Category: Miscellaneous

 

A sad reflection of reality: interview with author Esther Blau Marcus

The Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2009

Esther Blau Marcus, author of the children’s book Tzeva Adom, offers the following story to illustrate her family’s experience of Operation Cast Lead: “During the war,” Marcus recalls, “I had the TV on one day and my son said, ‘Mom, look, the picture is the same as what I see from the window.'”

Her nine-year-old son, Tamir, wasn’t exaggerating. Marcus and her husband have lived on Kibbutz Alumim, within sight of Gaza, for 17 years. It is there the couple, both British born, has gone about the difficult task of raising four children in this hot zone.

“We have experienced the conflict directly,” she says. Of Tamir, her youngest child, she says that the tzeva adom (Color Red) alarm call has been a thread throughout his life. Living in an area that is under fire is “all he has known.”

Continue reading “A sad reflection of reality”

 

Mary, Mary, quite contrary: interview with author Mary Gordon

The Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2009

Mary Gordon’s work has been hailed as a prism that refracts Irish-American life, offering the reader a complex, multicolored look at this group, but the author herself is difficult to situate on the spectrum of writers. While she has been praised as a resounding voice for the inner world of Roman Catholics, and her writing is born of an abiding spirituality that is bound to the Church, she has resisted the term “Catholic writer.”

James Carroll, in his New York Times review of Gordon’s Joan of Arc, called her a “quintessentially American writer.” But in a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gordon shied away from this label, as well.

“American literature really links women with suffocation, strangulation and death,” she says. She cites bastions of the American literary guard – Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and “even The Great Gatsby which seemed sympathetic to women” – as examples. “These male writers offered models for writing about women that were no use to me, that I knew to be wrong,” she explains.

Continue reading “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”

 

Words that can’t sit still: review of Warsaw Bikini and interview with author Sandra Simonds

The Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2009

To move through the pages of Sandra Simonds’s collection of poetry, Warsaw Bikini, is to move with intent, with care, as though you were walking through a minefield.

That’s not to say Warsaw Bikini, Simonds’s first full-length work, isn’t a pleasurable read. The title is a reflection of the range of the content – it varies from lead to helium, from apocalyptic and Holocaust imagery to pop culture references, often within the boundaries of one poem. The reader gets a sense of Simonds’s supreme comfort with the form – lines vary in length, some poems are dense, some are light and airy, some zip along, some move with a deliberate thickness. But the reader also gets an overriding sense of her discomfort with much of the content, and the resulting dissonance and tension is irresistible.

This friction is a driving force to the Pushcart Prize-nominated Simonds. “I feel that my poems are anxious,” she says, “and a large part of this anxiety is historical and familial.”

Continue reading “Words that can’t sit still”

 

The story behind the story: review of Thomas Keneally’s memoir Searching for Schindler

The Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2009

More than 25 years after the publication of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which Steven Spielberg adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List, comes Keneally’s latest, Searching for Schindler. Keneally is a well-established figure in the world of words. In his long and distinguished career, he has been short-listed for and awarded a variety of honors, including the Booker Prize, which he won for Schindler’s Ark.

The reader is hooked from the first page by both the crisp, straightforward prose of his memoir as well as the utterly charming and colorfully portrayed Poldek Pfefferberg – the man who literally dropped the story of Oskar Schindler into Keneally’s hands. Keneally himself also makes for a likable character. But despite the allure, this memoir will leave readers searching for more.

Continue reading “The story behind the story”

 

Up against a wall

The Jerusalem Post, December 26, 2008

Slapped over the graffiti and posters that decorate an abandoned building on otherwise glossy Dizengoff is an advertisement – in plain typeface on plain white paper – for “Desert Life,” the first exhibition of a new artists’ collective. The homegrown advertisement mirrors both the space and the spirit of the exhibition, it is do-it-yourself. Just steps away from Rothschild Boulevard’s art scene, which has been abuzz with international attention, this group of artists is attempting to carve out their own space both literally and figuratively.

Entering the exhibition on Herzl Street is a bit of a surprise – one doesn’t expect to encounter dirt floors, plants dripping from overhead balconies, and the sounds of people going about their daily lives in an art gallery. Chick Corea drifts down into the gallery, resonating between the walls. This clearly isn’t an ordinary space, but that’s the point.

Hidden from view, in the ground floor courtyard of a building noted for having Tel Aviv’s first elevator, a few people are milling about – passersby drawn in by the banner that is draped over the façade of this quintessentially Tel Aviv building. Everything about this exhibition speaks to the fact that it stands apart from the bubble of the mainstream art world.

