Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

The post Jewish Authors Land on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014 appeared first on Jewcy.

Boris Fishman, 35, is the author of A Replacement Life, a dark, hilarious new novel about a failed young journalist who begins forging Holocaust restitution claims for Russian Jews in Brooklyn, at the behest of his incorrigible grandfather. I talked to Fishman about writing, grandfathers, Russian hirsuteness, and the immigrant experience.

So when I first saw that you were 35, I became quite jealous of your success. Then I looked at your author photo and realized you look like you’re 50 and like you might have killed someone in the Gulag.

Maybe you should be worried. Since the novel is about a crime and the first question anyone asks of a debut novelist is how autobiographical this is, I guess there’s a possibility that I have those tendencies. But I don’t. My temperament is the diametrical opposite… People assume you’re one kind of person but I’m a total teddy bear. Everyone’s kind of thrown by that.

You do seem awfully nice. I was expecting a Russian cliché.

I’m really nothing like the typical Russian person except for several key departments.

What are those key departments? Are you hirsute?

I am hirsute, absolutely, but nothing compared with my father. But really I’m talking about a certain quickness to intimacy. There’s a really wonderful essay in the New York Times by Alina Simone about the meaning of “How are you?” in American versus Russian culture. American culture is far more civil than Russian, if we are going to generalize and be reductive, but Russian culture tends to go soulful and deep much more quickly than American culture. I really don’t want to have small talk–I want to get down and deep very quickly. I don’t mean you, the person I’m speaking with right now, but hell, you too.

And the next thing is a real devotion to Russian literature and Russian culture. For all those horrible things that happened in the Soviet Union—there were many–the one thing that was remarkable was that there was state-mandated intellectualism, so to speak, in the sense that cultural production wasn’t dictated by the market, but the government. There was no low-brow literature published, and by the time you graduated high school, you were deeply familiar with all the Russian classics. In a society like that, there was obviously a big problem in the individual-freedom department, but at the same time you had a lot of people with a tremendous amount of respect for literature, a cultural literacy that was really impressive. I have a lot of respect for that heritage.

You got the good and none of the bad, except for the hirsuteness?

The hirsuteness gets rough especially when it’s warm. Some days, it really isn’t the most awesome cultural patrimony.

I’m speaking to an author about hairiness. I don’t know when exactly my life went wrong.

I do appreciate the novel direction this is going. There are only so many times I can talk about where I got the idea for the novel. [Laughs.]

That’s good–I really don’t care about that. I’m really more interested in your hair.

Well, I’ve got none on my head: an odd bargain. I took after my father. Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather, who is 87–may he live till 120, as we say–has a full head of hair and not a wisp on his chest. His hair is like goose down. He lives in Midwood. Sometimes I go down there just to eat his home-attendant’s cooking and rustle his hair.

We should trade grandfathers.

I should rent him out. Rent a grandfather.

He’d make a great pick-up line.

The thing about my grandfather is if I brought him as a wing-man, he’d collect more women than I would. He’s a really interesting storyteller.

When the story broke about the group of Russian Jews defrauding Holocaust restitution claims, did you see a novel in that?

The novel was formed by then. I started writing in November 2009 and this was exposed in November 2010. I had just gotten to a seven-month writing residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which is very remote from all things Jewish and all things New York. I was stunned to see this in the Times, but I didn’t really feel like my thunder was stolen. It didn’t feel like it was a story that would own the mainstream news for weeks and weeks. It was more that it was a bizarre and really depressing vindication of what I imagined.

What happened afterward was quite interesting. I wrote an article in Tablet Magazine saying that, legally, there’s no question these people are culpable and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But morally, let’s not dismiss them as pure evil. Let’s instead try to understand why they did something like this… The people who did this were primarily ex-Soviet Jews. For me, they’re trauma victims, and trauma victims inflict a lot of damage. But I feel that their culpability is mitigated by the trauma they underwent. I don’t know if they can plead insanity, but actually something close. They spent decades in a system whose perversity and abusiveness and discrimination against Jews is difficult to convey. That doesn’t make what they did okay–but I think it obligates us to be nuanced in our moral judgment of them. Certainly, you can’t write fiction about them without that capacity.

So what was the kernel that started the novel?

For me the genesis of the novel had to do with the fact that Holocaust survivors behind the Iron Curtain were not able to apply for restitution because it was felt that their governments would poach the money—a reasonable thing to have been concerned about. My grandmother, a survivor, did not become eligible to apply until we got here from the USSR in 1988. When she got set to submit her paperwork in the 1990s, it was given to me even though I was just a teenager because I had the best English in the family.

