Nearly a century before Dorle’s death, twenty-odd years before she met her many lovers on ships and at parties, a mob of poor angry Jews from the Lower East Side who had lost their savings at her family’s bank surrounded their upper Manhattan apartment building and rioted. When I learned the bare outline of an essential family story that neither my parents nor I knew anything about, I screwed up...
Secrets, Discoveries: The Bank Building
Writing the Virus
The Daisy Assassin: Incidents from a Time of Plague
by David Winner
Most risks have immediate consequence. If you get caught in a riptide, you drown. Not that afternoon, not the following month, but then. But if I catch a dribble of Covid sputum on Lookout Hill, I may wake up one morning two weeks later not with one of the mild sore throats that have been scaring me but a deep exhaustion so I can barely make it to the bathroom to pee. A...
The Oriental Master
My great aunt, Dorle Jarmel Soria, was a classical music impresario who helped arrange the debuts of Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas. I discovered thousands of love letters to her in her apartment after her death and am finishing a book about them. This concerns George Asfar, a Syrian from Damascus who was responsible for the Ottoman room at the Metropolitan.
David Winner
Jon Roemer’s Five Windows
by David Winner
We meet the small press editor/protagonist of Jon Roemer’s new novel Five Windows doing what he does throughout much of the novel, gazing out his window at a...