Jewih Book World 30-1 by Naomi Firestone

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The Quarterly Publication of the Jewish Book Council Spring 2012/5772 Vol. 30 No. 1

The 61st Annual National Jewish Book Awards

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HIGHLIGHTS • WINTER 2011

Now Available JuSTice in The ciTy

An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism By Aryeh Cohen ISBN 978-1-936235-64-3 (cloth) $59.00, 170 pp.

“This is an extremely important, interesting and creative project. Nothing like it really exists. Here is someone who combines erudition in the classical literature of Judaism (especially the Babylonian Talmud) with his passion for social justice, both as an activist and as someone who thinks in highly sophisticated terms about the tradition of political philosophy and of social theory inspired by religious traditions.” —Charlotte Fonrobert Taube Center for Jewish Studies Stanford University

Two STepS Forward, one STep Back Changing Women, Changing Society By Dahlia Moore ISBN 978-1-9434843-84-0 (cloth) $59.00, 250 pp.

“Delving into the historical realities of one specific society, Israel, Dahlia Moore enlarges our understanding of the interplay of ideologies and reality. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back presents an engaging and indepth analysis of the forces that have sometimes fostered and more often impeded equality between the sexes in Israel. The book will provide fascinating reading to anyone who wishes to study the status of women – in Israel or around the world.” —Faye J. Crosby Co-editor of Sex Discrimination in Employment

The ShTieBelizaTion oF Modern Jewry

Studies in Custom and Ritual in the Judaic Tradition: Social-Anthropological Perspectives By Simcha Fishbane ISBN 978-1-936235-77-3 (cloth) $75.00, 280 pp.

The Shtiebelization of Modern Jewry discusses the theory and model of minhagim, using the Mishnah Berurah and the Arukh Hashulkhan, analyzes rabbinic texts concerned with custom, and describes current rituals from a socio-anthropological viewpoint.

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Information about recently published titles at our press. alFred dreyFuS

Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash By Norman Simms ISBN 978-1-936235-39-1 (cloth) $55.00, 300 pp.

“Simms illuminates the Dreyfus affair in a new and fresh way, showing how it not only shattered French culture, but also shattered and questioned deep layers of modern Jewish existence and memory. He uses different symbolic forms and shifts freely from pshat (simple meanings) to drash (involved explanations), with hints for all of us who want to decipher the sod, or secret. This inspiring method incorporates historical, psychological, and cultural knowledge in the field of Jewish studies, presenting an important experiment and a great challenge that proves fruitful by inspiring us to ask new questions, see new links, and interact with pre-rabbinical and rabbinical traditions.” —Etan Bloom Author of Arthur Ruppin and the Production of PreIsraeli Culture

wiThouT red STringS or holy waTer Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah By H. Norman Strickman ISBN 978-1-936235-48-3 (cloth) $48.00, 175 pp.

“Rabbi Strickman has written an excellent, wellwritten and thoughtful book recuperating Maimonides as a medieval rationalist. Strickman’s thoroughness, rabbinic expertise, and commitment to the rationalist streams within medieval Jewish philosophical tradition make this an outstanding work.” —David Levy

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Jewish Book World the quarterly publication of the Jewish Book Council

Jewish Book Council Award Stickers: Winner: Black ink on gold foil

features

on the cover

emerging voices

National Jewish Book Award Winners

Mary Glickman Renita Last

book profiles 34

Lit Crits

They were Jewish intellectual household names in the 1940s and '50s; two new books show why Kazin and Trilling are still worth reading. Esther Nussbaum Alan Cooper

Tales of Two Cities Jews flocked to Kiev fleeing persecution and seeking economic opportunity; they fled Bialystok for much the same reasons. Robert Moses Shapiro

spring 5772/2012: vol. 30 no. 1

4 50 60 68

Graphic Examples Three strikingly original illustrated narratives show that comics are not just for kids. Sam White Alyssa Berlin Wendy Wasman

departments

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Booknotes Index

22 JBW Book Club

Recommendations 64 Contributors *[e] denotes e-book is available

The Sami Rohr Library

of recorded

Yiddish Books

Available from the Jewish Book Council The historic compilation of Yiddish classics, read aloud by native Yiddish speakers at Montrealâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jewish Public Library, and presented by the National Yiddish Book Center, preserves complete, unabridged books on CD. Thirty titles are now available, including works by: Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, I.L. Peretz, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and I.B. Singer, among others. For more information, call 212-201-2920 or email jbc@jewishbooks.org

Only $160 (plus shipping) for 30 titles on 215 CDs with liner notes, valued at $1200. A perfect gift for loved ones or donation for a local synagogue or senior citizen home. This project is subsidized by a generous grant from the Rohr family of Miami.

review highlights 26

BROADWAY BABY Alan Shapiro Reviewed by Eleanor Ehrenkranz

fiction

ORDINARY JEWS Yehoshue Perle Shirley Kumove, trans. Reviewed by Maron L. Waxman

nonfiction

cooking & food

FEED ME BUBBE: RECIPES AND WISDOM FROM AMERICA’S FAVORITE ONLINE GRANDMOTHER Avrom Honig and Bubbe Reviewed by Maron L. Waxman

THE SACRED TABLE: CREATING A JEWISH FOOD ETHIC Mary L. Zamore, ed.; Eric H. Yoffie, fwd.; Nigel Savage, preface Reviewed by Barbara M. Bibel

autobiography & memoir

GOOD LIVING STREET: PORTRAIT OF A PATRON FAMILY, VIENNA 1900 Tim Bonyhady Reviewed by Barbara Andrews

LUCKY BRUCE: A LITERARY MEMOIR Bruce Jay Friedman Reviewed by Alan Cooper

biography

LEON TROTSKY: A REVOLUTIONARY'S LIFE Joshua Rubenstein Reviewed by Bettina E. Berch

contemporary jewish life & practice

37 37

CREATING LIVELY PASSOVER SEDERS: A SOURCEBOOK OF ENGAGING TALES, TEXTS & ACTIVITIES David Arnow, Ph.D. Reviewed by Maron L. Waxman ONE HUNDRED GREAT JEWISH BOOKS: THREE MILLENNIA OF JEWISH CONVERSATION Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman Reviewed by Eliyahu Rosen

UNTIL THE DAWN’S LIGHT Aharon Appelfeld Jeffrey M. Green, trans. Reviewed by Ruth Seif

THE PRAGUE CEMETERY Umberto Eco Richard Dixon, trans. Reviewed by Jack Fischel

american jewish studies MUSLIMS AND JEWS IN AMERICA: COMMONALITIES, CONTENTIONS, AND COMPLEXITIES Reza Aslan and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper, eds. Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman

modern jewish thought & experience

HOW JUDAISM BECAME A RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION TO MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT Leora Batnitzky Reviewed by Wallace Greene

OPEN MINDED TORAH: OF IRONY, FUNDAMENTALISM AND LOVE William Kolbrener Reviewed by Jeffrey H. Bogurksy

history

poetry

“A” Louis Zukofsky Reviewed by Jason Myers

LOVE’S VOICE: 72 KABBALISTIC HAIKU Richard Zimler Reviewed by Debbie Schoeneman

JEWS AND BOOZE: BECOMING AMERICAN IN THE AGE OF PROHIBITION Marni Davis Reviewed by Edward S. Shapiro

holocaust

HITLER’S FOREIGN EXECUTIONERS: EUROPE’S DIRTY SECRET Christopher Hale Reviewed by Jack Fischel

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ: A TRUE STORY OF WORLD WAR II Denis Avey with Rob Broomby Reviewed by Carl J. Rheins

israel studies

SEEING ISRAELI AND JEWISH DANCE Judith Brin Ingber, ed. Reviewed by Linda F. Burghardt

visual arts

BUILDING AFTER AUSCHWITZ: JEWISH ARCHITECTURE AND THE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Reviewed by Maron L. Waxman

women’s studies

TODAY I AM A WOMAN: STORIES OF BAT MITZVAH AROUND THE WORLD Barbara Vinick & Shulamit Reinharz, eds. Reviewed by Carol Poll

editor’s note

id Napoleon Bonaparte create denominational Judaism? Odd as the question might seem, Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion at Princeton University, makes the argument that in Napoleon’s various decrees, he both emancipated and afforded citizenship to French Jews. This, Batnitzky claims, was a causative influence on the creation of Jewish denominations. In her recently published book, How Judaism Became a Religion, Professor Batnitzky addresses the question, What is Judaism? That is, is it a religion, a culture, a race, a combination or something altogether different? Fundamental as this question may be to us, until the nineteenth century, it was a question of little import. For millennia, Jews lived within, but yet apart from, the prevailing culture of their residency. They spoke their own language, wore their own garb, established their own cultural norms and adjudicated their own disputes, and all of this in a Rabbinic tradition based on halacha—Jewish law. With French Emancipation, Jews were free to stay or to leave their communal confines without having to abandon their Judaism. Moreover, perhaps for the first time in all of Jewish history, Jews were able to define what Judaism meant to them personally. This was an extraordinary shift. And, this change took on institutional dimensions as the Enlightenment moved to Germany. The first significant development here was the rise of Reform Judaism under the leadership of Abraham Geiger. Reform Judaism was not just a break from the cultural confines of the traditional Jewish community but it was also a declaration that Judaism was something that could be personally defined. Ironically, perhaps the biggest move in the direction of personal choice was not from the left but from the right. As Batnitzky argues, Samson Rafael Hirsch, an important Talmudic scholar to the Torah observant community of Frankfurt and chief antagonist of Geiger, inadvertently, or perhaps, inevitably contributed in his own way to redefining Judaism. By moving his followers away from the communal institutional life of Germany, which had become increasingly influenced by the mores of the broader Gentile society, Hirsch, paradoxically, confirmed the notion that somehow one’s Judaism could be

Jewish Book World

spring 5772/2012

chosen. Although Professor Batnitzky focuses mainly on the early years of the German Enlightenment, she also looks eastward to the contemporaneous rise of Hasidism—and the choices it presented—and, she looks forward in time to the contemporary Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere. She examines how their definitions of Judaism have been influenced by the seminal events of the nineteenth century Enlightenment. Of course, not everyone shares Professor Batnitzky’s thesis that the gift of freedom of choice was the defining event in the definition of Judaism. A gentler, more evolutionary view is presented in Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman’s new book One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation. In his introduction, Rabbi Hoffman, a prominent Reform rabbi, also asks what Judaism is. Certainly, more than merely a religion, Hoffman says. But it’s not a nationality (the creation of the State of Israel notwithstanding). In fact, Rabbi Hoffman actually sidesteps the question. “I don’t know what Judaism is,” confesses Hoffman, “but I do know that Jews love books.” “And books,” says Rabbi Hoffman, “are a conversation… And if we can isolate and study the greatest of those books, we can recreate the conversation that is Judaism, its history, its philosophy, its culture and ultimately, its definition.” Rabbi Hoffman’s book is more a survey course than an-in depth examination of the Jewish canon. But it does direct one’s thinking and inspire one’s curiosity. The conversation begins with the Bible, posits Hoffman, and then is continued with the Talmud, Rashi, and other commentaries. The Siddur codifies our conversation with the Almighty. The conversation broadens in the Middle Ages with the introduction of the philosophy of the Duties of the Heart, the Kuzari, and the Rambam. Yet, Rabbi Hoffman and Professor Batnitzky do share one observation. With the advent of the Enlightenment the conversation exploded, as freedom and choice inspired philosophy, literature, verse, and political discourse. And so the conversation continues to this day, as Rabbi Hoffman brings in the contemporary— Philip Roth, Joseph Telushkin, Amos Oz—into our conversation. Jewish Book World is dedicated to this conversation. It is our mission to help you navigate it. We hope you enjoy the books we have highlighted today, and in the rest of this issue. And we hope that you keep reading. When there are readers there is conversation.

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Jewish Book Council is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1943 to promote the publishing, writing, and reading of quality books of Jewish interest. In sponsoring Jewish Book World the Council aims to meet the need for a journal devoted to providing thoughtful reviews of new Jewish books and features on the author and literary scene. It is our hope that Jewish Book World will be a valued resource in navigating today’s exciting Jewish literary scene. The Council is also the sponsor of Jewish Book Month, the National Jewish Book Awards, the Jewish Book NETWORK, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and other programs and activities.

Staff

Carol E. Kaufman Editor Naomi Firestone-Teeter Managing Editor Michal Malen Children’s Book Editor Dani Crickman Art Director

Jewish Book Council

President Vice-President Secretary Honorary Chairman of the Board Director Carolyn Starman Hessel Miri R. Pomerantz Dauber Program Director JBC Network Associate Joyce Lit Program Assistant Sharon Bruce Intern Samuel Liebmann Lawrence J. Krule Judith Lieberman Mimi S. Frank Henry Everett (z”l)

Board of Directors

Elisa Spungen Bildner Ruth Legow Tracy Brown Dan Levine Edith Everett William Liss-Levinson Paul A. Flexner Stuart Matlins Ellen Frankel Deborah Miller Samuel G. Freedman Marcia W. Posner Sharon Friedman Julie Potiker Ari L. Goldman Austin Ratner Blu Greenberg Steven Siegel (z”l) Stephan Gross A.A. Steinberger Rae Gurewitsch Livia S. Straus Miriam Holmes Joseph Telushkin Altie Karper Jonathan Tepperman Francine Klagsbrun Alan J. Wiener Myra Kraft (z”l) Bernard Weinflash Carmel R. Krauss Jane Weitzman Jewish Book World (ISSN: 1083-8341) is published quarterly by the Jewish Book Council, 520 8th Avenue, 4th floor, New York, NY 10018, (212)201-2920; jewishbookcouncil.org; email: jbc@jewishbooks.org. The subscription rate is $36.00 a year or $12.50 for an individual issue. Copyright © 2012, by Jewish Book Council. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Jewish Book Council, 520 8th Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018. The articles and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the view of the Board of Directors, or any member thereof, or any particular editor or staff member. Advertising in Jewish Book World does not necessarily imply editorial endorsement. To advertise in Jewish Book World, please email naomi@jewishbooks.org or call (212) 201-2921. Claims on orders that have not been received must be made within two months of the date of publication.

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The st N The National Jewish Book Awards is the longest running North American awards program of its kind and is recognized as the most prestigious. The awards, presented by category, are designed to give

recognition to outstanding

books, to stimulate writers

to further literary creativity

and to encourage the reading of

books of merit.

National Jewish Book Awards The following synopses of the NJBA winners and finalists were written by either the members of the judging panels in each category or the publisher of the title.

Everett Family Foundation 2011 Jewish Book of the Year Award Jerusalem: The Biography SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Hardcover 688 pp. $35.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0307266514

imon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: A Biography is one of those books that comes along too rarely: a brilliantly insightful, exhaustively researched work of history that is also a colorful and gripping entertainment. Montefiore covers a staggering swathe of time—3,000 years—to bring us a deeply informed account of one of the world’s most important, most bitterly contested, and most intriguing cities. Perhaps most remarkable is how evenhanded the book is. Its purpose is neither to inflame nor to defend, but rather to enrich a reader’s understanding—any reader, of any background, whether Jewish or Christian or Muslim or any other. It is a gargantuan undertaking, but Montefiore met this challenge and went beyond it. From the moment we started reading Jerusalem, we were absorbed and impressed, and we knew that it deserved the highest honor that the Jewish Book Council could bestow. © Ian Jones

national jewish book awards American Jewish Studies

Anthologies and Collections

Winner

Celebrate 350 Award

The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education

Gender and Jewish History

JONATHAN B. KRASNER Brandeis University Press Hardcover 512 pp. $39.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1584659839

MARION A. KAPLAN & DEBORAH DASH MOORE, EDS. Indiana University Press Hardcover 428 pp. $27.95 ISBN: 978-0253222633

great story teller, Krasner masterfully brings to life the careers of Samson Benderly and his protégés, painting a vivid picture of the emergence of American Jewish education in the twentieth century. Synthesizing prodigious amounts of information from diverse sources, Krasner creates a rich, nuanced portrait of Benderly and the New York Bureau of Jewish Education that he directed. Readers will find themselves swept up by Benderly’s zeal as he and his students work tirelessly to professionalize the field and infuse Jewish education with Hebrew language, Jewish culture, and Zionism. Thanks to Krasner’s masterful account, readers will appreciate as never before the breadth, scope and impact of Benderly and his “boys”—including several “girls”—and the revolution they wrought in American Jewish education.

Finalist The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters: Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity, 1843-1914

his admirable volume of Jewish Women’s history is a tribute to the late Paula E. Hyman, whose research and publications virtually created the framework for this field of study. The very useful introduction by the editors provides a context for the essays that follow. Organized into three sections, “Women’s Culture in Jewish History,” “Gendered Dimensions of Religious Change,” and “Jewish Politics in American Accents,” the essays span in time and range from a consideration of the late nineteenth century Russian Jewish writer Paula Wengeroff, to a study of a new coffee culture and its social implications for women, to the popularization of Kabbalah in the late twentieth century, to the American scene and Margaret Sanger’s movement for birth control, the growing professionalization of women artists and photographers, and the influence of Jewish women on the “migration” of their communities from the city to the suburb in the years after World War II. An afterword provides a summary of Paula Hyman’s writings on the history of the Jews in modern France.

Finalists Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible

CORNELIA WILHELM Wayne State University Press Hardcover 361 pp. $44.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0814334034

MICHAH GOTTLIEB, ED. Brandeis University Press Hardcover 296 pp. $26.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1584656852

n this richly-researched scholarly volume, Cornelia Wilhelm rethinks the early history of the B’nai B’rith and its lesser-known sibling, the Independent Order of True Sisters. Her abundant efforts in the archives are readily apparent. Wilhelm has recovered a slew of German-language sources that force us to reconsider the very nature of the B’nai B’rith in its formative stages of development. We now know much more about the context from which it emerged, the motives of its founders, its role in the shaping of Jewish identity in America, the opportunities it presented to women, its relationship with Reform Judaism, and the social and communal roles it filled. This book is a significant contribution to the history of Jewish immigrant life in America, substantially increasing our breadth of knowledge of the dynamic organizational world created by the men and women of the B’nai B’rith and the True Sisters.

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n this volume, Michah Gottlieb, assistant professor of Jewish history at New York University, collects a wide range of German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelsson’s seminal writings, many of which appear here for the first time in English translation. Ranging from polemical essays to writings on the study of the Hebrew Bible and philosophy, Gottlieb has assembled a scholarly, yet accessible, collection of Mendelssohn’s works. This volume is a valuable research tool and can be adapted for use in the high school or college classroom. In addition, Gottlieb has included an introduction entitled “Moses Mendelssohn and the Project of Modern Jewish Philosophy,” in which he provides critical biographical and historical background to assist the reader in appreciating the contributions of Moses Mendelssohn to the world of philosophy and Judaism in the eighteenth century.

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national jewish book awards Portraits in Literature: The Jews of Poland

Finalists

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

HAVA BROMBERG BEN-ZVI, ED. Vallentine Mitchell Hardcover 380 pp. $79.95 ISBN: 978-0853038733

ortraits in Literature is a compelling anthology of writings reflecting Jewish life in Poland from its beginnings, during the Holocaust period, and its almost total annihilation during World War II, ending with stories of renewal in America and Israel through the tales of survivors. The book contains many perspectives, including those of women and children, presented in their short stories, memoirs, reports, excerpts of novels, folk tales, and poetry. This remarkable literary collection weaves a rare and touching tapestry of our rich Jewish heritage combined with the vibrancy of Polish Jewish culture. The editor, Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi, survived World War II in Poland and came to Israel in 1946, thus experiencing the challenges and joy of the new State of Israel. Her choice of writings and stories recaptures this unique period in Jewish history with unforgettable literary memories and emotional power. This book is an exceptional resource for all who seek to explore Jewish life and culture in bygone worlds of Polish Jewish history through literature.

Biography, Autobiography and Memoir

VIVIAN GORNICK Yale University Press Hardcover 165 pp. $25.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0300137262

his biography has the advantage of achieving brevity without sacrificing the essence of Emma Goldman’s life—an existential trajectory which included leftist-feminist activism, struggles with integrating Marxism and anarchism, and theories of sexual radicalism with the desires of the individual heart. Gornick’s look at Goldman, like many of the other studies in the Yale University series on Jewish figures of significance, successfully skirts the traditional, and often oppressively fact-laden biography, by reflecting on the meaning and consequences of a life devoted to achieving unfettered personal freedom. Although unique in many ways, Goldman’s life is representative of a particular strain of Jewish immigrant secularized thought and action. Gornick might have done more with this, but the connection between radicalism and Jewishness (no matter how transformed or reconstructed) can be found in this book, which also looks concisely and incisively at Goldman’s often neglected activities and relationships after her deportation to Russia. Moreover, Emma Goldman reads well and is more accessible than earlier biographies of this quintessential American anarchist.

Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism, and Love from His Extraordinary Son

The Krauss Family Award in Memory of Simon and Shulamith (Soﬁ) Goldberg

Winner MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus ART SPIEGELMAN Pantheon/Random House Hardcover 300 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0375423949

TOM FIELDS-MEYER Penguin Paperback 256 pp. $15.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0451234636

etaMaus is as brilliant and paradigm-shattering as Spiegelman’s award-winning modern classic, Maus. It is extremely valuable for its insights into the artistic process, and it contextualizes a life of creative imagination and the haunting questions that surround and penetrate it. Indeed, this is a work of genius. Even if it were only a memoir about writing a memoir, it would stand as extraordinary in itself. But in new and striking ways the book (though we need another, richer name for this piece of art) includes, through text, drawings, photos, and oral testimony, a grappling with the questions that surrounded Maus and persistently followed in its wake: Why the Holocaust, why mice, why comics? Spiegelman not only confronts and wrestles with these questions, he also tries to tell us something about the meaning of Jewishness across the generations. He often succeeds.

ollowing Ezra, Tom Fields-Meyer’s extraordinary memoir of parenting a son with autism, is not only deeply affecting but profoundly instructive. The increasing incidence and prevalence of autism demands that we better understand this diagnosis, and Fields-Meyer makes a substantial contribution in this regard. With straightforward, accessible prose, keen observations, and a talent for narrative, Fields-Meyer brings warmth and empathy to the portrayal of autism. His sure-handed, engaging stories about his son help us to consider aspects of the condition that belong not to the spectrum of pathology but to the larger spectrum of normal psychology. For example, Fields-Meyer notes not only Ezra’s difficulties with sensory integration, but also the understandable anxiety those difficulties produce in the autistic child; he understands many of Ezra’s obsessional behaviors as responses to this anxiety. This empathy, partly inspired by the Jewish value of tolerating—even celebrating—differences, has clearly helped Fields-Meyer to communicate with his son and it ought to help us all to understand and © Joanna Wilson connect with the autistic population. Photography

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spring 5772/2012

Jewish Book World

national jewish book awards Children’s and Young Adult Literature Winner Deadly

labors, to the dismal work camp, and then to the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, Dina’s strength of will and ingenuity keep her alive. In the midst of the terror she finds friendship and love, and she survives to marry and raise her own family in the United States. In the Face of Evil is compelling testimony, an important book for teen-agers and riveting reading for any age.

Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein

JULIE CHIBBARO Atheneum/Simon & Schuster Hardcover 304 pp. $16.99 [e] ISBN: 978-0689857386

SUSAN GOLDMAN RUBIN Charlesbridge Hardcover 178 pp. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1580893442

eadly is the story of Typhoid Mary, who sickened hundreds and killed dozens of New Yorkers with typhoid fever in the early 1900s. In Julie Chibbaro’s fictionalized account of how Mary Mallon was identified and quarantined, we meet sixteen-year-old Prudence Galewski, a young Jewish American girl who “wants to do something astonishing” despite “being a girl.” She lives with her widowed mother, a midwife in the neighborhood, whom she assists. Her father disappeared during the Spanish American War after her brother died from an untreated infection. Frustrated by a school that does not challenge her intellect and eager to learn how the body fights disease, she gets a job helping the head epidemiologist at the Department of Health and Sanitation to investigate the cause of the City’s deadly typhoid outbreaks. In an exciting race against time, she interviews family members and victims with him, recording data and mapping the path of the disease. They trace it back to the cook, Mary Mallon, and her popular peach ice cream. The theory of a healthy carrier of a deadly disease was novel, and Prudence and the members of the Department are severely criticized for incarcerating an “innocent person.” The experience reinforces Prudence’s interest in medicine, and, with the encouragement of a female physician in the Department, she studies for the medical school entrance exam. This compelling adventure story, showing an early triumph of epidemiology, will engage young teens.

Finalists In the Face of Evil: Based on the Life of Dina Frydman Balbien TEMA N. MERBACK FriesenPress Hardcover 404 pp. $29.99 [e] ISBN: 978-1770670815

n this remarkably vivid and authentic novel based on the Holocaust experiences of her mother, Tema Merback has given us an unforgettable account of loss and survival. The reader is drawn into the loving warmth and Jewish traditions of young Dina’s prosperous family and the vibrant life of their Jewish community in Radom, Poland. We experience, with Dina, the invasion of Hitler’s forces, the disintegration of the Jewish community, and the gradual disappearance of her parents, her siblings, and almost all of her beloved extended family. From the ghetto and the factory where thirteen-year-old Dina

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eonard Bernstein said life without music is unthinkable. This is the story of how he overcame the obstacles that blocked his path so he could have the life he wanted. His Jewish family did not expect or wish him to be a musician. His father wanted him to work in the family business, The Bernstein Hair Company. Music Was It shows how Leonard, young, gifted, and persistent, found the way to study and play the music that was so important to him. The climax of the book reveals how Leonard Bernstein, in 1943, was given an unexpected and unbelievable opportunity. This American born, American trained, young Jewish man became world famous and recognized as the musician he had longed to be. His hope was to introduce the joy of classical music to a young audience, and in 1957, in tandem with the New York Philharmonic orchestra, his Young People’s Concerts fulfilled that hope.

To Hope and Back: The Journey of the St. Louis KATHY KACER Second Story Press Hardcover 200 pp. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1897187968

his book is based on the true story of the 1939 sailing of the St. Louis, a large ocean liner, and its 907 Jewish passengers from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba. It is told through the lens of two children traveling with their families. In alternating chapters, Lisa in first class and Sol in tourist class express their fears, hopes, and dreams of a new life in America. While Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda rages, optimism turns to despair as the ship’s passengers are refused entry into Cuba, the United States, or Canada. Unsure of their fate, a committee of passengers is formed to negotiate with immigration authorities of these Western governments and deal with the anxious would-be refugees. The Captain, Gustav Schroeder, is forced to turn the ship around and return to Europe, all the while frantically working with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to secure landing permits for the passengers in countries other than Nazi Germany. The book will provide many opportunities for discussion on prejudice. The photographs and primary source documents throughout immerse the reader in this tragic event, providing a deeper understanding of this episode in our history.

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national jewish book awards

Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice

The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic

Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award

MARY L. ZAMORE Central Conference of American Rabbis Paperback 519 pp. $19.95 ISBN: 978-0-88123-170-0

Winner A Guide to Jewish Practice: Everyday Living RABBI DAVID A. TEUTSCH RRC Press Hardcover 636 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-0938945185

hether it’s questions related to how to navigate family relationships, local community relations, or issues of global economic justice, generations of Jews have sought insight from Jewish texts and traditions. In A Guide to Jewish Practice, Rabbi David A. Teutsch has written an important contribution to the canon of books intended to help thoughtful individuals of all ages understand and apply Jewish wisdom to everyday living. Weaving together centuries of text, multitudes of perspectives and practical guidance, Rabbi Teutsch has written a book that is both substantial and accessible and one that belongs on the bookshelf of every individual seeking to understand and enrich their Jewish practice.

here is a new movement gaining momentum in the Jewish community: the Jewish Food Movement. In The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic, Mary Zamore assembles a variety of voices, from rabbis to historians, to help us navigate through this new terrain. The compendium encompasses such far-reaching sensibilities as ethical vegetarianism, kashrut from a Reform perspective, and feeding the hungry in our midst. It asks provocative questions like, Hechsher— who decides what is kosher? And can there be a kosher Christmas dinner? It does not shy away from current issues like the Postville meatpacking scandal, eating disorders, and genetically modified foods. Bottom line, The Sacred Table is intended to help individual Jews make informed choices about how food can contribute to their health, lifestyle, and identity.

Fiction

JJ Greenberg Memorial Award

Winner

Finalists

Until the Dawn’s Light

The Koren Rosh HaShana Mahzor

AHARON APPELFELD JEFFREY M. GREEN, TRANS. Schocken Books/Random House Hardcover 240 pp. $26.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-8052-4179-2

RABBI JONATHAN SACKS Koren Publishers Jerusalem Hardcover 1118 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-9653013421

or many, the traditional (Orthodox) Rosh HaShanah liturgy has been out of reach or impenetrable. Either we are not comfortable with the Hebrew text or are put off by the stilted translations. Even those comfortable with the Hebrew are often unable to decode the subtle poetry, complex references, and intricate wordplay. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Mahzor succeeds in placing the Rosh HaShanah liturgy comfortably in the hand of anyone who is interested. It requires no knowledge of Hebrew or prior familiarity with the Rosh HaShanah liturgy. Rabbi Sacks takes the reader gently by the hand as his powerful introduction decodes the meaning and intention of Rosh HaShanah and places the holiday within Jewish thought and history. The Hebrew translation sparkles. It is straight forward, choosing the best modern English, without ever distancing itself from the Hebrew itself. Rabbi Sacks explains the essence of the holiday: Life is short. Life is a gift from God. Life is sweet and bitter. Life should not be wasted. This Mahzor is an extraordinary contribution to the spiritual journey of the Jewish People.

haron Appelfeld’s Until the Dawn’s Light is a beautiful, spare novel about the impossible choices faced by victims of abuse. Set in early twentieth-century Austria, and focusing on a bright Jewish girl who converts to Catholicism to marry a young man expelled from her high school, the book offers a heart-rending examination of the ethical complexities of self-defense, and explores the ability of writing itself to explain, if not justify, what might otherwise seem to be reprehensible actions. Narrated in transfixing, almost fable-like prose, which has been masterfully translated by Jeffrey M. Green, this novel—like so much of Appelfeld’s oeuvre—resonates with the history of Jewish suffering and resilience in the twentieth century. © Frédéric Brenner

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Jewish Book World

national jewish book awards Finalists

The Vices

Life on Sandpaper YORAM KANIUK ANTHONY BERRIS, TRANS. Dalkey Archive Press Paperback 424 pp. $15.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1564786135

whirlwind of art, music, and lust, Life on Sandpaper is Yoram Kaniuk’s overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the ‘50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Willem de Kooning. In driving prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk’s memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that defined Greenwich Village. Kaniuk’s stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this was his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.

