David Stromberg
I am a writer, translator, and literary investigator. On this site, you can read essays and translations, explore some books, or check out scholarly articles.
In 2019—armed with an undergraduate degree in applied math, a master’s in critical studies, and a doctorate in literature—I set out to write about the emotional layers of race in America, the cultural echoes of the pandemic, literature’s role in daily life, and the social and historical implications of life in Israel after October 7.
I first published a series of personal essays in Public Seminar about growing up on the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles. Later, I began publishing long-form speculative essays from the perspective of Mister Investigator, a private eye whose landscape is culture, history, and politics—including “A Short Inquiry into the End of the World” (The Massachusetts Review), “The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew” (The Hedgehog Review) and “To Kill an Intellectual” (The Fortnightly Review). During this period, I also published shorter essays in The American Scholar, Hedgehog Review, Hopkins Review, Dispatches Magazine, Speculative Nonfiction, Critical Flame, and Literary Matters. In 2024, I began to contribute a column, “Letter from Jerusalem,” to Salmagundi.
I am also editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, and in that capacity have published translations of Singer’s work in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, One Story, Sewanee Review, Tablet, and Los Angeles Review of Books. I edited a volume of Singer’s essays, Old Truths and New Clichés (Princeton University Press), prepared a retranslation of his canonical story, Simple Gimpl: The Definitive Bilingual Edition (Restless Books), and translated and edited a three-volume collection of Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt (White Goat Press). I have also translated from the Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, including a collection of children’s stories from the early 20th century, In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times (Delacorte).
As a scholar, my research has appeared in Prooftexts, Soundings, Russian Review, French Forum, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, among others. My first book-length study was Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer (University of Delaware Press), focusing on narrative technique and moral vision. The second study, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan), explored the intersection of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
My early publications included four collections of single-panel cartoons, the last of which was Baddies (Melville House), and fiction in Ambit, Litro, The Account, and The Woven Tale Press. For five years, I wrote on arts and culture for The Jerusalem Post and The Jerusalem Report.
Born in Ashdod to ex-Soviet parents, I immigrated to Los Angeles as a child, and twenty years later moved to Jerusalem, where I live and work.
