Currently Browsing: reading 3 articles
Dreamlike and Hallucinatory
Shai Afsai on Reading Bruno Schulz. Years ago, there was a small bookshop on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, near Brown University’s campus, called College Hill Bookstore. It had late hours — I recall the shop being open until eleven p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on weekends — and its motto was: Dedicated […]
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 […]
What types of Jewish culture have you been consuming during the pandemic?
To answer this question, I return to a beginning – a discovery in graduate school where my work concentrated on the history and theories of British literature. When we reached the twentieth century, devoid of Jewish content, it was the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen who inspired my fascination with British Jewish history and culture. Although I found Bowen a compelling writer, it was her treatment of British antisemitism […]