Steven G. Kellman
By Steven G. Kellman
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Esperanto
The deadly pogroms that swept through Eastern Europe following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 encouraged some Jews to become socialists, others Zionists, others emigrants. In 1887, Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist born in Bialystok and based in Warsaw, Poland, became the inventor of the most widely spoken constructed language, what came to…
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Culture Diving Back Into Henry Roth’s Streams of Consciousness
Mercy of a Rude Stream By Henry Roth Liveright, 1312 pages, $39.95. Henry Roth was rediscovered twice. In 1964, 30 years after the debut of “Call It Sleep,” an enticing new paperback edition and ecstatic praise from Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review catapulted Roth’s neglected masterpiece onto…
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Culture Dara Horn Offers Her Own ‘Guide For the Perplexed’
● A Guide for the Perplexed By Dara Horn W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $25.95 In Dara Horn’s first novel, “In the Image,” published in 2002, Rosenthal, an elderly Jewish immigrant, tells young Jason about crossing the Atlantic in steerage. When the ship finally approached the Statue of Liberty, passengers were so eager…
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Culture Marco Roth’s Frustration and Triumph
● The Scientists: A Family Romance By Marco Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $23 Marco Roth’s childhood was privileged, pampered and precocious. He entertained guests in his family’s duplex on Central Park West by playing the violin and reciting Jean de La Fontaine’s fables in French. Twice a week he visited his psychotherapist….
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Culture Némirovsky’s Book Reveals Passion for Country That Betrayed Her
All Our Worldly Goods By Irène Némirovsky, translated from French by Sandra Smith Vintage, 224 pages, $14.95 ‘All Our Worldly Goods” opens with fireworks. Two families, the Hardelots and the Florents, gather on a Normandy beach to watch a pyrotechnical display light up the late-summer sky. Indifferent to Simone Renaudin, the pudgy, sullen heiress his…
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Culture A Man, a Dog and an Author
MOTTI By Asaf Schurr, Translated from Hebrew by Todd Hasak-Lowy Dalkey Archive Press, 169 pages, $13.95 It is not obligatory for an Israeli novelist to double as national prophet, but it helps secure publication in the United States, where translations constitute less than 3% of books. Writing about and against public injustice, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav…
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Culture Nicole Krauss’s Desk and Its Clutter
Great House By Nicole Krauss W.W. Norton & Company, 289 pages, $24.95 It is a great desk — an enormous, ornate escritoire equipped with 19 drawers — rather than a “Great House” that connects the characters in Nicole Krauss’s ambitious third novel, following “Man Walks Into a Room” (2002) and “The History of Love” (2008)….
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Culture From Suitcase to ‘Suite Française’
The Life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903–1942 By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, translated by Euan Cameron Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $35 Many recently released novels have been written by authors who are unavailable for interviews, on account of their posthumous status. But even more thrilling than the publication of works by Roberto Bolaño, Ralph…
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