Word: jewish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Seated in his book-lined office in Vienna, Wiesenthal, who is ailing with a heart condition, despairs of ever bringing his old quarry to justice. Two years ago, his Jewish Documentation Center suffered a severe setback; most of its funds were deposited in a Vienna bank that failed. His only real hope for bringing Mengele to justice would be Israeli intelligence, but the Israelis find the operation too risky. They have sent several teams to Paraguay to study a possible Mengele snatch. After losing at least one agent on a reconnaissance mission, they concluded that the potential losses involved...
Woody Allen came from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; Diane Keaton's parents are Methodists who live in Southern California. She lacks the spooky older brother of Annie Hall (she has a younger brother, unspooky, and two younger sisters). But there is general agreement that the dinner scene, in which Alvy imagines that "Grammy Hall" sees him with yarmulke, full beard, earlocks and frock coat, bears some resemblance to truth...
...hero of Philip Roth's tenth book is Jewish and unhappy. So what else, as Alexander Portnoy's mother might say, is new? Indeed, David Kepesh is the same slick monologuist that Portnoy was, given to frequent exclamations, flurries of rhetorical questions ("Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known?") and carefully italicized emphases. He tosses off one-liners (calling, for instance, his Aunt Sylvia "the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel") as if he has a stable of Borscht Belt writers churning out his material. On the psychiatric couch, Kepesh is a regular lie-down...
...earlier books. Kepesh's monologue is a more humane and thoughtful handling of the subject that has fascinated and obsessed Roth in print for the past ten years: the woebegone, self-destructive tug of war between high aspirations and low lusts. Kepesh is another of Roth's Jewish centaurs, trying to keep his head in a cloud of pipe smoke while ignoring his pawing hooves...
...become fashionable to twit Roth for returning so often to characters like Kepesh: enough, already, of Jewish intellectual sex maniacs. Such criticism is self-incriminating, a tribute to Roth's wicked skill at probing nerves and making people who think they know better say silly things. Like most writers who prove they have enough talent for the long haul of a career, Roth has found the story he will tell until either he or it is exhausted. It is a good story and, as The Professor of Desire proves, it gets better with each telling...