A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York

Finck, Liana

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HarperCollins

Annotation: Drawn from letters submitted to the popular advice column of "The Forward," this illustrated tribute to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New York City offers insight into a segment of America's rich cultural past.

Genre: [Graphic novels] [United States history]

Reviews: 1

Catalog Number: #5669733

Format: Paperback

Special Formats: Graphic Novel

Publisher: HarperCollins

Edition Date: 2014 Release Date: 04/15/14

Pages: 1 volume (unpaged)

ISBN: 0-06-229161-0

ISBN 13: 978-0-06-229161-5

Dewey: 974.7

Dimensions: 24 cm.

Subject Heading:
Jews. New York (State). New York. Social life and customs. Comic books, strips, etc.
Immigrants. New York (State). New York. Social life and customs. Comic books, strips, etc.
New York (N.Y.). Social life and customs. Comic books, strips, etc.
New York (N.Y.). History. 1898-1951. Comic books, strips, etc.

Language: English

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

The Jewish Daily Forward was a Yiddish socialist newspaper based in New York City (known simply as -the Forward-) that, among other things, helped early-20th-century Jewish immigrants adapt to their new lives in America; -Bintel Briefs- was a hugely popular advice column based on letters from readers. Finck fictionalizes a collection of these letters, turning them into short stories linked together through the narrative of a young woman who finds the letters pasted into a book belonging to her grandfather. When she opens the book, Abraham Cahan, the founding editor of the Forward, leaps out and joins her. Cahan takes her through the stories and grows and changes himself, now living in the present day. It-s a clever idea, but one that never quite resonates emotionally. Finck-s art is decidedly and deliberately crude but has its charms. Each letter has a slightly different visual style, which is intended to reflect its story, but the art is not distinctive enough to feel deliberate, and it instead ends up feeling inconsistent and, in some cases, amateurish. The present day interludes that connect the stories give some consistency, but they-re printed in a strange faded blue font that is hard to read. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Reading Level: 9.0

Interest Level: 9-12

In an illustrative style that is a thrilling mash-up of Art Spiegelman's deft emotionality, Roz Chast's hilarious neuroses, and the magical spirit of Marc Chagall, A Bintel Brief is Liana Finck’s evocative, elegiac love letter to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New York City and America itself.

A Bintel Brief "A Bundle of Letters"—was the enormously popular advice column of The Forward, the widely read Yiddish language newspaper begun in 1906 New York. Written by a diverse community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, these letters spoke to the daily heartbreaks and comedies of their new lives, capturing the hope, isolation, and confusion of assimilation.

Drawn from these letters—selected and adapted by Liana Finck and brought to life in her appealing two-color illustrations—A Bintel Brief is a tour of Lower East Side New York, and includes an imaginative conversation with the Yiddish "Dear Abby," Abraham Cahan, The Forward's legendary editor and creator of the Bintel Brief column.

From premarital sex to family politics to struggles with jobs and money, A Bintel Brief is an enlightening look at a segment of America's rich cultural past that offers fresh insights for our own lives as well.

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