Wuthering
Expectations

The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (2005) is an attractive little City Lights collection of eight stories. The ...

Some David Bergelson stories: "Remnants": An ugly woman is finally married, to a self-conscious weirdo who won't talk to her. ...

When I was first compiling my list of the early, modern Yiddish writers , I missed at least one pretty big one, David (or Dovid) Bergelson. ...

" Reb Dovidl , I do not know if you have heard of the world-famous writer Shakespeare. Among his works is a drama with the title King...

At some point in the middle of my two week Poe festival , I felt an anxious spasm - I really should have read Daniel Hoffman's Poe Poe P...

Typee (1846), first sentence of Chapter 25: "Although I had been unable during the late festival to obtain information on many interes...

My invaluable commenters have made me feel not guilty - I feel guilty for inflicting more Mardi on everyone - but irresponsible. So a bit m...

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849) is sort of a catastrophe. I'm glad I read it, more or less; I doubt I'll ever return to it. But ...

It's time for a roundup of literary links. Most people seem to use posts like this to link to other websites. Consider them all linked, ...

Now I really have run out of reviewable books. I had some ideas, but none of them quite worked. For example, I thought I might review Matthe...

I thought I had run out of recent books to review. Didn't plan this week of genuwine book reviews very well! But I remembered another, a...

Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars , originally published in 1909 and newly re-Englished by the expert Aliza Shevrin, is a Yiddish theate...

I'll start this review on the right foot. The beginning of Vladimir Nabokov's 1954 poem "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin'...

In response to Bibliographing Nicole's cruel mockery , this week it's nothing but proper book reviews. Today, Giordano Bruno (2008...

Somewhere or another I called The Dybbuk the Greatest Yiddish Play. That's not really my judgment - what do I know, I've read a few...

"The souls of the dead do return to the world, but not as disembodied spirits. There are souls which must go through several incarnatio...

S. Ansky's tone in The Destruction of Galicia reminds me more than a bit of Chekhov. I suspect a direct connection to Chekhov's Sak...

S. Ansky spent 1912 to 1914 travelling through the Jewish countryside in and near the Pale of Settlement, collecting Jewish stories, songs, ...

The writer who called himself S. Ansky did three lasting things in his life. He “conceived and directed” the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition ...

“Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it. … Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed, Things that N...