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Tag : Yona Zeldis McDonough
February 3, 2021 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Forget Russia: a Q&A with L. Bordetsky-Williams
“Your problem is you have a Russian soul,” Anna’s mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve college senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. She’s also a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror.
Novelist L. Bordetsky-Williams talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how Anna’s experience both illuminates the dark corners of her family’s past and shines a light toward the future she is fashioning for herself.
YZM: You write about Russia with such affection and intimacy; what is your relationship to the country?
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February 1, 2021 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Tell Me How You Got Here: An Interview With Emily Franklin
Emily Franklin’s “The Proper Care of Silver,” a deft and insightful story that explores the relationship between a woman and her housekeeper, appeared in the 2018-2019 winter issue of Lilith. Now Franklin is back again, this time with her first collection of poetry, Tell Me How You Got Here (Terapin Books) and she chats with Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about the many and varied sources of her inspiration.
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January 6, 2021 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
A Q&A with Jennifer Robson, Author of “Our Darkest Night”
It’s 1942, and Antonina, a young Jewish woman, is no longer safe in her native Venice. With help from a benevolent priest, her father finds her shelter with a family of farmers outside the city. Although she knows she should be grateful for the chance to escape, Antonina grieves the separation from her parents and is terrified of accidentally exposing the charade she is forced to perform — assuming the role of the young farmer’s wife. Novelist Jennifer Robson talks to fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about Our Darkest Night (William Morrow, $17.99), her newest novel that is devoted to Antonina’s brave and harrowing story.
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December 4, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Saving Leonardo de Vinci’s “Lady with the Ermine”
September 1939 and Edith Becker sits with her hands trembling beneath the table where she’s seated before some of the most important men of the Alte Pinakoteck, one of Munich’s greatest museums. Usually, Edith’s work as a conservator keeps her ] behind the scenes, but today she’s been asked to identify and comment on paintings held in private collections across Poland. What she doesn’t know is that this is just the beginning of an extensive and highly organized plot to plunder Europe’s artwork and use it to glorify the Third Reich.
Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to Laura Morelli about The Night Portrait, (William Morrow, $16.99) a novel that traces the fraught journey of Leonardo de Vinci’s famous Lady with the Ermine, and how this priceless work of art was ultimately saved.
YZM: How did the idea to write about this aspect of World War II come to you?
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August 26, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Friendships and Race: A New Orleans Coming of Age Story
New Orleans, in all its tawdry glory, is the setting for Iris Martin Cohen’s second novel, Last Call on Decatur Street (Park Row Books, $27.99). After swearing that she’ll never get to return to the Big Easy, Rosemary gets kicked out of college and finds herself back in her hometown, working as a burlesque dancer. Most nights she dulls her private sorrow with a combination of booze, drugs and sex but on the January night in question, her world is cracked wide open and she’s forced to confront the choices—good and bad—that she’s made. Cohen talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how her Jewish protagonist fits into this very Catholic world.
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August 13, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Daphne Merkin on the Nature of Love and Lust
Daphne Merkin is an essayist known for her take—at once both ferociously observant and fiercely introspective—on everything from depression, spanking during sex and the importance of handbags. In 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)) her first novel in more than 30 years, Merkin turns her gimlet-eyed attention to Judith Stone, a young book editor in New York City who has not yet had her first real reckoning with love—or with the erotic charge that often fuels it.
Enter Howard Rose, the somewhat older attorney she meets at a party. Howard arouses her in ways she’s never before experienced and very quickly, she’s putty in his hands. That he’s inclined to insult, undermine and emotionally abuse her only makes him more desirable. Merkin talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about the nature of lust, love and whether the two can ever truly be reconciled.
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August 5, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Nostalgia for the 1939 World’s Fair
Neither Maxine Roth nor Vivi Holden wanted to be sent to World’s Fair in the spring of 1939; Max was angling for a journalism internship at the New York Times and Vivi was excited by a starring role—her first—in the Hollywood film Every Last Sunset. But both young women do end up at the fair. What they learn—about themselves, the nature of friendship and indeed life—are the basis for the novel We Came Here to Shine (St. Martin’s, $16.99). Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough chats with author Susie Orman Schnall about her entertaining new summer read—think of it as a perfect respite from the horror of the daily news. (more…)
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July 31, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Is Rape a Crime? A Conversation with Michelle Bowdler
Is Rape a Crime: A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto (Flatiron, $27.99) ought to come with a warning: parts of this book are so harrowing that I frequently had to put it down for a spell before picking it up again, avid to continue. Long after the fact, author Michelle Bowdler returns to the home invasion and brutal rape she suffered as a young woman. As one might expect, the attack both branded and shaped her. When she was finally ready to explore the subject in print, she was able to go deep into her own experience but also wide, to place it within a historical and cultural context. Bowdler talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about what this literary exploration has meant for her—and what she hopes it will mean to others.
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June 25, 2020 by admin
The Impact of Reality
When I was nine years old, I ordered a biography of Adolf Hitler from the Scholastic Book Club. I read it in one mesmerized, horrified sitting. It was my first graphic exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust, and when I finished it, I burst into tears. Nothing I read before had given me such a sense of vulnerability or peril, all based on the mere accident of having been born Jewish. I read that book many times in the next two years, perhaps with the unconscious and certainly unarticulated hope that, this time, Hitler would be stopped and the tragedy averted.
Yona Zeldis McDonough lives in Brooklyn, New York. The author of several books for children, her biography of Anne Frank (illustrated by her mother, Malcah Zeldis) will be published by Henry Holt and company.
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June 12, 2014 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Author Q & A: The Many Faces of Sonia Taitz
Essayist, playwright, author of a well-received book on mothering and winner of the Lord Bullock Prize for Fiction, Sonia Taitz is nothing if not nimble as a writer. Although she trained as a lawyer—at Yale no less—the pursuit of a legal career held little appeal for her and she soon returned to her first loves, reading and writing. Mothering Heights: Reclaiming Parenthood from the Experts, is both political satire and heartfelt memoir about the changing role of mothers. The Watchmaker’s Daughter is another sort of memoir, detailing her “binocular” life as the American child of European, Yiddish-speaking concentration camp survivors. Taitz’s novels include In the King’s Arms, a coming-of-age story that has been called a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Philip Roth. And in her forthcoming novel Down Under she takes on Mel Gibson, reinventing the famously anti-Semitic movie star’s past to include an early, pre-fame romance with a Jewish girl. Fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough asks Taitz some questions about her wide-ranging literary output and the scarred but heroic parents who shaped her life.
Sonia Taitz (courtesy author)
YZM: What inspired you to make the leap from lawyer to writer?
My adventures in law originated in the mind of my father. A Holocaust survivor whose own education had stopped at age 13, he was determined that I have a careerwhich put me in “a place of importance” in society. He felt that with a law degree I would be armed—at least verbally—if danger reared its head again. Somehow, he equated me with Queen Esther—able to eloquently step into the corridors of power and avert imminent disaster. Because I was good in school (in my case, yeshiva through 12th grade), and because the Torah we analyzed prepared me well for verbal debate, I thought my father’s vision suited me.
But from the time I started college, more creative instincts began to take me over. I didn’t want to win arguments or massage facts; I wanted to weave spells with words, to compose in utter freedom. I didn’t want to be cunningly adversarial, but creative and connective. It didn’t hurt that my mother was a concert pianist (providing Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu as theme song to my childhood) or that my father wrote poetry in Dachau. Transcendence was as much my legacy as Talmud, or torts.
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