I would take my mom against Clint Eastwood in any movie. Sure, he usually plays a grizzled, gunslinger with cat-like reflexes and something to prove, but if you cross my mother, you will find yourself, like the title of Clint\’s greatest Western, \”Unforgiven.\”
We look back on the past because it was another era. In our youth and young years, life included activities you chose. Your responsibilities were minimal compared to those as you grew older. Being young and thinking young allowed you to exist in a world that is the start of the middle age.
Writing is said to be a lonely business, solitary in the task to fill up so many empty pages. And before I decided to try my hand at writing my autobiographical novel, \”The Other Shulman,\” I\’ll confess I had fears about such an undertaking.
Liev Schreiber has traveled a similar road in coming to terms with his personal history, the loss of his grandfather and the mystery — the unspoken family history his grandfather embodied.
As a child, Joseph Lelyveld\’s parents called him \”memory boy.\”
To capture flat Valley spaces that retain old West emptiness, Jacobson decided to shoot the movie in anamorphic widescreen. But while scouting locations, he discovered the kind of childhood scenarios he remembered had moved to the North Valley.
In a tale rooted in personal experience, Dr. John Menkes explores the themes of loss and recovery in his novel “After the Tempest” (Daniel & Daniel, 2003). A Holocaust survivor, Menkes returned to his hometown of Vienna after the war and found that not only was his family and his home gone, but his very identity had been irrevocably lost.
\”Boy\” revolves around 40ish novelist Eric Weiss, who returns home — actually to the hospital where he was born — to visit his dying father, Manny, a shoe salesman. It\’s his first trip back in a while, and he\’s ambivalent: \”I saw what Brooklyn did to my parents, and I knew I had to get the hell out of here,\” he tells a friend. \”I saw … the fear, the xenophobia, the suffocating double grip the Holocaust and the Depression had around their throats.\”
I was fired in 1998 from my job as a writer at The New Republic and dismissed from several freelance assignments for having fabricated dozens of magazine articles.
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