Jewish writers and writing of the (last) Depression
| 11:53 AM Jan 22, 2009
Just as the octogenarian survivors of the Great Depression are about to go extinct, we are beginning to suffer, in the winter of 2008-2009, another catastrophe—with the collapse of our most prominent investment banks, the failure of giant insurers, and the nationalization of so many related businesses. We meet these challenges today with an undifferentiated ...
What a 1942 essay contest revealed about immigrants' lives, in the Old World and the New
| 12:00 PM Jan 13, 2009
In New York City in May 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute—known then and now by the transliterated Yiddish acronym YIVO—announced a memoir contest for members of the aging remnant of the estimated 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who had crossed the Atlantic during what scholars call “The Third Migration”—roughly, 1880 until a nativist Congress slammed, ...
Jonathan Rosen talks about the tortured vision of Henry Roth. With a reading from Call It Sleep.
| 11:15 PM Aug 9, 2005
Henry Roth
Redemption, Steven G. Kellman’s new biography of Henry Roth, explores a brilliant novelist with a deep secret—an incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose. Roth’s sexual shame informs Call It Sleep, Roth’s Joycean novel of the Lower East Side, which was published in 1934 but forgotten until the 1960s, when Irving Howe’s praise put the ...