Currently Browsing: Donald Weber 7 articles
“You killed my Jew”
Donald Weber reviews a new book about author and artist Bruno Schulz. In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Highjacking of History Benjamin Balint re-visits issues he pursued in Kafka’s Last Trial, awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for 2020 by the Jewish Book Council. In each case, Balint’s subject is “the political implications […]
Soviet Jewish Writing
Donald Weber reviews a new book about postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film. In How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Sasha Senderovich maps a fascinating landscape of Jewish literary expression in Eastern Europe between the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union. The ongoing horrific violence in Ukraine and – for perhaps […]
An Unfathomable Nightmare
Donald Weber admires a new translation of Lion Feuchtwanger The Oppermanns. “Berlin is a city full of future émigrés,” Lion Feuchtwanger declared in 1931, prophesying his own fate two years before the 1933 publication of his deeply prescient novel, The Oppermanns. By then, the well-known author, a political novelist and playwright affiliated with Brecht and […]
Johanna Kaplan’s Miraculous Ear
Donald Weber reviews an author whose work might not be so well-known in Britain. Johanna Kaplan arrived on the literary scene almost fifty years ago as a superb interpreter of American Jewish life at mid-century, a time of social mobility, yet also an era haunted by the still raw traumas of the past. Loss of […]
Borowski’s Brutal Vision
Donald Weber reviews Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski. The publication of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories is a significant event for students of Holocaust literature. Sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1943, at the age of 21, and released from Dachau […]
The Philip Roth Minefield
Donald Weber offers his verdict on the new Philip Roth biography. Researching his richly-textured Philip Roth: The Biography, authorized by Roth himself in 2012, Blake Bailey recognized the challenge of narrating the story of one of the most celebrated, complex, and controversial figures in contemporary American literature. Roth, Bailey admits at the outset, is ‘too […]
An Uncanny Prophecy of Our Time
Donald Weber reviews Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger. The publication of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s harrowing novel, The Passenger, with a new translation from the original German by Philip Boehm, is a major literary event. Written in the weeks following Kristallnacht, in early November 1938, when Boschwitz was just 23, The Passenger offers an intimate portrait […]