Lewis M. Weinstein's Blog, page 11

* CASE CLOSED – Lew’s novel about the anthrax attacks and the failed FBI investigation – has been re-published. In this interview, Lew explains why perhaps his novel is closer to the truth than anything the FBI is asserting.

Originally posted on CASE CLOSED ... what really happened in the 2001 anthrax attacks?:
Here is the link to the interview … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A2yb... purchase CASE CLOSED at amazon … kindle $3.99, paper $14.95 http://www.amazon.com/Case-Closed-Lew...

* The new edition of CASE CLOSED could not come at a more opportune time.

The new edition of CASE CLOSED could not come at a more opportune time. Just a few days ago, on June 3, 2015, the Pentagon reported that 51 laboratories received shipments of live anthrax, across 17 states (plus D.C.) and three foreign countries over a period of at least ten years. The Defense Department admitted […]

* Lew’s comments on I.J. Singer’s “The Family Carnovsky”

I.J. Singer (the older brother of Isaac Bashevitz Singer) tells the story of three generations of a Jewish family, from Poland to Berlin to New York, from the early 1900s to the 1930s. German Jews thought they were safe, with careers and sufficient wealth to live comfortably, to work, marry, have children and pray. They […]

* Kristen Lamb’s post about structuring a novel

I have just read Kristen Lamb’s newsletter post entitled … Anatomy of a Best-Selling Story—Structure Part One. It is brilliant and it comes at the perfect time for me as I am now editing and revising the first draft of my new novel. You can find Kristen’s post (and much more) at her blog at … https://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/. Kristen […]

* First draft complete. Still untitled.

Big day today. I finished the first draft of my still untitled novel. There’s much editing to do before I ask any “early readers” to give me feedback, but it was very satisfying to write the final scene. I think it may turn out to be a powerful and emotional story. ***

* Lew’s comments on “The Jewish King Lear” by Jacob Gordin

This is a wonderful introduction to Yiddish theater in eastern Europe and New York, seen through the prism of the playwright Jacob Gordin and his play “The Jewish King Lear,” written in 1891 when it was not unusual to adapt plays from the European repertoire into Yiddish. The play was first performed on the New […]

* a poem by Chaim Nahman Bialik

I extracted several lines from one of C. N. Bialik’s poems, written in the early 1900s, that beautifully express the feelings of the young Polish girl who is one of the two major fictional characters in my novel-in-progress … Distant islands, lofty worlds of our dreams, they made us into strangers wherever we went. They made […]

Lew’s comments on David Vital’s “A People Apart”

I have only read a small part of Vital’s book, those chapters dealing with Jewish life in the years between Versailles (1919) and the invasion of Poland (1939), but there were several important insights in those chapters that have great relevance for my novel-in-process. In particular, Vital describes a change in the way European Jews […]

* Lew’s comments on “The King of Children” by Betty Jean Lifton

There are many tears to be shed for the way Janusz Korczak died, marching at the head of his final group of orphans off to a German death camp, but one cannot fail to be thrilled by the way he lived. For 30 years, he ran an orphanage in Warsaw, out of love for the […]

* Lew’s comments on “There Once Was a World” by Yaffa Eliach

This is an absolutely marvelous compendium of detailed insights into Jewish life in Polish shtetls before the holocaust. Although focused on Eishyshok, much applies to other shtetls as well. I am well along in my new novel set in Germany and Poland during the Nazi years. Recently, though, in re-reading some of what I had […]