LAWRENCE DOUGLAS Other Press Hardcover 352 pp. $15.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1590514153

awrence Douglas’s second novel The Vices is a wry and farcical tale of familial intrigue, academic folly, and the construction of identity. The story follows Oliver Vice, star philosopher and public intellectual, hired to instant tenure at a prestigious New England liberal arts college. When Oliver goes missing one stormy night on a cruise ship, the unnamed narrator—colleague and confidante to Oliver—embarks on an obsessive search to discover the fate of his vanished friend. But what starts as a case of literary sleuthing to locate Oliver’s whereabouts unravels into a subtle examination of the inherent illusions that accompany admiration. © Fred Ward

History

Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award

Winner

One More River

The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival

MARY GLICKMAN Open Road Integrated Media Paperback 266 pp. $24.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1453220276

t’s 1962, and Mickey Moe Levy’s quest to discover his father’s identity takes him deep into the backwoods of Mississippi and Tennessee, where he meets with danger and mayhem at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan at the dawn of the civil rights era amidst the devastation caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Mary Glickman’s One More River tells a sweeping tale of ordinary men caught in the midst of worldshattering moments. She explores their lives and the loves that transform them during the greatest natural disaster in American history, and the greatest social revolution of our time.

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spring 5772/2012

HIRSH GOODMAN PublicAffairs Books Hardcover 256 pp. $26.99 [e] ISBN: 978-1586485290

fter almost sixty-four years since the establishment of the third commonwealth and the creation of the State of Israel, we all know that there is no State that is given on a Silver Platter. The State of Israel keeps surprising us with its accomplishments and endeavors. Nevertheless, Hirsh Goodman, in his brilliant capacity of looking at the Jewish State full of challenges, allows us to enter a universe of hesitation. Is this State going to survive? What is the price for its survival? Goodman enchants us with the vicissitudes of Israel’s new challenges. The Haredi (right wing Orthodox) community presents a barrier to the societal integration, the “neighborhood” in the Middle East that surrounds this tiny country threatens its existence on daily basis. Hirsh Goodman compels us to think in depth about the fragility of Israel’s reality. If you are ready for a treat…pick up this book and be © Riki Rosen ready to confront the truth.

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national jewish book awards

Finalists

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

Holocaust Winner

Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice

ADINA HOFFMAN & PETER COLE Schocken Books/Nextbook Press/ Random House Hardcover 304 pp. $16.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0805242584

he retrieval and study of ancient texts has always been a Jewish tradition, sometimes as an exercise in piety, sometimes as a matter of scholarship and, more recently, as a component of nation-building. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole honors all three by showing how a series of tireless and visionary investigators succeeded in restoring to us an invaluable cache of manuscripts that have come to be called “The Living Sea Scrolls.” The tale is told with scholarly discipline but also with a rich appreciation of the inner passions that drove Solomon Schechter and others to piece together a lost version of Jewish literature out of scraps of paper whose historical significance was far from obvious and to thereby fill in the blanks © Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole in Jewish history.

The Unmaking of Israel GERSHOM GORENBERG HarperCollins Hardcover 336 pp. $25.99 [e] ISBN: 978-0061985089

fter making aliyah in the 1980’s, Gershom Gorenberg quickly became one of Israel’s most perceptive journalists and analysts. In recent years, he has reached into the archives to become one of Israel’s most insightful popular historians as well. Now he has written a vitally important history of Israel’s present-day situation: The Unmaking of Israel. Writing as an insider-outsider – an American who has become an Israeli, an Orthodox Jew outside the Orthodox mainstream—Gorenberg brings together a mass of historical evidence to elucidate three critical developments in Israeli life: the creation of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and the associated transformation of religious Zionism into a messianic ultra-nationalism; the massive expansion of Israel’s haredi population; and the mainstreaming of extremist attitudes toward Israel’s Arab citizens. In Gorenberg’s view, these developments taken together threaten to undermine Israel’s fragile democracy—and he marshalls powerful, detailed arguments showing how they have already begun to do so in Israel’s government, on Israel’s streets, and even in the army. Agree or disagree, this is a book that everyone who cares about Israel needs to read.

GERALD STEINACHER Oxford University Press Hardcover 400 pp. $34.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0199576869

erald Steinacher’s Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice makes an important contribution to understanding how Nazis, SS-members, and their collaborators fled Europe—and war crimes charges—after World War II, and made their way through Italy to refuge overseas. Steinacher scours archival materials across several countries to examine the escape routes and network of assistance that enabled war criminals to flee Germany and Eastern Europe, and establish new lives in Argentina as well as other nations. He looks at the aid provided by fellow Nazis in helping each other elude capture, as well as the role played by international organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Catholic Church, and Western intelligence agencies, in facilitating Nazis’ escape. Among the most disturbing of Steinacher’s findings is the manner in which these bodies put larger institutional objectives and fear of an ascendant Communism above moral considerations and the capture and prosecution of war criminals. Nazis on the Run is critical to understanding the lingering shadow of the Holocaust, and the manner in which the war’s injustices did not end with the fall of the Nazi regime.

Finalists The Eichmann Trial DEBORAH LIPSTADT Schocken Books/Nextbook Press Hardcover 272 pp. $24.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0805242607

eborah Lipstadt, in The Eichmann Trial, has given us an incisive analysis of both the trial itself and its after effects. She raises anew the moral questions engendered by the case and presents a nuanced, well-researched, and wellwritten narrative. Her critique of the conduct of the trial and of Hannah Arendt’s reportage is thoughtful and fascinating. This is also an account of the crimes, capture, confinement, appeal of the verdict, and execution of Eichmann, thereby placing the trial itself in historical context. In that analysis Lipstadt examines Simon Wiesenthal’s claims of involvement in Eichmann’s capture as well as the American Jewish organizational establishment’s attitude towards the trial. Her most penetrating criticism, however, is justifiably reserved for Hannah Arendt, who not only got many facts wrong, but wasn’t even present in the courtroom for most of the trial. In sum, this is an excellent work of historical and political analysis. © Emory University

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Jewish Book World

national jewish book awards Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

Finalists

Lipman Pike: America’s First Home Run King

DAVID SHNEER Rutgers University Press Hardcover 304 pp. $39.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0813548845

avid Shneer’s Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust is an engrossing account of the Jewish photographers who dominated photojournalism in the early decades of the Soviet Union and who were the first to document the war crimes of the Holocaust. These young Yiddish-speaking men had left the provinces to seek their fortunes in the big cities and, in disproportionate numbers, entered the new field of photojournalism, feeding both the news magazines of the day and the Soviet propaganda apparatus. Despite the Stalinist purges, by the time the USSR entered into war with Nazi Germany, fifty to sixty percent of the photojournalists covering the war were Jewish. Holocaust liberation photography as a genre was virtually created by Soviet Jewish photographers who arrived at the scenes of German mass killings as early as 1942 on the heels of the Red Army. With sympathy and understanding, Shneer provides a penetrating examination of the conflicted identities of these “new Soviet Jews”—when responding to the Nazi horrors before them, and when being targets themselves of Soviet anti-Semitic persecution. This ground-breaking book is illustrated with startling canonical images of World War II (the three most famous Soviet photographs of the war were taken by Jews) as well as never-before-published photographs that Shneer amassed from photographers’ families, collectors, and private archives.

Illustrated Children’s Book Winner

Louis Posner Memorial Award

The Golem’s Latkes ADAPTED BY ERIC A. KIMMEL AARON JASINSKI, ILLUS. Marshall Cavendish Hardcover 38 pp. $17.99 [e] ISBN: 978-0-7614-5904-0

RICHARD MICHELSON ZACHARY PULLEN, ILLUS. Sleeping Bear Press Hardcover 32 pp. $16.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1-58536-465-7

ritically acclaimed poet, history buff, and versatile wordsmith Richard Michelson steps back in time again to celebrate the remarkable life of “one of baseball’s greatest sluggers,” Lipman Pike. Overlooked by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and even forgotten by the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, young readers will be captivated by Michelson’s attempt to restore our nation’s first homerun king to his rightful place in the annals of sports history. Pike broke new ground as America’s first “paid professional baseball player,” and Michelson stays true to his story. His prose is fresh, yet crackles with the authenticity of another era, playing off well against Zachary Pullen’s fine illustrations. Lipman Pike was a proud Jewish boy who stayed true to his big league dreams, against the odds, facing down the antiSemitism of his day both on and off the diamond.

Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime GLORIA SPIELMAN MANON GAUTHIER, ILLUS. Kar-Ben Publishing Hardcover 32 pp. $17.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-7613-3961-8 ime would have been a lost art if it hadn’t been for Marcel Marceau who took it to a whole new level of mastery. Gloria Spielman introduces young readers to Marceau, the very gifted and giving man behind the “white-painted” face. Spielman’s accessible narrative is historically embedded and richly descriptive of the art form of mime. There is a larger message underlying the story as well—the power of hard work and perseverance in achieving one’s dreams. Manon Gauthier’s quasi-whimsical illustrations are captivating and add to the book’s approachability.

he Golem’s Latkes, adapted by Eric A. Kimmel, is a delightful retelling of the classic story of the Prague Golem. In a suspenseful and humorous take on the Golem narrative, Kimmel tells the story of how the Golem—a creature Rabbi Judah created out of clay—helps get ready for the first night of Chanukah, and what happens when he takes it a bit too far! Aaron Jasinski’s rich and vivid illustrations lend a fairy tale-like quality to the story, which together with the enchanting text make this fresh rendition of a classic tale relevant and engaging for young readers today.

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national jewish book awards

Modern Jewish Thought and Experience

Dorot Foundation Award in Memory of Joy Ungerleider Mayerson

Winner

played out by man, but without looking directly at them. Steiner goes deep without getting graphic; he will not taint language with descriptions that cannot match the schrecklichkeit of reality. He skillfully raises that unsaid question to the surface as we continue through history, repeating “never again” like a mantra that can lose its meaning—until we read Disenchantment, and our conviction is renewed. ©Joel Ross Photography

The Choice to Be: A Jewish Path to Self and Spirituality

The Koren Rosh HaShana Mahzor

RABBI JEREMY KAGAN Feldheim Publishers Hardcover 452 pp. $24.99 [e] ISBN: 978-1-59826-821-8

he Choice to Be: A Jewish Path to Self and Spirituality offers the reader a path of immersion into the living waters of Torah. Like a good poem whose language reaches beyond description to become the actual event, Rabbi Jeremy Kagan’s book, through metaphor, through definitions of spiritual concepts, through building a bridge and a ladder from the physical to the spiritual, and for presenting the human need for these connections, shows how to see and hear and do. Aharon Feldman, in the foreword to Rabbi Kagan’s first book, The Jewish Self, says, “This book is both a remarkable Torah perspective on Jewish history and a deeply philosophical work…” The Choice to Be, rich in these attributes, is also rich in insights regarding “the evolving relationship between God and the Jewish people,” a history of our past spiritual exiles to our present modern exile from the Creator. The author gives a beautiful explanation of the soul and its part in our path to spirituality. The soul is a “many layered entity that emanates from its root in the Creator, descending through dimension after dimension of reality until it finally connects to physical being through our bodies.” He goes on to say, “Spiritual reality is the basis of existence; physical reality is its expression.” The threads of this book are woven with intelligence, passion, wisdom, and generosity in its “search for coherence in the world of Torah.”

RABBI JONATHAN SACKS Koren Publishers Jerusalem Hardcover 1118 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-9653013421

abbi Sacks and Koren Publishers have contributed an important and inspiring Rosh HaShanah Mahzor that continues the high standards that we have come to expect from Rabbi Sacks’s other contributions. The Koren Rosh HaShana Mahzor provides an inspiring and beautiful twenty-three page introduction by Rabbi Sacks that communicates in clear and exquisite language the meaning and history of the holiday. The translation of the prayers conveys in easy to understand and poetic English the majesty and awe of the holiday. The spacing and font that is used throughout the prayer book is up-to-date and contributes to the mood of contemplation. The commentary at the bottom of the pages and explanations throughout the mahzor give the reader extra information and important topics to think about during prayer.

Outstanding Debut Fiction

Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Goldberg Prize

Winner Boxer, Beetle

Finalists Disenchantment: George Steiner and the Meaning of Western Civilization after Auschwitz CATHERINE D. CHATTERLEY Syracuse University Press Hardcover 186 pp. $24.95 ISBN: 978-0851609605

n Disenchantment, Chatterley captures Steiner’s world as he changed it and as it changed him. The book is a superb portrait —gleaned from Steiner’s own writings—of the man who revolutionized scholarship by adding human feeling to academic thought. Chatterley cleverly uses Steiner’s own words to paint the picture of a man struggling to rise above his own strong emotions and ask the question that has no answer—the question of the Holocaust. It is the question we ask silently as we witness the most horrific scenes ever

NED BEAUMAN Bloomsbury USA Paperback 256 pp. $16.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1-60819-680-7

oxer, Beetle is fully-realized, gem-like, brilliant. It’s hysterically funny at moments and deeply informed at others. [The judges] felt it was the most original book of the group by far, the most sophisticated, the most complete. Where other books fall apart at the end or just stop, this has a satisfying wholeness to it. One section in particular—a dinner party that’s sustained for a significant number of pages—was technically so impressive, both so funny and so incredibly sad at the same time, it confirmed for us an enormous talent already realized. Given that he is only twenty-six, who knows where Ned Bauman will be © Nick Seaton able to go from here.”

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spring 5772/2012

Jewish Book World

national jewish book awards Finalist

Finalists

These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam

A Stranger on the Planet ADAM SCHWARTZ Soho Press Hardcover 336 pp. $24.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1-56947-869-1

Stranger on the Planet is witty and quirky, fun and well-written. The narrator’s voice leans on certain tropes of the American Jewish literary canon, especially the troubled family, but also manages somehow to rise above these. Like Saul Bellow before him—a writer who makes more than one appearance here—Schwartz’s novel appears to begin with the self-consciously autobiographical, but indeed quickly transcends these elements to become something wholly original. We were charmed by it.

Poetry Winner Wait

RIVKA MIRIAM LINDA STERN ZISQUIT, TRANS. The Toby Press Paperback 260 pp. $14.95 [e] ISBN: 978-159-264-249-6

ivka Miriam, the author of These Mountains, was born in Israel in 1952. One of the most significant contemporary Israeli poets alive today, her work is influenced by her family’s Holocaust experience, Jewish texts, and religious and theological ideas. The language of Miriam’s poems is deceptively simple and straightforward, yet contains worlds within. Some lines come directly from Biblical or liturgical texts, while others could be everyday speech. The land of Israel is also a common theme in Miriam’s poetry. She writes of a mystical connection to the land, one that is deeply physical and sensual. The land in her poetry is a living being, a friend and sometimes a lover. Many of Miriam’s poems are disquieting. There is a sense that the poet cannot help but bring forth what her legacy has bequeathed her, and that she is continually trying, over and over, to make sense of her family history of European suffering and the struggle of modern Israel.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010

C.K. WILLIAMS Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover 144 pp. $14.00 ISBN: 978-0374532765

ADRIENNE RICH W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Hardcover 89 pp. $24.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0393079678

K. Williams, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the three or four American poets that came out of the Jewish prophetic tradition, along with Philip Levine, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and Gerald Stern. His words are sometimes harsh but they are always accurate and moving; and finally they are governed by an underlying love and heart-breaking tenderness. His new book, Wait, continues in this direction, but adds to it more personal and philosophical poems that confront war, death, and destruction.

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drienne Rich is one of the most highly esteemed poets of the last half-century. Articulate, unsparing, and visionary, she has produced more than thirty volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Her many honors include the National Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, in recognition of her “incomparable influence and achievement as a poet and essayist.” In Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Rich grapples with war and atrocity, history and hope, in language that refuses to divorce the political from the personal. Poems that range from stark, compressed lyrics to more expansive forms evoke intimate life as part of the larger moral landscape and interrogate the © Robert Giard ethics of language itself.

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national jewish book awards

Scholarship

Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award

Winner Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures

Sephardic Culture

Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy

Winner Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine

TALYA FISHMAN Univeristy of Pennsylvania Press Hardcover 413 pp. $65.00 ISBN: 978-0-8122-4313-0

MICHELLE U. CAMPOS Stanford University Press Hardcover 343 pp. $70.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0804770675

n Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman, associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, develops a highly original interpretation of the development of “talmudocentrism,” the shift that firmly established the Talmud as the centerpiece of the religious curriculum and the basis for adjudication and Halakhic practice. While the centrality of the Talmud has usually been assumed to date back to the period of the Geonim or even earlier, Fishman suggests that this common perspective is anachronistic. Becoming the People of the Talmud deepens our understanding of the history of the Talmud and gives us enormous insight as to how Judaism developed during the High Middle Ages. In so doing, it indirectly raises important contemporary questions for us regarding curriculum, custom and culture. This book is clearly important for the scholar and researcher but it is equally important for anyone who recognizes the central role that Talmud has played in the history of the Jewish people. © Max Apple

Finalist Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe

ichelle Campos examines the Ottoman Empire during the beginning of the twentieth century, at the very moment when it was changing from a multi-ethnic empire into a series of separate nation-states. Ottoman Brothers offers a new perspective of the Ottoman Empire by focusing on notions of imperial nationhood and observing how Muslims, Christians and Jews both claimed and exercised their citizenship rights. This study also shifts between Istanbul and Palestine, presenting the history of the “Ottoman nation” from different vantage points and emphasizing the permeability of imperial space. Furthermore, Campos claims that “the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather erupted in dialectical tension with the premises and shortcomings of “Civic Ottomanism.” Well-researched and well-written, Ottoman Brothers is an innovative and ambitious work; it will engage readers interested in the history of the Middle East, in theories of nationhood, in the history of Zionism and Arab nationalism, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and those just wanting a good read.

Finalists Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belle Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire

ELISHEVA CARLEBACH Harvard University Press Hardcover 304 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-674-05254-3

n astonishingly innovative work. Using the mundane, yet ubiquitous artifact, the Jewish calendar, Elisheva Carlebach opens up the rhythms of early modern Jewish life so effectively and thoroughly that this book is likely to emerge as signpost itself, a marker of the capacity of Jewish studies to speak authoritatively and lucidly to academic and general readers alike.

OLGA BOROVAYA Indiana University Press Hardcover 304 pp. $34.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0253356727

lga Borovaya’s Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belle Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire does an excellent job in making the journalism, literature, and theater written in the vernacular language of the Sephardim come alive. The first study to focus on three forms of Ladino writing, she examines texts published mostly between 1842 and 1908 in the three major cities of Ladino culture: Salonica, Istanbul, and Izmir. Engagingly written, it opens up the secular literary world and cultural life of these Sephardic communities. In addition to closely examining particular periodicals, novels, and plays, she also introduces the reader to fascinating writers and literary figures attempting to bring both Jewish-themed works and European ideas and texts to a Ladino reading public. Since Ladino, like Yiddish, is often seen as an endangered language, the uncovering of this history is particularly timely.

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Jewish Book World

national jewish book awards Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora JULIA R. LIEBERMAN, ED. Brandeis University Press Paperback 279 pp. $29.95 ISBN: 978-1584659570

portray the characters and zeitgeist of the era. This section provides a concise and informative overview of Man Ray’s life.

Finalists Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust

ephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora, edited by Julia R. Lieberman, is a fascinating study of Sephardic Jewish households of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing from a variety of sources, authors Hannah Davidson, Ruth Lamdan, Cristina Galasso, Tirtsah Levie Bernfield, David Graizbord and Julia Lieberman use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience. The essays in this volume all feature the lives of women, children, adolescents, and slaves, helping the reader to see the long-term consequences of the expulsion on ordinary people, from a perspective seldom discussed in historical books on the topic. This investigation of family life breaks new ground on important chapters in early modern Jewish social history.

Visual Arts Winner Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention MASON KLEIN Yale University Press/The Jewish Museum Hardcover 256 pp. $50.00 ISBN: 978-0300146837

n artist’s reputation, like most variables, depends on timing. In 2010, the Jewish Museum mounted a stunning, and long-overdue, retrospective of the work of Man Ray, the first avant-garde Jewish artist of the twentieth century. Alias Man Ray, the handsome accompanying book by the exhibition curator, Mason Klein, is the product of many years of careful research. It is a bold reexamination of an elusive and contradictory artist within the context of the Jewish immigrant experience in America and the modernist artistic milieu of Paris. Born Emmanuel Radnitzsky, the artist recast himself as Man Ray while maintaining a lifelong secrecy regarding his familial roots. Klein perceptively focuses on the crucial emotional importance of biographical erasure and offers a revisionist reading which is also well timed; it resonates in an era of self-invention, mutable identities, and artistic freedom to experiment with multiple mediums. For an artist who we thought we knew, Alias Man Ray provides a fresh, psychologically-grounded framework to understand the push/pull contradictions of a projected persona as well as the artist’s leap into Dadaism and abstraction. Mason Klein has contributed a significant addition to the literature of an important artist who was born Jewish and, like many intellectual Jews before and afterwards, struggled with that identity. The book is enriched by an excellent, annotated time line illustrated with vintage photographs that vividly

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spring 5772/2012

GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD Yale University Press Hardcover 448 pp. $50.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-16914-0

avriel D. Rosenfeld writes about the conundrum of architecture and Jewish culture, particularly after World War II, by exploring Jewish ideas embedded in specific architectural works, as well as speculating conceptually about modernity and the leading Jewish (or quasiJewish) architects of our time. This interesting study offers a ground breaking interpretation of contemporary architecture that does not shy away from tackling a subject seldom discussed, trying to find a new way to construct the argument, without insisting on a conclusion about “Jewish architecture.” Whether you accept or reject the basic premise, this mind-bending new interpretation is meticulously researched and impressively argued. It takes the preponderance of Jewish architects, including modernists, postmodernists and deconstructivists, who have risen to international prominence since World War II, like Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Louis I. Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Moshe Safdie, Robert A. M. Stern and Stanley Tigerman, and looks at them (and others) through the prism of Jewish themes, ideas, cultural concepts and imagery. Rosenfeld balances the dichotomies of alienation/ assimilation, modern/classical, Hebraic/Hellenic values and ideas, finding architecture to be a kind of bridge to memory, identity and understanding. Furthermore, the book attempts to examine the ties between architectural achievement and the memory of the Holocaust, to understand how Jewish memory may have influenced the post-war evolution of what the author is fond of calling “Jewish architecture.” This book is provocative and controversial as it speculates on what is Jewish about modern architecture and what that tells us about the Jewish experience in the last sixty-five years.

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national jewish book awards Houdini: Art and Magic BROOKE KAMIN RAPAPORT, ED. Yale University Press/The Jewish Museum Hardcover 261 pp. $39.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-300-14684-4

oudini: Art and Magic is a spellbinding account of the life and legend of a singular Jewish-American, Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest. This beautifully designed book is full of surprises, enhanced by a treasure trove of images from varied, yet interconnected worlds. Abounding with colorful show posters and broadsides, genres that gained currency at the turn of the twentieth century with advances in color lithography, the volume also includes intriguing photographic records of the era and works by artists who have taken inspiration from this iconic figure. Rapaport and her contributors provide us with a rich portrait of Houdini, the master magician and rabbi’s son, who captured the popular imagination of his day with showmanship, agility and daring. Also touched upon insightfully are Houdini’s ardent involvement as a crusader against fraudulent spiritualists and his fascination for subsequent generations, including Matthew Barney, Raymond Pettibon, and other artists of our own time. This companion volume to the acclaimed 2010-11 Houdini exhibition at The Jewish Museum gives added dimension and scope, with its vivid presentation of Houdini’s extraordinary Jewish immigrant story and visuals that astonish, provoke, enlighten, disturb and delight.

A Journey through Jewish Worlds: Highlights from the Braginsky Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books EVELYN M. COHEN, SHARON LIBERMAN MINTZ & EMILE G.L. SCHRIJVER, EDS. Bijzondere Collecties, Universiteit Van Amsterdam Hardcover 320 pp. $99.00 ISBN: 978-9040076541

his gorgeous volume represents the passion, scholarship, and exquisite taste of René Braginsky, who has been collecting Jewish manuscripts, printed books, marriage contracts, and Esther scrolls for more than three decades. Created as a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of selections from the Braginsky collection, the book itself is a work of art with its fine paper, elegant design, and beautiful reproductions. The selections range over six centuries across Europe and Asia, wherever Jews lived. They include sacred and private texts, public and private, biblical and liturgical. The descriptions introducing each item open up worlds to the reader, the world of the artist, the world of the society in which the piece was created, and the world of the text itself. Thus the book includes a stunning marriage contract from the “Miscellany of Life Cycle Events,” a compendium of texts related to the human life cycle, probably created in fifteenth century Ferrara, Italy. We see the fashions of the times in the bride’s lush, full-skirted burgundy gown with sleeves of a different material and the groom’s pleated short coat cinched with a gold belt.

The bold floral borders follow the contemporary style, but the artist creatively added the figure of a man within each pattern, possibly intended as witnesses to the nuptials. The manuscript was probably given as a wedding gift to the young couple. Another dramatic selection, this from the Herlingen Haggadah of 1725, shows Moses, Aaron, and Miriam with her magic well, leading scholars to deduce that it was made for a wealthy woman named Miriam. The selections from the Braginsky collection offer scholars an opportunity to study books and manuscripts never before seen together. They offer general readers the joy of seeing and learning about an array of books and manuscripts, customs and traditions that, taken together form the core of Jewish culture.

Women’s Studies

Barbara Dobkin Award

Winner The JPS Bible Commentary: Ruth DR. TAMARA COHN ESKENAZI & DR. TIKVA FRYMER-KENSKY The Jewish Publication Society Hardcover 216 pp. $40.00 ISBN: 978-0827607446

his fine and accessible commentary on the book of Ruth by two excellent biblical scholars, Tamara Cohn Eshkenazi and the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky (z”l), is an outstanding addition to the JPS Bible Commentary series. Published in a handsome format that includes a fully vocalized Hebrew text and the 1985 JPS translation, this volume offers a careful and insightful line by line commentary of the book of Ruth. Moreover, the outstanding introduction places the book in its larger historical, social, Jewish ritual, and critical contexts and discusses its dominant themes of redemption and loving kindness. Ruth is a book about the centrality © Marvin Steindler of marriage, family, and progeny in the biblical story but it is also a reflection on female relationships and the necessity of women helping women if Israel’s covenantal destiny is to be achieved. It is especially fitting that this volume emerged from a collaboration between two distinguished and erudite women.

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national jewish book awards Finalists

Biblical Seductions: Six Stories Retold Based on Talmud and Midrash SANDRA E. RAPOPORT KTAV Publishing House Hardcover 540 pp. $29.50 [e] ISBN: 978-1-60280-170-7

andra E. Rapoport, an attorney specializing in litigating sexual-harassment cases, presents the six stories most likely to have been skipped by your Jewish studies teacher in elementary, middle or high school. Whether it is Lot and his Daughters, Dinah and Shechem, Judah and Tamar, David and Batsheva, Amnon and Tamar or Ruth and Boaz, Rapoport uncovers the simple meaning of the text, rabbinic and medieval commentaries, midrash, and contemporary scholarly and feminist perspectives on these complex Biblical stories. The texts work together cohesively, the style is elegant, and new ways of revealing the texts are illuminated.

brothels; and women bartering sex to stay alive or protect a family member. It posits that the lack of testimony results from the fact that most sexual violence victims perished in the Final Solution. In addition, survivors were reluctant to disclose this pain and shame to their new families. Hopefully, this work will encourage further serious scholarship, enlarging our understanding of the unfathomable Shoah, as well as contributing to current scholarship and discussion about this particular plight of women in war around the world.

Writing Based on Archival Material

The JDC-Herbert Katzki Award

Winner Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams CHARLES KING W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Hardcover 336 pp. $27.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0393070842

In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia ELIYANA R. ADLER Wayne State University Press Hardcover 196 pp. $44.95 ISBN: 978-0814334928 This accessible and well-documented monograph expands our knowledge of Jewish women’s lives in nineteenth century Tsarist Russia. Adler’s discussion of over one hundred private schools established between 1831 and 1881 demonstrates that parents and dedicated administrators and teachers provided thousands of girls from diverse backgrounds with excellent educations in Jewish and secular subjects. The book also shows how the schools responded to cultural changes and were themselves sources of transformation in their communities.

