Working briefly at Shakespeare and Company in 1972 introduced me to the amazing world of 1920s Paris. I learned about Sylvia Beach opening the original store in 1919, the convergence of many of the great authors of the period, including Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others, at the store, and the complex, competitive yet fertile relationships among them. I was 18 and fantasized about what it

Epigraph: “How do you know that a book is great? They tell you.” I didn’t always love reading. In a family that did, I was the exception. It wasn’t until junior high school that I gradually came to appreciate literature. A classmate I admired was a reader and used to recommend books to our circle of friends. We would read and discuss the books he

In his generous blurb for my book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel (Toby, 2019), Yossi Klein Halevi wrote that for Jews, “history is always personal.” It is the summation of countless personal memories constructed from individual stories passed down through generations. Objectively, history is “his story” – an account of events that occurred to someone else. But for Jews, it