My 4-year-old son is obsessed with superheroes, dressing up at every opportunity as the superhero du jour to do battle with the bad guys lurking around the corner. (My 2-year-old daughter is just as enthusiastic, but at her age all she can really muster is a “meanie” face.)
It\’s estimated that 97 percent of Polish Jews died in the war. To this day, Geminder can\’t quite fathom how he ended up in the 3 percent that survived.
Do you write from memory? Someone always asks, and I become tongue-tied and uncertain, scrambling for the words, the ways to make believable what I know will sound bizarre — a too-complicated response where all that is required is a simple \”Yes\” or \”No\” or \”Sometimes; the rest is research.\”
I lived in Iran for only 13 years. I remember very little — a handful of places, a couple of dozen friends and relatives. Yet, I\’ve spent my entire career writing about the country and its people, and I\’ve written it all — this is the part that\’s difficult to explain — from memory.
One of the best American short story writers, Apple has just published \”The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories\” (Johns Hopkins Press), his first collection of stories in 20 years. He writes with the same playful imagination and comic intelligence as in his earlier stories, layered with irony and an infallible sense of detail.
\”Herb is this wonderful combination of New York savvy, old school wisdom and outrageous life experiences,\” Kaminoff says. \”Imagine Garrison Keillor, only if he was a handsome Jewish guy from Brooklyn.\”
Kristallnacht marked the end of Jewish life in Germany; a pivotal turning point in what later became known as the Holocaust. A generation is passing, but it is a generation that has left behind voluminous records, testimonies and memoirs, video recordings and diaries, letters and notes.
One should read Israeli writers, of course — Agnon, Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret. But the more appropriate template may come from fellow Americans, writers who, by exploring the Diaspora Jew\’s relationship to Israel, have gone down this road before.
When Jews hire people to do household jobs — anybody who cleans, cooks, does the laundry, cares for children or elderly parents — we are the ones who represent the privileged class, with the funds to hire help. Jews today are generally wealthier and better educated than the majority of Americans.
The Rosenbergs were executed for spying for the Soviet Union in June 1953. Their personal story was told 51 years later by their granddaughter, Ivy Meeropol, in the powerful 2004 documentary, \”Heir to an Execution.\”
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.