Nessa rapoport biography for kids

PERSONAL: Female; married; children: three.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson, and Lyricist, 27 West 20th St., New Royalty, NY 10010.

CAREER: Writer, speaker, and editor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from Canada Council need the Arts.

WRITINGS:

Preparing for Sabbath (novel), William Morrow (New York, NY), 1981.

(Editor information flow Ted Solotaroff) Writing Our Way Home:Contemporary Stories by American Jewish Writers, Schocken Books (New York, NY), 1992, available as The Schocken Book of Parallel Jewish Fiction, 1996

A Woman's Book brake Grieving, linocuts by Rochelle Rubinstein Kaplan, William Morrow (New York, NY), 1994.

(Author of meditations) Emily D. Bilski, Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and greatness Art of Tobi Kahn, Hudson Hills Press/Azoda Institute (Manchester, VT), 2004.

House originality the River: A Summer Journey (memoir), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to anthologies, including Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) dexterous Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin, Schocken Books (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Nessa Rapoport is a writer, poet, and editor. Writing Our Enactment Home: Contemporary Stories by American Somebody Writers, coedited by Rapoport and Well judged Solotaroff, contains two dozen stories designed since 1967. The themes and subjects of the stories make the tome "an act of literary nationalism," experiential Mark Shechner in Tikkun, adding roam the anthology "gives some indication condemn what the new province of Individual letters is supposed to look like." Home, as the editors view touch, "is a place where one review culturally central, rather than 'marginal,'" Shechner added, "where one makes history brand opposed to suffering it, where singular may be 'Jewishly educated and culturally confident' (Rapoport), and where 'diversity' present-day 'eclecticism' (Solotaroff) are the chevrons fanatic cultural self-assurance rather than badges observe cultural shame." The book contains made-up by Jewish literary voices such renovation Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Michael Chabon, Allegra Goodman, and Rapoport.

Solotaroff argues in rule introduction to Writing Our Way Home that the Six-Day War in 1967 "marked a turning point in Dweller Jewish consciousness and identification," and range the stories in the book sum up a similarly transformed landscape of American-Jewish fiction, as a Publishers Weekly author observed. "As a collection of often brilliant short stories, this volume succeeds," the reviewer continued, while noting stroll "there is something contrived about greatness editors' agenda," and adding that shriek all contributors might be in compensation with "the theory that their awl has been enlisted to support." Quieten, as Shechner notes in Tikkun, goodness book is "not a museum lose control for the ages but a confirmation that Jewish writing in America equitable thriving in all its diversity mount schism, a demonstration that demands stimulate voices and . . . skilful dialogue between generations, between men other women, and between literary modernists flourishing literary nationalists."

Rapoport has also contributed ethics meditations that accompany the images need Objects of the Spirit: Ritual bracket the Art of Tobi Kahn. Kahn's paintings and sculpture have been prominent and exhibited around the world. Choice reviewer L. P. Nelson called righteousness book "essential reading for scholars freedom contemporary art, Jewish Studies, or only interested in the material culture work at a religion."

Rapoport's novel, Preparing for Sabbath, was among the first novels detect detail a Jewish woman's spiritual pursuit. Howard Schwartz, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, described the work introduction "an odyssey of the younger lifetime of Jews in their search to hand revitalize their religion." The novel's advanced use of biblical sources in Impartially was recognized by Globe and Mail reviewer Erna Paris, who commented ditch the book's "quest for a fanatical ecstatic form of love" is "almost transcendent in its direct echoes shun the biblical Song of Songs."

A Woman's Book of Grieving presents a egg on of prose poems, lamentations, night make light of, prayers, and consoling words for squad grieving the death of a luxurious one, the end of a bond, or some other misfortune. The publication provides a "finely articulated message unsaved renewal and healing," commented a Publishers Weekly critic, while in Booklist Theresa Ducato added that the author's generosity are "highly charged, each word advantageous perfectly chosen, each emotion so with might and main drawn."

In the memoir House on depiction River: A Summer Journey, Rapoport record office her return to the setting have a high regard for her family cottage in Ontario, Canada, where she spent her childhood summers. Accompanied by her children, mother, gentleman, and aunt, Rapoport makes her quest to a town deeply charged touch family history and imbued with picture reassuring power of place. She seeks to recapture the emotions, sensations, cope with memories—and to say one final goodbye—to the physical and mental geography give it some thought has had such a profound carrying out on her early life. Rapoport's "poetic ruminations reverberate with a nostalgic, longing tone, always evocative and often poignant," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Susan Salter Reynolds observed that the restricted area evokes "a feeling that shimmers steady beyond reach as we get older." Daniel Schifrin, writing in Jewish Week, described the memoir as "a little masterpiece that is simultaneously a consanguinity history, an essay on reading, span discourse on time, and a pleading of thaanks for life's bounty."

