Steven Kellman

Oct 29, 2024 | forward.com | Steven Kellman

Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah By Ezra Glinter Yale Univesity Press, 320 pages, $28Jewish Lives, the laudable series of short, reflective biographies published by Yale University Press, includes volumes on such canonical figures as Solomon, Elijah and Maimonides.

Dec 1, 2023 | forward.com | Steven Kellman

The Rothschilds were the royalty of European Jewry, so it was only natural that, in Baron James (1981), Anka Muhlstein was drawn to write about the consequential founder of the French branch of the family, James de Rothschild - especially since he was her own great-great-grandfather.

Sep 10, 2023 | forward.com | Ariel Dorfman |Steven Kellman

The Suicide Museum By Ariel Dorfman Other Press, 688 pp, $21.99In Ariel Dorfman's chilling account, Patricio Guijón, a physician present during the storming of Chile's presidential palace, calls Sept. 11 "the most dramatic day in Chilean history." For South Americans, it is a day that will live in infamy not because the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked on 9/11/2001, but because on Sept.

Sep 7, 2023 | forward.com | Jerome Charyn |Steven Kellman

Ravage & Son By Jerome Charyn Bellevue Literary Press, 288 pp, $17.99For all the exquisite savor of kishka, gefilte fish, and tongue, it is probably nostalgia more than hunger that draws out-of-towners to Katz's Deli on East Houston Street. The Lower East Side is, according to historian Hasia Diner, the Plymouth Rock of American Jewish culture, and that swath of southeastern Manhattan is sacred space.

Jun 26, 2023 | forward.com | Steven Kellman

Poland, A Green Land By Aharon Appelfeld Translated from Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman Schocken, 240 pp, $27"Tell all the truth," Emily Dickinson advised poets, "but tell it slant." Faced with the monstrous enormity of the plot to murder all the Jews of Europe, Aharon Appelfeld, who escaped from the slave labor camp where he was sent at age 8 and spent three years hiding, used indirections to find directions out.