The short story that became The Heartbreak Kid
| 1:44 PM Oct 3, 2007
And so finally, after four years of drift, they had found all exits barricaded and gotten married in a sudden spurt, bombing their parents with the news. A Justice had been rounded up, also uncles in the area. After the ceremony, Cantrow’s new father-in-law had taken him around and said, “It’s going to be great, ...
The remake of The Heartbreak Kid favors bawdiness over sharp-edged satire
| 1:44 PM Oct 3, 2007
Cybill Shepherd and Charles Grodin
In the 1972 hit The Heartbreak Kid, screenwriter Neil Simon took the ethnic and class differences hinted at in Bruce Jay Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” and made them explicit. New Yorker Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting-goods salesman, marries Lila (Jeannie Berlin) in a ceremony where a wineglass ...
What happens to a writer when Hollywood calls?
| 1:43 PM Oct 3, 2007
One night, in the mid-60s, my wife at the time, Ginger Friedman, turned to me and said she had read a short story in Reader’s Digest and loved it. I was suspicious. The magazine rarely printed fiction. What little they published was of a homespun variety.
“You didn’t love it,” I said, after reading the story. ...
The author of Stern remembers his heady first days on the literary scene
| 1:14 PM Jan 9, 2007
Read Meg Wolitzer’s essay on Bruce Jay Friedman and Philip Roth.
There is a moment—much longed for—in the life of the occasional writer when a door seems to swing open. Darkness becomes sunlight. The writer feels anointed, ready to step forward and to claim a reward for what often felt like years of pointless effort.
A door ...
Jocheved sets up a snow-cone business
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The anti-‘Edge of Darkness’ email your relatives are forwarding
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At 86, blind and housebound, Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg is still dispensing crass words of wisdom
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The Fox cult hit ‘Glee’ is about outcasts and Broadway—so naturally it offers a Jewish storyline
Wallace Shawn on being Jewish—onscreen and off
William Kentridge and the art of righting history’s wrongs
At 50, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue still glimmers—leaks and all
While trying on new artistic hat, artist develops series of paper coats
How Russian-Jewish émigrés are changing the face of competitive ballroom dance
How a latter-day vaudevillian from Kansas City got himself to speak perfect Yiddish
As it progressed, the playwright’s autobiographical trilogy grew more dark—and more true
