Reading through the stack

The Sunday New York Times Art & Leisure had a nice piece
on Jimmy Breslin, who increasingly seems the last link to a generation of
columnists such as Murray Kempton, and others who predated him such as Joe
Mitchell and A.J. Liebling and Damon Runyon.

 

David Denby goes to great length in The New Yorker to
explore Otto Preminger’s famous “lack of style” – his lack of a signature style
or of passion in the exploration of various adult dramas, but never attributes
it to Preminger’s Viennese or Polish Jewish émigré background. I take Preminger’s
style to be the kind of facility for self-invention and fluency with genres
that one could also attribute to producer Alexander Korda, or director Michael
Curtiz or Billy Wilder for that matter.

 

Searching for Bobby Fischer

What was missing from the numerous obits of Chess phenom
Bobby Fischer was both an acknowledgment of the great pride Jews took in his
Jewish heritage at the time of his championship in 1972, and any insight into
his anti-Semitic ravings in recent years which could be seen as the
self-loathing flip side of his grandiosity.

 

HERE COMES the “NIGHT”

Rachel Donadio’s NYT Book Review essay on Wiesel’s “Night” was interesting in
tracking down the actual sales history of the novel. Donadio finds Wiesel’s
protest of President Reagan’s visit to Bitburg as the tipping point. In some
ways it was a tipping in my life as well. I traveled to Bergen-Belsen
with a group of survivors and children of survivors as a protest to show where
Reagan might have a laid a wreath instead. I had met my future wife a few weeks
before and the fact that I went on this trip seemed to impress her in ways that
changed my life. And the following year I came across a story that became my
first book. More recently, I made note of the reissue of Wiesel’s night in a
column about how my own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the
years.

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