Currently Browsing: Fiction 8 articles
Keeping Kosher
A new story by MJ Popplewell. Joseph struggled upstairs and into the apartment with his bags. He laid them on the kitchen table and took out a selection of pans: small for milk, medium for vegetables and a large one for meat. He had also bought some cutlery: knives, forks, spoons and so forth, and […]
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 […]
The Apotheosis of Consumer Culture and a Career
In his continuing exploration of David Cronenberg’s Jewishness, Sean Alexander appraises David Cronenberg’s only novel, Consumed. In 2014, the Baron of Blood and King of Venereal Horror, Canadian Jewish movie director, David Cronenberg, released his last movie to date, Maps to the Stars, and published his first novel Consumed. It brought the filmmaker’s career full […]
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 […]
The Secret History of Hava Nagila
The Secret History of Hava Nagila is an animated short story that could change everything you thought you knew about Jewish history.
Faithful, Fruitful
A short story by Tamar Hodes. The winter of 1876 was cruel, even by Lithuanian standards. Citizens and animals were numb with cold; foliage was edged in frost; the soil froze. My great-grandfather was a woodcutter in the Algirdas forest where firs stood like giants’ legs against a vanilla sky. All day, he chopped trees […]
COVID, Ducks and Balak the Crazy Dog
A dream-like state. Thousands of random flashing images gradually replaced by a piercing, high frequency sine-wave and my wife’s urgent pleas to ‘wake up! Wake up! Kirk, wake up!’ After initial confusion, I realised I had passed out in the lobby of our apartment block. I remembered exiting the lift and telling my wife I […]
Why Isn’t Anybody Talking About…
Why isn’t anybody talking about the North London lockdown murders? You hear a lot about how domestic violence has risen by 24 per cent under lockdown, but nobody talks about the fact that in one area of London – the small, largely Jewish boroughs of Finchley, Hendon and Golders Green — the murder rate has […]