‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and ...

Imre Kertész is one of Hungary’s greatest living writers, and yet he is perhaps the writer a certain breed of Hungarian dislikes most—a fact that owes as much to Hungarian anti-Semitism as it does to Kertész’s Jewish anti-Hungarianism. Since winning the Nobel for Literature in 2002, the author has spent much time criticizing his homeland, ...

Two subjects that even most conscientious readers know not enough about: concrete poetry and the German-language, postwar literary avant-garde. These subjects reach their dark syzygy in the work of Heimrad Bäcker, an Austrian poet, editor, and publisher of a certain generation whose transcript—the lowercase is not just correct but imperative—has recently been translated into English.
We’ll ...

Once, a Hungarian physician by the name of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss (1818-1865) took it upon to himself to investigate the causes of childbed fever in the maternity ward of Vienna’s largest hospital. There, in the cramped, squalid quarters where the poor gave birth—the rich birthed at home, delivered by professional midwives—mortality rates for mothers were ...

Styles exist only in retrospect. A Late Style is only late if the author dies immediately after, or, more dramatically, during, the work. An Early Style is only early if the author grows and changes. Regionalisms, and ethnic or national literatures, seem artifactual: today, French and German literatures are remarkably similar; with the invention of ...

When a person is sick, Jews pray for him by reciting the verses of Psalms that begin with the letters of his name; Psalm 119 is often used for this purpose, as it is made of 22 sets of eight verses that begin with the same Hebrew letter, and the sets are arranged alphabetically—or, perhaps, ...

Mahmoud Darwish was, in one respect only, a poet of another era—a national poet, a bard. This distinction is not meant to characterize his poetry, merely to give an idea of his reputation, of what his poems mean to his people. Like Robert Burns of Scotland, like W.B. Yeats of Ireland, Darwish was the poetic ...

It is regrettable that for a man who wrote so much, so little is known, and so little is the desire to know. There is hardly any scholarship about Benjamin De Casseres (he’s mentioned in a handful of doctoral dissertations regarding interwar New York literary society); none of his books are in print; and the manuscript of his thousand-page diary, Fantasia Impromptu, reposes in the basement of the New York Public Library, where I might have been the first person to read through its pages since they were interred there by De Casseres’ widow, Adele “Bio” Terrill, following her husband’s death in 1945.

Pasternak’s autobiography, Safe Conduct, was published in English 60 years ago this spring, and has just been republished in an anniversary edition from New Directions; the Russian original of this fragment of formative days was written in 1930, just a year before Pasternak’s first marriage collapsed. And yet there’s no mention of this union with Yevgeniya Lurye, and none either of their son, Yevgeny. The author’s father, Leonid, a portraitist of Leo Tolstoy and the first Russian painter to espouse Impressionism, and his mother, famed pianist Rosa, only make brief appearances; and one would think, from reading for facts, that the only events that ever affected Boris Leonidovich after his birth in 1890 were a mysterious Tintorettan dusk in Venice and meeting the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Reading Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann’s newly published autobiographical novel Curriculum Vitae (New Directions) caused me to think about the Two Easts, about Zen Buddhism and Hasidism. Hoffmann’s books, five out of nine of which have been translated from Hebrew into English, represent a polyglot’s synthesis: his commingling of these two mystical traditions begins with a delight in paradox, and darkens as both Zen and Hasidism concern themselves with life’s futility and human powerlessness.