An interesting review in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer, who writes in the book, as an example of the watering down of Jewish identity in this country, that instead of Saul Bellow novels we now have Seth Rogen movies.
Today marks the start of Polish American Heritage Month, one of the less promoted of the themed months. Hoping to set up October talks about my memoir, I spent part of the summer contacting bookstores. A few show special consideration to the marginalized and underrepresented. In my pitch to these, I noted that there are few groups more underrepresented in American publishing than the Poles. No bookstore I contacted invited me to speak.
It was a slow night at the café. The 20-something waiter was sitting at the hostess station scrolling through his iPhone.
“The Harry Potter woman died,” he said to the waitress, and immediately I thought: J.K. Rowling?
Then I realized he was talking about Maggie Smith.
I love malls, not so much for shopping – I can’t remember the last time I bought anything other than food in one – but for people-watching and picture-taking. In South Florida we are blessed with two of the nation’s most successful malls: Sawgrass Mills and Aventura Mall. I rarely enter the first; I sit with a book on a bench outside and watch the parade of nations pass by. Aventura boasts one of the best food halls in the region and, since the summer, a delightfully unconventional bookstore.
Unlike Sawgrass’s Books-A-Million, Quade Books is a small, bright, extremely well-curated space. It sits next to the Apple store on the second level; you walk under the food court to get to it. And there you find books in English and Spanish, not in separate sections, but on the same wall, in the same genre. It is an interesting approach, and one perfectly reflective of our bilingual home. On one shelf you can find Leslie Jamison in English and on another Eduardo Galeano in Spanish. There are also romance novels, with their bright covers, and a large section of children’s books. It is a wonderful addition to the mall, a place where I will actually buy something.
I’ve been dipping into Joan Reardon’s Poet of the Appetites: The Life and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher, specifically the section about her time in Aix-en-Provence. She rented a room in a kind of boarding house where, during the meals, the other women would question her ability to write with any understanding about French cuisine. They called her, derisively, la californienne.
There is a moment in Jonathan Raban’s memoir Father and Son – which describes his recovery from a stroke – in which his physical therapist announces that she’s going on a cruise. Ever the literary man, Raban gives her David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” somehow not realizing that it is like giving Deliverance to someone planning a camping trip.