Continue reading “Up against a wall”

 

Bittersweet surrender

The Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2008

I landed in the Philippines as I land everywhere – with no plans. Though I didn’t know where I was going, I knew exactly what I was looking for: a mind-blowing beach, minus the mind-numbing tourist scene. I wanted meditatively quiet sands, a place to let a few days slip away. I wanted to be somewhere that I could slip out of my skin.

Manila was anything but quiet, and the minute I got a look at the city – from the backseat of a cab – I wanted out. I checked into a pension, dropped my bags and headed straight to the closest Cebu Pacific airline office, located in a nearby mall.

It’s a cliché of travel writing to talk about contrasts, but in Manila the class differences are too glaringly obvious to ignore. As I walked to the mall, I passed a family of eight living on a street corner. The mother, a baby hoisted on her hip, stood outside their makeshift shelter of cardboard. One of her children, a little boy who looked to be about four, ran barefoot and naked in and out of the street, merrily bouncing on and off the sidewalk. Air-conditioned cabs, their windows rolled up tight, spirited their shopping-bag-laden passengers by, whisking them past the family.

Continue reading “Bittersweet surrender”

 

Where there’s smoke: review of A.B. Yehoshua’s novel Friendly Fire

The Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2008

While perusing the bowing bookshelves of a dinner party host recently, I noticed a large A.B. Yehoshua collection. “Looks like someone’s a Yehoshua fan,” I remarked.

The hostess laughed, “Not exactly.” She explained the books once belonged to her mother. No, her mother hadn’t died – “Savta,” as everyone called her, was alive and well and sitting across from me at the dinner table.

“It came to a point that I was through with Yehoshua,” Savta said. “Enough was enough!”

A literature lover and a poet herself, she adored the writing but despised the ideology. She found herself torn, unable to throw the books away, and she bequeathed them to her daughter instead.

Love him or hate him – or both, like Savta – Yehoshua provokes strong reactions in his readers.

Sometimes.

Continue reading “Where there’s smoke”

Bare-faced humor: review of Alan Zweibel’s non-fiction collection Clothing Optional

The Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2008

Clothing Optional and Other Ways to Read These Stories is the latest effort by award-winning comedy writer Alan Zweibel. This imaginative collection includes a wide range of forms – from a mock court deposition, to essays, to scripts, with an occasional pencil drawing thrown in for added humor.

The subject matter of the often irreverent pieces varies tremendously. Nothing is off limits for Zweibel and (reader, be warned) nothing is sacred. The opening act, “My First Love,” includes material that Zweibel refers to as “a heartwarming story titled ‘The Day I Got Caught Playing with Myself in Hebrew School… While Thinking About Abraham’s Wife, Sarah.'” Bouncing off of passages from Genesis, Zweibel takes us on a hilarious ride through the imagination of the 11-year-old “Avraham” Zweibel.

Continue reading “Bare-faced humor”

Fugee Fridays

The Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2008

It’s almost Shabbat and Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market is slowly closing up. Stalls are clapped shut, the walkways are sprayed with water, and the last of the customers are clearing out, passing by mounds of unsold lettuce that have been dumped on the ground.

Behind the shuk, a motley crew of volunteers – some Israeli, but most American – is assembling on the sidewalk adjacent to the Carmelit bus terminal. A guy in a bright blue tank top and navy sweatpants pulls up on a bicycle. He has close-cropped dark hair and an easy smile. He looks relaxed, but the work he’s doing here is serious.

His name is Jesse Fox. He chats with some of the volunteers for a few minutes and then debriefs the group. Speaking of the vendors inside the shuk, he says, “These guys know us already. Just tell them we’re collecting food for the refugees from Darfur. They’ll give you a little food. It’s very simple.”

He’s right. It is simple. And the beauty of the project lies in its grassroots simplicity.

Continue reading “Fugee Fridays”

From sunny Tel Aviv to cloudy Michigan: review of Danit Brown’s collection of short stories Ask for a Convertible

The Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2008

Danit Brown’s debut, Ask for a Convertible, is a collection of beautifully woven short stories, most of which revolve around Osnat Greenberg, who is both American and Israeli and comfortable with neither. Upon leaving sunny Tel Aviv for the cloudy suburbs of Michigan at the beginning of her teen years, Osnat embarks on a long and, under Brown’s artistry, exquisitely rendered struggle to find a place she feels she belongs in and can call home. Bookended by the appropriately titled “Descent” and “Ascent,” we follow Osnat as she freefalls through identity issues and as she searches for somewhere she can feel her feet firmly planted on the ground.

The journey we are on as readers is through stories full of vivid, quirky characters many of whom, like Osnat, are forced to continually define themselves and their place in the world. The characters are at turns compelling, darkly humorous and downright funny.

Continue reading “From sunny Tel Aviv to cloudy Michigan”