A well-crafted anthology of a literary giant’s complicated and assertive thoughts.
Stromberg presents newly translated and collected essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Yiddish language and the Jewish community.
In this third volume of selected Yiddish essays by Singer, translator/editor Stromberg focuses on the period between 1956 and 1973, when the Polish American author’s stature was growing among the English-speaking public. (He would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.) Included in this volume are essays on Yiddish literature on the world stage and its uses, as in “The Claim That Yiddish Literature Is Provincial,” as well as Singer’s complex feelings on the Torah, other religious writings, and their interpretations, as in “Torah—Yesterday and Today.” Through it all, Stromberg highlights the division in Singer’s work and his focus on the concept of the Jewish exile as opposed to the Jewish diaspora, an idea that was central to his writing in this period. As translator, Stromberg works within the untranslatable, including those words in Yiddish that have no equivalent in English (or, in some cases, have multiple equivalents), and he does so deftly while keeping Singer’s brash and forceful voice intact. For example, Stromberg opted to translate the Yiddish word “gayst” as “spiritual” instead of “mind,” but he also notes that “when the words ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’ or ‘genuine intellects’ appear, their deeper sense points not just to a mental quality but to a spiritual quality as well.” As editor, he provides useful context for each essay, though this context could have been expanded for readers who are not as familiar with Jewish intellectual life, particularly in the United States, during this time period. In “Yiddish and Yiddish Literature,” Singer reflects on the Ashkenazi Yiddish writer Hillel Zeitlin, but extra information about Zeitlin would have been useful to understand how Singer was influenced by him. But this volume is effective at continuing Stromberg’s efforts to both render Singer readable to an English-speaking audience and situate him within and as vanguard of the larger Jewish literary and philosophical community.
A well-crafted anthology of a literary giant’s complicated and assertive thoughts.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9798998779824
Page Count: 234
Publisher: White Goat Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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