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust SONJA M. HEDGEPETH & ROCHELLE G. SAIDEL, EDS. Brandeis University Press Hardcover 314 pp. $35.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1584659051

he judging panel of the 2011 “JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material” found the book Odessa to be an exemplary case of excellence in this field. Charles King is professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University. He has written widely on the Black Sea region and on the Caucasus. In his book, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, King uses new archival materials to draw together the story of the birth, life, near-death, and rebirth of Odessa. He vividly describes Odessa’s unique role in the region as a cosmopolitan, multiethnic hub of creativity. As the city long-associated with Count Vorontsov and Alexander Pushkin, it was also the locus of a flowering of Jewish learning and literature. Using new archival materials, King details the World War II period, when Odessa’s Jewish community was decimated by Romanian occupiers allied with Nazi Germany. With a combination of historical sweep and small vignettes of daily life in that period, King shows how over-zealous Romanian officials attempted to rid the city of every single Jew. His portrait of the city contrasts the suffering of the Jews with the Soviet “official” history of how Odessa survived the Axis occupation. King’s book adds to our knowledge of Jewish, Odessan, and Ukrainian history and illuminates a less-well known aspect of the holocaust. It also gives the reader a warm and glowing picture of one of the most vibrant cities in contemporary Ukraine.

he widely held view for 60 years has been that sexual violence against women was not a major phenomenon of the Shoah as in other wars, largely because the Nazis prohibited cohabitation between Aryans and Jews. A dearth of testimony corroborated this view. This collection of essays offers counter-testimony, documenting many individual cases of rape, including kapo and protector rape. The definition of sexual violence is also expanded to include forced nudity, sterilizations and abortions;

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Special Thanks to the panel of judges for the 2011 National Jewish Book Awards

Monique Balbuena Judith R. Baskin Liliane K.Baxter Randall C.Belinfante Jerry Benjamin Toni Bickart Elisa Spungen Bildner Analia Bortz Margery Cohen Seth Cohen Helene Kalson Cohen Ruth Cole Bobbi Coller Dan Friedman Rela Mintz Geffen Rae Gurewitsch Tully Harcsztark Margelit Hoffman Sharon Keller Jonathan Kirsch Mark Kligman Rebecca Kobrin Josh Lambert Joan Larkin Adam Mendelsohn Naomi Miller Adam Mintz

Jean Mishkin Karen Moss Kenneth B. Moss Carol Neuberger Rachel Norton Hara Person Sharon Pomerantz Austin Ratner Dana Raucher Barbara Reisner Robert Rifkind Rebecca Rohr Carole Saivetz Jonathan Sarna Adah Scharf Shuly Schwartz Robert Shaviv Rona Sheramy William Shulman Jessica Siegel Neal Sokol Gerald Sorin Gerald Stern Diane Wohl Lois Zachary Paul Zakrzewski Steven Zipperstein

for book clubs JBW recommends...

Boxer, Beetle

Council Jewish Book s: er Award Stick ink on gold foil k ac Winner: Bl

by Ned Beauman

1. How does the opening scene set the tone of the novel? What transforms the somber subject matter into something humorous?

Faulkerian idiot man-child which I must drag along groaning behind me wherever I go.” (p. 36) Do you find his statement sad, funny, or both? Why? How does Broom’s physical condition reflect or amplify the themes in the Erskine and Roach storyline?

2. Do the names of Horace Grublock, Kevin “Fishy” Broom, and Seth “Sinner” Roach suggest anything about their roles in the story? Are your initial expectations of them altered or reinforced as the tale unfolds?

9. Rabbi Berg notes that “a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.” (p. 55) How do you interpret this statement? How might it apply to the lives of Roach, Erskine, and Evelyn.

3. Grublock is quoted as saying of the Nazis: “They allowed no exceptions to their vision, and that is a lesson we should all learn.” (p. 5) What do you think he means? How is his statement later revealed as ironic? 4. Rabbi Brasch is reputed to have told Roach that “Jews don’t have sinners, we have idiots.” (p. 16) What, if anything, is funny about such a claim? Do you think it reflects a certain “Jewish sensibility” or is it specific to that character? 5. Consider the invitation to The Caravan. (p. 23) Is there anything about the wording of the event that suggests what is being advertised? Were you surprised to learn of the type of party it was? Why? What is the historical context that might explain the ambiguity of the invite? 6. In what way are Erskine and Roach both outsiders? Why might Erskine be drawn to Roach, apart from any scientific interests? Why is Evelyn drawn to him? 7. Early in the novel, Erskine reads “a book by Lord Alfred Douglas called Plain English,” an actual journal published under Douglas. (p. 29) What do you know about Douglas and Oscar Wilde that might make this reference funny or informative? Does Erskine’s response to the book tell you anything about his character? Where else does the novel use historical figures and events to humorous or enlightening effect? 8. Broom confesses that “I have come to see my body as a sort of

10. After meeting Evelyn, Roach realizes how much she reminds him of his sister Anna. (p. 100) What connections does he make? Do you see any similarities between the lives of Evelyn, Anna, and Tara? What does the novel suggest about the women’s roles in England during the 1930s? How do their lives differ from those of gay men like Erskine and Roach? In what ways are they alike? 11. Erskine has a series of dreams throughout the novel, including one involving the rabbits of Francis Galton (p. 35) and another concerning a “bloody, translucent, glistening tube.” (p. 105) How do you interpret these nightmares? Why do you think Erskine characterize dreams “as pure anarchy” and “bullies.” (p. 75) How might his dreams be anarchistic or bullying? 12. Erskine tells Roach that “Jews, by and large, are greedy and traitorous and unpleasant” and that “I know you wont be offended because those are just the facts.” (p. 114). Where else does the novel play with the notion of “facts”? What does the novel seem to be saying about facts, history, and human nature? 13. What significance does the story of Erasmus Erskine and his search for linguistic perfection have in relation to the rest of the novel? (p. 118) In this same chapter, Richard Thurlow states: “A language needs its secrete passages and bricked-up dungeons. Otherwise poets like me would have no profession.” (p. 121) What do you think Thurlow means? Could his observation apply to any of © Nick Seaton

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for book clubs

the other characters’ quests for perfection? 14. Consider Evelyn’s defense of dissonance in her conversation with Roach: “It’s not about beauty or comprehensibility. It’s about life. Dissonance is the sound of life in the twentieth century.” (p. 171) Do you agree? Why? In what ways might Evelyn be considered the heroine of the story? 15. At the end of the novel, Broom notes a statement from Le Corbusier, the French architect of the early twentieth century: “Architecture is

the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathematical order, speculation, the perception of harmony that lies in emotional relationships.” (p. 244) Does this assertion connect the story’s many themes? Why? Compare the quote to the book’s opening epigraph by Theodor Adorno. How might it be a fitting end to Boxer, Beetle?

16. How is “the perception of harmony” reflected in the novel’s emotional relationships and, ultimately, in Broom and Stuart’s friendship? Do you think Boxer, Beetle concludes on a note of harmony or dissonance?

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

by Vivian Gornick

1. Consider Emma Goldman’s early life and the reasons anarchism held such appeal for her. What was the source of her drive to defy the conventions that bound other young immigrant women?

4. Goldman was a sexual radical who supported birth control and radically opposed the institution of marriage. She believed in free love and argued that the marriage contract stifled sexual passion and thus was antagonistic to love. How did Goldman’s real-life love experiences reinforce or undermine her theories about erotic love and relationships?

2. Vivian Gornick portrays an activist whose whole being was dedicated to protesting the tyranny of institutions over individuals. As Gornick shows us, the right to stay alive in one’s senses, to enjoy freedom of thought and speech, to reject the arbitrary use of power—these were key demands in the many public protests that featured Goldman. How do these concerns resonate with today’s protest movements?

5. What role does Jewishness play in Goldman’s development as a radical?

3. In Gornick’s view, Emma Goldman’s personality was central to her astonishing rise to fame. Discuss the role of Goldman’s personal charisma in the visibility and influence of her ideas in her own time.

6. How does Gornick’s feminist perspective influence her telling of Goldman’s life? 7. Discuss Goldman’s experiences with regard to the Russian Revolution. What were her initial hopes for the Revolution? What were the reasons for her disillusionment? How did her final exile affect her as a person? How did this period affect her political views? 8. Many today think Emma Goldman speaks directly to the social (not just economic) © Esther Hyneman

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emerging voices a conversation with

Mary Glickman by Renita Last

Mary Glickman is a writer, public relations professional, and fundraiser who has worked with Jewish charities and organizations. Her first two novels, Home in the Morning and One More River, were both published in 2011. One More River was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. © Open Road Integrated Media

Renita Last: The characters in Home in the Morning and One More River have such strong distinct personalities. Did you use any role models in creating these well-deﬁned men and women? Mary Glickman: I don’t think I had specific role models in mind, but I’ve always been attracted to people who are capable of passionate devotions to causes and others. I admire those people with strong passions and high ideals. Perhaps they have a foolish and a courageous will to love and live honestly. In my mind, when such men and women come together and come up against life’s cruel realities, that’s when you have great drama born. Sometimes they’re crushed, but they retain their nobility and sometimes they succeed. I love people like this.

conflict and crises define which loyalty is stronger. That’s why I like to put my characters in extreme situations to test them. It’s very easy to delude oneself about one’s attachments until push comes to shove. Friendship is very important to me. One thing I want to talk about are relationships that last forever despite conflict and troubles along the way. Family members die, spouses die, and you are left with your friends. You need friendships for a life well lived.

RL: Your book titles are taken from spirituals. Why? MG: One of the reasons I use spirituals for the titles is that, for me, it emphasizes the connection of Jewish and African-American lives in the South as well as their being an important cultural touchstone. Jackson tells Li’l Bokay on their fateful truck ride together that, “You can’t grow up in the South without learning a spiritual or two.” That’s pretty much true. There are no set in stone lyrics for spirituals. Traditionally they are meant to be an improvisation on a theme where a worshipper is supposed to get up and burst into song with his own soul-felt imprint on the lyrics. This aspect of spirituals also impressed me when talking about a culture that is fixed in many ways, a culture obsessed by history and how an individual comes to live independently within it. That resonated for me. In the spiritual, Home in the Morning, the singer takes old sins, puts them on the shelf, and shakes himself and that rings to me of the Old South-New South transition.

RL: Your books beautifully evoke time and place through abundant descriptive language and detail. How important are Southern speech and storytelling in your writing? Is there any speciﬁc reason you don’t use quotation marks? MG: Southern speech is magnificent. I love the way Southern speech lilts, the way it rises and falls. There’s a distinct creativity of metaphor that I haven’t seen in other parts of the country or it doesn’t hit me where it counts. It’s a springboard, an inspiration for me. When I started Home in the Morning I had this idea that I wanted it to sound like an oral narrative. As if someone were telling you a story on the front porch or by the fireplace. When someone tells you a story you don’t need them to be holding up their fingers making quote marks to tell you who is speaking. That idea intrigued me. It also allowed me to use patterns of speech that are not really correct in formal narrative. I thought I could capture the Southern métier much better this way.

RL: Why are the themes of love, family, friendship, and loyalty so important to you? MG: Without loyalty love is meaningless. As far as I’m concerned it’s a cardinal virtue. To be loyal requires self-abnegation and courage. It’s not the same thing as even being 100% faithful or supportive. But loyalties

RL: What ﬁrst inspired your interest in Judaism? Where does your understanding of Jewish customs and traditions come from? MG: I was always drawn to Judaism;

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even as a small child I was very much attracted to the Tanach. I remember as a young girl being taught by the good sisters who said that faith is a gift. When I got to be an adolescent I realized I didn’t get the gift, but my mother instilled in me a strong spiritual need. Joseph Campbell says religion is a music that speaks to the soul and Judaism was my soul’s music. It was no incidental air or etude in a minor key. Judaism wasn’t the only religion I investigated to satisfy my innate needs, but it was where my soul’s poetry lay. I discovered the great Jewish writers and they struck a sympathetic chord in me. You could say the beauty of Talmudic logic and metaphor were first put to me by these writers of fiction. RL: The position of Jews in Southern society, the diﬀerences between Northern and Southern Jews, and the tumultuous 1960’s are vividly presented in Home in the Morning. What is important for Northern Jews to know about Southern Jews? What is the “Yankee provincialism” you refer to? MG: I started out by wanting to write about the South. I wanted to break that enormous wall of the redneck stereotype. When asked about “Yankee provincialism” I think about the fact that most of our great American writers were Southerners. I also started thinking about important differences between the Southern and Northern Jewish experience. I think the North is very insular, but has an intellectual sophistication. Northerners are generally ignorant about how the South works and its values and culture. Southern Jews have a long history of acceptance in the South and were more welcome in the dominant society. They were well entrenched and accepted, by and large, without comment. They also shared a common culture with Southern blacks. I also realized race is the great American sin. It is our original sin and should be the great American literary subject. I’ve been fascinated by trying to mix all these elements together.

fiction RL: How do you think Southerners perceive Jews now? Do Jews still heed Bernard Levy’s grandfather’s warning to “never forget you are a Jew?” MG: In the South, like anywhere else in the world, we tend to get the finger pointed at us in periods of crisis. I don’t think it does Jews anywhere well to forget they are a Jew no matter where they are. To forget that imperils us all. It is a truism of life. There hasn’t been a period of history Jews haven’t been discriminated against. I worry about young Jewish kids who don’t even have a cultural identity. RL: Home in the Morning and One More River are tied together by plot and characters. Will your future writings be about the South? What are you working on now? MG: I have a working title for my next book, Women Alone, and I am using some characters from both my novels. I realized I have several women characters who spend significant periods of time without a man. The ways that these women cope and survive with their lives alone are different because the cultural demands are different in different eras. I want to explore what happened to these women during these times. I’m not far along, but I’m thinking about how I’ll knit them together. I plan to keep writing from my unique perspective as a Southern Jew. Renita Last is a member of Hadassah Nassau Region’s Education Committee. She is currently involved in volunteer work at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. A retired teacher of the Gifted and Talented, she participates in book clubs and writing projects.

review Home in the Morning MARY GLICKMAN Open Road Media, 2011 Hardcover 244 pp. $24.99 [e] ISBN: 978-1453201299

he Sassaports of Guilford, Mississippi are an established Southern Jewish family thrown into the tumultuous civil rights movement of the 1960s. They guard family secrets, struggle with racial and familial relationships, experience Northern vs. Southern sensibilities, and grow into change. Thoughtful, kind, and gentlemanly Jackson Sassaport is the central figure of Home in the Morning. His coming-of-age story and later life serve as the book’s catalyst as he learns to attune himself to a triad of special and different women. There is his demanding and very Southern mother, Missy; his courageous Northern wife, Stella, and Katherine Marie, the black woman who has imprinted herself on his heart and mind. Jackson must also deal with his fiendish brother, Bubba Ray, his stoic physician father, and the extended Sassaport clan. These characters interact with servants, friends, townspeople, rednecks, activists, and those Yankees, with their “typical provincialism.” Through them, Mary Glickman creates a story of love, hate, friendship, and healing. Glickman, who was born Catholic, is a convert to Judaism. She now

makes her home in the South, and skillfully reveals her understanding of Southern culture. She draws the reader into her storytelling through the use of backstory, history, and intriguingly believable and flawed characters. She captures the details, mood, and events of a place and time. Reading Home in the Morning provides a history lesson in black-white relationships, Southern Jewish culture, and the Civil Rights Movement. The frequent flashbacks are temptingly offered and give clarity and understanding to the characters as their stories develop and bisect. There are no quotation marks in this book, but this does not distract or hamper the reader. In fact, it is hard to stop reading as the story begs to be unfolded. RL

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fiction Broadway Baby

ALAN SHAPIRO Algonquin Books, 2011 Paperback 258 pp. $13.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1-56512-983-2

he heroine of this novel by award-winning poet Alan Shapio is Miriam, a Jewish girl with stardust in her eyes and a passion for Broadway musicals of the 1940’s. She especially reveres the character of Miss Julie from Jerome Kern’s musical Showboat and keeps a poster from the show over her bed. In her diary, she details every show she and her boyfriend, Curly, see, as well as every menu from every restaurant they frequent. After he is drafted, she enjoys describing herself as “a fiancée pining for her gorgeous soldier boy.” In actuality, she is relieved that he is away. For it is the idea of them as a couple she enjoys infinitely more than she enjoys actually making love with him. And we begin to notice that she seems to see everything in the third person, as if she and those around her were characters in a play she is viewing. When she gives birth to a girl she names her Julie. But she doesn’t bond with her the way she did with the character’s namesake from Showboat. And when she has two more children, both sons, Ethan and Sam, and they all sit together in her rocking chair one evening, she sings “Lullaby of Broadway” to them while thinking, “Someone should take a picture of this, what a picture we’d make…” Gradually we begin to realize that Miriam is disconnected from herself and others, and this has tragic consequences for her and her family. Situations which seem unimportant to her, when ignored, become monumental drawbacks. Because it is neglected, Ethan’s bed-wetting lasts so long that he can’t attend camp or a sleepover even as a teenager for fear of embarrassment. Julie’s lack of interest in communicating with her mother is never dealt with, as Miriam’s narcissism makes

her retaliate by not interesting herself in her daughter. And Sam’s annoyance at having to spend long hours “babysitting” his grandmother, which is convenient for Miriam, has repercussions as well. The posters from South Pacific and Showboat remain on the wall while her children grow up. Their presence fuels Miriam’s desire to promote Ethan’s singing talent so he can become the star in the family. Yet, no matter what successes each child has, they are never satisfying enough for Miriam. A strange kind of justice is served Miriam. As things spiral downward, the story evokes chills and even horror—a far cry from the optimistic mood at the beginning of this compelling novel. EE

City of Promise BEVERLY SWERLING Simon & Schuster, 2011 Hardcover 352 pp. $26.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1439-136942

everly Swerling’s fast-paced new novel continues her saga about the Devrey and Turner families, picking up the story in New York City in 1864, at the end of the Civil War. The city is slowly creeping northward, construction has begun on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there is talk of an elevated train to help rid the city of its awful traffic. Swerling deftly fills us in on every aspect of life in the city, from the grimy tenements at the bottom of Manhattan and the splendid mansions of the wealthy along the avenues uptown, to the new concept of apartments for middle class commuters. With the introduction of steel, buildings can now rise up higher than ever and entire tracts of land are being filled with these new high-rises. Thomas Edison’s great invention illuminates the streets and then the apartments. We hear about the corruption of Boss Tweed, Jewish pawnbrokers, and the

beginnings of the Italian Mafia. We read about different classes of whorehouses and how women were influential behind the scenes. We learn about the growth of big name

Swerling deftly fills us in on every aspect of life in the city, from grimy tenements...and the splendid mansions of the wealthy...to the new concept of apartments for middle class communters. department stores and Macy’s big breakthrough: hiring women as clerks. This novel gives a fascinating account of how New York City came to its present-day form. Kudos to the author for educating readers with her colorful descriptions of the rich tapestry that defines this remarkable metropolis. MBA

In the Name of God: A Gidon Aronson Thriller STEPHEN J. GORDON Apprentice House, 2011 Hardcover 380 pp. $32.95 ISBN: 978-1-934074-63-3

hat’s the connection between young gang members in Baltimore and an assassination attempt on an Israeli official at a fundraiser in the same city? Gidon Aronson, owner and operator of a martial arts studio and part-time substitute teacher, is involved in both: in the first case as a near victim, in the second as the hero who trips up the would-be assassin and saves the day. Aronson, trained in combat, has a secret past in Israel. He has been trying to live under the radar in his new hometown, but trouble seems to find him. That and his complicated love life make for an interesting, readable crime novel. Aronson’s detective work leads him to a private school for troubled Jewish boys, with a branch in Israel. The pace really picks up about two thirds of the way through, when the action moves to Israel and the reader learns more about Gidon’s past life there. The author’s descriptions of Baltimore and Jerusalem are vivid and detailed. MBA

The Linen Queen PATRICIA FALVEY Center Street, 2011 Hardcover 320 pp. $21.99 [e] ISBN: 978-1-59995-200-0

et in Northern Ireland during World War II, this novel is the story of beautiful and flirtatious Sheila McGee, who works in the

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fiction her husband. Although the count is kind to Hannah, his brothers and servants are openly hostile. Jews are the scapegoats for everything that goes wrong for the Christians, and now the plague is returning to Venice. Though a tad dramatic, this tale of adventure and heroism under dire circumstances is an enjoyable read, filled with rich details about this period in Venetian history. MBA

Mitzvah Man

linen mill in her small town. She and her selfish, mean mother live with a miserable aunt and drunken uncle, and Sheila dreams of escape to England or America. When she wins the local Linen Queen contest she thinks it will change her life, but it is the bombing of Belfast by the Jerries and the Yankee army’s arrival in town that radically alter life for Sheila and her fellow townspeople. Now she must share her tiny room with a troubled teen, a refugee from the Blitz. A relationship with a lonely American Jewish soldier opens up her world, and she begins to evolve into a caring human being. The author evokes the local Irish lingo and landscape beautifully. Although the story is slightly repetitive, it reveals much about how great world events affect a small, remote town. The book is suitable for both teens and adults. MBA

Love and Shame and Love PETER ORNER Little, Brown and Company, 2011 Hardcover 434 pp. $24.99 [e] ISBN: 978-0-316-12939-8

nstead of a bar mitzvah Alexander Popper, henceforth known as Popper, has, as a certain group of young men do, the traditional “chat” with Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, long time Chicago insider. At the conclusion of their meeting, when the judge asks Popper about Moses and the end of his life, Popper gives the much rehearsed, perhaps controversial, but expected answer, “Moses died alone. No family, no friends. Nobody even knows exactly where he is buried. An angry God isn’t much of a friend, Your Honor, and everybody needs friends.” Thus begins the tale of three generations of the Popper family—their lives, their loves, and their shames. Orner’s novel is also a story of Chicago—the lake, the weather, and its longstanding political profile. Popper’s coming of age is all wrapped up with the dilemma of whom to keep as “friends” and whom to leave behind. As each

family member’s story grows more complicated, it is clear that no one is all good and no one is all bad. While we know this, Popper’s emotional journey is worth taking. Orner employs great craft in exploring the intricacies of love and family, inter-generational histories and loyalties. Traveling back and forth in time we try to assemble the jigsaw of the Poppers and the glue that holds them together. We are at once relating to the familiar twentieth century social and political mores and at the same time into the new century, and curious about what the future may or may not hold for this very familiar demographic. PGM

The Midwife of Venice ROBERTA RICH Gallery Books, 2011 Paperback 352 pp. $15.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1-4516-5747-0

annah, the heroine of this novel, is a gifted midwife who lives in the Jewish ghetto of Venice in 1575. Isaac, her husband, was captured at sea while on a business trip and sent to Malta to be sold into slavery. Now he is awaiting ransom by the Venetian Jewish community. Hannah is paid a secret visit by

Hannah's rabbi forbids her to go: she would risk not only her own life but also the position of the entire Jewish community... a count, who wants her to help his deathly ill wife deliver their baby. Because of an edict against Jews giving medical treatment to Christians, Hannah’s rabbi forbids her to go; she would risk not only her own life but also the position of the entire Jewish community if she helps the countess. Hannah asks the count for an enormous sum of money if she successfully delivers the baby, in order to ransom

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JOHN J. CLAYTON Texas Tech University Press, 2011 Hardcover 268 pp. $26.95 ISBN: 978-0-89672-683-3

he original comic book superheroes were born out of the need to find morality and justice in a threatening world. So now, alongside Superman, Spiderman, and Batman is a new version of the superhero. Born out of tragedy and grief—he is Mitzvah Man! The Mitzvah Man John J. Clayton creates is Adam Friedman. He loses his wife in a horrible and untimely car accident while he is off preening about his success and lifestyle at a twenty-fifth prep school class reunion. Wrapped in grief, he is surrounded by a cast of characters that readers will easily relate to. The Mitzvah Man searches his soul constantly, communes with God and nature, and takes himself on a confused, sometimes foolish, and yet ultimately intelligent journey through death and life. He begins to perform small mitzvot and then braver and greater ones. His teenage daughter presents him with her handmade Mitzvah Man tee shirt and he is thrust into the public spotlight. His publicized good deeds attract admirers, get-rich-quick schemers, followers, and detractors. Is he a false prophet or a real hero? A storm of controversy overtakes him as he tries to hold onto his life and daughter while continuing to stand up for good in a world that is falling apart and quick to judge. Clayton’s entertaining style abounds with references to music, literature, religion, and Jewish history and customs while dealing with many universal questions. What is the role of God in one’s life? How does doing for others give solace and meaning to one’s own grief? Can one overcome deep fears to be true to one’s calling? How do the love of family and the goodness of friendship affect lives? What is the role of good and evil in one’s life choices? Mitzvah Man is a timely book that reflects the world that Adam Friedman lives in. It nibbles at and challenges the reader to find the Mitzvah Man within ourselves. RL

spring 5772/2012

Jewish Book World

fiction

The Muse of Ocean Parkway: And Other Stories JACOB LAMPART New Rivers Press, 2011 Paperback 216 pp. $14.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-89823-256-1

omething about the characters in Jacob Lampart’s stories makes me worry if they will be all right in the end. This concern comes about because Lampart often begins with a character who is in the midst of a heartbreaking event. In the story “Joanna Loves Jesus,” for example, a rabbi visits his daughter, who has been in a horrific car accident, but he is more distraught about her attraction to the Catholic religion than he is about her physical well-being. Because he feels guilty about her rebellion against everything he has taught her, he studies whatever he can about Catholicism, and even watches gospel TV shows. What finally happens is hugely ironic and totally unpredictable. Lampart’s characters often surprise us. We think we know them from the way they talk or think and then they behave in unexpected ways. Their conversations are frequently soulbaring—very little small talk for these people. In “Miss Finkelstein,” the narrator, who disparages his neighbors, visits the title character and finds himself starting to make love to her. She tells him, “I’ve been next door for years. You didn’t see me. You didn’t talk to me. You never looked at me the way you’re looking at me now.” Although she wants him to make love to her, she has to get the truth out first. A wry sense of humor underlies many of the stories, as in “Dear Mr. G,” which is composed of letters from a down-and-out Holocaust survivor named M. Znessener to a famous actor turned director. He would like to be an advisor and subject on a new film dealing with the cruelties inflicted on concentration camp inmates during World War II. He feels that this Mr. G, who has made a movie

Jewish Book World

spring 5772/2012

about the torture of Jesus Christ, would be astonished at what tortures Znessener knows about from experience. We gradually realize that he is writing to Mel Gibson. Most of Lampart’s stories include aspects of the rituals and laws of Orthodox Jews. In “New Stoned City,” a thirty-year-old drug addict returns to New York for Passover with his mother. Lampart contrasts his physical being, “eyes red from a long sleepless night, skin crawling with imaginary bugs, his tongue a slab of raw liver” with his seventy-two-yearold mother who is “in the bloom of health... When she walks, she and her body are on excellent terms.” She is concerned with getting her house kosher enough for Pesach while her son is only concerned with how soon the Seder can be done with so he can get his next hit. The ending delivers a kind of accidental justice to both of them. Lampart’s characters intrigue me at the beginning of each and every story; I only wish most of them didn’t dismay and disappoint me at the end. EE

Ordinary Jews YEHOSHUE PERLE SHIRLEY KUMOVE, TRANS. SUNY Press, 2011 Hardcover 344 pp. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-4384-3550-3

he Holocaust wiped out East European Jewry and the way of life of millions of peasants, small merchants, craftsmen, peddlers—ordinary people. But even before the Holocaust, change was slowly coming to the provincial towns and cities of Poland, under Russian rule in the years before World War I. This is the world that Yehoshue Perle, an active figure in Warsaw’s literary circles, so effectively evokes in his landmark novel Yidn fun a gants yor, translated as Ordinary Jews by Shirley Kumove. Mendl Shonash, the only child of the mismatched second marriages of both his parents, lives in an unnamed city in Poland that closely resembles Perle’s hometown of Radom. His family’s life follows the routines and rituals that had defined Jewish life in Poland for centuries. His illiterate Tatteh—father—works long and often unrewarding days as a hay merchant, davening morning and evening and taking Mendl to shul with him on the holidays. Restless and always on the lookout for a better house, Mammeh cannot forget better days with her departed first husband, when she had a home with brass door handles. On the brink of adolescence, Mendl is an observant narrator of the life buzzing around him. Mendl’s life revolves around his parents’ families—Tatteh’s rich sister, Mammeh’s sister

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and parents, his adult half-sisters and brothers, who turn up at the holidays; the hangerson and maids who appear at the house; his friends from cheder or the neighborhood. The relationships are dense and sometimes difficult but nevertheless vital in this tightly knit community. News travels fast, and so do its consequences. The others, the goyim, are also a presence, with daily life and business often bringing them and the Jews together. Perle’s rich and vivid picture brings to life the smells and the grit, the mud and the homely meals, the curses and the struggle to piece a living together. But at the edges change is taking place. Mendl’s half-sisters and brothers arrive with their city attitudes and stylish clothes, a striking contrast to the unchanging habits of their parents. And when Mendl leaves the unquestioning cheder and enters a new school where he will learn Russian as well as read Hebrew newspapers, where the teachers’ heads are uncovered and a portrait of a beardless Baron de Hirsch stares down from the wall, he unwittingly becomes part of the change, too. Writing in the 1930s, Perle was already chronicling the past, preserving the hardscrabble existence of generations of poor Polish

Perle's rich and vivid picture brings to life the smells and the grit, the mud and the homely meals, the curses and the struggle to piece a life together. But at the edges change is taking place. Jews. Their Yiddish flows with insults and curses, somewhat softened by numerous diminutives. In her translator’s notes, Shirley Kumove explains her approach to reproducing not only the meaning but also the lilt and nuances of the original. Her decision to retain the Yiddish of untranslatable terms, glossing them with English—“pshakrev cholera…son of a bitch, a cholera take it”—works very well; however, her English slang contractions—“are’ya”— sometimes sound forced and awkward rather than earthy. In his straightforward account of everyday life, from the steamy mating of two horses and Mendl’s own physical awakening to the small-time business dealings and family squabbles, Perle fulfills the promise of his title, Ordinary Jews, and gives today’s readers entry to a world that is now dust. Bibliography, glossary and notes, photographs. MLW

fiction

The Prague Cemetery UMBERTO ECO RICHARD DIXON, TRANS. Houghton Miﬄin Harcourt, 2011 Hardcover 464 pp. $27.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0547577531

mberto Eco’s fascinating and disturbing new novel is a fictional account of how the notorious sham “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was invented from novels and forgeries to become the work that contributed so heavily to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. In Simone Simonini, the only fictional character in the novel, Eco has created one of the most despicable characters in modern literature. He describes how this spy, forger, glutton, and virulent anti-Semite manufactured an eye-witness account of a meeting of rabbis from throughout Europe who come together in a cemetery in Prague to plot the destruction of Christian civilization and become the rulers of the Western world. Eventually Simonini will enhance his original narrative for the Czarist secret service; it subsequently becomes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Eco’s novel requires some understanding of nineteenth century European history, as he moves from the events that unified Italy; to

