Alizah Holstein is a historian and author of the memoir My Roman History (Viking Press, 2024). Growing up (mostly) in Boston, it was reading Dante’s Inferno at 17 that first inspired her to study Italian, literature, and medieval history. Alizah holds a PhD in history from Cornell University and an MFA in creative writing & literary translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing can be found in LitHub, Hamilton Arts & Letters, World Literature Today, and MarketWatch. To her own occasional surprise, she lives with her family in Providence, RI, which everyone knows is the literary capital of the U.S. Website: www.alizahholstein.com. Email: alizah.holstein [at] gmail [dot] com
Website: http://www.alizahholstein.com
by Alizah Holstein Today an electrician came to visit. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had arms like sausage links that were fairly covered in tattoos. One of the tattoos was a date: January something-or-other. I tried to read it as he walked through my front door, but he looked me in the eyes and…
by Alizah Holstein Hebrew or English? English. How long were you in Israel? 36 hours. So short? Yes. That’s unfortunate. Maybe. What was the purpose of your trip? To visit my mother. Is she ill? No. Where does she live? Tel Aviv. Did you stay with her? Yes. Did you visit anywhere besides Tel Aviv…
by Alizah Holstein Once upon a time, summer meant windows thrown open, midnight breezes, the cooing of doves at dawn. Now, though, the panes have fallen. My family has at long last joined the approximately ninety percent of American households with access to air conditioning. Statistically speaking, it’s possible we had already joined that number:…
by Alizah Holstein Think of a Roman monument. What leaps to mind? The Pantheon? The Colosseum? The Arch of Constantine? Maybe even the aqueducts? I’ll wager that when you thought of the word “monuments,” your imagination traveled upwards instead of down. For what is a monument if not a tall, grand thing, large, and to…
by Alizah Holstein Here are some books that have long been available for consultation on Level 2 of Pusey Library, which is not exactly a library in itself but an underground extension of Widener Library at Harvard. The Erotic Tongue: A Sexual Lexicon; The Erotic in Literature: A Historical Survey of Pornography as Delightful as it is…
by Alizah Holstein In my junior year of high school, I wrote and illustrated a children’s story. Its title was Spiderfish, and it featured a fish who was also a spider, but who thought he had to commit to being either one or the other and was consequently unhappy. To find out who he really…
by Alizah Holstein How are we to live, to work, when the house we live in is being dismantled? When, day by day, we learn that programs and initiatives, organizations and institutions that have defined and, in some cases, enriched our lives, or provided livelihoods to our communities, are being axed by the dozen? Can…
by Alizah Holstein When a statement was issued last November stipulating that a new U.S. government department known by the acronym DOGE was to be formed, the medievalist in me snapped to attention. To me, “doge” was a word with distinctly medieval meaning. But hardly anywhere was this meaning being explored in the context of…
by Alizah Holstein A pandemic has swept the land, talk of apocalypse abounds. A charismatic political figure with a penchant for opulence and known for captivating the populace with speeches about reviving the old empire is embarking upon his second stint in power. In his crosshairs is the political establishment, and under his rule the…