Two things stood out to me, one leading to the next. The first was that virtually no documentation was requested, for obvious reasons. You weren’t given a confirmation voucher when you went to the Minsk ghetto. So it kind of came down to how good a story you could tell; a matter of history became a matter of storytelling. I didn’t need to make it up for my grandmother since she went through it, but that idea was intriguing.

And the second thought I had was: It’s just a matter of time before someone has a field day with these applications. And that someone, I knew, might very well come from the ex-Soviet community. If you lived in that place, you couldn’t get certain basic things without going around the law. Some people remained honorable and did without; some people lucked out and knew the right people; others just wanted a little more for their families. I’m not talking about Rolls-Royces and gold watches. I’m talking about another pair of shoes or a banana. Tangerines were a once-a-year luxury. Sometimes, you could not get basic things without resorting to light crime.

Speaking of Russian Jewish writers, Gary Shtenygart just came out with his memoir. Was your arrival in America as painful as his?

I would guess that it was, but every pain is its own. That’s why people fail to learn from their mistakes, not because they’re stupid but because every mistake has its own character profile.

It’s brutal at such an impressionable age to switch from one place to another that’s so different. In my case, I became the adult of the family. I learned English the fastest and became my family’s ambassador to a world that had things going on that we had never dreamed about: phone bills, credit cards, medical insurance, car insurance… Suddenly I was responsible for all this being handled properly, for the family coming to no disadvantage or harm. I used to be so terrified of making a mistake that when I collected cans to bring to the supermarket for the five-cent deposit, not only did I wash them out with water, I sprayed them with my mother’s Parisian perfume so the supermarket would have no way to say no.

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

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Gary Shteyngart is… Oh hell, you probably already know who Gary Shteyngart is. Part myth, part blurbing machine, part bear, Gary is the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, and most recently the memoir Little Failure. He spoke with Michael Orbach about his new book and his typical Soviet upbringing.

As someone whose father was active in the Soviet Jewry movement (he wrote a book about it actually), I wonder if I should begin the interview by apologizing for getting you out.

Was it? I just read your descriptions of unending misery in Solomon Shechter and I was kinda wondering about it…

It was this weird historical accident where we ended up being in a country where we were the enemy. These kids just heard what was being said on the TV and around the dinner table and they couldn’t help equating us being Russians because we looked so Russian, like we stumbled out of that Wendy’s Soviet Fashion Show commercial. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

When the original Red Dawn came out were you like, “Dammit!”

By that point I was so Republican I wanted to bomb Russia even though that meant bombing my grandmother. That made me a little concerned. I don’t think there’s been an enemy to match the Soviet Union in terms of the fact that we had missiles pointed at each other. It was an existentialist thing for many people.

I suppose Solomon Schechter boys and girls aren’t known for subtly dealing with enemy empires.

I’ve been on this book tour for a month and so many Russians come up and say, “I survived Solomon Schechter.” I met someone in Florida who said in second grade her parents yanked her out to public school and nobody made fun of her there.

Should there have been a movement to save Soviet Jewry from Solomon Schechter?

That would’ve been a one-two punch. Get us out and get us out again. [Laughs.]

I’m not trying to butter you up for a blurb, but I really loved the book. One of the things that struck me was how fiction helped you escape from who you were, like when you started making up stories so kids would stop beating you up.

Storytelling is great. Being surrounded by Jews was a positive thing because everyone had a sense of humor. Well, not everyone. But a lot of people had a sense of humor and that is how you progress in a Jewish society: make jokes.

It didn’t make me popular but it did, as they say in L.A., change the narrative. It made me not Russian so much as this weird Gary Gnu Telling Stories Guy. It wasn’t great, but it was certainly better than being The Russian. I was amazed looking back at the yearbook how all the references to the other Russians were all about them being Soviets and Reds, but for me it was about how I was this nutty, crazy guy. That was a step up.

I suppose that sort of happens to everyone, where you shed your persona to try to impress people and become the person you want to be.

The thing is I exchanged what other people were thinking about me with another completely fraudulent persona too. Fraudulent in the sense that there was no inner life, it was an act, but even the act felt more real than people calling me a Commie. Good lord, by that point I was the most Republican kid on the planet. At age 11 I had membership in the NRA. It doesn’t get any more right-wing than that. I was very confused. I wanted to love America as deeply as I loved the Soviet Union and it worked for me. I fell in love with it so blindly. I couldn’t believe America had any flaws other than the Democratic Party. It was very blind love, but at school no one would return that love.

