Sublime

her supernatural ability to slow time,

Al Jolson’s ivories

Mrs. Sloper, who on this first day gave me the exact same look of incurious distaste I would receive from her for the next thirteen months, and wore (this I sure remember) a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly. She was maybe fifty, and very thin and tendony, and had the same asymmetrical beehive coi

But she was acidly disappointed by the price her double—“The Dark Lady of American Letters,” “The Sibyl of Manhattan”—exacted. She confessed that she’d hoped “being famous would be more fun,”9

she’d knit herself, which went well with her red hair streaked with gray. Abigail was also an author and I was hearing lots of great buzz about her new children’s

After playing a crucial role in the shaping of modern Europe for more than two hundred years—think of Mendelssohn, Marx, Freud, Mahler, Kafka, Einstein—Jews will gradually leave center stage. The golden era of European Jewry will be over.