#178 / Editorial

First he heard a thud. Then he felt a dull blow and the handlebars crumpled into his ribs. He knew he’d hit someone—a male, fair-skinned, slightly curly-haired pedestrian. But he had absolutely no idea that the person he’d hit was a literary critic. He’d had the opportunity to run over all sorts of people with his electric bike on the sidewalks of Tel Aviv, but never a literary critic.

“Longing” was first published in Yiddish in the New York online magazine ‘Yiddish branzhe’. It is the epilogue of a novel in Yiddish that Ber Kotlerman, professor of Yiddish language and literature at Bar-Ilan University, will soon publish with the Swedish publisher Olniansky Tekst. Ber Kotlerman, who was born in Irkutsk in 1971, has the distinction of having grown up in Birobidzhan. The “autonomous Jewish region” founded in 1934 as part of the USSR is the backdrop to his book.

Born in Germany, from which she fled to London, the narrator of “The Appointment” pours out her heart while being examined by her gynecologist, Dr. Seligman. Resolutely provocative, mixing sexual fantasies about Hitler with sharp insights into our contemporary society, the novel is a satirical parable over which the shadow of Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Thomas Bernhardt hovers.

Published a year ago, The Memory Monster (Restless Books) is Yishai Sarid’s fourth book, after two crime novels and a novel set in a futuristic dystopia. This penultimate novel, The Third, imagined the destruction of Tel Aviv and Haifa, an endeavor to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and Israel’s transformation into a theocratic kingdom. The Memory Monster is an equally provocative and disturbing story that questions the relationship of Israelis to Europe and the memory of the Holocaust.

Kafka’s art is accessible again. Hundreds of his drawings are now available, free, from the National Library of Israel, where the Kafka Archive–a collection of his work saved by his friend and collaborator Max Brod–remains to this day.

Albert Cohen is most often considered a French writer, although he was born an Ottoman citizen and was naturalized Swiss. He died on October 17, 1981, forty years ago. This anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the figure of the man who was a representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine before focusing primarily on his work, which combines lyricism and an extraordinary narrative invention – not to mention a powerful reflection on Jewishness and Judaism.

The impromptu arrival of the Netanyahu family one day in the winter of 1959 under the roof of Ruben Blum’s family causes the life of the young history professor at a provincial university in New York State to falter. But how can we understand this explosive event that American novelist Joshua Cohen stages without giving us the key?

July 1942. Robert Klein is a Parisian art dealer who takes advantage of the Occupation to enrich himself on the backs of Jews forced to sell the pieces of art they own at low prices. One day, he receives a copy of “Information Juive” in his name. But isn’t Klein a good French Catholic? Who is this double? Is it a misunderstanding? A manipulation? Klein goes in search of this Other… and thereby of himself. Jean-Baptiste Thoret revisits Joseph Losey’s film on the occasion of its release on Blu-ray and an edited volume commenting this masterpiece made in 1976.