by Stefan Kanfer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 26, 2006
Yiddish theater for beginners.
Biographer and cultural historian Kanfer (Ball of Fire, 2003, etc.) provides a workmanlike chronicle of the populist drama that flourished in the US as long as the Jewish masses kept one foot in the Old World, one in the New.
The Yiddish theater was born in Romania in 1876, when Abraham Goldfaden knocked out a farce to be performed in Yiddish, the mamaloshen (mother tongue) that united Jews dispersed throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. But it gained its greatest commercial success in America, spurred by the flamboyant acting of Jacob Adler, David Kessler and Boris Tomashefsky. Like their audiences, they had emigrated from the old country to escape oppressive laws and vicious pogroms. Tomashefsky was content to be the prince of shund (trash), winning the adoration of New York’s Lower East Side with splashy spectacles that allowed him to wear tights showing off his handsome legs. Kessler and particularly Adler aspired to uplift the race through art, favoring Shakespeare and the serious, realistic dramas of Jacob Gordin. While Yiddish-speaking immigrants poured into America’s cities through the beginning of WWI, there was room for all three to pursue their ferocious rivalry, and for other companies and stars to thrive in their wake, most notably Maurice Schwartz on the high end with the Yiddish Art Theater, Artef on the political left and Molly Picon on the crowd-pleasing side. Assimilation in the US and mass murder in Nazi Europe eliminated the uneasy but fruitful middle ground occupied by a theater catering to Jews making their way in a new land but clinging to old ways. Kanfer covers the salient points and reels off famous names, from Sophie Tucker to Paul Muni, to demonstrate Yiddish theater’s impact on American culture, but he doesn’t delve into any of it very deeply. In particular, the remarkable nature of the Yiddish language, flexible and polyglot like no other except perhaps pidgin, cries out for further consideration. The result is a readable narrative heavy on anecdotes, many of them very funny, but regrettably light on insight.
Yiddish theater for beginners.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4288-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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