Through the character of Simonini, Eco shows us the underworld of conspiracy theory which played its part in the events that led to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. the Prague Jewish cemetery, where the legendary Rabbi Loew of Golem fame is buried, to the France of the Dreyfus affair. Along the way we encounter the Jesuit plot against the Freemasons, and the canard that Jews were behind the Masons and all revolutionary movements since 1789, conspiring to destroy crown and scepter. Through the character of Simonini, Eco shows us the underworld of conspiracy theory which played its part in the events that led to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. He concludes this work with a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: How much of the whole existence of this people is based on permanent falsehood is apparent in the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Every week the Franfurter Zeitung whines they are based on forgery: and here lies the best proof that they are genuine… When this book becomes the common heritage of all people, the Jewish peril can then be considered as tamped out. Eco notes that the Protocols may be the most

widely circulated work in the world after the Bible. JF

Pulp and Paper JOSH ROLNICK University of Iowa Press, 2011 Paperback 180 pp. $16.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1609380526

he sense of place is primary in Pulp and Paper, Josh Rolnick’s sterling debut collection of stories. Characters are deeply set within their communities. In “Mainlanders,” teenage islanders Tubby and Thomas struggle to impress a couple of young beauties from the mainland. The Jersey shore is powerfully evoked: mussel beds, dried black seaweed, land eels, weakfish stew. The dialogue is pitchperfect and hilarious. In “Big Lake,” a high school boy blames himself for the death of a beloved teacher who fell through the ice on a local lake and drowned. Snowmobiles, icefishing shanties, moose sighting, and walleyes are among the signifiers. In the beautifully wrought title story, “Pulp and Paper,” an elderly widow’s life intersects with a neighbor’s after a train derailment results in a tragic spill at a nearby plant. An aging carousel operator recalls the bygone world of Coney Island in “Carousel”: grand chariots, the brass ring, the carved wooden mermaids. Throughout, the language is rich and evocative, the point of view deeply compassionate. JuF

The Spinoza Problem IRVIN D. YALOM Basic Books, 2012 Hardcover 352 pp. $25.95 ISBN: 978-0-465-02963-1

azi propagandist and self-proclaimed philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, a highranking party official driven by an obsessive

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need for Hitler’s approval, had a “Spinoza Problem.” How could a German cultural giant like Goethe pay homage to the mind and writings of a Jew? Dr. Yolam establishes this intellectual and emotional quagmire as a key to Rosenberg’s essential nature. A virulent anti-Semite who promoted the concept of the essential depravity of “Jewish blood,” Rosenberg’s confidence in Aryan supremacy was threatened by Spinoza’s stature. One time line of Yalom’s daring novel is a fictional biography of Rosenberg up through the fall of the Third Reich. The other timeline is a fictional biography of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth century Dutch apostate Jew whose writings prefigured much in modern and contemporary philosophy. Spinoza’s argument with the fables of traditional organized religion and his pursuit of a reason-based way of living and responding to Nature are dramatized through chapters of intense conversation and strenuous, disciplined thinking. Yalom explores the psychological consequences of Spinoza being cut off from participation in the Jewish community. Shunned and isolated, his exile and loneliness seem, eventually, to benefit his cerebral mission. The timelines are developed in alternating chapters, magically interweaving the characters’ destinies. For both Rosenberg and Spinoza, Yalom invents plausible confidantes to allow access to their most intimate fears and feelings. Dr. Yalom’s own professional experience as a practicing psychiatrist fuels his penetration of these half-real, half invented characters. Beautifully written, remarkably ambitious, filled with vivid descriptions of place, and bursting with brilliant insights, The Spinoza Problem carefully develops its personalities and issues so that they come alive in a highly original and absorbing way. Epilogue, foreword. PKJ

spring 5772/2012

Jewish Book World

fiction Until the Dawn’s Light AHARON APPELFELD JEFFREY M. GREEN, TRANS. Schocken Books, 2011 Hardcover 231 pp. $26.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-8052-4179-2

e enter this sad, prescient story as a mother and son are on a train; we sense the tension of flight. Aharon Appelfeld signals us at once in this remarkable novel that “movement” in its many forms will relentlessly propel the lives of his characters to their doom as Blanca and her young son, Otto, flee the scene of a horrific crime. Movement and frenetic motion signify every aspect of Blanca and her family’s life. Her immediate family has moved over the entire religious spectrum; her parents are nonreligious, assimilated; she herself has tried converting to Catholicism in a useless effort to please. Only Blanca’s grandmother, Carole,

Sweet Like Sugar WAYNE HOFFMAN Kensington, 2011 Paperback 352 pp. $15.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0758265623

enji Steiner straddles the middle—neither observant nor secular, neither independent nor reliant upon his parents, neither closeted nor in a relationship with Mr. Right. Then the shiftless twenty-something meets curmudgeonly and recently widowed octogenarian Rabbi Jacob Zuckerman. The rabbi encourages Benji to take a second look at Judaism, and an unsuspecting friendship takes root over snacks and Torah study. Still, Benji holds back. “I didn’t tell him that his apple cake had gotten stale. I didn’t tell

The rabbi encourages Benji to take a second look at Judaism, and an unsuspecting friendship takes root over snacks and Torah study. him that I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in God. And I certainly didn’t tell him that I had a date the next night—just days before Yom Kippur—with a tattooed skinhead named Frankie, a non-Jewish guy who was the half-naked model for my latest ad promoting Paradise, a venue where homosexuals gathered to drink excessively and pick one another up.” When the rabbi learns that Benji is gay, their flourishing relationship comes to a halt. Author Wayne Hoffman sets the stage for the pair to realize they have much to learn from each other about tolerance, open-mindedness, and interpreting the Torah. JT

Jewish Book World

spring 5772/2012

Movement and frenetic motion signify every aspect of Blanca and her family's life. remains an observant Jew. Indeed it is Carole, who when the local synagogue is forced to close because so many of the congregants have converted, will condemn the apostates at the top of her lungs for their desertion or movement away from the religious core. Blanca, a promising student, is either oblivious, or reluctant to confront what lies ahead. She forfeits her academic future to marry Adolf, an abusive, sadistic brute, a non-Jew who forces her to move away and separate from her parents. Blanca’s attempts to please and cajole Adolf are never successful and we witness yet another form of existential movement as Blanca detaches from her core Jewish values so clearly embedded from an early biblical adherence to the Ten Commandments. To survive, she begins to drink liquor, steal, lie, and ultimately to murder her Hitler-like husband. Blanca records her story in a diary for her son Otto. She knows that he will be growing to adulthood without her, her incarceration and hanging for the murder of her husband looming. She wants him to know everything. ”When you grow up, don’t forget the notebooks,” she urges him. Strikingly, Appelfeld’s novel predates the Holocaust by several decades. We learn that Appelfeld in all his works may have preferred allegory to a realistic depiction of his own suffering, losing his mother to the Nazis and deportation to a concentration camp. Simon Wiesenthal provides a chilling answer as a

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possible reason for Appelfeld’s avoidance in his memoir, The Murderers are Among Us, remembering the SS men admonishing the prisoners that in the unlikely instance that any of them would survive, even if they were to tell their stories, they wouldn’t be believed. Perhaps this was Appelfeld’s thinking. Or we can conjecture that he has taken another tack, preferring to depict the social and moral climate of the years preceding the Holocaust to suggest the moral guilt of those who chose to deny the culpability of the community that ultimately lead to the Holocaust. In any case the early brutalization and subjugation are for the reader all too hideously palpable, suggesting the horror of what was to come. RS

“Grant’s order expelling Jews A from his war zone has long helped ensure his eternal disgrace. Supposedly, the drunken, bloodthirsty crook was also an antisemite! Jonathan Sarna’s excellent, painstaking reevaluation of what really happened helps rescue Grant’s reputation; it is long overdue. It also affirms Sarna’s unsurpassed standing as a historian of American Jewry.” SEAN WILENTZ $24.95 U.S.A.

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nonfiction american jewish studies

Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities REZA ASLAN & AARON J. HAHN TAPPER, EDS. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 Hardcover 214 pp. $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-10861-5

his compilation of sixteen essays by scholars and activists addresses the complex relationship between Muslims and Jews in America. Congressman Keith Ellison writes in the foreword, “The thing to understand about Muslim-Jewish relations in the United States is that they are just fine.” The editors, both academics, are active in Abraham’s Vision, “a conflict transformation organization working within and between the Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, and Palestinian communities.” The book is organized into four loosely assembled sections whose selected essays do not always fit well together. For instance, the first section includes a diatribe by Omid Safi against pro-Israel Jewish organizations that embrace U.S Evangelical Christians, as well as an essay by Rabbi Amu Eilberg about “Children of Abraham in Dialogue.” Section four includes two essays that are actually speeches by Rabbi Eric Yoffie and Ingrid Mattson (a Muslim woman), delivered, respectively, to the Islamic Society of North America and the Union for Reform Judaism. While these two speeches dovetail, because in each case the speaker was addressing a mainstream audience of the “other,” the section’s last two essays, dealing with Iranian Jews and Muslims and peacemaking in America, seem out of place. Besides the organizational problems, the essays suffer from group-think in that most of them are drawn from similar perspectives; the Muslim voices are primarily traditionalist while the Jewish voices represent a liberal, progressive

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Jewish view. These drawbacks aside, the book is an original and insightful attempt to bring together a variety of writers about an important subject. For instance, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield details his experience working for the American Muslim television network Bridges TV, during which the co-founder, Mo Hassan, murdered his wife, Aasiya Zubair. Taymiya Zaman describes how Muslim organizations on college campuses have imitated Jewish groups like Hillel in gaining access and prominence on campus. Certainly this collection of essays represents a good beginning to the study and discussion of this important topic. Acknowledgements, index, notes. SJF

autobiography & memoir Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 TIM BONYHADY Pantheon Books, 2011 Hardcover 400 pp. $35.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0307378804

ew people have heard of the Gallia family of fin de siècle Vienna, but few will forget their extraordinary story after reading Good Living Street, a richly detailed portrait of a prominent Jewish family living in Austria during a time of Jewish assimilation and aﬄuence, in a contradictory world of rising anti-Semitism. This book gives intimate details of the daily life of a patron family played out against the larger backdrop of history during one of the most devastating periods in Jewish history. Mr. Bonyhandy, the son of one of the few survivors of the Gallia family, begins with the history of his family’s patriarch, Moriz Gallia, a successful businessman. Like other Jews of Central Europe who found economic opportunity in the large cities, he came to Vienna to

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pursue his various and growing business interests. His marriage to Hermine Hamburger produced four children, and Good Living Street focuses primarily on the story of their daughter Gretl and her daughter, Anne, the mother of the author. The Gallias were like many other successful middle class Jews, who remained part of the larger Jewish community but converted to Christianity in an effort to fully assimilate into the larger European culture. Some of their children did receive instruction in Jewish life, but largely led a secular Christian life, celebrating Christmas and Easter while ignoring Jewish life and rituals. Many chose atheism over any religion. But none of this would matter when the Nazis came to power. The Gallias found that for all their efforts they were considered racially Jewish and had their money and possessions taken from them, while they were shipped to concentration camps. Gretl, her daughter, and two of her siblings and their families were able to escape to Australia with many of their possessions. This is also a story of the Secessionist art movement in the early twentieth century and the accumulation of great works of art by affluent Jewish families. Much of this property was confiscated by the Nazis but the Gallia family managed to save much and transport it with them to Australia, including the famous Gustav Klimt portrait of Hermine Gallia that now hangs in the National Gallery in London. This book will give the reader a personal account of history during one of its darkest moments and the impact it had upon the survival of one very interesting family. BA

Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN Biblioasis, 2011 Hardcover 290 pp.. $26.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1-926845-31-9

ruce Jay Friedman’s anecdotal memoir is about a life of continual striving and settling—striving for the quiet torture of being a writer; settling for making a living amidst famous, usually insecure, denizens of a writer’s world. It plays loosely with anecdotal facts but piercingly with each anecdote. And the voice of the self-satirizing narrator puts him justly in that company. Temptations toward bravado are continually undercut by parenthetic challenges from an inner voice—a surrogate for parents always suspicious of big shots—that keeps BJF the reader’s companion. I broke out laughing on every other page and yet felt the poignancy of nonjudgmental friendship and appreciation of foibles that were more than human baggage, more like human marrow. The narrative, gathered from pieces first published in magazines and

nonfiction reviews, occasionally repeats itself or just breaks off. BJF’s life, he says in a parenthesis, is all rough edges. The bedrock of Bruce’s luck, as BJF sees it, was a Bronx Jewish boyhood, sleeping next to the kitchen sink in a three-room apartment—but with a dropped living room!—and a mother who always thought he could move up, though for her up was toward managing ticket sales, not writing plays or novels. He was launched into writing in the Air Force, lucky to be out of harm’s way; then propelled into the ad and magazine world, able, as an executive, to manage several publications and to support a young family (that hardly knew him as more than a suburban cliché) by writing on subways and in restaurants. His roster of celebrities (he confesses to being a name-dropper) is breath-taking, but his more significant (if understated) droppings are the titles of books read throughout his up-and-down life. He is more surprised than impressed with having his stories accepted by a dozen of America’s most highly regarded literary magazines while himself piloting men’s pulps and slicks like Swank. This memoir is literary beyond BJF’s mingling with novelists, playwrights, directors, actors, the whole crowd at Elaine’s, where you can find the men’s room by “tak…[ing] a right at Michael Caine.” Out of his head came novels like A Mother’s Kisses and Stern, plays like Scuba Duba and Steambath, and movie plots like Stir Crazy, Splash, and The Heartbreak Kid. For all this buckshot contact with the powerful and famous, what moves the reader most are the extended portraits in friendship. And from the author of all that “lonely guy” stuff (mostly written after he was warmly ensconced in a three-decade—and counting— romance with his second wife), some portraits of insightful women emerge. Elaine, of the eponymous Manhattan restaurant, not only served hungry guys, but launched partnerships by seating together talents only she might see as compatible—in response to Sidney Zion’s famous quip on friendship, “If you had Sinatra you didn’t need a friend,” BJF remarks, “If you had Elaine, you didn’t need Sinatra.” The most remarkable friendships are with Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo, the one hard to like but eventually bracing to love, the other, always needing to sink into working-class Italian surroundings, even while giving away piles of money to needy friends and astute gamblers (BJF had hired Puzo for his earliest, pre-Godfather magazine work). These two regular dinner partners, authors of two of the most noteworthy American novels of the 20th century, encouraged BJF’s own fiction writing. They also helped him stave off economic failure with tips about—and deflations of—work in Hollywood. In New York, you wrote: in Hollywood, you penned, which might mean 200 words of a concept for a film that might never get made your way, or at all. But Friedman

upholds his authorial chastity in Lucky Bruce’s final sentence: a frequent traveler, he always fills in the Occupation blank at Customs “with the single word…writer.” AC

Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest MICHAEL KRASNY New World Library, 2010 Hardcover 264 pp. $22.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1577319122

ichael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy is, above all, a book of questions. It is a book about a personal journey from faith to agnosticism, from childhood doubts to adult philosophical struggles. The more Krasny read the more he questioned, not only God, but the commandments as well. Is it possible to accept some commandments but not all of them? Are the commandments absolute? Is it right for someone to be punished for stealing bread in order to survive? Does the commandment not to kill include animals and plants? “I concluded,” he writes tongue in cheek, “to be absolutely moral, one had to not eat.” Krasny’s intellectual range is impressive. There’s a dizzying array of scientists, philosophers, and writers. Darwin, Nietsche, Hawthorne, Derrida, all make an appearance (to mention a few). Even comedian George Carlin shows up for his riff on the commandments. Krasny’s search for God was nothing if not thorough and what drives the search is a deep longing for spirituality. Krasny searched also in religions other than his own Judaism. He learned about the codes that are central to Hinduism (Laws of Manu) and Buddhism (the Vinaya). In the end he tries to do what we all do: figure out how to live with what he calls a “spiritual smorgasbord stocked by both the East and the West and not necessarily catered by God.” In later chapters Krasny addresses a wide array of religious experiences. He talks about reincarnation, evangelicals, and even the neuroscience of God. The one constant is the search. “I preferred the idea of having such knowledge arrive via my intellect, but I was open to its arrival by means of mystical vision or the miraculous,” he writes. In the end, the book is a wonderful journey for anyone who questions. Krasny’s easy prose takes us through literary, religious, and philosophical anecdotes and through refreshingly naughty stories from his own life. Those for whom God is not a question but a non-entity will still find the book rich and rewarding, but they will encounter the same flaw in reasoning that has played out many times over in this discussion. Krasny writes, “What refutes atheism is the simple fact that one cannot prove a negative.” But this is akin to saying we can’t

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prove there is no Diana, goddess of wisdom, so we have to remain agnostic. The more interesting question Krasny asks is, “How do I, or any who seek answers ... to questions of God’s existence, create God?” And when God is seen as a metaphor, I might argue that we are all trying to create God. Among Krasny’s powerful parting words: “If no spiritual power is visible behind life’s elevations, ... if we doubt the origins of moral or spiritual authority...and if we cannot determine what is worth dying for...then how do we derive purpose, our code, our meaning? The answer appears to be: from whatever sources we choose.” AB

What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past NANCY K. MILLER University of Nebraska Press, 2011 Hardcover 248 pp. $24.95 ISBN: 978-0803230019

hat They Saved is the very readable, true story of Nancy Miller’s quest into a murky past to unravel the mystery of a collection of disparate items found after her father’s death and, in so doing, to discover her roots. Tracing minute clues, her journey carries us back in time to areas as diverse as the Ukraine, Kishinev (Moldavia), Memphis, Argentina, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side of New York City. One overarching question remained: why hadn’t her parents ever spoken about these ancestors? Through her journey she discovered, sought out, and met the grandparents and cousins whom she did not know even existed. This unusual memoir is well worth reading. For one thing, who knows—this book might encourage the reader to discover the source of his or her own mysterious life artifacts. NDK

spring 5772/2012

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nonfiction

Lit Crits They were Jewish intellectual household names in the 1940s and '50s; two new books show why Kazin and Trilling are still worth reading. Alfred Kazin’s Journals RICHARD M. COOK, ED. Yale University Press, 2011 Hardcover 598 pp. $45.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0300142037

elected from journals that total more than 7000 pages by Kazin’s biographer and obvious admirer Richard Cook, chair of the English Department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the entries begin in 1933 when Kazin was a sophomore in college and conclude with entries from March 1988, a few months before his death. Kazin was admittedly compulsive about writing in his journal and writing in general. A prolific author, he drew on ideas recorded in his journals, most directly in his final publication, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996). He was a well-known and influential public critic from the 1940’s to the end of his life, teaching, reviewing, and writing commentaries on literature, literary figures, politics, and society. His journals are the immediate expressions of what interested him. Entries

biography David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance SHLOMO ARONSON Cambridge University Press, 2011 Hardcover 454 pp. $44.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-521-19748-9

aced with the rising criticism of David BenGurion in recent decades from revisionist

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on Jews, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Israel, and social issues document his life-long identification as a “New York Jew” as well as his lifelong ambivalence on the subject. For those interested in Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, among others, Kazin’s uncensored entries will provide a personal perspective not often found elsewhere. As for Israel and Jewish issues, his perspective is often that of a leftist outsider. The selected entries on his personal life reveal Kazin’s insecurities from childhood in a poor Jewish household, his sexual appetites—four marriages and many extra-marital affairs—and his harsh, often mean-spirited opinions about literary peers such as Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. The index includes more than 900 individuals about whom Kazin wrote: authors—both past and contemporary—political figures, academics, editors, and publishers, among others. Professor Cook’s editing is impressive. Brief, lucid essays introduce sections that define periods in Kazin’s life. Cook has footnoted every individual Kazin almentioned—invaluable, since many of the people, once well-known in the intellectual milieu of much of the twentieth century, have passed into relative obscurity. Cook, raised in Maine and the son of two Baptist ministers, writing about the “New York Jew,” has done an admirable job.

historians and anti-Zionists, Shlomo Aronson has written a densely argued apologia pro sua vita. He certainly succeeds in rescuing this remarkable figure, even if the reader sometimes wonders if it could have been achieved with fewer words. A voracious, self-taught reader and thinker, Ben-Gurion was somewhat sensitive about his lack of formal education. It feels as if the author shares some of that discomfort and sets out in a long opening chapter to detail BenGurion’s intellectual forebears. He constructs a complex theory of a moment in history he calls the Jewish Renaissance in order to explain the omnivorousness and essential practicality of Ben-Gurion, when these traits can be plainly defended by his unique success. These small flaws aside, the book is extremely valuable. Aronson refutes Ben-Gurion’s many detractors, deflecting accusations of all stripes. He explains the real world that the Jewish leader inhabited, the horrible “trap” of the Holocaust, the unrealistic and damaging activities of the Zionist Left and Right of his day. And through this intellectual biography, Aronson educates the reader on the background history of Zionism, and its anything but assured success. JHB

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The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life of Rachel Beer: Crusading Heiress and Newspaper Pioneer EILAT NEGEV & YEHUDA KOREN Bantam Books, 2012 Hardcover 368 pp. $30.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-345-53238-1

eiress Rachel Beer (1858-1927) was the first female publisher of a major national newspaper, the Sunday Times of England. Born into the wealthy Sassoon family, whose travels from Bombay through Europe to England occupy the first section of this book, Rachel Sassoon converted to the Anglican faith when she married the wealthy Frederick Beer, effectively severing her ties with her family and the Jewish community. She ran both the Sunday Times and, for a period, her husband’s paper, The Observer, writing a regular editorial column. She raised money for charities, endorsed new technologies, and championed some progressive causes, including the rights of women and minorities. After her husband’s early death—they’d only been married fifteen years—Rachel was declared mentally incompetent and bundled off to an

nonfiction This book will continue to fan the fires of controversy about Alfred Kazin’s place in the intellectual history the last century but at the same time it is filled with expression of direct experience of life by a keen observer of much of the twentieth century, personal hang-ups notwithstanding. EN

Why Trilling Matters ADAM KIRSCH Yale University Press, 2011 Hardcover 185 pp. $24.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-300-15269-2

n this remarkable contribution to Yale University Press’s “Why X Matters” series, Adam Kirsch traces the growth of Trilling’s career in education and criticism, musing along the way on the titles of Trilling’s works as sign posts of his development. Trilling’s own responses to his life, its disappointments as well as its successes, provide, in the Dantesque sense, a journey, in the middle of which (The Middle of the Journey, 1947) he had gone, not so much astray as afield, into imaginative writing, and needed to find his greater talent in criticism, as had his dissertation model, Matthew Arnold. Trilling engaged mid-century modernism, but rarely mid-century authors. He wanted to understand their predecessors, those who had fashioned the liberal spirit that his own age took for granted. And he read them as people, not new-critically, as name tags on textual artifacts, or as biographies or representatives of –isms. What they had seemed to say about his own life made them worth rereading to see if they really had. As a boy in shul, he had pondered not the prayers, but the Pirke Avoth,

early dotage. While readers may wonder how this Victorian woman overcame so many social barriers, how she related to the Jewish community, and what insights her life might offer, these questions remain largely unanswered. If this biography has relatively little to say about Rachel Beer herself, there are compensations. One learns a lot about the Sassoon and Beer dynasties, the Dreyfus affair, the opening of journalism to women, and the (limited) social life of an ex-Jewish heiress in late nineteenth century England. Still, the tragedy of this talented woman’s restricted existence is an inescapably sad bottom line. Bibliography, index, notes, photo insert. BEB

Heinrich Himmler: A Life PETER LONGERICH Oxford University Press, 2012 Hardcover 991 pp. $34.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0199592326

eter Longerich, author of the critically acclaimed book Holocaust, has written what is almost the definitive biography of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Nazi genocide

which he would later incorporate into his essay “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” (1950). As a young man he had leaned toward communism, but recoiled from its political excesses; he plumbed Freud, who appreciated poetry as a medium of thought, and learned that non-utopian civilization required a chastening of urges, at the price of discontent, which could be wrestled with in literature and life. As a literary critic it was not the liberal intellect that Trilling probed—this was evident all around him and surely embedded in the prevailing readership—but The Liberal Imagination (1950). What made Huck Finn shun ritual civility for the peace of the river, what made Wordsworth seek in nature a “wise passiveness,” what fascinated the weak-eyed Jewish Isaac Babel about Cossack brutality could make the reader question his own moral and political assumptions without reading lectures on politics. Trilling died eleven years after the political routing of Goldwater and five years before the ascendancy of Reagan, believing that conservatism was a lurking but humanely bankrupt alternative to the liberal spirit, but one that could rear its head as it had in Europe if liberals did not constantly challenge themselves As for Trilling’s Jewishness, after it nearly cost him his appointment in the all-gentile Columbia University English department, he wore it openly though lightly. But his doctrinal faiths, both in Judaism and in Marxism, gave over to a humanistic faith, connecting Arnold and Freud, that saw this life as the only life; saw human aging not only as loss, but as fulfillment “[i]In the faith that looks through death” by “an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;” (Wordsworth, “The Immortality Ode,” reevaluated in The Liberal Imagination); saw in Keats’s letters, human life not as “a vale of tears” but as “a vale of soul making” that “school[s] an intelligence and makes it a soul” (“The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters”). For Keats’s soul read self, immortal only in what it leaves as a contribution to life on earth. Our age, flitting from likes to dislikes, has lost this spirit of criticism. That’s why Trilling matters. Adam Kirsch has brought him back to us with a balance that his subject would appreciate. AC

against the Jews. Almost because, although the biography is comprehensive with regard to Himmler’s early life and how he turned the SS into the murderous organization that was responsible for the mass murder of Jews, Longerich writes surprisingly little about his relationship to Hitler. Historians agree that Hitler issued the orders for the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question,” and Himmler was given enormous power to enforce this murderous objective. Given Hitler’s propensity to give general policy directions without specifics, it is unclear whether the murderous rampage that became the Holocaust was the product of his explicit orders or that of Himmler’s fanatical and far-reaching objective of creating a new Aryan racial order in the East through mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Himmler’s ultimate goal was based on racial fantasies which he gleaned from the racial literature of his teenage years, when he dreamed of resettling the lost Nordic-Germanic populations of Eastern Europe within an Aryan German empire in Europe. This opportunity arose when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941 and Hitler issued his “Commissar ”order calling for a ruthless ideological war in the East against

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“Judeo-Bolshevism,” resulting in the murder of six million Jews, viewed as the primary target, as well as millions of other “inferior” beings. Given the leeway Hitler gave his commanders in the killing fields to interpret his orders, it is hard to distinguish Hitler’s ultimate intentions with regard to the Jews from Himmler’s own initiatives. Thus, without knowing more about their relationship and the manner in which Hitler conveyed his orders to Himmler in regard to the general objective of making Europe Judenrein (free of Jews), it is difficult to concur with Longerich’s conclusion:

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he was repeatedly guilty of disloyalty to his own principles....” and yet, he was a baptized unbeliever with a strong aﬀection for the Jews. For her part, Lesser views as conjecture the uproar over Shostakovitch’s loyalties, choosing to leave it all behind as “pointless” and emphasizing that it is above all Shostakovitch’s music, particularly his ﬁfteen quartets, that must be listened to again and again to be heard in all their superb diversity. RS

Paul on Mazursky If Himmler had been replaced in the 1930s by someone else, this speciﬁc and highly dangerous network of diﬀerent powers (referring to Himmler) would not have come into being. If, on the other hand, these responsibilities had been distributed among several Nazi politicians as separate domains, Nazi policy could not have led to its dreadful consequences in quite the same way… for the systematic murder of European Jews to which Himmler’s is connected today was not in his eyes the ultimate goal of his policies but rather the precondition for much more extensive plans for a bloody new ordering of the European continent. JF

Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN Yale University Press, 2011 Hardcover 224 pp. $25.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-300-13724-8

s Rubenstein’s subtitle, “A Revolutionary’s Life,” hints, this is not so much a study of Trotsky-the-man, as a study of Trotsky’s struggles to bring about a proletarian revolution in Russia. While some material is included on his boyhood, education, wives, and lovers, the real focus is on the factional maneuverings leading up to the Russian Revolution, the evolving relationship between Lenin and Trotsky, and, finally, Stalin’s campaign to eradicate Trotsky. To deal with a polarizing figure like Trotsky is no easy task; the fact that so many contemporaries initially accepted Stalin’s version of events and condemned Trotsky, only makes Rubenstein’s job more difficult. Viewing Trotsky’s story through a Jewish lens adds further complications; while Trotsky never hid his Jewish roots, he struggled against what he considered Jewish ‘parochialism.’ Yes, Russian Jews faced very particular problems—widespread peasant anti-Semitism and murderous pogroms—but these were not problems that Trotsky felt he had any special obligation

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to tackle; he identiﬁed himself as a Marxist internationalist, not as a Jew. In Rubenstein’s preface, he groups Trotsky with history’s ‘tragic heroes,’ the ones who dream of justice and then ‘wreak havoc.’ The ambivalence of that description is underscored in page after page of this intelligent but uneasy biography. Index, notes on sources. BEB

Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets WENDY LESSER Yale University Press, 2011 Hardcover 368 pp. $28.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0300169331

mitri Shostakovich’s music is marked by its almost unearthly ability to convey emotion—joy and hopelessness, anxiety and ambiguity, humor and anger. In this biography of the great Russian composer, Wendy Lesser, editor of Threepenny Review, has written a book of musical and biographical insight. The tragic irony of Shostakovich’s life was that music and art in Russia were revered by both the general population and its repressive leaders, leaving him always to grapple with the possible and often dangerous repercussions of the political interpretation of his music. As in other totalitarian states, all Russian music was considered “program” music, that is, intended to convey a message, or meaning outside itself. Thus, the ongoing drama of his life saw his music at times openly suspected by Stalin and the party as being the work of a “secret dissident”; at other times he was reputed to have been a loyal party member, sometimes betraying colleagues and fellow musicians when his word in their defense was desperately needed. As such, he has left behind a legacy of documented, sometimes egregious actions, leaving lasting questions regarding his character. Lesser describes him as a series of contradictions, a “self- acknowledged coward who sometimes demonstrated great courage...immensely loyal to his friends,

