PositiveJewish Currents... a brilliant, challenging, and uncompromising novel by the Israeli writer Yishai Sarid, recently translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan .... In this grim portrait of an Israeli scholar who makes his living leading tours of the hell of the camps, Sarid, son of the late left-wing politician Yossi Sarid, forces us to question the complacency and moral blindness that accompanies the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli life ... the novel takes the form of a letter to the director of the institution ... The Memory Monster is animated not by stirring plot points, but by the vital questions the narrator asks of himself and those he takes on tours. His queries prod at the tour attendees’ feeling of moral purity, inviting them to occupy roles other than that of quintessential victim or existential avenger and thus displacing them from their comfortable, sacrosanct position ... The tone and spirit of The Memory Monster is Dostoevskyan, and its narrator not unlike the Underground Man, who perceptively observes the baseness in both himself and the world. But if his vision is exaggeratedly bleak, it is also honest.
Curzio Malaparte, Trans. by Jenny McPhee
PositiveJewish CurrentsAs an observer—or imaginer—of Soviet Russia and its elite, Malaparte sees things few else did ... one reads The Kremlin Ball more for its unique and off-kilter vision of the Soviet Union and the beauty of its writing than for any serious analysis of the collapsing revolution ... Translator Jenny McPhee gets Malaparte exactly right ... This is precisely how Malaparte should be read. Nothing he reports should be taken at face value, but in his death-and-decay-obsessed vision, it all could and should be true.
Alfred Döblin, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
MixedJewish Currents\"NYRB Classics has rescued Döblin’s masterpiece from oblivion ... Hofmann’s solution is to make these residents of 1920s Berlin Into cockneys, to transpose Alexanderplatz to Whitechapel. In doing so, he denatures the novel completely: at no point did I feel I was reading a German classic. In a book totally dependent on its site-specific language, moving its setting and characters lock, stock, and barrel to another country is one solution to this problem in translation, but it’s a bad one ... What we have here is aBerlin Alexanderplatz. What we are still waiting for is theBerlin Alexanderplatz.\