The Americans around me didn’t seem interested until I met people like Jonathan, my friend, and that was sort of a turning point. Having a friend like Jonathan saved my life in a big way. It was an indication that I could have real lasting friendships with people. I didn’t know that before. He and his whole family were my model American family, the first idea of what a smart, intelligent well-meaning American family could look like. I don’t want to glorify or exalt them. I’m sure they had their problems as well, but they were, as I was growing up, that was what I wanted. I wanted that wood-paneled station wagon and Lassie and they just generally seemed to love each other without the kind of Soviet residue that everyone around me had.

Can we talk about that Soviet residue? It seemed like a lot of pain.

This is cultural. What seems very abusive to Americans would make a lot of sense to Russian readers. On this tour so many people came up to me and said, “I know exactly what you mean, I had the same life, my parents called me a failure too.” There’s an incredible cultural dissonance between these two countries that I think still exists even though the Iron Curtain is down and Russia has some psychiatrists running around at this point.

I’ve noticed, we’re Facebook friends, though you haven’t liked any of my Facebook posts yet, FYI.

I’ll start liking immediately.

On Facebook you posted that your favorite Olympic event is Bobsledders Breaking Down Elevator Doors.

I have a very natural fear of getting stuck in elevators that coincides with the fact that everything in Russia gets stuck every once in a while and you have to break out of it with your fist. I pack a lot of Ativan for the elevators.

There’s this rather haunting line in the book where you write about your parents and you describe them by saying that some people weren’t made to have kids. Do you still have that sentiment?

No, I don’t. I think that the book charts an evolution on my part. I was such an angry child in many ways—there was a lot of anger and that anger floated around. I was angry at the kids for making fun of me, and I was angry at my parents for not understanding my pain and causing some of it.

By the end of the book—in going back to Russia—all these feelings turn to sorrow for my parent’s lives. I wish they had been born in a normal country. I wish my father had a chance to become an opera singer if he grew up somewhere that wasn’t as anti-Semitic as Russia. Learning about their lives and their first memories and the way Stalin and Hitler were so responsible for the world they came into, it was very sad. So by the end of it, I realized that they did the best they could. They really did. But what they were given was very faulty. The country did not prepare one to become anything: a parent, a husband, a wife. Look at the past of so many Russian families: you get married by 22, you have your child by 23; you’re divorced by 25, and you’re an alcoholic by 30. That was the trajectory. People weren’t prepared for any real kind of emotional life. There was no psychological insight and you were spouted lies all day long. How were you expected to become a decent human being?

Do you think that’s changed in Russia now?

Russia doesn’t really change. I think there is a correction for the better, then a correction for the worse. The overall path of the country is a disaster. I often mention there’s a restaurant in St. Petersburg named “1913.” I asked the owner why 1913 and she said that was the only good year in Russian history. That seems really right to me. There was so much hope after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a democracy might develop, a middle class might develop, but it frustrates you on every turn. After finishing this book, I almost thought: “Hey I’m kinda free of Russia for a while.”

And are you free of it now?

I’m going to try to be free of it. I’m going to try to write about other subjects for a while. As a travel writer, I travel around the world and that’s been eye-opening. It would be wonderful to try my hand on something that doesn’t focus entirely on Russian Jews.

One of the people I look at is Philip Roth. He wrote so well about people who came from the same part of the world as he had, Portnoy and Zuckerman, for example. Then in his earlier career tried to jump away from that. He tried to write about non-Newarky subjects and I gotta say that that isn’t the work I love the most. So there is some danger of it as well, but let me try at least to see what happens. I enjoyed writing the Korean character in Super Sad True Love Story. Maybe the only way of writing about Jews these days is writing about Koreans and Indians.

There’s one other thing I wanted to apologize to you for on behalf of all Jews: your botched circumcision. We’re sorry about the Soviet Jewry movement and your bad brit mila…

No. No. [Laughs.] It’s fine. I feel much better now. It doesn’t hurt as much.

The post Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions appeared first on Jewcy.

Author Gary Shteyngart recently debuted his first ever book trailer for his first memoir, Little Failure. The memoir, which is said to be one of Shteyngart’s most raw pieces of writing, takes a long, hard glance back at his intense childhood as a son of two Russian immigrants who fled the Soviet union for Queens. It’s a story of assimilation, but also of one of Gary coming to terms with his family hierarchy, their expectations, and his constant tango between life as a Russian and as an American.

His self-deprecating prose, which is as vivid as ever, captures the existential woes of adolescent misadventure, becoming a writer, and dealing with the love/hate torture parents can inflict on their children.

Shteyngart recently sat down with Interview Magazine for a thorough conversation about his book writing process, being a Hebrew school bully, and of course, Russia.