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SAM WASSON Wesleyan University Press, 2011 Hardcover 342 pp. $35.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-8195-7144-1

am Wasson is definitely a fan of Paul Mazursky, the writer-director of such 1970’s-era films as An Unmarried Woman, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto, and Next Stop, Greenwich Village. This volume of interviews sets out to pay homage to Mazursky much as Francois Truffaut paid homage to Hitchcock in his interviews with the master of suspense. Wasson laments that Mazursky is widely acknowledged to be widely underrated (paradoxical as that may seem), and he labors mightily throughout to bolster his subject’s reputation. He rightly observes that Mazursky is underrated largely because his sensibility is not primarily “cinematic.” As a writer with deep roots in stage acting, Mazursky’s principal concern was to put compelling stories and performances on the screen, rather than to explore the boundaries of what film can do as a visual medium. When the mantle of greatness is reserved for distinctive innovators, relatively unstylistic auteurs like Mazurksy easily get lost in the shuffle. Wasson’s efforts are not in vain, but they would have been more persuasive if he had not presumed that his readers would be as familiar with Mazursky’s work as he is. For better or worse, Mazursky’s films are not common currency, so breezy discussions of “the orgy” and “the rape,” lacking sufficient context, also lack force. While these amiable conversations between Wasson and his subject may prompt a pause while channel-surfing to take in a cablecast of Down and Out in Beverly Hills, they are unlikely to send many readers rushing to Netflix to order up their own Mazursky retrospectives. BB

contemporary jewish life & practice Becoming Jewish: The Challenges, Rewards, and Paths to Conversion RABBI STEVEN CARR REUBEN & JENNIFER S. HANIN BOB SAGET, FWD. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011 Hardcover 244 pp. $22.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1-4422-0848-3

ecoming Jewish is the proverbial treasure trove of information about converting to Judaism, with facts, fables, and foibles all rolled into one well-written, well-conceived book. The two authors, one a rabbi, one a convert, write smoothly together, blending their viewpoints and deftly piggybacking on each other’s thoughts and feelings. A wealth of material covers everything from shopping for a rabbi, understanding Jewish values, learning about Jewish ideas on believing vs. belonging, studying Hebrew, honoring Shabbat, and celebrating the holidays at home to facing the Mikvah and the Bet Din. It also touches on issues related to raising Jewish children and brings to life the great love of the Jewish people for Israel and, especially, Jerusalem. Meaningful anecdotes about Hanin’s conversion process and the new ways she learned to relate not only to Judaism but to a world that now looked diﬀerent to her are sprinkled throughout the book and add a grace note of personal warmth to an already welcoming set of concepts. The book is well-organized and easy to follow. Reuben, a Reconstructionist rabbi, artfully explains the diﬀerences among the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements and his own, honoring each in its own right and also mentioning trans-denominational Jewish organizations. Appendices explain the syllabi of typical conversion courses, and a glossary provides

nonfiction deﬁnitions of common Jewish terms, including tzedakah, Talmud, and sufganiyot. A resources section helps encourage Jewish activism by listing online Jewish magazines, such as Jewcy, museums of Jewish history and Israel-centered think tanks. Appendices, glossary, index, resources. LFB

Creating Lively Passover Seders: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts & Activities, Second Edition DAVID ARNOW, PH.D. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011 Paperback 415 pp. $24.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1580234443

hoever elaborates on the story of the Exodus deserves praise.” David Arnow, psychologist and co-editor of My People’s Haggadah, deserves much praise for compiling a treasury of Passover material to enrich any seder. The first edition, published in 2004, grew out of supplements Arnow composed for his family’s seders. This expanded edition, with new chapters, continues Arnow’s exploration of every aspect of the seder. The chapter on Dayenu lifts it from a rousing song to a summary of the Exodus, built around the number fifteen and its significance in Jewish tradition. Similarly, Arnow brings both medieval scholars and Shmuel Agnon and Yehuda Amichai to comment on Chad Gadya. A chapter on the seder plate opens up the question of where to place what, and Arnow finds Moses in the Haggadah despite the fact that he is not named. The chapters from the first edition are equally expansive, notably the controversial “pour out your wrath” and the figure of Elijah; the archeologic evidence for the Exodus and how it could have entered Jewish tradition; and midrashim that bring women into the story. This is a book to be consulted, not read from to cover. Taking his directions from the Mishnah’s brief chapter on the sparse ritual requirements of the seder and its stress on instructing children, Arnow encourages discussion as a means to better understand the

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festival. He suggests elaborating on one topic a year and outlines formats that encourage discussion, such as distributing passages to participants ahead of time and gathering before the seder for an activity or a conversation about a passage. However readers choose to use the material, there is enough here for a lifetime of thought-filled seders. As I read the book, I found myself marking passages that I might insert into a seder or that were personally valuable and informative. The great range of material, from the rabbis through medieval scholars to contemporary commentators, not only provides these opportunities but also underlines the remolding of the Exodus story to fit the time and place of its retelling. If you do not have the first edition, you will be rewarded with this expanded version; if you own the earlier edition, you know the possibilities that Arnow’s research provides. Appendixes, index, notes, select bibliography. MLW

One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation RABBI LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN Blue Bridge, 2011 Paperback 368 pp. $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-933346-31-1

rom the Book of Genesis to Start Up Nation, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman has compiled 3,000 years of Jewish dialogue into a guide to Judaism’s one hundred most essential books. Interestingly, the book opens with an analysis of why Jews are considered a “People”—as opposed to a religion, culture, or nationality—and how the entirety of Judaism is best defined as an ongoing conversation— one that has traversed several generations, continents, and cultures. Playing on the theme of Judaism as a conversation, Hoffman divides all of Jewish history into nine phases of the Conversation: from the time of the Bible when “The Conversation is Launched,” through modern day as “The Conversation Continues.” Within each of the nine categories, each book is summarized with a three-page synopsis, a notable quote from the book, and the book’s historical significance and background. Designed to be an introduction to Judaism, One Hundred Great Jewish Books provides an overview of the pivotal books of each time period, and deftly identifies each one’s place in the lexicon of the forever-ongoing Jewish conversation While the book is—admittedly—a highly subjective overview of the texts it presents, it is nonetheless a meaningful, interesting, and unique synopsis of Jewish historical thought. Both newcomers and knowledgeable Jews will find it to be an enriching compendium that

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weaves a single thread through thousands of years, and millions of pages of Jewish conversation. ER

Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy YOEL FINKELMAN Academic Studies Press, 2011 Hardcover 255 pp. $49.00 ISBN: 978-1-936235-37-7

he premise underlying this interesting study is that the values and assumptions of a particular group, in this case, the Haredi right-wing Orthodox world, can be identified and analyzed from the perspective of the literature produced for and consumed by members of the group in question. Recognizing that in addition to the primary and secondary works that comprise Jewish traditional literature, the Haredi world has of late produced marriage manuals, parenting guides, cookbooks, novels, and periodicals, as well as “renderings” and “translations” of Halachic and theological works for its membership, the author accesses a wide range of literature in order to substantiate his analyses. A recurring theme in the work is what the author presents as a disconnect between, on the one hand, the expressed self-perceptions of the Haredi world that includes a deliberate sense of setting oneself apart from the dangers associated with general secular society, a rigid, sacrificial adherence to Torah values and lifestyle, and a total submission to the directives of acknowledged Rabbinic authority, and on the other, the introduction by means of literature of genres and even secular approaches packaged as legitimate Torah understandings of the issues being addressed. In addition to providing a helpful perspective for reading this type of material, Finkelman’s book demonstrates the challenges faced by a traditional minority group to living within a majority culture, striving not to be affected by the host society’s

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values and progressive thinking. Bibliography, endnotes, index. JB

cooking & food Feed Me Bubbe: Recipes and Wisdom from America’s Favorite Online Grandmother AVROM HONIG & BUBBE Running Press, 2011 Paperback 224 pp. $16.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0691144122

his is your grandmother’s cooking, homestyle Jewish food that has been served for generations. Bubbe, the grandmother of Avrom Honig, began a new career at eighty, when her grandson Avrom asked her to let him make a video of her cooking for a demo to help him ﬁnd a media job. From a YouTube video, an online cooking show was born. Practical and wholesome, Feed Me Bubbe is Jewish Cooking 101 with a supportive and experienced teacher who laces her lessons with personal anecdotes, advice, and a Yiddish word a day. Chopped herring, brisket, chicken fricassee, stuﬀed cabbage, matzo brei, a variety of blintzes, kasha varnishkes, potato knishes—for everyone who craves the food of

Practical and wholesome, Feed Me Bubbe is Jewish Cooking 101 with a supportive and experienced teacher... his or her grandmother, Feed Me Bubbe serves it up clearly and concisely. The chapter on baking is particularly attractive, with easy-tobake home cakes and cookies, highlighted by Bubbe’s signature Jelly Jammies. But Bubbe is open to innovation, substituting tofu and low-fat ingredients to reduce cho-

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lesterol in classic dishes, enclosing kreplach in wonton wrappers, and embracing new flavors like honey mustard for baking salmon and lavash for Lox and Cream Cheese Rollups. Like most skilled everyday cooks Bubbe uses readymade ingredients judiciously—bouillon cubes if necessary to bolster chicken soup, packaged puff pastry, ketchup—to save time without sacrificing flavor. All the recipes are kosher, with symbols indicating whether they’re meat, dairy, pareve, or for Passover. To round out her book, Bubbe has a short list of her favorite Yiddish songs, which she suggests listening to while cooking; menus for the holidays and for everyday; a glossary of basic cooking words; and formulas for metric conversion. Although Bubbe doesn’t divulge her name or address, she does give a phone number and e-mail address to which readers can address questions. Proudly old-fashioned, Feed Me Bubbe is a lively and relevant guide for the homestyle cook. Index, photographs. MLW

The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic MARY L. ZAMORE, ED. ERIC H. YOFFIE, FWD. NIGEL SAVAGE, PREFACE CCAR, 2011 Paperback 519 pp. $19.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-88123-170-0

ood is clearly an integral part of Jewish culture and the laws of kashrut are central to the way that Judaism deals with food. This volume of essays by Reform rabbis and Jewish scholars “celebrates the ideology of educated choice” (jacket note). Each paper addresses an aspect of our relationship to food and to halachah. The book encourages liberal Jews to think about kashrut and how it relates to their lives. Rather than using the rigid approach of Orthodoxy, the authors of these essays encourage readers to consider mindfulness as they eat, think about eating meat and what it means, consider the way the animals are treated, and care about the working conditions in the places that grow and process food. They examine the infamous T’reifah Banquet that took place in 1883, the health issues related to food and its production, the inequities in modern society, and fasting. By expanding the parameters of kashrut to include ethical considerations, these essays make readers focus on the sanctity of food and its importance in the lives of all people. The Sacred Table is an excellent resource for individuals, educators, and liberal synagogues. BMB

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Jelly Jammies From Feed Me Bubbe by Avrom Honig and Bubbe (Chalutz Productions, Running Press, a member of the Perseus Book Group; 2011) Makes 16 servings These days, everyone has fancy kitchen equipment like miniature food processors and spice grinders. But when I need to chop nuts, like I do for this recipe, I just put them in a plastic sandwich baggie and roll a soup can across them. My Jelly Jammies have become so famous I have to keep a continuous supply in my freezer for guests. Fortunately, they couldn’t be easier to prepare. I like them best made with strawberry jam, but feel free to use your favorite. These make a perfect afternoon pick-me-up with a cup of coffee or tea. Here is a tip: I hate washing pans! If you do too, try lining yours with nonstick aluminum foil. When your Jelly Jammies are done, you can just throw the foil away—no cleanup required! ¾ cup strawberry jam 1 medium tart apple, such as Granny Smith, peeled and coarsely grated 2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest 4 teaspoons chopped walnuts 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons golden raisins 1½ cups all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon kosher salt ½ teaspoon baking powder 4 ounces (1 stick) pareve margarine, softened ½ cup granulated sugar 1 large egg 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract Preheat the oven to 400°F. Spray a 9 x 9-inch baking pan with nonstick spray or line the bottom and sides of the pan with nonstick aluminum foil. In a medium bowl, stir the strawberry jam, apple, lemon juice, lemon zest, walnuts, cinnamon, and raisins until combined. Set it aside. In another medium bowl, sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder. In a large bowl, beat the margarine and the sugar with an electric mixer until they are nice and light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in the egg and the vanilla extract. Slowly add the flour mixture and beat, scraping the sides as you go, until it is well mixed and forms a dough. Spread two-thirds of the dough into the bottom of the prepared pan. Spread the jam mixture over the dough. Using your hands, gather tablespoon-size pieces of the remaining dough and flatten them into little disks. Place the dough pieces over the jam filling. (They won’t cover the filling entirely, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to be that way. The dough will spread.). Bake the Jelly Jamies for about 25 minutes, until the filling is bubbling and the dough is golden brown. Cut them into 16 squares while still warm. They are hard to cut when completely cool. Note: This recipe easily can be doubled. Just use a 13 x 9-inch baking dish and bake 25–30 minutes.

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history After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers DANIEL MORRIS Syracuse University Press, 2011 Hardcover 300 pp. $29.95 ISBN: 978-0-8156-0987-2

rofessor Morris provides significant insights into the photographic art and documentary projects of the imposing photographers discussed in his ten essays. He is sure-handed in surveying their technical and thematic range, keeping his critical language accessible even while projecting an authoritative, scholarly voice. However, the effort of dealing with the Jewish factor is strained and oddly reductive. Morris notes, over and over again, the social consciousness of these image makers and their concern with the human condition at the margins. The homeless, the dispossessed, the marginalized subjects of their documentary projects are relentlessly tied to the ostensible outsider identity of the photographers, a status that is a consequence of their Jewishness—by definition. (Annie Liebovitz’s celebrity gallery is an exception here, although the show business world her best-known work explores is also considered a Jewish cultural product.) It could just as well be that people on one side of a camera are almost invariably outsiders to the subject communities they approach and record. Morris’s study, then, succeeds best as a series of essays and not so well as a thesismongering whole. Aside from Liebovits, Arthur Fellig (Weegee), Bruce Davidson, Jim Goldberg, Mel Rosenthal, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Allen Ginsberg, Tyagan Miller, Marc Asnin, and Mary Ellen Mark are at the center of these passionately wrought essays. Illustrations, index, introduction, works cited. PKJ

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Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History JONATHAN DEKEL-CHEN, DAVID GAUNT, NATAN M. MEIR & ISRAEL BARTAL, EDS. Indiana University Press, 2011 Hardcover 220 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0-253-35520-1

nspired by the work of the late historian John Klier, who helped reframe how scholars now understand anti-Jewish violence in late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, the articles in this book are a product of an international academic conference he helped organize in Stockholm in May 2005. Klier inspired many scholars to question the prevailing assumptions about the connection

...although the pogrom became a central part of the Russian discourse of violence...the research also suggests that local, national, and transnational conditions and responses often determined how deadly and how likely they were to occur. between the Russian regime and pogroms, thereby challenging the dominant national narratives of Eastern European Jewish culture and memory on the issue of Russian antiJewish violence. The editors and authors, coming from Europe, the United States, and Israel, oﬀer analysis based on newly available primary sources that provide context and nuance to the conventional wisdom regarding Russian governmental responsibility and complicity. It turns out that although the pogrom became a central part of the Russian discourse of violence, easily remembered and easily invoked, the research also suggests that local, national, and transnational conditions and

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responses often determined how deadly and how likely they were to occur. There are valuable contributions in the book that underscore the need to explore “regional” variations in Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia. There is also new research on who the pogromshchiki were, who supported and encouraged them and for what purpose, and their overall impact on society generally and the Jewish community speciﬁcally. There are particularly important chapters by Vladimir Levin on preventing pogroms, Natan M. Meir on the impact of pogroms on everyday Jewish life and self-understanding, and Claire Le Foll on the missing pogroms of Belorussia in 1881-2, shedding light on the motives for the absence of violence in some regions while they raged in others. This volume signiﬁcantly advances the scholarship on the roots and nature of pogroms in Russia and will be of interest to those who want to learn more about Eastern European Jewish life. MND

Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition MARNI DAVIS New York University Press, 2012 Hardcover 272 pp. $32.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-8147-2028-8

ewish identity is the great theme of American Jewish historiography, and Marni Davis’s engrossing and well-written book belongs to this genre. Jews and Booze originated as a doctoral dissertation at Emory University under the direction of Eric Goldstein, whose own book, The Price of Whiteness, is a brilliant exploration of the theme of race and Jewish identity in the early twentieth century. Davis argues that Jewish participation in the alcohol business, a business disdained by much of the dominant Protestant population, “exacerbated the inherent and inevitable tensions” between the Jews’ efforts to blend into American culture and their efforts to stand apart from it. Alcohol was a significant element in the American Jewish economy. Some of the most

Alcohol was a significant element in the American Jewish economy. important distillers were Jews, Jews were conspicuous in the wholesaling and retailing ends of the business, and several of the most prominent bootleggers were Jews. I. W. Harper bourbon whiskey and Rheingold were just two of the major alcohol products created by Jewish entrepreneurs. According to Davis, Jews in Cincinnati, Louisville, and Atlanta in 1900

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Tales of Two Cities Jews flocked to Kiev fleeing persecution and seeking economic opportunity; they fled Bialystok for much the same reasons.

Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914

Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora REBECCA KOBRIN Indiana University Press, 2010 Paperback 380 pp. $24.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0253221766

his engaging book is a creative effort to retell and explore the East European Jewish immigrant experience by focusing on Jews from Bialystok who settled across the seas in America, Africa, Australia, Palestine/ Israel, and beyond, while maintaining their transnational links to their Polish hometown. The author argues that there were ongoing mutual contacts between the capital of the “Bialystoker Empire” and its colonies abroad. Those colonies grew in confidence, especially in New York City with its iconic Bialystoker Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The author’s sources include materials in a variety of languages drawn from archives in five countries, as well as numerous interviews, press sources, and other published materials, along with photographs and drawings. Of special value is the wealth of material originating from the Bialystoker Center and its analogs in other countries. A small complaint can be raised about clumsiness in transcription and translation of a number of Yiddish and Polish terms, as well as typographic errors. However, these defects do not detract from the fascination of the tour through the regions of the transnational Bialystoker Empire that continues to exist even after the Jewish community in that Polish city was annihilated by the Nazi Germans. Beginning with an account of Jewish Bialystok, this book itself examines the effects of mass immigration on Jewish identity in a variety of settings: New York, Argentina, Australia, Israel, and more. Bialystokers in exile clearly attempted to rebuild their hometown in new promised lands of opportunity, where those same Bialystokers and their children undertook to care for their hometown by sending remittances and aid home. Bialystokers in America and elsewhere became experts at organizing to mobilize aid for the needy, both in their old hometown and in their new hometowns, and ultimately also in the reborn State of Israel. Bibliography, illustrations, index, maps, notes, photographs. RMS

were overrepresented in the alcohol business by a factor of four or ﬁve times, and Jewish businessmen in the trade were an important source of funds for Jewish communal institutions. The role of Jews in the alcohol business was complicated by the growing popularity of the Prohibition movement, which most Jews disdained, but which became the law in 1920

NATAN M. MEIR Indiana University Press, 2010 Paperback 403 pp. $27.95 ISBN: 978 0 253 22207 7

iev, Jewish Metropolis seeks to reconstruct the fabric of Jewish daily life in the dynamic city of Kiev, known as the mother of Russian Orthodox cities. Banned from living in Kiev since the 17th century, small numbers of Jews were initially allowed to obtain residence permits in 1859, with more Jews entering both legally and illegally. The period between 1859 and 1914 saw tremendous economic and demographic growth and cultural change, especially for Russia’s Jews, who were largely restricted to the notorious Pale of Settlement. Mostly impoverished Jews poured into Kiev from the economically stunted and conservative small market towns or shtetlekh. Like Jews who made the trans-Atlantic voyage to America, many Jews in Kiev felt constrained to give up aspects of traditional Jewish life, customs, and ritual, such as the Sabbath, kosher food, and regular synagogue attendance, in order to make a living and succeed materially. For many young Jews, Kiev was a place to forge a new assimilated Russiﬁed identity, which paradoxically triggered fear of hidden Jewish dominance of Kiev. The author makes creative use of a broad range of primary and secondary sources in many languages, found in libraries and archives in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and the US. Diaries, memoirs, court records, petitions, newspaper articles, and advertisements are used to reconstruct threads of history, in addition to short stories, novels, and poetry. The book examines how the Jewish community was organized and looks at the dynamic change in Russian and Russian-Jewish civil society during the ﬁnal decade before the First World War. Bibliography, index, maps, notes, photographs. RMS

with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. As loyal Americans, Jews did not want to appear as law-breakers, but on the other hand, they saw nothing wrong with a moderate consumption of alcohol, particularly at holiday times. Looming in the background was the anti-Semitic charge of Henry Ford and others that Jews were behind the ne-

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farious liquor trade. Jews naturally rejected such accusations since they challenged their identity as loyal Americans. “Jewish responses to Americans’ inconstant relation to alcohol,” Davis concludes, “encapsulated their eﬀorts to clarify and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.” ESS

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nonfiction The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 1, 1350 to 1881 ANTONY POLONSKY Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010 Hardcover 534 pp. $59.50 ISBN: 978-1784774648

his is the ﬁrst volume of a comprehensive new survey of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, where for over eight hundred years there have been communities of Jews, from which a majority of the world’s Jews originated. The history of Poland’s Jews was intimately intertwined in the history of old Poland, when it was one of Europe’s largest states, and continued under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian rule. Yiddish-speaking Jews contributed substantively to general economic and cultural life in Poland and Russia, while they cultivated their rich East European Jewish heritage. It is a complex story with many threads that is presented with admirable clarity, ethical objectivity, and honesty. This book is destined to become the standard survey of East European Jewish history for the next generation. It is a lively, well-written work that draws on the wealth of recent scholarly research published in Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, French, and English. Bibliography, glossary, index, maps, notes, tables. RMS

Philosemitism in History JONATHAN KARP & ADAM SUTCLIFFE, EDS. Cambridge University Press, 2011 Hardcover 348 pp. $85.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-521-69547-3

hilosemitism, the idealization of Jews and Judaism, has not generated much scholarship and reﬂection. Too often it has been treated as either existing on the margins

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of non-Jewish attitudes or as a mask for anti-Semitism. The term, coined in Germany in 1880, is awkward and problematic since it was invented by avowed anti-Semites (anti-Semitism as a term was invented a few years earlier) to deride their opponents. Even though the word “philosemitism” is tainted by its association with its antonym and vague and illdefined, the phenomenon it generally covers is worthy of careful consideration. Most of the existing work on the subject assumes one of two approaches: either that philosemitism is the exact opposite of anti-Semitism, or that it is itself a form of anti-Semitism. This book takes a different approach, exploring the complex and nuanced interplay of positive and negative attitudes toward Jews, recognizing the problematic nature of many currents of idealization of Jews and Judaism while taking seriously the significance of non-Jewish efforts to support, defend, and appreciate the contributions of Jews to Western civilization, religious thought, literature, economics, and politics. The fourteen essays in this volume represent a broad range of disciplines and approaches from history, religious studies, literary studies, and anthropology, ranging from antiquity to the Middle Ages, to such contemporary topics as philosemitism in African American culture, the rise of Christian evangelical Zionism, philosemitic television in post-Shoah Germany and the current idealization of Eastern European Jewish culture in Poland bordering on kitch and exploitation. The book also has an extensive introductory chapter by the editors that provides a wonderful overview of the topics and a survey of the scholarly literature. In this time of increasing anti-Semitism, rising tensions in the Middle East and Europe, challenges to the legitimacy of the State of Israel and continuing threats of global terrorism, this book provides a timely and dispassionate treatment of philosemitism and a reminder that there is a rich history of positive responses to Jews and Judaism and that Jewish-non-Jewish relations should not be viewed only through the prism of antiSemitism. MND

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holocaust studies Contesting Histories: German and Jewish Americans and the Legacy of the Holocaust MICHAEL SCHULDINER Texas Tech University Press, 2011 Hardcover 336 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0-89672-698-7

ichael Schuldiner provides a unique angle into understanding how the Holocaust unfolded and was received and understood in the years before the war and how it was interpreted in the years that followed. Reflecting on his experiences teaching Holocaust literature courses at the University of Alaska and other institutions and the resistance he encountered in the classroom, particularly from German American students, he came to realize that this resistance was part of a long cultural history. This book is primarily about the conflict between German Americans and Jewish Americans and the ways in which their arguments in the years leading up to World War II have found their way into the academic discourse and provided the foundation for opposing historical interpretations of the Holocaust. There is much that is new and suggestive here, particularly his examination of how the Holocaust has impacted the German American community, creating feelings of guilt, defensiveness, insecurity, and fear, even leading to anti-Semitism, Holocaust “normalization” claims and Holocaust denial. Although interesting, his claims about intellectual influence are a bit overdrawn and not compelling. The feelings that German Americans and Jewish Americans have about the Holocaust are clearly the product of their experiences, perceptions, and internalizations of the phenomenon. Schuldiner discusses to great effect the anti-German sentiment in the U.S. during WWI; confrontations between German American isolationists and Jewish American interventionists in the 1930s and '40s; boycotts of German goods in the U.S. and counter boycotts of Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany; accusations by isolationists and others that Jewish “dominated” Hollywood was anti-German; and the debate in Congress and the country over changing the immigration laws, allowing sanctuary for Jews seeking to escape from Nazi persecution. Fundamental disagreements over these issues colored the perception of the developing Shoah in these two ethnic communities These disagreements continued after 1945 in the debates over the establishment of the

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; the controversy over President Reagan’s visit to a German military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985; and the substantive and sometimes heated disagreements by scholars over whether the Germans were “Hitler’s willing executioners” as Daniel Goldhagen claims, or merely “ordinary men” placed in extraordinary situations, as Christopher Browning suggests, with the implication that anyone in the same group situation would commit similar atrocities. Here I differ somewhat from Schuldiner’s characterization of the debate. I don’t believe that he effectively makes the case that at its heart it was about victim sympathy on the one hand and perpetrator identification on the other. That is not how most scholars would “read” Goldhagen and Browning. Nevertheless, this is a well-written book that looks at the Holocaust from the perspectives of communities deeply connected to the perpetrators and the victims and thereby provides new insights and dimensions to Holocaust studies in America. MND

as threatening a Romania for Romanians. The same held for many Russians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and most brutally among Ukrainians. Hale notes that the foreign volunteers who joined the various agencies of the Reich clearly understood the “ethics” of the German war—Jewish women and children were not viewed as “collateral damage” in the war against “Jewish-Bolshevism,” but were deliberate targets for annihilation. Hale, who researched archives throughout Europe and used ﬁrst-hand testimony, estimates that nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to ﬁght a deadly crusade against a mythic JewishBolshevism. Although Hitler fought his war to create an Aryan empire in the East, this objective was not shared by the non-Aryan contingents who fought the war against the Soviet Union. What they did have in common with Nazi Germany was their hatred of the Jews, thus making them both Hitler’s accomplices and his willing executioners. JF

Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret

Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story

CHRISTOPHER HALE The History Press, 2011 Hardcover4 447 pp.. $36.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0752459745

hristopher Hale, author of Himmler’s Crusade (2003), and a television documentary-maker, advances our knowledge of the non-German perpetrators of genocide who aided the Nazis during the Holocaust. Now, in his prodigiously researched book, Hale challenges Goldhagen’s argument by raising the question of how Germany’s exterminatory anti-Semitism accounts for the mass killing of Jews by the nationals of Croatia, Romania, the Baltic states, Belorussia, and the Ukraine, let alone Hitler’s willing executioners in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Bosnian Muslim contingents in the Waffen SS. Hitler’s Foreign Executioners describes the collaboration of local non-German militias throughout Europe in the brutal massacres of Jews, as well as in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. The author concludes that these non-German men and women were also Goldhagen’s willing executioners. Once the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the enemy was not viewed as a hostile armed force but as upholders of the Russian-Bolshevik-Jewish system, and Jews were the enemy simply because they were Jews; their murder was justified because their existence threatened the well-being of the Reich. This type of rationalization also characterized the Romanian massacre of Jews but for a different reason; they perceived Jews

REBECCA BOEHLING & UTA LARKEY Cambridge University Press, 2011 Hardcover 433 pp. $29.99 ISBN: 978-0521899918

ased on correspondence written by the Kaufmann-Steinberg family that spanned two generations, the authors have pieced together an important account of how a Jewish family in Germany coped with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The book is a valuable addition to the literature dealing with the unfolding tragic events that forced members of German-Jewish families to consider emigration from Germany to Palestine or the United States. The letters that constitute the basis for the book’s narrative describe the deteriorating conditions that the Kaufmann-Steinberg clan faced in Nazi Germany, as the Nazis pursued their objective of forcing Jews to leave Germany. The letters convey all the emotion of the danger that this particular family faced on a daily basis. The daughter of parents who owned a dry goods store in Alternessen, Essen, Marianne Steinberg exchanged more than two hundred letters with her family. The correspondence brings to life how diﬃcult it was for a bright student like Marianne to realize her ambition of becoming a physician as the Nazis passed laws that drove Jews from the professions. The authors, both scholars of twentieth century German history and the Holocaust, place the letters within the framework of the

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Third Reich’s social, political, and economic policies toward the Jews. We learn many details of the obstacles placed before Jews. For example, the authors discuss the Reich Flight Tax, a measure that sought to facilitate the regime’s confiscation of Jewish emigrants’ property without discouraging Jews from leaving Germany. This was only one of the additional taxes Jews seeking to emigrate from Germany were forced to pay. There was also the Disagio, a fee based on a percentage of the last estimated tax value of a Jew’s property. Those hoping to emigrate had to deposit their money in a special ”blocked account” for prospective emigrants. Originally set at twenty percent in 1934, this fee was imposed at a rate of sixty-five percent of the value of the funds and valuables emigrants transferred out of the country. By the outbreak of the war in 1939, the regime increased the fee to ninety-six percent. Thus the contradiction in Nazi policy. On the one hand, the regime “encouraged” Jews to emigrate, and on the other, emigrants faced an ever-increasing number of taxes and fees that discouraged them from leaving Germany. The letters are a valuable primary source that relate the daily fluctuations of hope and despair that characterized not only the Kaufmann-Steinberg family but probably most German-Jewish families caught in the evertightening noose of Nazi persecution. MWP

Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust VALENTINA GLAJAR & JEANINE TEODORESCU, EDS. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 Hardcover 275 pp. $85.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-11254-4

his is an important book that explores the memory and history of the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria through the lenses of local memory and speciﬁcity informed by the transnational and trans-cultural understanding of the Romanian events in the wider context of Holocaust and genocide studies.

