Last week, Booknique decided he was an actor, quitted drinking cognac coffee in the morning, chose an ideal bookstore, held pauses, stumbled and stuttered, searched for the Promised Land, and cooked latkes. Meanwhile, Booknique Jr. created a Golem, and now he thinks how to make a fool of it on April 1.
Picture This
The German Boy, by Patricia Wastvedt
An unhurried novel, a multicolored silent movie, an illustration that acquires depth not at first sight but it starts living gradually, touch by touch. A girl with long hair stands in the sunny square holding on to her hat. A man sits at the table, waiting for the girl to come closer. The rest is just details, one has to look for them, yet they are the most important thing. Booknique’s literary critic Nastique Gryzunova shares her findings with our readers.
There are probably no such things as ideal stores but there are places where it is good both for people and books. They are the places of power, the places of wisdom, and they may be famous or not but wonderful discoveries and rare findings occur there. We are the People of the Book, and we know such places. In the first installment of our global bookstores guide, there are “Bookworm” in Suzhou, “Lello & Irmão” in Porto, “Shakespeare & Co” in Paris, Charing Cross antique bookstores in London, all bookstores of Madrid, and Strand Book Store in New York.
Bitter Seeds
Memoirs From Antproof Case, by Mark Helprin
As a punishment for some carelessness, a teacher orders his pupil to eat three coffee beans. The next day, the boy’s parents die. An unbearable bitterness becomes connected to another one, for life. From that time on, the main character of Mark Helprin’s novel is the coffee’s sworn enemy. All trouble in the world stem from this hellish drink, and the habit of drinking coffee should be eradicated. Those who do not stop drinking coffee, that is, most everyone on the planet, arte not worth shaking hands with. Therefore, our very impressionable book reviewer Eugenie Ritz now drinks cocoa in the morning.
…and nothing else in the Books & Reviews section.
Booknique’s music-loving reporter Helen Polyakovsky talked with the famous
…and a little bit of everything else in the Articles & Interviews section.
Sweethearts of America
The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius
It seems so quaint, with this pure love, no bedroom scenes, and no vulgar gestures. Nevertheless, moviegoers should not think that he or she sees the stylized motion picture. It is in lyrical scenes that it is especially well seen that actors are our contemporaries. In the old silent films, heroines would wring her hands, and “breathe with her busts,” and heroes would roll their eyes like crazy persons, and drop on one knee, trying not to lose track of the camera. Booknique’s film reviewer Miriam Guroff proclaims her love to The Artist, with no false modesty.
In the second installment of his memoir On the Time We Lived In. the Episodes of a Soviet Provincial Doctor’s Life, Dr. Borukhovsky remembers the so-called “Doctors’ Case.” “As soon as the official report on killer doctors was out, the people changed their attitudes to us drastically. Hearsay went through the town that my wife and I met Mikhoels in Moscow, and brought two suitcases with typhus louses, to launch an epidemic. Our pre-planned surgeries almost stopped for our patients were afraid we would butcher them.”
Latkes a la Health Food
Booknique’s gourmet contributor Irene Golovinsky shares her memories of her grandmother, and latkes recipe that even our dieting readers can afford.
Five Stories of Adapting from Booknique contributor Lenore Goralique.
Let us say, a minor producer L. has a bright idea of arranging the conference on “Why Is Everything So Bad?” It is going to be a very serious conference on the mechanisms of failure, based on commercial calculations, with admittance fees. One speaker will talk on failure in private life, another one on failure in business, and there will be others to cover creative activities, public life, and self-realization. Unfortunately, the small-time producer L. fails to organize the conference on failure for a year and the reasons are obscure.
…and something else in the Columns & Columns section.
There is the premiere in the Mayakovsky Theater. They have staged Hanoch Levin’s Suitcase Packers, and the new translation of the play had been commissioned specially for this production. The translator Allah Kucherenkow attended the first night, and she shares her feelings about the production. “It is amazing,” she writes, “that both actors and spectators were able to accept and feel deep for the typically Levin’s concoction of vulgarity and high tragedy that recreates this human comedy in eight funerals on stage.”
…and some more reading stuff in the Stories & Essays section.
Hebrarium, the Lexicon of Jewish Whatnots, E-1
Why does Cyril Cheechaeff look at an etrog through the magnifying glass? Where is the Promised Land? Who is present at a circumcision ceremony but cannot be seen? Watch our “E-Hebrarium” and get wiser and wiser.
The Yiddish Fest 2012: The Ballad of Diction
One of the best songs by Jeanne Lopatnique is The Ballad of Diction where Moses tells Jews where to go and what to do. However, they heard only “Bow, prabababow, prabababow. Let di yidelekh go. Leave my people alone.” He stuttered you see. This song written in Yiddish is performed for the first time in Russian, and a little bit of Ukrainian, as translated by Jana Tokareff, and Psoy Korolenkow, and arranged by the Yiddish Fest Amalgamated Capella.
…and a bit of hearing and seeing in the Video Blog section.
In Moscow, the exhibition Golem and Little Shoes has opened, displaying children’s illustrations in the books by Kadya Molodovsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It has been set up by the Knizhniki Publishers, and the Turgenev Memorial Reading Library, under the auspices of the Children’s Book Festival. Both A Golem and Little Shoes are rather sad books, so the art stories created after them are not very joyous in themselves, but they are very pure.
The All Fools Day Quiz
April 1, the All Fools Day AKA Day of Fun and Jokes is upon us but you, our not especially bright grown up readers do not seem to know anything a lot about this bright spring day. Shall we try it?
…and many other curious curios at Booknique Jr., also known as Family Booknique, our own web site for kids and their parents.
There's no small jobs — just small people. Booknique and Family Booknique are supported by the AVI CHAI Foundation.
