A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York / Liana Finck

A charming new graphic novel.  The narrator receives an old notebook full of newspaper clippings, from which emerges the ghost of Abraham Cahan, famous founder of the Yiddish paper the Forward.  (I wrote about an interesting Cahan bio recently.)  Together the narrator and Cahan look at letters from Cahan's 100-year-old advice column, The Bintel Brief.  Finck brings the stories to life with quietly effective drawing, and shares Cahan's response to each letter.  Alongside the letter stories, which evoke Lower East Side life at the turn of the last century, Cahan and the narrator carry on their own dialogue, and before he departs Cahan has advice for our author as well.  Moving but not sentimental, this would make a great gift.  Recommended.