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nonfiction Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family MIRJAM PRESSLER WITH GERTI ELIAS DAMION SEARLS, TRANS. Doubleday, 2011 Hardcover 404 pp. $28.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-385-53339-3

W While scholars now frequently interpret the Holocaust as a universal trope of suffering and persecution—a metaphor to explain genocide in other times and places—Romanians are still in the beginning stages of coming to terms with their country’s role in the Holocaust. And that role was particularly brutal and primitive. Whether it was slaughtering Jews and labeling them “kosher meat” during the Bucharest pogrom in January 1941, or executing thousands during the Iasi pogrom in June 1941, or asphyxiating thousands in sealed “death trains,” the Romanians brought a resolve and blood lust to the enterprise that, according to Raul Hilberg, forced the Germans to step in at times to slow down the pace of the killings. The Romanian experience shows, as the authors in this volume demonstrate, that it is misleading to talk about a “Holocaust” experience separated from its local context. There is still much research to be done on violence in the East, particularly at the fringes. The editors and the authors, both from the West and from Romania itself, explore the memory of what happened, its representation and the implications for Romanian history as well as for our understanding of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the issue of the collaboration of locals. The essays in this volume discuss survivor accounts, letters and art work, as well as literature and film, in order to break the silence imposed by the communist regime and debunk the claim that the Romanian government and people were not complicit in the genocide against the Jews. There are also some excellent reflective essays on the impact of renowned authors like Paul Celan, Aharon Applefield and Eli Wiesel and film directors like Radu Gabrea, who have helped shape our understanding of the Shoah while working through their complicated relationships with their country and culture. This is a most worthy volume and particularly of interest to those who want to learn about the Holocaust in Romania and how contemporary Romanian intellectuals and artists are slowly coming to terms with what happened then and what it means for contemporary Romania today. MND

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The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II DENIS AVEY WITH ROB BROOMBY Da Capo Press, 2011 Hardcover 288 pp. $25.00 [e] ISBN: 978-306-81965-0

our miles east of the Auschwitz I main camp, the SS, at the urgent request of I.G. Farben and other German manufacturers, built Auschwitz III (also called Buna or Monowitz), a slave labor camp designed to produce synthetic fuels and rubber for the German war effort. At its peak Buna “employed” 5,000 slave laborers, mostly Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Netherlands, among eight other countries. The Jewish work force was augmented by several hundred British prisoners of war, including Corporal Denis Avey, who had been captured in early 1944 and transported to the Buna camp, where he was forced to work on several I.G. Farben projects Like other British POWs at Buna, Avey was treated fairly well. Still, the British prisoners found themselves “toiling daily alongside a separate group of starved Jewish wretches.” Determined to learn more about the conditions of the Jewish prisoners, Avey developed a plan to swap places, overnight, with a Jewish inmate. On two occasions Avey experienced first hand the working and living conditions of Jewish slave laborers. As a result of his efforts, Avey saved the life of German Jewish prisoner Ernest Lobethal, who had lived before the war in Breslau. In 2010 Avey was awarded the “British Hero of the Holocaust” medal for his bravery, one of fifty-six such awards presented by the British government. CJR

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hen Gerti Elias moved with her family into the house in Basel, Switzerland, in which many of Anne Frank’s extended family members had lived, she came upon a treasure trove of family history: thousands of items, including numerous letters, which had been preserved in the attic of the house. In Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family, Mirjam Pressler and Gerti Elias present a selection of these and other items, such as paintings, photographs, and poems, in a moving narrative that spans numerous generations and focuses on members of Anne’s extended family. They include her grandmother, Alice Frank, her aunt, Helene Elias, and her cousin, Gerti Elias’ husband, Buddy. A valuable addition to the growing body of work on Anne Frank and her public legacy, Treasures from the Attic is also an important record of how the loss of Anne, her mother Edith, and her sister Margot personally impacted their family members’ lives. SS

israel studies Israeli Statecraft: National Security Challenges and Responses YEHEZKEL DROR Routledge, 2011 Hardcover 245 pp. $138.00 [e] ISBN: 978-0-415-61630-0

n this important contribution to the study of statecraft the author seeks to provide “a monographic analysis and evaluation of Israeli statecraft with the help of…concepts and frames.” Yehezkel Dror is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University and a former staﬀ member of the RAND Corporation. He has been an advisor to several Israeli governments and he uses his extensive experience to detail both the history of Israeli statecraft and his advice for how the country might improve. “This book is in part based on personal observation which provides insights not otherwise available,” writes Dror. Statecraft, as deﬁned here, is “the sense of coherent, long-term, and broadband politicalsecurity paradigms, assessments, frames of

appreciation...dealing with issues of much importance to national security.” In this sense it includes both the historic legacy of the Jewish people as well as major threats to Israel’s security, such as Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, and broad historical-religious trends in the region. In this book, which serves as a sort of primer to understanding Israel’s position, numerous scenarios and security issues are detailed in various short lists (forty-four in all) of contingencies, responses, and models. For instance, one list examines “statecraft errors” which include “inadequate integration of the Arab minority into Israeli society” and “great difficulties with the United Nations and its bodies. The book is accurate, original, and a unique contribution to this wide-ranging subject. However, it suffers from a choppy style of writing and a fast-paced approach that forces the reader, who is expected to have prior knowledge of the subject, to move quickly between various types of theories and real life scenarios affecting the country. The author argues persuasively for reforms to the way Israel views international bodies, suggesting that Israel work more closely with them. Dror also suggests that Israel’s defense establishment has had too much influence over Israel’s statecraft. Acknowledgements, bibliography, index, notes. SJF

The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Palestinian Politics and the City Since 1967 HILLEL COHEN Routledge, 2011 Hardcover 162 pp. $45.95 ISBN: 978-0-41559853-8

erusalem has long been a center of conﬂict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, particularly the future status of the eastern half of the city. Hillel Cohen, a scholar at Hebrew University and research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, has written several important studies on Palestinian Arabs, but here he turns his sights on East Jerusalem. Cohen’s major interest in this volume is political and militant activity carried out by Arabs in East Jerusalem. “Palestinian residents of the city initiate relatively few armed actions. Even so, the Palestinians of Jerusalem are organized in the same organizations as Palestinians in the territories…live under occupation…and have a deep connection to the Palestinian ethos.” The book begins by describing how Jerusalem, which has immense religious signiﬁcance to Muslims and Palestinians, became “a border city of secondary importance” under Jordan. In the 1980s it became a center of culture, home to several Palestinian newspapers

nonfiction and various cultural clubs. Israelis, primarily on the political left and working with peace organizations, established contacts with Palestinian leaders in East Jerusalem such as Faisal Husseini. Cohen asks, “To what extent does work among Jews inﬂuence the readiness of Palestinians to carry out attacks?” In several cases Palestinians who had close connections to Jews, studying or working with them, were nevertheless involved in terror attacks in the city. However, Cohen stresses that in general the Arabs of East Jerusalem did not engage in attacks during the Second Intifada. The author also examines, to a lesser extent, Israeli settlement and policing methods in East Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem is an interesting and original study that is based on formidable research and also a deep knowledge of the people involved. Few if any other books on East Jerusalem examine the family and educational backgrounds of the Arab population and show such an understanding of the personal relationships between the individuals and events studied. Acknowledgements, bibliography, index, notes. SJF

Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance

modern jewish thought & experience How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought

JUDITH BRIN INGBER, ED. Wayne State University Press, 2011 Hardcover 437 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0814333303

his large-format, sumptuously illustrated anthology fulﬁlls the visual promise made in the title; the reader truly “sees” the dance on the pages, not only in the photographs but in the words that swirl and twirl out of the stories in the wide range of essays that comprise the book. Ingber, a dancer, dance scholar, and choreographer, has created a remarkable collection of commentary that combines academic thinking with the viewpoints of the dancers themselves. A wide variety of Jewish dance styles are included, emanating from Europe, Israel and other Middle East countries, Africa, and the Americas and covering over two thousand years of dance evolution in Diaspora communities. The writing is as full

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of vitality as the artists and artistic expressions it covers. A broad range of times, places, and styles of dance are explored, including both ancient and modern Israeli folk dance and current theatre performance and traditions of Hasidic, Yemenite, Kurdish, Ethiopian, and European dance are examined. Ingber deﬁnes Jewish dance as encompassing a full range of artistic expression, including community or ethnic folk dance, religious ritual dance, and choreographed performances. With over 180 illustrations, the volume is richly decorated, and each of the pieces of art is carefully annotated. The eighteen highly credentialed contributors pose and then answer—each in his or her own individual way—such intriguing questions as what makes dance Jewish, how dance enhances Judaism and Jewish identity, and how the diﬀerent genres of dance changed over time. Bibliography, contributors, glossary, index, notes. LFB

LEORA BATNITZKY Princeton University, 2011 Hardcover 211 pp. $27.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-691-13072-9

hat is Judaism? For most Jews it is how they express themselves Jewishly. However, over the millennia Judaism included sovereignty, a political structure, a military force, a priestly class, Temple worship, and of course religious observance. Following the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews were dispersed throughout the world and their welfare depended on the degree that the temporal rulers either needed their skills or felt compelled to persecute them because they were neither Catholic nor Moslem.

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Following the French Revolution a new spirit of tolerance began to emerge in which Jews were (eventually) given full citizenship rights. Professor Batnitsky has deftly provided a primer on how the major Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries defined Judaism in this new epoch of emancipation. Is Judaism only a religion based on the Protestant model of private ritual practice and articles of faith (i.e. be a Jew at home but a German in public)? What about the political structure and nationalism inherent in Judaism? For Jews who maintained fidelity to Jewish observance this question may have been inconsequential. However, for the governments who were considering granting full citizenship rights to Jews, this was a very important question. Jewish responses to emancipation took many different forms. The ways in which Jews viewed their Judaism corresponded to what the thinkers and writers of the times wrote about Judaism. Some practiced insulation and isolation, some tried to bridge the gap between modernity and Judaism, some felt that the old traditions were outmoded (Reform), some felt that only certain practices had to yield to modernity (Conservative Judaism), some explored all the facets of Jewish experience dispassionately with scientific rigor (Wissenschaft des Judentums), others turned to Hebrew and Yiddish literature and poetry, many were content to be cultural Jews, some were deeply engaged in the philosophical meaning of Judaism, still others dared to fan the flames of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), both religious and political. Needless to say the Holocaust and the State of Israel have also had a role in defining Judaism. One might quibble with certain minutiae of interpretation, but taken as a whole, How Judaism Became A Religion is an excellent introduction to the key philosophers and writers who influenced modern Jewish thought. Starting with Mendelssohn, the neo-Kantian Cohen, and proceeding to Rosenzweig, Buber, the Kooks, Hirsch, Kaplan, Soloveitchik, Levinas and Fackenheim, with many detours to

other writers and thinkers, Prof. Batnitzky has presented a valuable volume which frames the questions that produced contemporary Judaism. A lot of material is covered in this slim volume, and the annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter provides sources for more detailed reading. The book is an excellent overview of one aspect of modern Jewish thought. MG

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love WILLIAM KOLBRENER Continuum, 2011 Paperback 182 pp. $19.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1-4411-1866-0

he subtitle of William Kolbrener’s little book is “Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love.” Could three more opposed elements coincide in a single sentence? The antithesis of fundamentalism is not shallowness or disbelief, but the ironic stance. On its other border we find not love but doubt and insecurity. Kolbrener ponders this dyspeptic trio and delivers a measured but powerful series of appreciations. As he puts it, the mission of the believer is to “be pure. Live in the present; give up the charmed stories about the future that the idolators of the world entertain.” In that world, we could all do worse than having Kolbrener as our guide. Weaving insights from classic Jewish texts with those of Milton, Freud, and other writers, the author creates essays of insight, beauty, and strength. His topics range widely: his son with Down Syndrome, overheard snippets of street conversation, contemporary cultural references. His touch is light, but he expects the reader to join in the lifting. This is no Sunday morning paper fluffery. On the contrary, Kolbrener wants us to work at his side and truly open our minds to not just the Torah as a work of religious literature, but as a tool.He asks us to “lay aside that very contemporary and

Western desire for objectivity” and engage the world as it is, full of suﬀering, mud, and grace. JHB

poetry “A” LOUIS ZUKOFSKY New Directions, 2011 Paperback 826 pp. $24.95 ISBN: 978-0-8112-1871-9

arl Sagan once said that in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe. A touch melodramatic, perhaps, but an effective way of saying that we live in a world where nothing can exist without an unfathomable number of prior and ongoing causes and effects, relationships, and developments. Regarding Louis Zukofsky’s extraordinary, forty-six-years-in-the-making, eight hundred page poem “A” (in twenty-four sections, or movements), Sagan might have said that in order to read it, you must first read every other book ever written. Or at least, Zukofsky had to read every book ever written in order to write his poem. A Shakespeare scholar before he was a teenager, Zukofsky’s childhood in a Russian-Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn in the 1910s and '20s formed early in him a polyglot passion for language. His penchant for punning can make Joyce seem like a buttoned-down prose stylist. It is impossible in this brief review to give you a sense of the full sweep and sorcery of this masterful, magisterial, majestic work, which begins with a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall in 1928 and ends with a choral setting of multiple Zukofsky texts by his wife Celia to Handel’s “Harpsichord Pieces.” At times strenuous, pedantic, esoteric, and puzzling, “A” is also ecstatic, inspiring, poignant, and will stand as one of the great literary achievements from the twentieth century. Zukofsky’s brilliant, heartfelt treatment of everything from music to Marx, astronomy to Henry Adams, his magnetic command of sound and image make for edifying, exhilarating reading. JM

Love’s Voice: 72 Kabbalistic Haiku RICHARD ZIMLER Tarcher, 2011 Paperback 77 pp. $10.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1-58542-893-9

he Kabbalah’s mystical interpretations of the Bible aim to explain a relationship between the eternal and mysterious Creator

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nonfiction

and the temporal universe created by this Source of all Creation. Haiku, on the other hand, is a traditional poetic form often used to express aspects of the natural world. Richard Zimler has combined these two meditative elements to form seventy-two thoughtful and beautiful verses about creation, life, and the divine. At times Love’s Voice resembles a book of Zen Buddhist thoughts, like the enigmatic koans also of tradition, or the Suﬁ ponderings of Rumi. Consider this gem: “Whispering tzaddik (righteous one): / Be poetry, and let your / self be sung by God.” or this more temporal meditative piece, “The hands that God needs / to eﬀect change in our world / are holding this book!” In another verse Zimler muses, “Each of us a land / surrounded by endless seas, / but bridged by Torah.” These selections one may quickly peruse, slowly ponder, or just be with on a daily basis. However one responds to these beautiful verses, they are a gift and a delight. DS

“With no agenda except enlightenment, A Convenient Hatred allows us to finally comprehend the awful history of antisemitism. It deserves the widest possible reading— by young, old, Jew and non-Jew.”

Singing Me Home CAROL LIPSZYE Inanna Publications, 2011 Hardcover 88 pp. $18.95 ISBN: 978-1-926708-15-7

—Carl Bernstein, journalist and coauthor of All the President’s Men

emories, images, visions, and more soar in this new collection of Lipszye’s poems. Many of the initial verses reﬂect the poet’s connection to her religious youth, when the world was like a strand of yeast to become challah, stretched “…to see how wide God’s honey-laced / blessings can spread.” Lipszye catches an essence of childhood that is more than just pleasant reﬂection, instead invoking metaphors revealing childhood nuances of mixed thoughts and feelings, such as those in “Preserving Childhood": “In minutes, the schoolyard drums a feral beat / of rival cliques and rhyming chants, / and nebulous games of hide-and-seek.” Unafraid to face or ignore the harsh realities in life, the author pens a painful and questioning poem in “Legacy,” in which Yom Kippur is paralleled with the fearful ponderings of pregnant mothers about to give birth on cattle car trains heading for extinction, or the poignancy of a picture in “Reading a Photograph (On the Coming of the Shoah). In “Parchment of Peace,” perhaps Israel is truly “…[a] vessel for the dispossessed / to hold in abeyance.” Bouncing back and forth from bliss to sorrow, the mood is broken in another section where the author revels in nature, as in “A Boy Dreams of a Fishing Rod…” where “…[t]he world around him is moving, waiting in a story circle….” Finally, the author demonstrates her eye for observation and vivid association in the metaphorical “Breaking Vows in a Telephone Booth,” in which “Walking on Bloor Street, / I saw / an icon in white, / an angel on

“A tour de force of one of the most intriguing and disturbing phenomena in history.” —Omer Bartov, Brown University

“Delineates with clarity and intelligence the long history of discrimination, insult, and assault against Jews.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University

From ancient Egypt to medieval Europe to the modern world, a very particular hatred has been used for reasons of politics, power and greed. Discover the powerful stories of the men and women who have suffered at the hands of antisemitism for thousands of years, and how some—both Jew and non-Jew—fought and are fighting to keep the light of knowledge and tolerance alive and burning. Available wherever books and eBooks are sold Learn more at facinghistory.org/convenienthatred

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women’s studies Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah around the World BARBARA VINICK & SHULAMIT REINHARZ, EDS. Indiana University Press, 2011 Hardcover 280 pp. $29.95 [e] ISBN: 978-0-253-35693-2

sabbatical, / wings trapped / in the straitjacket bodice of a red telephone booth….” A superb collection from a talented poet. DS

visual arts Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD Yale University Press, 2011 Hardcover 448 pp. $50.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-16914-0

the horror of the Shoah not only in physical architecture but also in its emotional impact. The brutality of the Holocaust found expression in deconstructionism, exempliﬁed architecturally by such innovators as Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry, born Frank Goldberg, all of whom experienced anti-Semitism and a sense of “otherness” and cited their Jewish backgrounds among their sources of inspiration. Along with Stanley Tigerman, Richard Meier, and Moshe Safdie, as well as other Jewish architects, they are internationally recognized; in the contemporary world their Jewish backgrounds and inspiration have not been obstacles to their success.

Multiculturalism, the engagement with the Holocaust, and the postmodern movement allowed for a flowering of Jewish creativity and imagination...

s the world rebuilt after World War II, Jewish architects achieved new-found prominence. In his sweeping survey of Jews and architecture, Gavriel Rosenfeld, associate professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, explores the emergence of these architects, the influence of Jewish connections and themes on their work, and how they ultimately faced the memory of the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath of the war, modernism held sway in architecture, with its rejection of historical reference and its abstract universalism. Jewish architects—or, more accurately, assimilated Jewish architects—worked in this ahistorical style even when designing synagogues. But during this period one of the most influential and admired architects of the twentieth century, Louis Kahn, broke with modernism, and his work began to draw on the past, including the Jewish past. With the unrest of the 1960s in Europe and the United States and with a break in the silence that had surrounded the Holocaust, architecture, like the other arts, acknowledged the fragmented world and the failure of rationalism and responded with postmodernism and a return to historic reference, which for Jewish architects often meant incorporating the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish themes into their work. Holocaust museums and memorials, as well as synagogues, offered an opportunity to interpret

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Does this mean that there is a distinctive Jewish architecture, a parallel to Jewish literature or Jewish music? Rosenfeld concludes that this not the case. Rather, multiculturalism, the engagement with the Holocaust, and the postmodern movement allowed for a ﬂowering of Jewish creativity and imagination and an embrace of Jewish themes and inspiration. With its handsome layout, 175 photographs, and accessible if occasionally academic language, Building After Auschwitz is a rich catalogue of Jewish architecture. Brief proﬁles of almost every Jewish architect—Marcel Breuer, Max Abramovitz, Richard Neutra; the list is long and surprising—are a useful reference, and chapters on Israeli and postwar German Jewish architecture provide thoughtful contrasts and insights. In the end, however, Building After Auschwitz tells the reader almost as much about the Jewish experience of postwar culture and society as it does about Jewish architecture. Illustrations, index, notes. MLW

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oday I am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World is filled with lyrical accounts of being a bat mitzvah in such exotic places as Cochabamba, Bolivia and Tegucigalpa, Honduras. As co-editor Barbara Vinick reports in her introduction, bat mitzvah and female coming of age ceremonies, unlike bar mitzvahs, are less enshrined in traditional rituals and come in a “dizzying array of forms,” which may make them more “personal and meaningful.” According to Brandeis Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna, the “first indisputable” mention of girl’s coming-of-age ritual appears in the writings of the nineteenth-century sage Joseph Hayim ben Elijah al-Hakam of Baghdad. His book Ben Ish Chai “advised a simcha (celebration) when girls assumed their womanly obligations at age twelve.” Public religious ceremonies for boys date back to the fifteenth century. This publication is an outgrowth of the work of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) whose mission is to study Jewish life worldwide. Reading this book will take you on a fascinating Jewish journey around the world. It is heartening to read about many Jews all across the globe who are committed to retaining Jewish practices while at the same time ensuring that women are included. One particularly fascinating account was presented by Remy Ilona who described Jewish life among the Igbo (Igbo is probably a derivative of Ivri) in Nigeria. Historians speculate that Igbos are most likely descendents of the Israelites who

It is heartening to read about many Jews across the globe who are committed to retaining Jewish practices while at the same time ensuring women are included. separated from their fellow Israelites in their escape from Egypt and are part of the “Hebrew stream” that also settled in Ethiopia. Ilona, an Igbo lawyer, describes the “culturally Hebraic” aspects of Igbo life. Boys are circumcised on the eighth day of birth. Burial practices are “unmistakably Hebraic in form and content.” About 20,000 have fully returned to

nonfiction

Graphic Examples Three strikingly original illustrated narratives show that comics are not just for kids.

Farm 54 GALIT AND GILAD SELIKTAR Fanfare Ponent Mon, 2011 Hardcover 136 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1908007001

arm 54 contains three stories, collaborations between a writer, Galit, and her brother, Gilad, an illustrator. The stories can feel heavy-handed but in contrast with the light touch of the sketches the effect is poignant and romantic. Familiar growing pains are set against a 1970s and '80s Israeli background: childhood on a the family farm, working at an egg factory, phone calls from a father away at war, enlisting in the army, and a military operation. Each page has only three illustrations of black lines blocked in with rosy lavender, black, and the cream paper. The drawings are frameless and often stand alone without words, emphasizing the fact that although most things go unsaid in life, facial expressions and setting supply ample testimony for the observant reader. Both siblings draw upon visual and emotional memories for these semi-autobiographical stories, which aim to be self-reflective and honest. The book concludes with a supplemental chapter, “Behind Farm 54,” with family photographs and a dialogue between Gilad and Galit discussing their writing process and the facts versus fictions in the stories. SRW

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus ART SPIEGELMAN Pantheon, 2010 Hardcover 300 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0375423949

or the past sixty years, Holocaust survivors have told their stories in writing, but few books have revolutionized the way people looked at the Holocaust as much as Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic biography of his father, Vladek. In his new

“rabbinic Judaism.” In some parts of the Igbo community, there is a coming-of-age ritual for girls. It is considered a “Judaic passage” called “isi migha.” It signiﬁes a young girl’s entry into adulthood and her readiness to accept marital suitors. It is a festive community event

autobiography, MetaMaus, Spiegelman takes readers through the process of his innovative graphic narrative. He tells us why he chose to tell his father’s story in comic book form, why he chose to represent Jews as mice, and how he responded to the backlash he received after Maus was published. He also includes interviews with his wife and children, discussing their roles in the creation of Maus and how it changed their lives. Not surprisingly, the most striking feature of this autobiography is Spiegelman’s artwork. The book is ﬁlled with his rough sketches, inspirations, previous work, and even family photos. Also included is a DVD of Maus I and II and “an exemplary thimbleful from the vast ‘Maus Midrash.’” AIB

Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land HARVEY PEKAR & PAUL BUHLE, EDS. Abrams Comicarts, 2011 Hardcover 240 pp. $29.95 ISBN: 9780810997493

ore than a little nosh, this comics anthology is a veritable feast for fans of Yiddish language and culture. If editors Harvey Pekar (z”l) and Paul Buhle had only included the history and emergence of Yiddish culture, dayenu! If they had only introduced readers to the Yiddish press and poets, dayenu! If they had only included a snippet of drama, and not a full-length play, dayenu! Not to make a tzimmes, but this book features original stories by acclaimed writers and artists, such as Pekar, Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Allen Lewis Rickman, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. The graphic novel medium is the perfect venue to showcase the themes of assimilation, culture, and the revival of the Yiddish language. As deﬁned in the introduction, the word Yiddishkeit means “Jewish sensibility,” but as the authors in this volume so masterfully show us, Yiddishkeit must be felt in order to be understood. There is no better way to accomplish this task than to become immersed in the rhythms of the language. Go ahead: indulge in this rich treat. Your bubbeh would be proud. SRW

celebrated by group dancing and gift giving. Ilona’s niece, Uchennna Ezimmadu, is an “IboBenei Yisrael activist” at her university and stresses the importance of an Ibo relationship with Israel and the “importance of going back to our roots of Torah.” All the vignettes are

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accompanied by a well-researched history of the Jewish community in the area. Bibliography of further reading, endnotes, glossary of illustrations. CP

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children’s The Cats in the Doll Shop YONA ZELDIS MCDONOUGH HEATHER MAIONE, ILLUS. Viking, 2011 Hardcover 144 pp. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0670012794

he Cats in the Doll Shop is the second book in the Doll Shop series. The story takes place during World War I in New York City. Three Jewish sisters live with their parents above their family doll shop and one day, a cousin escaping the poverty of Russia, comes to live with them. The cousin, Tania, is the same age as the narrator and speaks only Yiddish when she arrives. It is a story of family support, sibling rivalry, pets, and children’s desires. The school and house setting, including a bathtub in the kitchen, remain true to the time period. Some explanation may be necessary as to why, for example, Tania begins regular ﬁrst grade instead of going to an ESL class; however, the story is an eternal one to which anyone who has struggled in a new place, who has a sibling, or has loved an animal can easily relate. At the end of the book, there is a glossary of the Yiddish terms which are used throughout the story. This book is appropriate for children ages 8-12. DA

The Chafetz Chaim: A Giant in Torah and Middos, Special Youth Edition SHULAMIT EZRACHI LIBBY LAZEWNIK, TRANS. Feldheim Publishers, 2011 Hardcover 240 pp. $20.99 ISBN: 978-1-59826-663-4

he Chafetz Chaim, also known as Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, lived from 1838-1933.

