MEMBER BLOG TAG: letters
| Friday, May 6, 2011 5:25PM | | | | Bloomerang | Tags: Harold Bloom, Kafka, letters, falling in love with literature
| | | "Let's get to the business at hand. I'm old, and I may collapse at any minute!" So says the critic Harold Bloom, settling into his chair with a portmanteau majesty. The very last event of the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival begins. I feel as if I've gotten lost on the set of a Woody Allen movie.
Maybe that's because the people seated with me in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library are well wedded to the word--and to their very own words. Also, everyone here appears to be a person of some importance to themselves. Except for me. Silent and self-skeptical, I am busy writing a letter. My letter is addressed to--but wait a little. We'll see . . . .
... | | | | | | | Friday, April 23, 2010 12:11PM | | | | Recommendation of a Book | Tags: Holocaust, genocide, 20th century, Hidden Letters, Flip Slier, Mandelstam, Borowski, Babel, Zdena Berger
| | | | In thinking about many of the offerings in this year's PEN festival, I'd like to mention my experience as a teacher of a freshman seminar in the personal essay. Each year, I include a different volume of memoir or autobiographical fiction about one of the human-rights cataclysms of the 20th century: Nadezhda Mandelstam's "Hope against Hope," Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," Isaac Babel's "Red Cavalry Stories," Zdena Berger's luminous "Tell Me Another Morning." One book spoke to the students immediately. It is called "Hidden Letters," and it consists of a compendium of messages written by a teenaged boy in Holland, named Philip (Flip) Slier, who, caught up in the Holocaust, wrote to friends and family from labor camps until he escaped, was apprehended, and... | | | | | |
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