On the writing process of a memoir:

“Yeah, it was very intense. But the memoirs I love are all very intense. If you’re going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell’s the point? Just do fiction.”

On whether to blame the time and place or his parents:

“Right. But the thing is, I’ve been in psychoanalysis for a long time. And really the big question of analysis is simple. A lot of it is obviously about my parents, and that question is: How much of it was them? How much of it was the Soviet Union, and how much was family, how much was society?”

The exact proportions:

“Forty percent Stalin, 30 percent Hitler, and 30 percent everyone else. [laughs] Their anxiety was palpable, obviously. It was the way I was raised—scared of everything.”

On embarking on his book tour:

“Now they know everything (his readers). And this time I have to read from my actual freaking life. I expect some angry Russians, obviously. I love these tours. I was in San Francisco, and a woman gets up—she’s Russian—she’s very angry at me and says, “Do you know you are writing this, but do you also know they are killing Jews at San Francisco State University?” I think I came up with a quick rejoinder, like, “Oh, where do I get in on that?” Or something like that. Then she said, “You know, I have a very lovely daughter in Los Angeles. You should meet her if you’re going there next.” I think I said, “But they’re killing Jews at UCLA!” So I imagine some angry Russians will show up.”

On being a Hebrew school bully:

“I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings—weaker than me, and I was already very weak—I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward, you know? Even writing that, I felt very sad about it. It just rolls downhill. It’s a cliché, but the shit rolls downhill.”

(Photo by Getty)

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James Franco and Gary Shteyngart are lovers and friends in Shteyngart’s book trailer for his first memoir, Little Failure. Shteyngart gathered up what seems to be a bunch of kick-ass friends and acquaintances, such as Jonathan Franzen, Alex Karpovsky, and Rashida Jones, to showcase the self-deprecating author preparing for his book release.

In the video, Franco and Shteyngart sit for morning coffee in matching fuzzy, pink bathrobes–but not before Franco gives Gary a smooch–and proceeds to tell Gary he’s written a memoir entitled, “50 Shades of Gary, An Erotic Memoir.”

Keep watching to see Shteyngart vent on his psychiatrist Jonathan Franzen’s couch, pay $13 for non-Fair Trade coffee from “barista” Karpovsky, and pop prescription pills in a sea of people gushing over Franco’s new “erotic journey.”

“Oh my God, it’s even more “Jewcy” on a Tablet device.” Did anyone else catch that?

(Photo by Buzzfeed)

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• Fresh off his Barclays Center concert (which a dad confirmed to us was great), Bob Dylan is headed uptown to unveil 30 piece of his “Revisionist Art.” Talk about a renaissance man. [NY Post]

• Culture Kvetch Jacob Silverman reintroduces the poetry of Samuel Greenberg, the cult writer who died of tuburculous in 1917, at the age of 23. [Poetry Foundation]

• Talking about Gary Shteyngart’s nipples (at his roast, so it’s okay). [NY Observer]

• Why Judy Blume is always right. [LA Review of Books]

• Jewcy’s own Miriam Krule shares the only kale recipe you’ll ever need. [Slate]

• Scarlett Johansson does the weather, obviously. [NBC]

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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• Krakow made Conde Nast Traveler’s list of top 10 cities in the Europe, earning an 89.3 rating for ambience. [CN Traveler]

• Gary Shteyngart, who was roasted at BAM last night, refers to his first novel as The Russian Debutante’s Handjob. We knew we liked him. [Entertainment Weekly]

• Jonathan Adler has a nanny, whatever. [Bon Appetit]

• For only $23.5 million, you can buy Madonna’s Central Park West apartment (Kabbalah string sold separately). [NY Daily News]

• Chelsea Clinton is reportedly trying to make a baby with king of the nebbishes Marc Mezvinsky [The Cut]

• We’re thankful for Larry David’s animated video about Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. “Rosie, would you sit down please?” [Funny or Die]

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There is an immutable law of Internet journalism that no article you write will be as appreciated as a goofy Tumblr created in a moment of idleness. (I’m sure Jeff Jarvis has a name for this.) That has been the case for me since earlier this year, when I started a Tumblr to catalogue all of the blurbs of author Gary Shteyngart, whose “promiscuous praise”—among today’s writers, he might be the most prolific blurber—had become something of a modern legend. Other writers might give me a small compliment for some review I’ve written, but upon hearing that I’m the proprietor of “The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart” and that I’ve made it a mission to catalog all of the outbursts of praise from an inveterate praise artist—well, that’s when my acquaintances nod their heads before politely excusing themselves.

