Новости за 25.05.2018

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. 

I have been taken to task, and rightly so, by a number of Russophones (speakers of Russian, that is) for having suggested that the Yiddish mutcheh, “to bother,” may be derived from the German mühe, which can mean “to make trouble.”

It’s September 2013. Preparations at the French Embassy are underway for U.N. General Assembly week, and I am told that the minister of foreign and European affairs, Laurent Fabius, will be decorating Philip Roth as Commander of the Legion of Honor at the groundbreaking ceremony for Albertine, a new French bookshop on Fifth Avenue.

When it comes to Israel, everything is complicated. Politics are complicated, religion is complicated, democracy is complicated, the conflict is complicated. Even the complications are complicated. These are the things that make us shout, and cry, that fill us with hope or plunge us into utter despair. But there is (seemingly) one island within Israeli society that escapes complexity, one thing that brings us together more than it divides us: Israeli music. Or so, at least, we thought.

My parents were married on very short notice when my dad got leave from the Army over Lag Ba’Omer in 1942, just before he was to start officer candidate school. After a stint in Pennsylvania for that training, they then lived in officers’ quarters on a military base for two and a half years, until my father shipped out to the European theater of operations.

Every family has a set of stories that play, continuously, like a loop, or, better yet, that function like a prompt: a gentle caution, a corrective, a signpost. When I was growing up, my father’s collegiate experiences at Cornell assumed that role. It didn’t take much for him to regale my three siblings and me with wondrous, fish-out-of-water tales of how he, Irving “Itz” Weissman, a Jewish boy from Schenck Avenue in Brooklyn, found himself “far above Cayuga’s waters.”

In a manila envelope in the top drawer of her dresser, my mother kept a Scottish Grenadiers’ cap with a red checkered band and ribbons falling from its back. Her brother Monroe had sent it to her from Great Britain a few months before D-Day.

The New York Islanders had just defeated Pittsburgh at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on March 20, and I was cruising up Flatbush Avenue with broadcaster Stan Fischler; one of his interns; and Chris Riley, Fischler’s producer-colleague at MSG Networks.

Every grieving Philip Roth reader who is Jewish understands that, as David Remnick of The New Yorker pointed out about the author who died Tuesday, “His sin was simple: he’d had the audacity to write about a Jewish kid as being flawed… He had violated the tribal code on Jewish self-exposure.”