On Jan. 26, 2020, Amy Bloom and her husband, Brian Ameche, boarded a flight from New York to Zurich. They hadn’t called on their usual driver to transport them from their home in Connecticut to John F. Kennedy Airport; they didn’t want to make small talk about their itinerary. Usually they flew coach, but this time they were in business class.
“In our Swissair pods, Brian and I toast each other, and we say, ‘Here’s to you,’ a little hesitantly, instead of what we usually say, ‘Cent’anni’ (‘May we have a hundred years,’ a very Italian toast),” Bloom writes in her 10th book and first memoir, “In Love,” which Random House will publish on March 8. “There is no ‘Cent’anni’ for us; we won’t make it to our 13th wedding anniversary.”
Dr. Parry, the author of “Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual,” traced the tradition back to at least the 18th century, when it was largely practiced by marginalized populations in Europe, he said, “such as traveling communities like the British Romani, rural Welsh communities, Irish individuals and various other people who lived on the margins of the British Isles.”
As Europeans who had jumped over brooms at their weddings came to the United States, so too did the ritual. It was soon adopted by another marginalized population: enslaved people in the American South. “While broomsticks were used in some West African ceremonies,” Dr. Parry said the earliest documented examples of people of African descent jumping over a broom in the U.S. are from the 1800s.
Some of the most enduring images from the Los Angeles riots are the photos of armed Korean shopkeepers patrolling the rooftops of liquor stores and laundromats to deter rioters.
In some Korean Americans those images inspire pride, and in others, shame. The actor John Cho, he told me, felt mostly panic and fear. Then 19 years old and a student at UC Berkeley, he could see how the images were being interpreted and worried that they would spark more hostility toward Koreans.
In his new young adult novel that he wrote with Sara Suk, “Troublemaker,” his goal was to start with those photos, and zoom out.
“Burning Questions” is a canny title for Margaret Atwood’s new book of essays and occasional pieces. It reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her — literature, feminism, the environment, human rights — and their combustibility, the risk that in writing about them she might get burned. Though she wryly self-defines as a “supposedly revered elderly icon or scary witchy granny figure,” Atwood, now in the seventh decade of her colossally successful literary career, can still rile and inspire.
My grandmother died in October 2019, the day after her 97th birthday. She must have been born within a few months of Howard Jacobson’s mother, who, as the moving preface to his memoir Mother’s Boy explains, died in May 2020 at the same age. Jacobson’s mother was an autodidact with a passion for poetry and a burning drive to write that her circumstances – living in Manchester as a working-class woman, wife and mother – ultimately thwarted.
My grandmother was able to live out her commitments in her younger days, inspired by the socialist ideals of the Jewish youth movement to travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine, via a stint in a British prison camp in Cyprus, to help found and establish a kibbutz. She returned to England when my father was a toddler, however, living in Southport, just down the road from Jacobson’s family. She worked as a dinner lady, her sharpness of mind and love of words finding an outlet only via the endless games of Scrabble that we played. I thought often of her and her life as I read Mother’s Boy and its insights into the frustrations, possibilities and intensities of human lives and of the lives of British Jews in particular.
Daniel Levy’s sprawling new history of 19th-century New York, Manhattan Phoenix, is subtitled “The Great Fire of 1835 and the Emergence of Modern New York”. The author argues, a little implausibly, that it was that conflagration that gave birth to the modern city. But he is thorough enough to include a detailed description of a much more important water project, the Croton Aqueduct, and passing references to the equally crucial Erie Canal, which determined New York’s status as the premier American metropolis.