Let us now praise the praiser. Over the years, Shteyngart has been interviewed about his blurbing compulsion, and his answers reflect his monkish devotion to the craft. Recently he talked to A.J. Jacobs, another compulsive blurber, about the habit for the New York Times, explaining how he decides to blurb a book: “I look for the following: Two covers, one spine, at least 40 pages, ISBN number, title, author’s name. Once those conditions are satisfied, I blurb. And I blurb hard.”

Indeed! And so I will testify, to you, reader, who accidentally clicked on this column. For I’ve gone deep into the Amazonian forests and gathered, like so many plump berries, 61 Shteyngart blurbs, though some of those were submitted by readers and others are evanescent things, unable to be pinned to a book cover, such as one about A.J. Jacobs’ Times article. There are still rarer, more delicate objects in my collection—Faberge blurbs—including a blurb about a tweet: “Simon montefiore has written a classic tweet that will endure for hours.” Aye, perhaps, but the record of that praise will now live on forever (or until Tumblr runs through its venture capital).

And however vain it might be, the most precious blurb under my stewardship is one that Shteyngart, who reportedly only writes fiction to support his menagerie of dachshunds (if he had his druthers, I’m told, he would do nothing but blurb, blurbing deep into the night), wrote upon my request. It is a blurb for the blurber, a blurber’s blurb, and I’ve positioned it, as one would a Picasso in the foyer, at the top of the site. It reads in full: “Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs are touching, funny and true. This is a blurber to watch.”

What makes a Gary Shteyngart blurb? First, it is in English. (This is no small matter, for Gary, nee Igor, was born in the Soviet Union and counts Russian as his mother tongue.) Second, it has words, usually complimentary words, many of them adjectives. There are periods and, sometimes, a wittily placed exclamation mark. Occasionally he allows a metaphor, catlike, to slink in. And surrounding all this: two quotation marks, staring fondly at each other across the expanse of neon prose.

Some people have told me that blurbs are meaningless, that they have long been despised as a low and disingenuous part of the book marketing machine. They are favors traded between writers; they are small kindnesses reluctantly given; they are a trick that agents, when they are resting their voices from screaming at their assistants, force their writers to perform. Others say that no one pays attention to blurbs or that, if they do, they are fools, seduced by puffery that probably originated in an infomercial testimonial for a food dehydrator.

But I think that blurbs are more than that—or at least that Gary Shteyngart’s, numinous and numerous, are. Sure, I have read and typed this word (“blurb”; bluuuuurb) enough times so that it no longer appears like language to me. Yes, I have spent so much time scouring book catalogs and googling “Gary Shteyngart blurb” (and, in more desperate moments, “Gary Shteyngart blurbs”) that I have lost all sight of where I came from, so that I now stand on some distant precipice, surrounded by a roiling sea of Tumblr tags, under a vaulted sky of reblogs and heart icons that, if only I stretched far enough, I think I could somehow click.

Yet on the way towards this place, I have seen things. I have seen the difference between “a brilliant, funny, humane writer” (Sayed Kashua) and a “highly entertaining debut novel” (George Hagen’s The Laments). More importantly, I believe—though we have only exchanged a few (masterful! irreverent! genre-bending!) tweets—that I have seen into the heart of Gary Shteyngart himself. Like Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms to know what it was like to write a great novel, I have done the same with The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart. Fine, I have only cut and pasted them into Tumblr between games of Starcraft II, but in this age of brevity, that must count for something near the same.

And when Gary Shteyngart decides to hang up that well-thumbed thesaurus, I will be there, asking him, Why? Were we not good enough? Do we, do they, those undersung MFA graduates, no longer deserve your praise? And I am sure that he will turn to me and—with great delicacy and prefaced by several improvised flattering remarks—ask why I have violated the court order that is surely in my future.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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• Buenos Aires, “kosher capital” of Latin America?

• The man orchestrating NBC’s 2012 Olympic coverage keeps kosher.

• Seriously though, what did happen to Jordache?

• Even Oprah (Magazine) loves Ari Seth Cohen’s granny-chic blog.

• Looks like Larry David might be headed back to HBO with a new film project, starring Jon Hamm.

• Gary Shteyngart’s new gig? Toilet reporter.

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• The time the late Maurice Sendak joked about blowing up Bush and Cheney.

• Pledge $500 to @tomorrowthemag and get a personalized PG-13 phone message from Jewish porn star James Deen.

• Former Jewcy editor Jason Diamond on the polarizing nature of the polo shirt.

• Check out Eytan, the chameleon singer behind this awesomely viral video:

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