Sherbert Illuminated

This is another wonderful gift from Professor Demleitner. Thank you so much for your compassion and generosity! Growing up in America, I thought I had a pretty solid idea of what a kids’ mystery series was like— Nancy Drew , The Hardy Boys and The Boxcar Children come to mind. So when my mother’s friend, Professor Demleitner, was kind enough to send my family some German-language mysteries, I had the opportunity to learn a little about how other countries perceive espionage and other mysterious topics. Thanks to Geheimagent Lennet Unter Verdacht by Leutnant X, I had fun doing so! The Geheimagent Lennet series is a German translation of a book series about a young French spy and his international adventures. Originally published under the French title Langelot in the 1960s and ‘70s, they offer an interesting insight into the portrayal of Cold War espionage by countries that aren’t the USA or the USSR. British and American fiction—particularly the works of John le Carré—tend to domi...

“SPIJAK: [The] art of a perfectly made suit is that you don’t notice it at all because it’s so well made, it fits so natural, there’s no cause to ask yourself if this twit is badly dressed or not. When a good suit is a good piece of making it’s so good it’s invisible. And that’s craft, boy.” (23). That Craft applies to making plays as well as making suits: the skilled playwright makes a story that, no matter who embodies it, appears seamless. Even on the page, the dialogue of Michael Hastings’ 1973 play The Cutting of the Cloth is clever but unpretentious, and each character’s way of speaking, though embellished with the slang of 1950s Savile Row, is distinct. That’s useful, because The Cutting of the Cloth is a play that builds its story on the personification of broader conflicts. Its leads, Spijak and Eric, two aging master craftsmen who share a space in London’s bespoke capital, nearly come to blows over their different worldviews: Eric sees work as a means to an end and handles ...

The cover for my copy of Kelli Jo Ford’s novel Crooked Hallelujah depicts two women filled in by a burning sky. This is clever advertising on the part of the publishing company—the sweeping, tough and flammable environment of Ford’s debut is its strongest element. It’s also one of the few things that Crooked Hallelujah ’s stories have in common. The novel feels like a literary experiment, since it’s a more-or-less linear arrangement of stories Ford published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and other magazines between 2012 and 2020. While time frames and perspectives frequently shift, the overall narrative follows Justine, a Cherokee woman raised in a conservative evangelical environment, and her family as they move between Oklahoma and Texas in the late 20th-century. The last of the stories, which was the first one Ford published, is a bizarre departure from the rest; it’s as if she wrote a killer finale, realized she could make a whole book about the characters but forgot to outlin...

Before I talk about these books, I’d like to thank my mother’s friend, who was generous enough to send them to me. Thank you so much, Professor Demleitner! After I expressed an interest in becoming a translator, she sent me many German-language books from her personal library. I have elected to begin with the shortest books and read longer ones as my comprehension improves. I read the first three books in quick succession: Das Geheimnis der Statue by Janet Clark, Heiße Spur in München by Stefanie Wülfing and Gefährliches Spiel in Essen by Gabi Bier. The first is about two friends, Max and Yannick, who encounter a discarded statue that they suspect is illegally-obtained ivory. Heiße Spur takes place in Munich, where Paola, an Italian photographer, falls unexpectedly and sinisterly ill. Baier’s Gefährliches Spiel is from the same series and follows Friso Breughel, a Dutch journalist studying Essen’s architectural history. Oddly enough, two of the three mysteries ended up involving d...

  “What does the future hold for Snow White…? When her Prince becomes a King and she becomes a Queen, what will her life be like. Surely, fairest of them all, she as exchanged one glass coffin for another,” (42). After reading The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, I understand why many people hate the classics. But The Madwoman is not a bad book. It’s a very good mirror.  Its analyses of the role of women in 19th-century English literature are clever and nuanced. But even as Gilbert and Gubar describe the ingenious strategies and symbols utilized by 19th-century authors like Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson, a depressing reality descends: most English-language authors before 1900 (at least) were male, and most of them couldn’t write women with range beyond a sewing needle. Gilbert and Gubar highlight the contributions of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson. But every artistic vi...

