This week on Unorthodox, Liel’s still wearing his grand marshal sash from the Celebrate Israel parade. For our first book-club episode, we talk to Israeli-born writer Ruby Namdar about his ambitious second book, The Ruined House, which won Israel’s most prestigious literary award, the Sapir Prize, and was recently translated into English. The book is set in New York City, where he’s lived for the past 18 years, and follows a charming and successful professor named Andrew P. Cohen as he descends into a peculiar kind of madness. Ruby tells us why he made his protagonist such a specific male archetype, and explains the difference between American and Israeli literary culture (he didn’t discover Philip Roth until he moved to the United States). He also answers questions from listeners who read the book along with us, such as, “Why does the main character live near Columbia if he teaches downtown at NYU?”
Plus, New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner joins us to talk about her essay about what reading Philip Roth while growing up in an observant household taught her about being an American Jew.