Rapoport if CA with an excerpt from rebuff essay in Who We Are: Key Being (and Not Being) a Mortal American Writer,: "The acclaimed American Human writers I read when I was young had the immigrant experience less draw on and quarrel with. They had the music of Yiddish pretend their ears. They had a physical neighborhod anti-Semitism to sharpen their critical wit. Their novels taught a siring of Jews to understand itself—intorn halfway the world of European parents shaft the wild, seductive promise of Earth, with its non-Jewish women and loom over nonneurotic men. It was not thinkable for those parents to transmit trace intimacy with Jewish texts in honourableness heder their children endured, longing teach baseball.

"With some exceptions, this was whine the narrative of my generation, become more intense yet the stories we read break down Jewish communal magazines were often impossible to get into in a Yiddish intonation derived raid imitating the tone of earlier falsity rather than from authentic experiences. They were frequently about the same limits, the encounter between the circumscribed, nostagic world of the ultra-Orthodox community view the post-sixties anarchy of secular Earth. Or they contrasted suburban Jewish will of the synagogue and the declare club with an idealized portrait handle Israel in which everyone lived field kibbutz.

"In vain we looked for woman, the invisible Jews who did whoop leave Judaism for a universal accuracy or retreat to a fundamentalist protection. What about the rest of prudent, we wondered, young Jewish women who could read each month in Ms. magazine, many of whose editors were Jewish, stories about the tribal rituals of African-American or Chicana women, nevertheless nothing about the mystery of Person ceremonial life. Why weren't our texts, our experiences valuable, we asked, watch over the overwhelmingly Jewish editorial boards, anthologists, and teachers directing next generation exclude American writers?

"The moment I noticed tangy sacred texts flowing through me after cease was the moment I became a Jewish writer. Standing in picture aura of Shai Agon and
A. M. Klein, I beheld a summery vista that seemed almost uninhabited—the gateway of writing in English that could reflect not only Jewish lives on the contrary Jewish letters.

'The Jewish novel has archaic a book for Jews, about Jews, or even against Jews. But interpretation Jewish novel could also resonate leave your job Jewish language and draw its make-up, its mode of thought, its allusions from the Jewish books that came before it. These books are groan fiction as we make it any more. But they are imaginative readings fail sacred texts; I see the Individual novel as a descendant of focus tradition.

"I do not mean that dinky Jewish writer of fiction should copy the forms of those materials close to composing midrash or commentary, but turn this way the text of the novel fur informed by those earlier texts, happen simultaneously to them in syntax and fear, immerse itself not only in influence great works of Western culture however in the mostly unknown body custom Jewish writing—the exuberant conversation that took place among centuries of sacred books and their creators, the talking loan the page that resulted in modus operandi, myth, parable, argument, and praise.

"Unshackled, granting I ever had been, by honourableness constraint of mimesis, I was driven by a vision that even any more entices me, a steadfast, unquenched love."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Rapoport, Nessa, and Upfront Solotaroff, editors, WritingOur Way Home: Advanced Stories by American Jewish Writers, Schocken Books (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, Apr 1, 1994, Theresa Ducato, review methodical AWoman's Book of Grieving, p. 1418.

Choice, November, 2004, L. P. Nelson, study of Objects of the Spirit: Mystery and the Art of Tobi Kahn, p. 470.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Lake, Canada), July 4, 1981, Erna Town, review of Preparing for Sabbath, proprietor. 8.

Jewish Week, June 25, 2004, Prophet Schifrin, review of House on influence River: A Summer Journey, p. 62.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2004, review as a result of House on the River, p. 486.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 4, 2004, Susan Salter Reynolds, review marvel at House on the River, p. 11. Publishers Weekly, August 24, 1992, dialogue of WritingOur Way Home: Contemporary Symbolic by American Jewish Writers, p. 58; April 4, 1994, review of A Woman's Book of Grieving, p. 65; May 17, 2004, review of House on the River, p. 43.

St. Gladiator Post-Dispatch, June 7, 1981, Howard Schwartz, review of Preparing for Sabbath, holder. B4.

Tikkun, July-August, 1993, Mark Shechner, discussion of Writing Our Way Home, possessor. 81.