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He was one of the most signiﬁcant scholars and ethicists in modern Jewish history. In The Chafetz Chaim: A Giant in Torah and Middos, Ezrachi captures the essence of the Chafetz Chaim's character in a way that is both eloquent and accessible to a younger audience. The inclusion of photographs provides greater insight into the Chafetz Chaim’s personality. As the Chafetz Chaim lived through several important events in Jewish history, this title is a wonderful way to teach Jewish history. Ezrachi clearly explains important events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia and the Zionist movement. Recommended for ages 9-14. NW

Chanukah Lights MICHAEL J. ROSEN ROBERT SABUDA, ILLUS. Candlewick Press, 2011 Hardcover 16 pp. $34.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-5533-4

hanukah Lights is a visually magnificent pop-up book. The pristine, intricately detailed white pop-ups are set against the richly colored backgrounds and the craftsmanship is superb. It is a coffee-table book, a work of art that is unlikely to survive constant handling. The text, a short paragraph for each double page pop-up, does not have equal impact. The meanings of several paragraphs are obscure and not suitable for the age recommended by the publisher, which is five years old. On some pages, the text and pop-ups are mutually supportive, while on others they are confusing. In addition, historical allusions are not explained, for example, “…where in the holds of ships refugees long for peace like the sight of land.” This further diminishes the impact of the text portions of the book. It would be wise to discuss the story and meaning of Chanukah

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before reading this book with children. For ages 9 and up; however, the pop-ups are ageless. NDK

Donkeys on the Roof and Other Stories (Sages for the Ages, Book 1) URI ORBACH SARA DANIEL, TRANS. IGOR KOVYAR, ILLUS. Maggid Books, 2010 Hardcover 97 pp. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-59264-323-3

he legends in Donkeys on the Roof are a mix of ancient and timeless with some modern features thrown in. They are the ultimate example of the very Jewish style of answering a question with a story. The twelve tales address family life and relationships. They leave the reader with morals and wisdom such as “Don’t judge a person on how he appears.” The ﬁrst story, “There’s No Place Like Home” begins, “The teacher Rabbi Yose was known for his patience.” But one student just did not learn. Rabbi Yose discovers that the student was homesick for the town of Great Snoring, a community laughable to all but the boy who missed his hometown, a place that was “so hot that even the camels won’t stray from the air-conditioning.” (Huh? Isn’t this long, long ago?) The book is a wonderful introduction for children to that very particular Jewish approach to ﬁnding our way in the world by looking at the examples of sages and rabbis. The Aggada, or Jewish folklore, in this book are proverbs, parables, and explanations of holy texts told in sermons. Over the years, these stories were written down and can be found in the Mishna, Talmud, and Midrash. Chapters of the book are great bedtime stories that can transport readers to a time long ago. However, the drawings are weak and cutesy

and the modern-day remarks that attempt to link old with new often break the writer’s rhythm and are a bit too cloying and out of character. Recommended for all ages. DW

The Dragon Turn: The Boy Sherlock Holmes, His 5th Case SHANE PEACOCK Tundra Books, 2011 Hardcover 220 pp. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-77049-231-8

ery few things surprise fifteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes but, when he takes his young lady friend out for her birthday, even he can’t figure out how a mediocre magician like Alistair Hemsworth can make such a life-like dragon appear on stage and then, just as quickly, make it disappear into thin air. The young couple goes backstage to meet the magician and they find him being arrested for the murder of the most famous magician in London. It appears that something has eaten the famous magician in a secret lab apparently belonging to Hemsworth. Sherlock sets out to prove Hemsworth’s innocence and actually accomplishes his goal. Once the magician is released, however, Holmes finds himself questioning whether the man he’d freed was, indeed, the murderer. Shane Peacock has done his research well. His character makes a very believable younger version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Shane has also accurately portrayed London of the 1860s. True to the style of the original master, this novel is filled with excellent deductions by the young Holmes, numerous twists and turns, and an exciting climax that kept me reading at the edge of my seat. The many Jewish references in this book mainly refer to the fact that Sherlock is a “half-Jew” and many of these references are not positive, i.e. (Sherlock) “Sir…I am part Jewish.” (Other) “And zat was

children’s diﬃcult for your, yes?” “Very.” Or (Other) “A Jew’s reputation is sullied enough in England by his mere existence.” Even in this respect, the author is accurate in showing that being a Jew in England in the 1860s was not easy. This book is highly recommended for ages 10 and above. MB

Estie the Mensch

Elmo’s Little Dreidel

JANE KOHUTH ROSEANNE LITZINGER, ILLUS. Random House, 2011 Hardcover 24 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-375-86778-1

NAOMI KLEINBERG CHRISTOPHER MORONEY, ILLUS. Random House, 2011 Board Book 12 pp. $5.99 ISBN: 978-0-375-87396-6

hen Elmo spends the ﬁrst night of Hanukkah with his friends Gil and Susie, their parents light the menorah and they all sing Hanukkah songs. They eat “yummy potato pancakes with applesauce” for dinner and then Gil and Susie teach Elmo how to play the dreidel game. Using chocolate coins as prize money, they follow the directions given by the Hebrew letters which appear on top after the dreidel stops spinning: Nun for “none”, Gimel for “get them all”, Hey for “take half” and Shin for “put one in”. This brief board book provides the youngest children with a simple, age-appropriate introduction to some of the holiday’s traditions: lighting the menorah for eight nights to remember the miracle of Hanukkah, singing Hanukkah songs, and playing the dreidel game. When Elmo leaves to go home, Gil gives him a dreidel as a Hanukkah gift. Elmo happily says that he is going to teach the dreidel game to his Mommy and Daddy and, on the book’s last page, he is enjoying just that. Aside from being introduced to the dreidel game, young children also learn the concept of sharing; when Elmo’s spin of the dreidel wins him all of the chocolate coins, he shares them with Gil and Susie. It would have been useful for the author to use the

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terms “latkes” and “gelt” but youngsters who love Sesame Street will enjoy the appealing, brightly colored Sesame Street characters as they tell the story of Elmo’s ﬁrst experience with Hanukkah. Recommended for ages 1-3. AD

iddish terms thoroughly embedded in English lose their genesis, their Jewish identity and, thus, our credit for adding to colorful speech. Not so in this fun picture book about a little girl who does not like people and actually prefers to be an animal herself. Through a charming, empathetic plot, the author brings the deﬁnition and connotations of the word “mensch” into sharp focus. Estie does not want to be a person (deﬁnition) much less a well-behaved, well-mannered or good person (connotation). She is always playacting as one kind of animal or another to the escalating frustrations of her parents and grandmother. On a trip to the zoo with her grandmother’s

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friend and her grandchild, Petie, Estie discovers that her silly imitating of many animals reaches the perfect audience. Petie laughs and laughs. He gets so excited he drops the ice cream out of his cone. He cries. The grandmothers comfort in vain. Estie to the rescue: she puts one of her scoops into his empty come. A perfect mensch! Estie receives such great feedback she decides it is not so bad to be a mensch as long as you can also be an animal. The stylized watercolor art reﬂects the emotions and actions in a mobile, appealing fashion. The text and characters are perfect for the targeted age group. The picture book delivers lessons of language and ethics in a warm, non-didactic way. Highly recommended for readers ages 5-7. EGC

The Hanukkah Hop! ERICA SILVERMAN STEVEN D’AMICO, ILLUS. Simon and Schuster, 2011 Hardcover 32 pp. $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-4424-0604-9

rica Silverman’s latest book introduces what may become a new tradition in many households, The Hanukkah Hop. Using a rhyming text with an added dose of jazz, she weaves a tale around Rachel’s family, creating their Hanukkah celebration with a twist, literally. All the ingredients are there: dreidels, jelly donuts, latkes, the menorah, candles, the Maccabees, and the oil and, when a klezmer band arrives, the party starts hopping. Family and friends join in the merriment as they celebrate with the Mazel-Tones and a playful biddy-biddy bim-bom bop floats from page to page. The illustrations by Steven D’Amico are joyous and reminiscent of the 50’s with a twenty-first century edge. One might find a relative of one’s own on every page. You will find yourself humming biddy-biddy bim-bom and tapping your feet as his artwork draws

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you further into the story. This is a perfect tale to set the stage for Hanukkah that will delight young and old and perhaps entice some to begin their own family traditions. Recommended for all ages. CM

Hashem Is Truly Everywhere CHANI ALTEIN MARC LUMER, ILLUS. Hachai Publishing, 2011 Hardcover 28 pp. $12.95 ISBN: 978-1929628575

hani Altein has brought to life a most enticing rhyme created by Rabbi Yosef Goldstein. “Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere” holds and delivers the grounding principle of Judaism to our youngest in such an all encompassing and loving manner that no doubt is left in one’s mind that Hashem truly is everywhere. The rhyming will gently draw children into the enormous concept of Hashem’s vastness and yet enable them to visualize that Hashem is, indeed, right next to them. Altein’s use of a friend, Tzvi, to be the teacher and messenger reinforces the transfer of knowledge of Hashem to the next generation. Through graphics and rhyme, there is not a space that a child can imagine in which Hashem would not be present and available for them. The illustrations by Marc Lumer are delightfully vivid, expressive, and engaging. The choice to incorporate Judaic elements into the art on each page makes this a treasure to explore. As an extra treat, the pages are laminated, guaranteeing continual use. This is a perfect book for use in an early childhood classroom, a religious school, and certainly, a home. Hashem Is Truly Everywhere will stand as a classic read beginning in infancy and beyond. CM

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I Will Come Back For You: A Family in Hiding During World War II MARISABINA RUSSO Schwartz & Wade Books, 2011 Hardcover 32 pp. $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-375-86695-1

hen Nonna’s granddaughter asks her why she never removes her gold charm bracelet, Nonna says it’s because the charms tell the story of her childhood. Beginning with the tiny donkey charm, Nonna explains the meaning of each one. Before Italy joined the side of the Germans in World War II, Nonna, her brother Roberto, and their parents had a happy life in Rome. But everything changed after Papa and other foreign-born Jews were ordered to leave their families and move to a village in the mountains. Now there were no more visits to the park for donkey rides, puppet shows, and ice cream; no more listening to Papa sing and play the piano after dinner. For a while, the family visits Papa on weekends but when he learns that the German would soon send all the Jewish men to a concentration camp, he slips away to join the partisans. When the police threaten to take Mamma in his place, she also goes into hiding, leaving Nonna and Roberto in the care of a kind family. The children are soon smuggled out of the village and brought to Mamma who is working on a farm high up in the mountains. No one there suspects they are Jews. When the war is over, Mamma learns that Papa has been killed by Nazi soldiers and she decides they will start a new life in America. The folk-art illustrations, painted by the author, evoke the time and place. A glossary, afterword and original black and white family photographs used for the end sheets provide more details about this true story. Recommended for ages 5-9. SK

Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto SUSAN RUBIN GOLDMAN BILL FARNSWORTH, ILLUS. Holiday House, 2011 Hardcover 40 pp. $18.95 ISBN: 978-0823422517

ho was Irena Sendler and why did she risk her life to help save nearly 400 Jewish children from the Nazis? Why have her heroic actions only recently come to light? This slim, illustrated biography serves as an insightful introduction to an unsung heroine and her valiant behavior during the Holocaust. Irena, a young, Catholic social worker living in Warsaw during World War II, did her best in aiding the many refugees that were filtering into Poland by bringing them bread and attending to the wounded. In 1939, when Poland fell to the Germans, Irena, an eyewitness to the squalor and lack of food, feared for the lives of the Jews and immediately joined the resistance movement of the Polish Socialist party. As she watched the city’s Jewish population become confined to the overcrowded walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Sendler, disguised as nurse, obtained a forged medical pass and dedicated her life to saving the children before they could be sent off to Treblinka. With the backing of an underground organization, Irena organized daring routes of escape through the sewer system, smuggled children out through floorboards in ambulances, body bags, and coffins, and transported babies in suitcases and potato sacks. Hoping the children would be reunited with their families, Irena kept secret records of their true identities, carefully concealed in jars that were buried in a neighboring garden. Irena’s life was often marked by fear and despair; when her “work” was discovered by the Gestapo, she was jailed and tortured. She miraculously escaped execution by a firing squad. On the run at the end of the war, Irena

children’s was shunned and labeled a traitor by the Soviet government until the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989. This dramatic tale is paired with arresting, oversized oil illustrations that are often haunting and bleak. Illustrator Bill Farnsworth skillfully captures the fear and darkness of the war. Irena is often surrounded by a white background and appears luminous. Personal commentaries from interviews of some of the children Irena saved are interspersed through the text and add a dimension of realism. Excellent notes at the back of the book, which include a resource bibliography and a detailed index, make this a worthwhile read. Recommended for ages 8-12. DG

Jewish Migration JOHN BLISS JEFF EDWARDS, ILLUS. Raintree, 2011 Hardcover 32 pp. $29.00 ISBN: 978-1-4109-4075-9

Itamar Makes Friends: A Children’s Story of Jewish Brotherhood JOSH HASTEN S. KIM GLASSMAN, ILLUS. Gefen Publishing House, 2011 Hardcover 28 pp. $14.95 ISBN: 978-9652295675

his is a gentle yet powerful story of a boy growing up in a small Israeli village who takes a trip to visit his cousins who live in one of Israel’s larger cities. In the city, Itamar faces a disturbing incident of playground prejudice. His tormentors don’t understand who he is or why he seems different. Itamar becomes mildly injured resulting in a breakthrough moment of understanding and opening up possibilities for increased insight and even friendship. The story is location-specific and there is much to be learned about Israeli society within its pages. The divide between Israeli “city kids” and “country kids” may have a political nuance slightly different than the same divide in other places. This is handled subtly and delicately and does not get in the way of the truly universal message of the story, that having an open

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mind and a willingness to get to know someone who acts or dresses differently benefits all. The illustrations are colorful and accessible but the illustrator could have done much more to give the story of sense of atmosphere and a touch of uniqueness. There are few pictorial details and the characters’ facial expressions are rather bland. Nevertheless, the book is a great jumping off point for discussions about bullying and about differences between people who turn out to be not quite so different after all. MHM

his book is about the migration of the Jewish people using four people as illustrations, telling why, where, and how they migrated from one place to another when they were children. The first story is that of Golda Meir, who migrated from Russia to the United States and then to Israel in the early 1900s. The next two stories tell of children who fled from the Nazis in Germany and Austria in 1938 and 1939. The final story is that of a girl who left Russia in 2000 to go to school in Israel. The book is visually pleasing and easy to read. The illustrations and photographs help bring the book to life and show how people lived and looked during the times that are described. The maps help to show the routes and distances that the people traveled. Anti-Semitism is explained in the introductory portion and Israel as the Jewish homeland is described near the end of the book. I read the book with my daughter who is in fourth grade and she understood it and was interested in the maps. She learned a lot from it but was a

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children’s

bit confused about why there is a photograph of a girl next to the bio of Kurt Fuchel on page 19. I was surprised that there is not a description of the Jewish religion in the book other than a sentence that says, “Being Jewish has more to do with culture (a person’s values and beliefs) than where they are from.” There is no reference to what those values and beliefs are. Recommended for children ages 8-10. DB

Kids Speak 6: Through Fire and Water CHAIM WALDER AVIVA RAPPAPORT, TRANS. Feldheim Publishers, 2011 Hardcover 201 pp. $22.99 ISBN: 978-1-59826-768-6

he newest addition to the Kids Speak series is out! It contains stories submitted to the editor by children 8-11 years of age and is filled with tales of struggles between friends, classmates, peers, and authority figures. We all remember the personal problems, fears, challenges, and triumphs of the middle grades and, as a result, the authentic characters in this series speak to us all. Who hasn’t been bullied by a group, becoming the one child who is the center of everyone’s attacks and unfriendliness? Who hasn’t been excluded from a group for no reason? And, perhaps, who hasn’t been part of the group doing the exclusion, without ever having thought of the effect on the child who is being mistreated? Experiences that embarrass, frighten, worry, and bother children are all included. Negative relationships with teachers are also a topic of discussion. There are group dynamics, some positive and some negative. Many of the stories are rewarding and refreshing, those in which one child goes out of his or her way to include another or help in some way. One particularly comes to mind, a story in which

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a big bully, called “Haman” by the boy who is excluded, realizes that despite his poor behavior, Chaim has put his life on the line to try to save Haman’s life. Many of the stories are uplifting and inspiring, though some are somewhat frightening until the resolution occurs. A glossary of words in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic follows the stories. The children who have submitted these stories identify themselves by age and the city in Israel in which they live. In this book, the protagonists come from Jerusalem, Haifa, Beitar Illit, Kiryat Gat, and Hadera; all are Orthodox. This book feels authentic and will appeal to children in the targeted middle age range. Children who are not Orthodox will be able to relate to the very real experiences that are shared. It can also serve as a read-aloud and as a trigger discussion opener. Recommended primarily for Orthodox children ages 8-11 and all other Jewish children. SF

The Lily Pond ANNIKA THOR LINDA SCHENCK, TRANS. Delacorte Press, 2011 Hardcover 217 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-385-74039-5

he story of Stephanie Steiner, a thirteenyear-old Jewish girl who left her parents in Nazi-occupied Germany and went on the Kindertransport to live with a foster family on a remote island oﬀ the coast Sweden, continues in this sequel to A Faraway Island (Delacorte, 2009). Since there is only an elementary school on the island, Stephie successfully persuades her foster parents to allow her to continue her studies by attending school on the mainland, in the city of Goteborg. She secures a scholarship and arranges to live with the family who had rented her foster parents’ island cottage for the summer.

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Excited to live and study in a big, cultured city, Stephie’s hopes are quickly dampened when she realizes that she is treated more like a boarder than an adopted daughter. She has difficulty making friends at her new school, faces anti-Semitism and prejudice from classmates, teachers, and even another Jewish student, and misses her younger sister, Nellie, who is still living on the island. At the same time, she is experiencing her first crush, on seventeen-year-old Sven, and is anxiously awaiting news from her parents who are still stranded in Vienna. Without whitewashing the war experience, Stephie’s story is easier to digest than other Holocaust fiction set in concentration camps or ghettos, and it will help readers better understand the effects of the immigration policies of Allied countries like Sweden that refused to grant visas to adult refugees. A smooth, straightforward translation from Swedish, fully developed characters and a tender, absorbing story make this a highly recommended addition to middle-grade fiction collections. While the novel certainly stands on its own, readers should be directed to A Faraway Island, winner of the 2010 Mildred L. Batchelder Award and a Sydney Taylor Honor Award. They will anxiously await the translations of the third and fourth books in the series. For ages 11-14. RK

Lily Renee, Escape Artist TRINA ROBBINS ANNE TIMMONS & MO OH, ILLUS. Lerner Publishing Group, 2011 Paperback 96 pp. $7.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-8114-3

ily Renee Wilhelm was fourteen in 1938, a Jewish girl from a privileged Vienna home whose world was about to be turned upside down by the war. In this graphic biography, Robbins, Timmons, and Oh bring her vividly to

life, describing her budding talent as an artist and her trips to the ballet and opera. With her father at the helm of the Holland America Steamship Company, money was clearly not an issue—until the Nazis drove their tanks into town. After Kristallnacht, Lily’s parents asked the family of Lily’s pen pal, Molly, to sponsor their daughter to move to England. In 1939, Lily’s escape from Austria on the Kindertransport likely saved her life. We know about the concentration camps, the death camps, and the hardships of the Holocaust. Lily Renee, Escape Artist does not revisit these subjects. Instead, it shows us how Lily’s life changed in England. Treated with disdain by her friend’s mother, she was expected to do the work of a domestic servant and was denied sufficient food. Her misery was exacerbated by the fact that she could barely speak English at the time. She tried hard to find sponsors for her parents so they, too, could escape Austria. Instead of assistance, she was offered “more tea." Fed up with her sponsors, Lily left the house, moved to the countryside and became a nanny. Later she worked as a nurses’ assistant. At one point, she was classified as an enemy alien. Ultimately, she was reunited with her parents in America where she found work creating a comic book series with women as the central protagonists. She built a successful life for herself and her family and lived happily ever after. This is a book about determination, hardship, and overcoming adversity. There aren’t many Holocaust-themed books that have a happy ending, which makes this one all the more pleasurable to read. LK

children’s The Midnight Zoo

Sabrina: The Girl With a Hole in Her Heart

SONYA HARTNETT ANDREA OFFERMAN, ILLUS. Candlewick Press, 2011 Hardcover 217 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-5339-2

hen their Romany camp is attacked, twelve-year-old Andrej, nine-year-old Tomas, and their baby sister, Wilma, hide in the woods. After everyone else is either shot and killed or taken away, the three children must survive on their own. They come upon a small zoo that has fallen into disrepair and discover that they can communicate with the animal occupants. The animals share their suspicions of each other and their understanding of what freedom means. Hartnett manages to give each of the animals a distinct personality. She draws readers in, helping them understand the animals’ plight; they are locked in their cages and, without their caretaker, they are starving. They tell the children about the girl who used to care for them and long for her return. While an adult reader will recognize the setting as World War II Europe, the key words a reader in the novel’s target age range might recognize as Holocaust-related are all absent, and much of the book is told from the perspective of animals, not people. Jewish experience during the war isn’t mentioned at all and a young reader wouldn’t necessarily make the connections. Guided reading or discussion with a parent or teacher would be valuable in helping readers get the most out of The Midnight Zoo. Recommended for ages 11-14. MLB

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WENDY LEWIS DIANE LUCAS, ILLUS. Two Dolphins Publishing Group, 2011 Hardcover 33 pp. $10.95 ISBN: 978-0-9836920-0-3

en-year-old Sabrina lives in Zanzibar with her mother and sister. A hole in her heart prevents her from running and playing with the other children. But luckily, the doctors from Save a Child’s Heart arrive near her village and offer to fly her to Israel for the much-needed surgery. Accompanied by an Israeli nurse, Sabrina leaves her family behind and journeys to Israel. At the Save a Child’s Heart house, she meets children from all over the world. Her surgery is a success and after recovering, she is able to tour the country before returning home. Colorful cartoon illustrations combined with echocardiogram images, photographs, diagrams, and text boxes complement the narrative. More information about Save a Child’s Heart is appended along with a detailed explanation of Atrial Septal Defects and instructions for making a heart pump and stethoscope. The font, layout, and design have an amateurish, self-published look but parents or religious school classes looking for more information on charitable organizations in Israel (and possible recipients of their tzedakah collections) will appreciate this offering. It also nicely highlights one of the many ways that the Israeli medical profession comes to the aid of patients around the world. For ages 6-9. RK

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children’s The Shabbat Princess AMY MELTZER MARTHA AVILES, ILLUS. Lerner Publishing Group, 2011 Paperback 32 pp. $7.95 ISBN: 978-0761351429

he Shabbat Princess is a fun, colorful book perfect for the three-to-five year old crowd—girls, in particular. For many in this age group, there is nothing more special than dressing up for an occasion. In The Shabbat Princess, Rosie starts asking questions about Shabbat and learns that her mother’s preparations are to welcome the Shabbat Queen. “Princesses are much more exciting than queens,” Rosie says, figuring she, herself, will dress up as the princess. She dresses to the nines and encourages her parents to go the extra mile to make their Shabbat experience more special, digging out their crystal candlesticks and shining their silver goblets. She creates a Shabbat table fit for a princess and enjoys a royal banquet with her parents. This is a fun book with great illustrations. It conveys the spunkiness of a young girl and her enthusiasm to truly celebrate the Sabbath in style. It’s a fun read for the under-five crowd and a story they will enjoy. LK

The Story of Hanukkah DAVID A. ADLER JILL WEBER, ILLUS. Holiday House, 2011 Hardcover 24 pp. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-8234-2295-1

avid Adler relates the story of Hanukkah in child-friendly language. The narrative is colorfully illustrated with acrylic painting, which clearly reﬂects the action of the story.

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The coherence between illustration and text enhances our understanding of why we celebrate Hanukkah. The author reminds us of the miracle, two thousand years ago, when the oil for the ner tamid, the eternal ﬂame in the recaptured and rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem, burned for eight days in spite of being suﬃcient for only one. We are made aware of another miracle, as well. Judah Maccabee led the Jews, who were farmers and shepherds and much fewer in number than the Greek soldiers. The Maccabees were victorious in every battle against the well-trained and well-armed Greeks. Readers might note the striking similarity of battle tactics used by the Maccabees to those used by the patriots and Native Americans during the American Revolution. The motivation for all was the acquisition of freedom. This book can be read aloud to 6 year olds and read alone by children 7 and older. NDK

THEN MORRIS GLEITZMAN Henry Holt and Company, 2010 Hardcover 196 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-8050-9027-7

HEN is the second in a series of books about the Holocaust told from the perspective of Felix, a ten-year-old boy. The first book in the series is entitled ONCE. Every chapter of the series starts with the first word of the title of the book. It is not only an effective ploy but it moves the plot beautifully. Felix has escaped from an orphanage that his parents, booksellers, put him into to escape from the Holocaust. It is now 1942 and Felix and Zelda, a seven-year-old girl he has saved, are hiding in the forest. Zelda’s parents have been killed by the resistance while Felix was watching. A woman who lives in a house outside the forest takes them in and hides them,

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pretending to be their mother. Felix and Zelda have frightening and dangerous experiences and the reader is drawn into worrying about them. The suspense increases and culminates in a startling ﬁnale. At ﬁrst, Felix does not understand what is happening to his world but he eventually sees what life is like under the Nazis. The series reminds me of the book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas but the characters, story, and writing are more believable in the Gleitzman books. I love this book because it tells the story from the perspective of a child; there is no idealization and we feel we are in the adventure along with Felix. It is helpful to read these novels in the order of publication. Another book in the series entitled NOW is coming out in 2012. There is an author’s note to the reader at the end of the book telling the reader that he doesn’t write from personal history because imagination gives him the ability to “grasp the unimaginable.” He also recommends his website and a bibliography to be found there. This book is highly recommended for ages 10 and up. BS

To Hope and Back: The Voyage of the St. Louis KATHY KACER Second Story Press, 2011 Hardcover 205 pp. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-897187-96-8

ow do you tell children what it’s like to live in Nazi Germany in 1939 and, subsequently, show their escape to Cuba via a luxury ship? By having the children tell the story. The author uses this technique except when she wants to insert the opinions of the captain who shares what is happening in the outside world. These chapters are entitled “What the Captain Knew.” The setting, for the most part, is the ship, The St. Louis, carrying 937 passengers, almost all of them Jews. On

the ship, the emotions range from jubilance to fear, despair, and finally, relief when they are allowed to dock in different ports in Europe. The message is not sugarcoated nor is it lurid. Lisa, the daughter of an upper class family, and Sol, the son of a working class one, give us vivid descriptions. Sol’s comment that he feels “free on the ship” and that his fears “fall away… like so many layers of heavy clothing” gives the reader a clear picture of what he has been facing. The captain is committed to releasing his charges to freedom in Cuba and, when unable to, works with negotiators to find other countries that will accept them. The author includes photographs of the people and activities that take place on board, as well as letters which plead for the release of the refugees. Additionally, in the epilogue, we see pictures and read stories about what happened later to Lisa and Sol and to some of the other passengers on the ship. This is a very well done nonfiction book, recommended for ages 10-15. MLK

Too Many Latkes RICHARD CODOR Behrman House, 2011 Paperback 44 pp. $9.95 ISBN: 978-0-87441-882-8

eaders will enjoy Codor’s digitally colored, humorous cartoon pictures of the Small family, in this newest addition to the evergrowing number of Hanukkah books. It is the ﬁrst night of Hanukkah and because Dad is broke, he can’t purchase decorations or gifts for his family. As he is leaving his job as Eraser Supervisor at the Tip-Top Pencil Company, he meets a strange little old man who gives him a magic potato, which he says will reveal the true meaning of Hanukkah. This one potato miraculously yields enough latkes for their dinner. Then, as they are sleeping, the one remaining potato latke in the frying pan creates

children’s a mountain of latkes that rises to the sky like Jack’s beanstalk. The kids sleep through it all, not hearing the efforts of the police chief and the fire department as they try to bring them down from the latke mountain. The little old man returns to save the day. He invites everyone to eat and all enjoy a city-wide all-you-can-eat latke party that finally reduces the mountain, letting the kids wake up with their beds back on the ground. The man collects gelt from everyone so the Smalls can clean up the mess. At the end, they open the Small Bakery in their house where they sell everything except latkes! This book should be read after an explanation of the history and meaning of the Hanukkah holiday and is a fun read for children ages 5-8. AD

When Life Gives You O.J.

Your Friend in Fashion, Abby Shapiro AMY AXELROD Holiday House, 2011 Hardcover 237 pp. $17.95 ISBN: 978-0-8234-2340-8

ERICA S. PERL Alfred A. Knopf, 2011 Hardcover 199 pp. $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-37585924-3

en-year-old Zelly wants a dog and she’d do just about anything to get one. But when Grandpa concocts an unusual scheme to help her, Zelly wonders if this time he’s really gone crazy. The plan? Take an old orange juice jug, attach a leash to it, and, presto – you have a dog. A practice dog, that is. To show her parents how responsible she is, all Zelly has to do is feed her “dog” and walk it three times a day. Zelly has her doubts but agrees to try it. But her “dog”, now named O.J., brings with it a big problem: what will the other kids think when they see her walking an orange juice jug? She contemplates giving up the whole idea until she meets Jeremy, her new neighbor. With his encouragement and support, Zelly comes to see the value of family and of true friendship. Erica Perl captivates her readers while subtly weaving in those two messages. The focus is deﬁnitely on Zelly’s often-humorous attempts

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to care for O.J. Sprinkled throughout the story are Grandpa’s Yiddish words and phrases. Although these are often explained by Zelly, there is also a glossary in the back that deﬁnes each word. When Life Gives You O.J. is a delightful chapter book that early middle-grade girls are certain to enjoy. While there are no illustrations (except for the book cover), the writing is vivid and the images and scenes well described. I highly recommend this book for any girl who wants a pet of her own. MB

bby Shapiro distracts herself from her miserable home life by designing clothes. When her alcoholic father moves out, Abby’s mother, already in pretty bad shape, gets even worse. Abby works through her difficulties during that tumultuous time by pouring her heart out about her family in letters to Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of Senator (and presidential hopeful) John F. Kennedy. In her chatty letters, she tells Mrs. Kennedy about school, her friends and the Jewish holidays and she encloses sketches of outfits she has designed especially for her. Though Abby is disappointed not to get any response, she continues writing and designing. Axelrod’s vivid description of Abby’s difficult home life is painful to read and readers will feel great sympathy for her. Her family’s prejudices, all too common in that period, may be jarring for some modern readers. Nonetheless, Abby is an engaging girl, trying hard to get by and readers will be nearly as pleased as Abby when her situation finally starts to improve. Recommended for ages 11-15. MLB

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children’s starred reviews The Auslander PAUL DOWSELL Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers, 2011 Hardcover 296 pp. $17.99 ISBN: 978-1-59990-633-1

n this historical novel set during World War II, a thirteen-year-old boy is left orphaned after a German tank strikes his parents’ car in a small Polish village. Peter’s family is of German descent, and he has the prized nordisch look of an Aryan, so he is spared a harsher fate and, instead, is repatriated to Berlin to live with a German professor of Racial Science. Although he is an auslander or foreigner, Peter is required to join the Hitler-Jugend youth corps and imagines becoming a pilot in the Luftwaﬀe, but he cannot escape his Polish origins, particularly when he witnesses the brutal treatment of Polish workers who are beaten, starved, and eventually sent east to Nazi concentration camps. Peter befriends a girl whose parents seem less steadfast in their support of the Nazis than his host family. The Reiters carefully hide their political leanings outside their own home and, as the tide of the war turns, Peter learns that they have been supplying food to families hiding German Jews in Berlin. When their subversive activities are

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ultimately discovered, Peter and the Reiters make a daring escape to Sweden, leaving behind a Germany that has already begun its hellish decline. With compelling characters and an intriguing plot, this is a novel that exposes an aspect of the war not often dealt with, namely the life of everyday German citizens whose personal beliefs contradict that of the dictatorial regime under which they are living. From the stiﬂing of outside inﬂuences such as American swing music, to the notorious medical experiments conducted on innocents in an attempt to prove the validity of Aryan racial superiority, this is a forceful book of historical depth. Recommended for ages 12 and up. TM

The Book of Amazing Facts and Feats 2: The Creator’s World and All That Fills It NATAN HURVITZ & AHARON YOSEF HOFFMAN NEHEMIAH KLEIN, TRANS. Feldheim Publishers, 2011 Hardcover 173 pp. $39.99 ISBN: 978-1-59826-769-3

s its title says, this book is truly a collection of amazing facts. Written in Israel and translated from the Hebrew, it is presented from an Orthodox perspective. The ﬁrst section, “Holy Men, Holy Books and Holy Places,” talks about the world of “our Sages," Jewish kings and their dynasties, people of the Bible and their longevity, the sourcing of the ﬁve books of Torah and warriors from the Tanach. In subsequent sections, introductory

