Vox Tablet

What does seltzer have to do with scurvy, vaudeville, or Israel’s War of Independence? Barry Joseph, “the Effervescent Jew,” may be the only one out there with the answer. Joseph is the go-to guy for all manner of seltzer fact and apocrypha. He is writing a comprehensive history that will start four billion years ago and end with an appendix of egg cream recipes. We spoke to him last summer, when he offered up his wisdom, and a glass of cold bubbly. In the heat of the summer, it seems fitting to re-visit that conversation.

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side. Gordin was won over, however, by stars such as Boris Tomashevsky and Jacob Adler, and went on to write plays—like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Jewish King Lear—that unflinchingly portrayed the conflicts and difficulties faced by new immigrants. His often heartbreaking, sometimes incendiary works earned him a devoted following (they called him “the Shakespeare of the Jews”), and more than a few enemies, among them Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who made it his mission to destroy Gordin’s career. Today Gordin is all but forgotten. But that may change with two recent publications: a biography by Beth Kaplan, Gordin’s great-granddaughter, and a new, annotated translation of his King Lear by Ruth Gay and Sophie Glazer. Eric Molinsky speaks with Kaplan, along with Yiddish theater scholars Barbara Henry and Stefan Kanfer, about Gordin’s work and legacy. Photos: From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

On a Friday back in 2007, Gertel’s Bakery—the most-loved of the Lower East Side’s then remaining kosher bakeries—permanently closed its doors after 90 years in business. Joanna Rakoff, a longtime consumer of Gertel’s prune danishes, talked to the shop’s final customers about rugelach, “water challah,” and the past and future of a neighborhood in flux.

André Aciman (Photo: Sigrid Estrada © 1999) With Out of Egypt, André Aciman established himself as a sharp, humorous, and often heartbreaking chronicler of bygone eras. Crowded with charismatic and eccentric relatives, the 1994 memoir portrays life in Alexandria through the year 1965, when the last members of Aciman’s family fled the country. It puts forth motifs—memory, loss, and longing—to which Aciman returns over and again in subsequent work. Now Aciman has ventured into fiction. His first novel, Call Me by Your Name, follows Elio, a 17-year-old Italian Jew, as he falls hard for a visiting American graduate student named Oliver, over the course of one passionate summer. Though the novel might seem like a departure from Aciman’s earlier work, it is in fact a variation on his favorite theme: longing. Aciman talks with us about the origins of the story and about what it’s like to write a gay erotic romance with your wife and sons down the hall.

Irving Berlin, the man responsible for “God Bless America,” was also the brains behind “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollar,” a 1916 number which sent up the stereotype of the tight-fisted Jew. It was one in a slew of Tin Pan Alley minstrel songs that made fun, often affectionately, of greenhorns and their slightly savvier predecessors. Jewface, a new album from Reboot Stereophonic, introduces several of these songs to listeners far removed from the immigrant experience and the Yiddish inflections that infused it. Jody Rosen, the music critic for Slate, is the album’s curator. He talks with Nextbook about discovering these scratchy wax-cylinder recordings and what audiences a century ago thought of songs like “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band” and “That’s Yiddisha Love.”

Etgar Keret writes deadpan, tragicomic stories about ordinary people who experience extraordinary things: they periodically become possessed by the psychotic spirit of a dead friend; their parents shrink to pocket-size; their sweet girlfriends become hairy, drunken sports fan at night. Already popular in his native Israel, Keret is now gaining a following in the United States. His work has appeared in The New York Times, in a regular column on Nextbook, and now with a new collection of short stories, The Nimrod Flipout, published by FSG. He recently visited New York as part of the PEN World Voices festival. This story includes a reading of Keret’s “Dirt,” by Chanan Tigay.

Editor’s note: This podcast is now available for educational use only. For more information, please email podcast@nextbook.org. L. Bloom was born in Sung-Nam, Korea. Adopted as an infant, like her brother, she grew up in a town an hour west of Boston. She’s got relatives in Brookline and Jerusalem, and close friends who are Korean- and Chinese-American. L. is Jewish and Asian, and at 24, she’s still figuring out where she belongs. Listen to interviews with families who adopted girls from China.