The writer Henry Roth’s English was sometimes difficult. A school examination in Germany asked young people to understand it—and the lost shades of the Yiddish that preceded it.
Campus Week: The bestselling writer’s ambitious new ‘Here I Am’ represents the triumph of sentimentality and sincerity over irony and anger, which is a great loss
What the novelist’s 1976 conversation tells us about the 2016 presidential campaign, the persistence of change, and the durability of political ideas
‘The Odd Woman and the City’ proves the memoirist is a peer of Kazin, Howe, and other great chroniclers of Jewish America
Now that you know the novelist’s incestuous secrets, is his newly reissued ‘Mercy of a Rude Stream’ quartet worth reading or not?
They lie. They cheat. The treat their kids terribly. This Father’s Day, be thankful your own dad is such a mensch.
Yuri Suhl’s One Foot in America, a long-lost novel of Jewish American immigration that reads like a more Dickensian take on Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, has been republished and deserves a new audience
Sleuths, voyeurs, and fabulists
An excerpt from a new history of Commentary shows how the fiction published in the magazine’s early years shook not just the world of Jewish literature but the very foundations of American letters
Jewish writers and writing of the (last) Depression
What a 1942 essay contest revealed about immigrants’ lives, in the Old World and the New
Jonathan Rosen talks about the tortured vision of Henry Roth. With a reading from Call It Sleep.
