Stories By Layle Silbert Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $17.95 Layle Silbert’s “Yudl” opens with the protagonist, an immigrant Jew with a thick accent and heavy socialist leanings, inspecting a building that appears incomplete. “With its empty unglassed windows,” the three-story-high, red brick building “could be a new building not yet…
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Culture Stuart Nadler’s Story of Interracial Love Explores Tensions in Jewish Families
● Wise Men By Stuart Nadler Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur, 352 pages, $25.99 In Stuart Nadler’s debut novel, a Jewish boy named Hilly, whose father has suddenly become enormously wealthy, falls in love with a black girl named Savannah whom he barely knows. The encounter, in 1950s suburbia, has far-reaching ramifications that will haunt Hilly for…
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Culture A.B. Yehoshua Looks Back at His Country and Art
● The Retrospective By A.B. Yehoshua Translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages, $26 In A.B. Yehoshua’s latest novel, an aging Israeli film director is invited to Spain for a retrospective of his life’s work. The trip engenders a kind of journey backward in time for the director, Mr. Moses,…
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Culture Caught Between Two Worlds
I Am Forbidden By Anouk Markovits Hogarth, 320 pages, $25 The title of Anouk Markovits’s English-language debut, “I Am Forbidden,” refers both to the tragic climax of the book and to the broader world of this novel, a world defined by forbiddenness. The allure of the forbidden is ever-present in the story, which spans several…
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