There is not much that can be said about Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice that has not previously been said, but conciseness was not Ms. Austen’s strong suit and it is probably not mine either. Pride and Prejudice is pretty neat, but it’s not my thing. The book is almost a magical artifact, because characters like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are icons in their own right. I cannot use quotes from the work, because the most illustrative passages are already famous. The world in which it is set—the balls, strolls and hushed letters—has cast a genteel shadow over English literature and continues to electrify the hearts of readers around the globe. Austen’s works survive, not for their plot, but for their characters. Pride and Prejudice is a love story, in that it is a story about the perils of social and romantic relationships. The restrictions surrounding the women of Hertfordshire, especially the economically-pressed Bennet family, lend a sense of urgency to their r...

Imagine a slow, painful disaster. Imagine yourself and your friends trudging across a seemingly-endless plain of ice, battered by bitter wind and nursing multiple bruises, each pulling over 100 lbs of food and equipment toward a distant, invisible goal. Imagine a colleague collapsing for the third time today and hauling himself back up on broken legs. Imagine dwindling supplies of biscuit and contaminated pemmican. Imagine the sun circling the horizon like a vulture. Imagine death climbing your frostbitten limbs. Imagine later explorers piling stones in the ice, constructing a grave for the last martyrs of Prewar Britain.   Whatever you imagined was probably more dramatic and exciting than Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s expedition memoir The Worst Journey in the World . Published in 1922, Cherry-Garrard’s account of exploration, camaraderie and tragedie was an instant bestseller. But today it’s the sterile hybrid of a melodramatic memoir and a scholarly account. Neither facet is particula...

In case you’re reading this review because you’ve recently heard of Yaa Gyasi’s bestselling novel   Homegoing   and are considering “getting around to it” but have no idea whether it’s as good as the professional, respected reviewers say it is: yes. Almost. But how is that possible? Can a debut novel by a twenty-something author that frames itself as a family saga (a well-trod structure in Western literature)  really  earn  an average rating of 4.44  on Goodreads? How can Gyasi effectively convey 250 years of slavery, racism, colonialism and human suffering in only 300 pages? Is there a point at all to reading popular books because of someone else’s recommendation? Yes.  Good characters. Maybe. The third question is the easiest to answer.  Homegoing  had been on my TBR for several months before I received a copy of it, and I had read rave reviews and seen Booktubers’ recommendations. I had loved some popular, oft-recommended books before it (...

Like contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes  s eries, Victorian author Jerome K. Jerome’s dual travelogues Three Men in a Boat  and Three Men on the Bummel   are famous not for their status as high art but for the ripples they have left behind. In 1889 when it was first printed,   Three Men in a Boat   was a commercial hit among the ‘clerking classes’ which it satirized, and 11 years later he reunited his protagonists for a bicycle tour of Wilhelmine Germany. My own Penguin Classics bind-up of the two books praises them for “hilariously captur[ing] the spirit of their age.” But their Zeitgeist  is novel. They are not   The Great Gatsby .  They are not The Hate U Give . That is not to say that they are bad books. The vision of three wide-eyed Englishmen (with an optional scrappy Fox Terrier) rowing incompetently down the Thames has left an impression on the artistic psyche, even if they are not as potent as works of Dickens and Wilde. I ...

  Who wants to see everything fall apart? I do, for one, and so do lots of other people. That’s why people read thrillers, watch horror movies and attend tragedies. The appeal of these darker stories is a mixture of schadenfreude and catharsis, and the latter is especially potent in stories with relatable premises like Arzhang Luke Pezhman’s play  Gravity . Set in a British classroom during the ignition of the Large Hadron Collider,  Gravity  uses the bonds and explosive separations between its characters to illustrate chemical reactions—or is it the other way around? But despite its scientific premise,  Gravity  is no  Elective Affinities . Its tense, thoughtful plot revolves around the worst human nature has to offer: schoolchildren. The saving grace of aging instructor David Milford’s Year 10 science class is Kyle, a vulnerable “late developer” who takes an interest in physics. But to David’s dismay, Kyle is also the favorite target of Chantay, a du...

 Until the beginning of this year, I did not know that Yiddish-language theater existed, much less that it had a rich and diverse history across Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th century. As someone who is involved in my own high school theater and is deeply interested in learning the history of the medium, I realized I needed to rectify that.  Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches , a collection of essays compiled by my mother’s colleague Joel Berkowitz, is the first step in an ongoing project to learn more about theater history and its intersection with society and culture. I expected a good history. I expected good insight and good translations. I did not anticipate that I would have so much fun reading or that I would respect the scholarship so deeply. Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches  is not a singular narrative, but a compilation of scholarly articles by multiple authors from across the world of Yiddish Theater. I cannot evaluate them as a historian might,...