“True Happiness and Joy”
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
Category: World Literature
Three Hours in the Morning
In Talking with Sartre, U.S. professor John Gerassi explores a fascinating range of subjects with the French intellectual, writer, and activist. At the book’s conclusion, Gerassi writes, “What we must do instead, he said, is…
In Praise of Sentimental Slop
Back in the late 90s, when the spring semester ended, and the grades had been turned in, I’d treat myself with another reading of Dostoevsky’s magisterial The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve lost track of how many…
For All My Friends Who Are Free Spirits
“What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” –William Blake Free Spirits desire the emancipation of all humankind Free Spirits conceive a habitable, harmonian world Free Spirits know that no revolution has gone far enough…
On the New York Literary Establishment in the Fifties
“There’s no room for youth and vitality in New York. It is a city full of guilty academicians.” –Gregory Corso “Too big, too multiple, too jaded.” –Jack Kerouac “We want everyone to know that we…
A Poem, a History, a Novel
This fall Dianne, Lynette and I are reading the following books:
“I’ll Never Know, in the Silence You Don’t Know, You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”
Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
Yiddish Writers/5
I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… –H. Leivick
Yiddish Writers/4
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
A Briiliant Bit of Victor Hugo
My friend Andrew Wimmer has taken on a translation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. He shared the following in this morning’s email… “If it had not rained on the night of June 17, 1815, the future…