Sheds light on the early, developmental years of the young, passionate writer.
Newly translated essays show Singer as a journalist and columnist.
Stromberg, translator and editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, collects 25 intriguing, emotional pieces by the Nobel Prize–winning author (1903-1991). They were published from 1939 to 1945 in New York City’s Forverts, a Yiddish newspaper, during a period of great turmoil in Singer’s life. Stromberg argues that these key wartime pieces are “fundamentally different from almost everything published to date,” offering a bridge between his Polish homeland and his adopted country and insights into the Holocaust’s impact on Singer as he explored cultural and religious customs and practices. “What is Kabbalah?” from late 1940, led him to formulate broader “notions that guided Jewish spiritual life throughout times of great crisis.” In an essay from Sept. 7, 1941, Singer confronted Hitler’s antisemitism head-on. “When Hitler says that the existence of the Jews is a personal insult to him,” he writes, “he’s not pulling it out of thin air.” From 1943, “Religious Jews Say That the Current War Is the War of Gog and Magog” shows Singer’s ability to “consider current events in both pragmatic-historical and mystical-philosophical terms at once.” A March 1944 essay on the Jewish language urges Jews to collect and preserve their Hebrew texts, and others from the same year lament Jewish powerlessness and argue that “American Jews need the past to be directly connected to the present.” In December 1944, he penned “Yiddish Language and Culture Undergo Their Greatest Crisis in History.” As the war wound down in the second half of 1945, Singer turned to artistic topics, such as the portrayal of Jewish life in Yiddish literature, its absence in movies (“Hollywood silences our existence”), and, most importantly, the future of Yiddish literature. Stromberg promises more collections to come.
Sheds light on the early, developmental years of the young, passionate writer.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798988677307
Page Count: 180
Publisher: White Goat Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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