Rebecca Kaplan Boroson
A fan letter to Nathan Englander
Don’t let that nasty man get to you; your fiction is exceptional
Dear Nathan (if I may call you that; we recently have been close, you and I; as close, that is, as reader and writer can get).
The Hebrew and Bible scholar Robert Alter has been fumfering about your “moral unseemliness” and your “weakness of moral imagination.”
In fact, in his recent New Republic review of your new book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95), he writes, “These stories are neither courageous nor outrageous. They are merely bad.”
Pay no attention. Well, maybe a little. It doesn’t hurt to listen to honest criticism, which I believe this is, as long as you have a solid sense of what you are doing, or trying to do.
Thumbing through the pages
Boroson on Books
I had thought to begin this first column on books of Jewish interest with a review of "The Emperor of Lies" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Steve Sem-Sandberg (translated from the Swedish by the eerily named Sarah Death).
It is a thinly fictionalized although richly imagined account of the Lodz Ghetto, peopled with a panoply of characters worthy of Dickens at his grimmest.
The changing of the guard
A night at the Philharmonic
Alas, poor Ketzel
Part II: The Harry Robert School of Journalism
Scenes from a career in journalism: I
In memory of Shuly Kustanowitz
What’s in a name?
Henry Taub, 1927-2011
Lautenberg remembers Taub as a man who “helped robustly”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that his longtime friend and former business partner Henry Taub was “distinguished by modesty and humility.” He was “concerned about all human beings,” not merely those who “had status and wealth,” Lautenberg continued. He was “very respectful” of those who needed help — and he “helped robustly.”
Taub was “devoted to the city of Paterson,” Lautenberg noted, creating “a program to help revitalize the economy and quality of life there. We were both fond of our roots in Paterson, both from poor immigrant families, and he had great concern for those who needed assistance. Whether fighting for better health or better education, Henry’s always been in the forefront.”
