Books

What Awaits Her ...

Life after death -- the death of a spouse, that is

By:

Confessional writing has been a fixture of the literary scene for so long now that we may forget how fraught with dangers the form can be, at least in its modern incarnation. A writer, even when striving to be unstintingly honest, can tip easily into bathos, or be so committed to "telling all" that he or she can begin revealing...

Books

Joyously Unstructured

Frank Gehry's architectural drawings are a world unto themselves

By:

Robert Leiter

I remember clearly what it felt like back in 2001 to walk into the Guggenheim Museum to see the massive Frank Gehry exhibition housed there. It was the most extensive retrospective of his work till then, and it was being held in the most perfect venue, as many critics had pointed out, since Gehry (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in 1929)...

Books

Illustrating the Alphabet, Beginning With 'A'

By:

Robert Leiter

Four years ago, Temple University Press published the wildly popular P Is for Philadelphia , a bright splash of an alphabet primer that takes young readers -- and adults, if they so choose -- for a tour of the City of Brotherly Love via illustrations done by area public-school children. (A city-wide art contest determined which drawings would be featured.)...

Books

Shanghai Express

A slice of Jewish life in an Asian community

By:

Robert Leiter

Back in February, NPR's "Morning Edition" ran a piece about Shanghai's Jewish history, and how the 1-square-mile area where Jews had settled after fleeing Hitler in the late 1930s and early '40s was being threatened by the wrecking ball. It seems that the wish to widen a road could possibly set the ball in motion, destroying a number of buildings...

Books

Everything Is Illuminated

By:

Robert Leiter

Last year, just in time for Pesach, the antiquarian bookseller Historicana, founded in 1987 and still run by Irvin Ungar out on the West Coast, published a new, highly detailed and quite exquisite version of The Szyk Haggadah. Illustrated by Polish-born artist Arthur Szyk, this version of the beloved text had been created in Europe as Hitler was coming to...