Recently, the Persian scholar and poetry translator Matt Miller sent me condolences upon the death of one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. I mentioned to him that the several of the teachers I first…
I’ve read half of Philip Roth’s books, a few more than once. Recently I returned to the novel Operation Shylock and was struck by this testimonial outburst of one of the characters— “‘Grant me that…
Philip Roth, American Pastoral Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997 …the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were fugitive—initiating the Swede…
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading…
I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known…
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,…
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,…
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…