One of the Early Influences on “Dear Layla”
We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum and at long last have to tell it, the truth. I want to be able to say to myself, “I bled truth…
Category: World Literature
For Example, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and The Diamond Sutra
“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our newspapers is that they force us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only…
Five Thousand Years of Jewish Creativity
I learned Hebrew by dint of much effort. It is a difficult language, severe and ascetic. Its ancient basis is the proverb from the Mishna: “Silence is a fence for wisdom.”…If it weren’t for Hebrew,…
Appreciating Kafka
The marvelous thing is that the bareness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language,…
Some Things Take Time
I read the following in 2005; Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine came out in 2015: Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historical fact. Flight of fantasy—the synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining…
Our Father
In the constellation of geniuses, he is a blinding light and father of us all. (I exclude Shakespeare because for Shakespeare no human epithet is enough.)… I think Ulysses is the most diverting, brilliant, intricate,…
Writing En Plein Air
Have you longed for the chance to sit outside and write while listening to the birds, smelling the sweetness of the grass and blooming trees, watching the beauty of the dancing trees, and feeling the…
What To Do/14
There was nothing to do but wait it out. My mind has to become accustomed to loneliness. And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study. — I.B. Singer, In My Father’s…
Svetlana Alexievich: Fascinated by People
Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Her oral history, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, appeared this spring in the US. Translated by Bela Shayevich, the book is a compelling…