Dennis Marks died on April 2 at the age of 66. This interview, conducted in 2012, is being republished in commemoration. Broadcaster, filmmaker and writer Dennis Marks talks to literalab about his recently published book Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth, in which he follows the geographical trail of the constantly moving writer from […]
“May 27, 1939 was the day the incessant wandering that had led Joseph Roth through a change of names, religions, political allegiances and literary styles would finally come to an end at Necker Hospital in Paris after four days of delirium tremens in which he never regained consciousness. He had been drinking himself to death […]
The new issue of The Critical Flame has a pair of reviews devoted to a new translation of the selected poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Stolen Air, by Christian Wiman and Ilya Kaminsky. Editor Daniel E. Pritchard pens a brief essay on the unusual practice of running two reviews of the same book. Then there’s Henry […]
Apparently it isn’t only filmmakers who misunderstand Kafka. In the Times Literary Supplement Gabriel Josipovici writes an article covering a number of quite varied books about or related to Kafka titled “Why we don’t understand Kafka” that brings a demanding yet even-handed take on the ultimate resistance to interpretation that Kafka’s writing contains. In a […]
My review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s On the Road to Babadag in the summer issue of The Cerise Press. “They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had to create their own rules, their […]
The Treatise on Mannequins is a theater piece inspired by Bruno Schulz’s art and writing, using music, visual art and acting to transmit a “world beyond time and space” to the audience. Director Krzysztof Żyliński talked to Czech Position about putting Schulz’s unique sensibility on stage and of the multinational theater company which resembles Schulz’s […]
The New York Times has an article on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s putting its archives online. The organization, which is known as “the Joint” (except perhaps among old-school gangsters) will be making its massive archives of photographs (100,000) and information (containing 500,000 names) available with a searchable index. The Times has a slideshow […]
I’m not sure where on the scale of literary ambitions getting your face on a postage stamp should be ranked, but Prague-born writer Franz Werfel has just achieved this distinction. I have to admit to never having read a word Werfel wrote, though I have read a lot about him over the years. Last summer […]
Jewish Book Week (JBW) inaugurates its 60th year on Feb. 18 in London, with a strong showing of Central and Eastern European literary events. Following a flight without end Joseph Roth might have thought of himself as an abandoned citizen of the vanquished Austro-Hungarian Empire, but from his origins in Brody, East-Galicia (today Ukraine) to […]
Jewish Book Week inaugurates its 60th year on February 18 in London, with a strong showing of Central and Eastern European literary events. Joseph Roth , Daša Drndić, Ludmila Ultiskaya , Umberto Eco, The Golem and more … “I have nothing to do with the landscape, nothing to do with the sky. Nor anything to […]
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