Members of the Scribe

What’s a Nazi?

“What’s a Nazis?” It was a question I had never heard before or even considered possible but there the man ...

The Champagne Spy

For five long years Wolfgang Lotz, a horse breeder and bon vivant, lived the high life of an affluent former ...

Non-Standardized Testing

I subjected you to quite a bit of fire and brimstone the other day, so let’s end the week on a ...

Feeding Other Writers, and Myself

A few days ago my novel,  Fields of Exile , was published in the USA, and this month marks exactly ...

Understanding the Villains; or, Stranger than Fiction

Donna Tartt, the author of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner  The Goldfinch , was once told by Ken Kesey, the ...

Leah Goldberg, Me, and the Search for a Title for my New Book

There’s a Jewish story you may know that includes the refrain: “You never know.” In one section of it, a ...

It’s the First Week of June. Do You Know Where Your Family History Is?

I’ve daydreamt for more than a decade about what a day like tomorrow—publication date for my debut novel A Replacement Life—might ...

Research and the Power of Bashert

I’m not a great believer in fate, but I certainly have encountered more than a few instances of bashert—that lovely Hebrew ...

Vienna: A Stroll Through a Haunted City

I was in Vienna earlier this month to talk about my book and to show the documentary film I made at the U.S. Embassy’s ...

Rock and Roll, Religion, and Leonard Cohen

With very few exceptions, the story of American popular music in the last five decades is largely a story of ...