Steven G. Kellman
By Steven G. Kellman
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Culture An Actor Exits
The Humbling By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 160 pages, $22. Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the enfant terrible of American Jewish literature,…
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Culture Why Is This Civil War Different From All Other Civil Wars?
All Other Nights By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Co., 384 pages, $24.95. More than most other novelists of her generation, Dara Horn draws inspiration from neglected nooks of Jewish history. She set part of her first novel, “In the Image,” published in 2002, in Amsterdam before the German invasion. Horn, however, has been reluctant…
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Culture New Manuscript, Same Conundrum
Fire in the Blood By Irène Némirovsky Translated from French by Sandra Smith Knopf, 129 pages, $22. Three years ago, a newly discovered manuscript became the talk of France. “Suite Française,” an uncompleted novel about the German invasion and occupation of France, attracted widespread interest in its author, Irène Némirovsky, who wrote in French and…
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Culture Being a Jew Among the Genteel and Gentile
Matters of Honor By Louis Begley Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95. The ordeal of civility, as defined by sociologist John Murray Cuddihy in his 1974 book, is “the ritually unconsummated courtship of Gentile and Jew.” This phenomenon is a recurrent theme throughout the fiction of Louis Begley. Even more than in his first novel — “Wartime…
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Culture My Friends and Me
Friendship: An Exposé By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $24. ‘What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield says in “The Catcher in the Rye,” “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on…
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Culture Reading Kafka’s Love Letters as a Key to His Mind
Kafka: The Decisive Years By Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Harcourt, 592 pages, $35. * * *| ‘I am nothing, absolutely nothing,” declared Franz Kafka, who longed to contract his life into a perfect sentence. Eighty-one years after his death, we’ve got plenty of nothing. Posthumous publication of thousands of pages…
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Culture Storytelling as Both Sacred and Sacrilegious
The Seventh Beggar By Pearl Abraham Riverhead, 355 pages, $25.95. —– Twenty-five years ago, thinking it a mitzvah to comfort a Soviet Jewish refusenik, I came, bearing books, to a Moscow apartment. During the time that its tenant — who had lost his job after applying to emigrate from Moscow to Israel — had spent…
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News A Chicano Writer Seeks Truth in Other Communities
The Nature of Truth: A Novel By Sergio Troncoso Northwestern University, 262 pages, $22.95. * * *| In “Fresh Challah,” an essay published in Hadassah Magazine in 1999, Sergio Troncoso described sitting in an Upper West Side cafe on Erev Yom Kippur devouring fresh rugelach, luscious fortification for the next day’s fast. Though not Jewish,…
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