The Interview Roundup Gravitates
to Jewish Authors of a Certain Age

Last month, when Imre Kertész came to New York, John Freeman of Newsday met with him--but the story hasn't made it into the paper until now:

Although Kertész has been labeled a Holocaust writer, he says the influence of communism was equally powerful, and it was through this second survival of sorts that he became the writer he is today. "You constantly, constantly think about the idea of suicide, especially if you live under a dictatorship," Kertész says. "I believe I would have written very different novels had I lived in a democracy."

David Mehegan of the Boston Globe gets close to Cynthia Ozick, which includes this rather astonishing bit: "She was an Alfred A. Knopf author for 32 years, until moving to Houghton Mifflin for Heir to the Glimmering World and in all that time never had a book tour. Why not? she was asked. She shrugged and said: Because they never asked me." (emphasis added) The news that, under Knopf, Ozick "never felt I had a readership" simply boggles the mind, though they can't have ignored her completely, since she was a two-time National Book Award finalist while published there.

Over at Nextbook, Natascha Freundel talks to Amos Oz, who was also recently featured in the New Yorker, the subject of a David Remnick profile--and, not surprisingly, a long Jerusalem Post interview.