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passages echo this approach but are followed by more generic information. Did you know, for example, that the people with the lowest life expectancy live in Zimbabwe where the women live to about thirty-four years of age and men until forty or that the most common non-contagious illness is tooth decay? Did you know that the country with the most prisoners, one out of every thirty-four citizens, is the United States? Second in this series, with a third book anticipated, the information ranges from sections about transportation (where we are told that the invention that has saved the most lives is the seat belt) to the “Armies and Wars” section, where we learn that in 1859 John Henri Durant “organized civilians to aid injured soldiers” and, subsequently, was the inspiration for the International Red Cross. Beautiful photographs augment the compelling information. This book will be a welcome resource to have in one’s home. Recommended for ages 9-adult. MLK

Experience Modern Israel AVIVA WERNER Behrman House, 2011 Paperback 112 pp. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-87441-800-2

xperience Modern Israel is a 112-page textbook and workbook meant to guide students to make a real connection. The lively writing and plentiful vignettes make for meaty non-ﬁction reading. The volume has a web component, rich with maps, video clips, music, games, facts, and images accessible through the publisher’s website. The highly researched nine-chapter book describes the many varied aspects of the country. It does not shy away from challenging topics. Chapters focus on visiting the country, arts and culture, diversity, aspects of the Jewish state, history, security and conﬂict, the environment, and the economy. Each chapter is rich with modern or historic photographs and graphics describing facts. “Meet-An-Israeli” boxes make an authentic connection for the young reader. The well-organized book makes the plentiful information easy to digest. Interactive sections spur thought on Israel including discussions on hot topics. One activity makes readers imagine they are in the middle of vibrant Israeli movements and activities such as army service or kibbutzim. The book makes Biblical connections to the modern land and explains how Jewish values like Bal Tashhit (Do Not Destroy) apply to everyday life in Israel. A “Say-It-In-Hebrew” section gives students who can read the language applicable language skills. Recommended for ages 10-12. DW

children’s or fantasy, Moriarty has created an interesting, detail driven story ﬁlled with dybbuks, famous ﬁgures, and hexers. That said, the co-existence of traditional religion, faith, and magic might trouble some observant readers. Early in the book, when Sacha’s mom does not make it back from the market until after sundown on Friday, they may wonder if the Jewish experience is authentic. If you can forgive this detail, what a reward! The reader will quickly be swept away by the great plot, characters, and themes. Moriarty is ambitious. The Inquisitor’s Apprentice addresses real world themes of religion, class, immigration, and prejudice. It is a well-written story, highly recommended for readers ages 10-14. Period ink illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer enhance the reading experience. SA

Naamah and the Ark at Night

The Golem’s Latkes

The Inquisitor’s Apprentice

ADAPTED BY ERIC A. KIMMEL AARON JASINSKI, ILLUS. Marshall Cavendish Children, 2011 Hardcover 38 pp. $17.00 ISBN: 978-0-7614-5904-0

CHRIS MORIARTY MARK EDWARD GEYER, ILLUS. Harcourt Children’s Books, 2011 Hardcover 352 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-547-58135-4

he Golem’s Latkes is another winner for award-winning author Eric A. Kimmel. In a style appropriate for young children, he combines the story of the Golem of Prague, allegedly crafted by Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of the fifteenth century, with the classic story, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Rabbi Loew goes to visit the Emperor, leaving his new housemaid to prepare both the house and the Hanukkah latkes for his guests. He returns to find that she has empowered the Golem to make the latkes instead. She has not returned home to instruct the Golem with the words “Golem, enough,” causing an overabundance of latkes to ensue, which are threatening to overtake the entire town. A note from the author explaining the historical facts and some of the Jewish content appears at the beginning of the book. This makes the story non-parochial and universally appealing for all readers. Even so, there is much Jewish content. The layout is designed beautifully. Illustrations are created in acrylic on wood panels and add significantly to the effectiveness of the story. The font also adds to the drama on each page, sometimes appearing in black and sometimes in white text. This book is highly recommended for ages 5-9, as a read-to for younger children and as a read-alone for older readers. SF

SUSAN CAMPBELL BARTOLETTI HOLLY MEADE, ILLUS. Candlewick Press, 2011 Hardcover 32 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-4242-9

he day Sacha found out he could see witches was "the worst day of his life,” but it is a great day for readers of historical fantasy. Chris Moriarty’s The Inquisitor’s Apprentice combines magic and religious mysticism in a compelling novel full of interesting characters and a great setting. This well-written book begins when thirteen-year-old Sacha Kessler makes his discovery standing in line in Mrs. Lassky’s magical bakery. This might not have been the worst news had the Inquisitor not been there, too. According to Sacha, being an Inquisitor is no job for a nice Jewish boy. The Inquisitor is one of the special police officers charged with regulating magic in New York. Along with society snob Lily Astral, Sacha is assigned to the enigmatic and notorious Inspector Wolf, a man who wears dirty shirts and has glasses, even though Sacha is sure he doesn’t need them. Lily and Sacha quickly begin an unlikely but realistic friendship. All the characters are interesting and likeable but the star of this book is Moriarty’s re-imagined turn-of-the-century New York. It is a magical melting pot where each ethnic group has its own brand of homegrown witchcraft as well as host of historical characters. Sacha and Lily’s first challenge is to find out who is trying to kill Thomas Edison. For readers who love history

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o, don’t sigh, another Noah’s Ark! This lovely picture book is a fresh take using a diﬀerent poetic style to teach young readers something new while they bask in a familiar old Bible tale. Here, the point of view of the traditional story comes from Noah’s wife. We learn that a scholar in 1941 listed 103 possible names for her. Rabbinic legends parse some of these; this version rests on the legend that Naamah can mean ‘a great singer.' Naamah sings at night to comfort animals, husband, sons, and spouses. The text delivers the night and her voice in the poetic structure of a ghazal, a strict Arabic form where every line ends in the same word, while the rhyming is internal and changes with each couplet. The poetry reads beautifully. The author’s choice of vocabulary paints dramatic word pictures of night in a storm. The rhyming words provide colorful choices for animal descriptions and actions. The singing is comforting to all, not only the denizens of the ark, but readers who might fear the dark. The illustrations are watercolor collage. The art, in color or in silhouette, has drama and depth to match the words. Naamah is the counterpoint to the edginess; she is warm and calm, a plump matron, soothing to all. Highly recommended for its art and its introduction of a new poetic form to readers age 4-7. EGC

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booknotes

Note: All blurbs have been compiled from information provided by the publisher.

autobiography & memoir And the Bridge Is Love FAYE MOSKOWITZ The Feminist Press, 2011.144 pp. $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-5586-1771-1 Life stories about growing up in a Jewish family in Detroit during the Depression, exploring in loving detail the rituals of family life and work. The book opens with a reﬂection on a friend who is dying of cancer, and ends with a hilarious account of binge eating at a wedding.

Walking with Justice MOLLIE MARTI Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2012. 200 pp. $21.95 ISBN: 978-1-60832-235-0 Walking with Justice recounts Marti’s time spent clerking under a mentor, Judge Max Rosenn, who infused her life with new meaning. Through her experiences emerge twentyﬁve guiding principles to conducting one’s work with justice and living life intentionally.

contemporary jewish life

The God Upgrade: Finding Your 21st-Century Spirituality in Judaism’s 5,000-Year-Old Tradition

are actually straightforward instructions on how to live simply, without rationalizations or excuses—no previous knowledge of the Hebrew Bible necessary!

RABBI JAMIE S. KORNGOLD Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011. 176 pp. $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-58023-443-6 “This is a book for people who equate religious services with counting how many pages are left in the service,” writes Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold. The God Upgrade examines changing ideas of God throughout the centuries, and shows how Judaism can be made more meaningful and compatible with twenty-ﬁrstcentury life.

Selected Writings: On SelfOrganization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism

Hanukkah Stories: Thoughts on Family, Celebration, and Joy NANCY RIPS Frederick Fell Publishers, 2011. 191 pp. $16.95 Hanukkah Stories is ﬁlled with over 101 tales of personal memories and anecdotes.

Proverbs: Annotated and Explained RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO, TRANS. & ANTN. SkyLight Illuminations, 2011. 176 pp. $16.99 ISBN: 978-1-59473-310-9 In this translation of an ancient “how-to,” Rami Shapiro unpacks the proverbs, demonstrating how these complex poetic forms

All These Vows: Kol Nidre RABBI LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN, PHD, ED. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011. 288 pp. $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-58023-430-6 This series of commentaries from scholars, rabbis, artists, and poets examines the Kol Nidre’s theology, usage, history, and deeply personal impact. It explores why Kol Nidre remains an annual liturgical highlight regularly attended even by Jews who disbelieve everything the prayer says.

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HENRI ATLAN, STEFANOS GEROULANOS & TODD MEYERS, EDS. Fordham University Press, 2011. 368 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-8232-3182-9 In this massive oeuvre that ranges from artiﬁcial intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to oﬀer an exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as careful with concepts of rationality as it is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically determined yet forever changing world.

Song of Teshuvah: A Commentary on Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook’s Oros HaTeshuvah RAV MOSHE WEINBERGER Penina Press, 2011. 351 pp. $31.00 ISBN: 978-193-6068-24-1 In 1952, Oros HaTeshuvah was published to deliver the message that teshuvah

(repentance), is not a somber process of self-deprivation but a joyful journey back to Hashem. Unfortunately, it remained mostly unknown. With Song of Teshuvah, Weinberger re-opens this hidden treasure and seeks to inspire those looking for a holy text written in a contemporary style.

Varieties in Jewish Experience RABBI AHARON LICHTENSTEIN KTAV Publishing House, 2012. $35.00 ISBN: 978-1-60280-193-6 Rabbi Lichtenstein addresses crucial issues facing contemporary Jews—including spirituality, marriage, philanthropy, Religious Zionism, and inter-denominational relations—with a blend of depth, scope, eloquence, and profound moral and religious sensitivity.

education The View from the Other Side: What Jewish Schools Could Be SARA CARTER Mazo Publishers, 2011. 144 pp. $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-936778-90-4 Carter demonstrates that by revisiting Torah directives and reviewing research in education, we can ﬁnd solutions that make it possible for our students to emerge as eager

booknotes learners and as Jews who are excited about their purpose in life.

Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka

Teenagers Educated the Village Way

JOHN KESSEL & JAMES PATRICK KELLY, EDS. Tachyon Publications, 2011. 288 pp. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-61696-049-0 Kafkaesque is dedicated to stories that use Franz Kafka as a character, or that bear a direct relation to a speciﬁc work of Kafka’s, like Philip Roth’s “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting” (an alternate history in which Kafka survived into the 1940s, emigrated to America, became Roth’s Hebrew teacher, and dated his aunt).

DR. CHAIM PERI The Values Network Publishing Group, 2011. $18.00 ISBN: 978-1-257-06206-5 Dr. Chaim Peri tells the stories of children born into uncertain existences who receive a second chance at leading successful lives at Yemin Orde Youth Village. He inspires readers to empower troubled young minds to follow their dreams of sports.

ﬁction

me, you

Far Away from Where? YEHIEL GRENIMANN Mazo Publishers, 2011. 234 pp. $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-936778-89-8 Grenimann describes the revival of Jewish life in the refugee camps of central Europe through the story of two highschool sweethearts, Yanosh and Eva. After confronting the destruction of Warsaw, Yanosh and Eva begin their escape to a faraway land, and journey towards hope and healing.

ERRI DE LUCA BETH ARCHER BROMBERT, TRANS. Other Press, 2011. 160 pp. $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-59051-479-5 The unnamed narrator of me, you revisits the tumultuous summer of his sixteenth year—spent extracting stories of war from a local ﬁsherman and bonding with a beautiful young Jewish woman and World War II survivor. Torn by insecurity, patriotism, and desire, the narrator is led into an act of rage and destruction that is both extremely personal and wholly cataclysmic.

history Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times EYAL PRESS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 224 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-374-14342-8 Beautiful Souls explores what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention. Through dramatic stories of unlikely resisters, Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals but by true believers clinging to their convictions.

Beyond the Tower: A History of East London JOHN MARRIOT Yale University Press, 2011. 384 pp. $45.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-14880-0 With the aid of maps, archive prints, photographs, and the words of East Londoners from seventeenth century silk weavers to Cockneys during the Blitz, Marriot explores the relationship between the East End and the rest of London, and challenges many of the myths that surround the area.

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Jewish Book World

booknotes Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century

Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in PostRevolution Russia

GUR ALROEY Wayne State University Press, 2011. 228 pp. $29.95 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3519-2 The sixty-six letters published here enable the reader to trace the hardships, suﬀering, and fears of the Jewish immigrant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Written by Eastern European Jews to information bureaus, the letters reﬂect divided populations trying to decide whether to migrate and begin new lives or remain in their homelands.

HARRIET MURAV Stanford University Press, 2011. 416 pp. $65.00 ISBN: 978-0-8047-7443-7 Music from a Speeding Train reveals a complex and vibrant Jewish literary culture that persisted beyond Stalinist opposition. The book explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system (emphasis on World War II).

A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Early Islam URIEL I. SIMONSOHN University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 344 pp. $79.95 ISBN: 978-0-8122-4349-9 A Common Justice seeks to fundamentally alter our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting strictly demarcated along confessional lines, Simonsohn’s comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under early Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of ﬂuidity across communal boundaries.

holocaust studies Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust CAROLYN J. DEAN Cornell University Press, 2010. 200 pp. $29.95 ISBN: 978-0801449444 Aversion and Erasure accounts for how the Holocaust has shaped discourses about victims in the West. Dean summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of “deserving” and “undeserving” victims on those who have suﬀered.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean DAVID ABULAFIA Oxford University Press, 2011. 816 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 9780195323344 Abulaﬁa tells the story of the Mediterranean. Focusing on the sea itself, he reveals its dynamic role in the rise and fall of world powers, its practical contribution to the growth of economies, and its role as a home of sorts for the various peoples who have crossed it.

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scholarship Bible and Music: Influences of the Old Testament on Western Music MAX STERN KTAV Publishing, 2011. 600 pp. $59.50 ISBN: 978-1-60280-166-0 Bible and Music is a conceptual study about the inﬂuence of the Bible on the history of Western music. Each chapter explores a speciﬁc composition or compositions by popular, classical and contemporary music, enriching the appreciation of both subjects.

Bringing the Prophets to Life RABBI NEIL WINKLER Gefen, 2011. 320 pp. $22.95 ISBN: 978-965-229-478-4 Rabbi Neil Winkler oﬀers insight into the early prophets, taking the reader beyond simple translation and identifying instead the struggles and challenges that faced the outstanding personalities of each era—the warriors and women, prophets and kings.

booknotes A Dangerous Legacy: Judaism and the Psychoanalytic Movement HANS REIJZER JEANETTE K. RINGOLD, TRANS Karnac Books, 2011. 240 pp. $41.95 ISBN: 978-1-85575-858-2 A Dangerous Legacy is a study of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalyst’s fear of ending up in the position of the Jew—the outsider. Reijzer examines how psychoanalysts have managed that fear, in the recent past and present.

How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms MARC CAPLAN Stanford University Press, 2011. 360 pp. $60.00 ISBN: 978-0-8047-7476-5 Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures (ninteenth century Yiddish, twentieth century Anglophone, Francophone African) are key to understanding modernism. He demonstrates the potential of these literatures to anticipate crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures, and proposes a new theoretical model and methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.

Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond (Volume II: Comparative Perspectives on Jewish Migration) SIMON KUZNETS, STEPHANIE LO & E. GLEN WEYL, EDS. Transaction Publishers, 2011. 334 pp. $49.95 ISBN: 978-1-4128-4270-9 This second volume of the Jewish Economies compilation makes public a great number of economist Simon Smith Kuznets’s unpublished or hard-to-ﬁnd works on Jewish immigration and economic structure. The book reveals a lesser-known side of Kuznets, including his studies on the economic history of the Jewish people, immigration, and the impact of immigration on economic structures.

JAY GELLER Fordham University Press, 2011. 448 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-8232-3362-5 The Other Jewish Question maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among corporeal signiﬁers in Germanophone cultures (their representation of ‘the Jew’s” body—or parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them in jokes, caricature, literature) between the Enlightenment and the Shoah.

Place and Ideology in Contemporary Jewish Literature

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock MICHAEL SCRIVENER Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 288 pp. $85.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-10289-7 Describing Jewish representation both by Jews and Gentiles in the British Romantic era, Scrivener explores the wildly varying treatments of stereotypical ﬁgures from that time (the moneylender, prophet, et al.).

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The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity

KAREN GRUMBERG Syracuse University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-0-8156-3259-7 In her study of vernacular landscape in the Israeli novel, Karen Grumberg proposes a new understanding of how Israeli identity is mapped onto the spaces it inhabits. Literary depictions of vernacular spaces, argues Grumberg, play a profound and often unidentiﬁed role in serving or resisting ideology.

Religion of Reason RABBI MOSHE BEN-CHAIM Mesora, 2011. 418 pp. $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-46370-960-0 The purpose of Religion of Reason is to demonstrate that intelligence is the sole faculty that can enable an appreciation for the Written and Oral Torahs. Ultimately, it seeks to assist the reader in his or her conviction in the truth of Judaism, a love for it, and a love of God.

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contributors

MIRIAM BRADMAN ABRAHAMS (MBA) is Cuban born, Brooklyn bred, lives in Woodmere, NY, Hadassah Nassau Region’s One Book chairlady and liaison to the Jewish Book Network, Hewlett Hadassah Herald editor, retired book fair chairlady, certified yoga instructor.

MARCI LAVINE BLOCH (MLB) holds an MLS from the University of Maryland, a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MA in English Literature from Fordham University. She worked in synagogue and day school libraries before moving to the corporate world.

BARBARA ANDREWS (BA) holds a Masters in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago, has been an adult Jewish education instructor, and works in the corporate world as a professional adult educator.

JEFF BOGURSKY (JHB) reads a lot, writes a little and talks quite a bit. He is a media executive and expert in digital media.

SARAH ARONSON (SA) holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College. She is a full time writer and has recently published her first novel, Head Case (Roaring Brook) for young adult. Sara blogs every Thursday for the Lilith blog. DRORA ARUSSY (DA), EdD, is an educational consultant who specializes in integrating Jewish and secular studies, the arts into education, and creative teaching for excellence in Jewish education. She is the mother to four school age children and has taught from pre-school through adult. Currently Drora is an adjunct professor of Hebrew language at Drew University. BETTINA BERCH (BEB), author of the recent biography, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Life and Work of Anzia Yezierska, teaches part-time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. ALYSSA BERLIN (AIB) is a senior at North Shore Hebrew Academy High School. Along with being an avid reader, she is the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper. Alyssa worked as an intern for the Jewish Book Council in the summer of 2011. MARCIA BERNEGER (MB) is a wife, mother of two teenage sons, second grade teacher, and in her spare time (lol) a writer. She has written stories and articles for children’s magazines and has a few picture book manuscripts making the rounds. Her goal is that one day she will have her own book reviewed by Jewish Book World. BARBARA M. BIBEL (BMB) is a librarian at the Oakland Public Library in Oakland, CA, and at Congregation Netivot Shalom, Berkeley, CA. JACK BIELER (JB) is currently Rabbi of Kemp Mill Synagogue in Silver Spring, MD. He has been associated with Jewish day school education for over thirty years. R. Bieler served as a mentor for the Bar Ilan University Lookstein Center Principals’ Seminar and he has published and lectured extensively on the philosophy of Modern Orthodox education. DANA BJORNSTAD (DB) is a mother of three and a teacher. She taught middle school for 13 years— reading, social studies, science, and art. She currently substitute teaches all grade levels and subjects.

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BILL BRENNAN (BB) is an independent scholar and entertainer based in Las Vegas. Brennan has taught literature and the humanities at Princeton and The University of Chicago. He holds degrees from Yale, Princeton, and Northwestern. ADA BRUNSTEIN (AB) is a freelance writer and an acquisitions editor for Cambridge University Press. She has an MA in Linguistics from NYU and an MS in Science Writing from MIT. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New Scientist, Discover, and The Vocabula Review. LINDA F. BURGHARDT (LFB) is a New York-based journalist and author who has contributed commentary, breaking news, and features to major newspapers across the U.S., in addition to having three non-fiction books published. She writes frequently on Jewish topics. ELLEN G. COLE (EGC), the librarian of the Levine Library of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, is a wellknown reviewer of Jewish books for children and adults. She is a past judge of the Sydney Taylor Book Awards for the annual best literature for Jewish children and a past chairperson of that committee. She is a co-author of the AJL guide, Excellence in Jewish Children’s Literature. Ellen is the recipient of two major awards for contribution to Judaic Librarianship, the Fanny Goldstein Merit Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries and the Dorothy Schroeder Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries of Southern California. She is on the board of AJLSC. ALAN COOPER (AC) teaches English at York College, CUNY. Notable among his numerous contributions to periodicals, reviews, and books is his Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Press, 1996). ANDREA DAVIDSON (AD) is the librarian of The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beechwood, OH. She holds and M.L.S. from the University of Michigan and is a former member of the Sydney Taylor Book Awards Committee. MICHAEL N. DOBKOWSKI (MND) is a professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is co-editor of Genocide and the Modern Age and On the Edge of Scarcity (Syracuse University Press); author of The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism; and co-author of The Nuclear Predicament.

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ELEANOR EHRENKRANZ (EE) received her Ph.D. from NYU and has taught at Stern College, NYU, Mercy College, and at Pace University. She has lectured widely on Jewish literature and is working on an anthology of Jewish poetry. SHELLY FEIT (SF) has an M.L.S. and a Sixth-year Specialist’s Certificate in Information Science. She is currently the library director and media specialist at the Moriah School in Englewood, NJ. JUDITH FELSENFELD’S (JuF) short fiction has appeared most recently in The Southwest Review, The Chicago Review, The Blue Mesa Review and on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts.” JACK FISCHEL (JF) is professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, Millersville, PA and author of The Holocaust (Greenwood Press) and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield). SETH J. FRANTZMAN (SJF) received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he currently holds a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies. DEBRA GOLD (DG) has been a children’s librarian for over 20 years in the Cuyahoga County Public Library System. An active member of the ALA, she has served on many committees including the Caldecott, Newbery and Batchelder committees. WALLACE GREENE (WG), Ph.D., has taught Jewish history at several universities in the NY/NJ metropolitan area. PHILIP K. JASON (PKJ) is professor emeritus of English from the United States Naval Academy. A former editor of Poet Lore magazine, he is the author or editor of twenty books, including Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture and Don’t Wave Goodbye: The Children’s Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom. RACHEL KAMIN (RK), M.L.S., is the preschool liaison librarian at the Des Plaines Public Library in Des Plaines, IL. Prior to that, she worked at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, MI for ten years as the director of the libraries and media center. A member of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee since 2003, Rachel served as Chair of the Committee from 2006-2008. She also reviews children’s literature for School Library Journal and the AJL Newsletter. SUSAN KANTOR (SK) is a senior writer/editor for Girl Scouts of the USA. She is a published children’s book author, has worked as children’s book editor and is a past judge for the National Jewish Book Awards in the illustrated children’s book category. MARGE KAPLAN (MLK) is a retired English as a Second Language teacher. She is a consultant for the children’s literature group for the Roseville, MN school system and is a storyteller of Jewish tales.

LAUREN KRAMER (LK) is a Vancouver-based journalist, wife, and mother with a lifelong passion for literature. Born in Cape Town, South Africa she has won awards for her writing and reported from many corners of the world. Read more of her work at www.laurenkramer.net.

CARL J. RHEINS (CJR) is executive director emeritus of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught courses on the Holocaust at several major universities.

NAOMI KRAMER (NDK) is a retired reading consultant teacher who developed curriculum for using literature to educate children and adults in the history of the Holocaust. She is a docent and educator at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Education Center of Nassau County.

ELIYAHU ROSEN (ER) is a former panel member for the National Jewish Book award in the category of Jewish history, and currently resides in New York City where he is the program director at the Yeshiva University Department of Service Learning & Experiential Jewish Education. eliyahurosen@gmail.com

RENITA LAST (RL) is a member of Hadassah Nassau Region’s Education Committee. She is currently involved in volunteer work at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. A retired teacher of the Gifted and Talented, she participates in book clubs and writing projects.

DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN (DS) is a former English teacher/Writing Across the Curriculum Center Coordinator at North Shore Hebrew Academy High School and coeditor of Modern American Literature: A Library of Literary Criticism, Vol. VI, published in 1997.

CHRISTINE MAASDAM (CM) holds a Masters in Humanities, certifications in Museum Studies and Cultural Property Protection. She is currently completing her M.L.I.S. Her interests are philosophy and the impact of art and technology on culture.

RUTH SEIF (RS) is a retired chairperson of English at Thomas Jefferson High School in NYC. She served as administrator in the alternative high school division.

MICHAL HOSCHANDER MALEN (MHM) is a librarian and editor of reference books. She is the children’s editor of Jewish Book World. TERI MARKSON (TM) has been working with children in public and school libraries for over 18 years. She has also been a book reviewer for many years and is still delighted when a children’s book makes her laugh, cry, or both. She is currently a children’s librarian at the Fairfax Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library where children and books go together like a cat in a hat. PENNY METSCH (PGM), MLS, formerly a school librarian on Long Island and in New York City, now focuses on early literacy programs in Hoboken, NJ. JASON MYERS (JM) is a writer whose work has appeared in AGNI, BOOKFORUM, and Tin House. ESTHER NUSSBAUM (EN), the head librarian of Ramaz Upper School for 30 years, is now education and special projects coordinator of the Halachic Organ Donor Society. A past editor of Jewish Book World, she continues to review for this and other publications. CAROL POLL (CP), Ph.D., is a professor of sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York. Her areas of interest include the sociology of race and ethnic relations, the sociology of marriage, family and gender roles, and the sociology of American Jews.

fiction contributors

MARON L. WAXMAN (MLW), retired editorial director, special projects, at the American Museum of Natural History, was also an editorial director at HarperCollins and Book-of-the-Month Club. She also leads editorial workshops.

DINA WEINSTEIN (DW) is a Miami, FL-based journalist. She is currently working on a series of articles and an exhibition about author, illustrator, and cartoonist Syd Hoff for his 2012 centennial. She can be reached at dina_w@hotmail.com. NATHAN WEISSLER (NW) is a senior in high school and lives in Chevy Chase, MD with his family. He has been writing for Jewish Book World for two years. Nathan loves to read, especially books related to Judaism and history. SAM WHITE (SRW) lives in Brooklyn and is from San Francisco and Bakersfield, CA.

EDWARD SHAPIRO (ESS) is professor of history emeritus at Seton Hall University and the author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (1992), We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (2005), and Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (2006). ROBERT MOSES SHAPIRO (RMS) teaches about East European Jewish history, the Holocaust, Yiddish language and literature, and Jewish communal selfgovernment. His most recent book is The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive: Catalog and Guide (Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, 2009). He is currently engaged in translating Holocaust diaries and writing a history of the Jews in Lodz, Poland, during the twentieth century. SARAH SHEWCHUK (SS) is pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research examines Holocaust literature. BARBARA SILVERMAN (BS) has an MLS from Texas Woman’s University. She worked as a children’s librarian at the Corpus Christi Public Libraries and at the Corpus Christi ISD before retiring. She now works as a volunteer at the Astor Judaic Library of the Lawrence Family JCC in La Jolla, CA. JACLYN TROP (JT) is a business reporter for The Detroit News and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. WENDY WASMAN (WW) has been a professional librarian since 1988. She is the former assistant librarian at The Temple - Tifereth Israel in Beachwood, OH and is currently the librarian at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

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In Memoriam MYRA KRAFT z”l

An Inspiration to the Jewish Commmunity

Myra Kraft’s passing this past year leaves a great hole in our hearts. As we mourn the loss of a dear friend, we miss her vision, her energy, and optimism. Myra was a committed catalyst for effective change and her reach was international, extending to Israel, Ethiopia, and the Former Soviet Union. Her love for Israel was exhibited in so many ways, including encouraging groups of people who had never visited the country to join her on specially arranged trips. Here Jews and non-Jews joined together to visit the sites and hear from Israel’s leaders. Myra’s love of books brought many outstanding Israeli authors to speak to the groups, adding new perspectives and experiences to the conversation. Through these interactions, her groups left with a greater understanding of Israel’s nuances, and returned home as ambassadors for Israel. As a lover of books, Myra particularly loved to read books of Jewish interest. Myra knew that books open worlds and books change lives. This led her to the Jewish Book Council, where she served on its Board of Directors and was an active participant in the National Jewish Book Awards program. The category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice has been endowed in her memory by her husband Robert and the Kraft Family as a living tribute to an outstanding woman. Myra’s acts of gemilut chasadim—individual, anonymous, personal acts of loving kindness—were essential to her being. No one in need was turned away. While she didn’t care for the word “philanthropist,” she found true joy in helping others—it was a fundamental part of her nature. In the days and years ahead, we will be instructed by the lessons Myra taught us about tzedakah at its best. We will be inspired by her values and ideals, and we will continue to celebrate the beautiful example of love and caring she set for us all.

STEVE SIEGEL z”l A “Renaissance” Man and Mensch

Reflections from Peninnah Schram In a biographical sketch of Steve Siegel, we would include his many roles and interests, as well as awards and accomplishments, and, thus, get an idea of how many people he had touched and what he had achieved. The amazing thing is that Steve juggled successfully all of his roles and interests concurrently during his thirty-two year ‘run’ as Director of the 92nd Street Y Library, as Archivist/Historian at the 92nd Street Y, co-founding and actively involved with the Jewish Genealogical Society, programming a series of Jewish storytelling programs annually at the Y Library, helping to publish The Jewish Storytelling Newsletter, meeting friends for dinners and opera, and much more throughout these thirty-two years that I had known him. Steve did them all with great professionalism, thoroughness, generosity of time and expertise—and love. Truly this gentleman was a “Renaissance” man! My connection to Steve began in 1979 when he became the Director of the 92nd Street Y Library where we were already presenting Jewish storytelling programs and workshops (since 1970). With Steve’s vision—and he was a most creative visionary—we were able to actively present a greater number of performances and workshops, helping to put Jewish storytelling on the national “map.” Storytellers from across the country have written to me about Steve. Steve Zeitlin of Citylore wrote: “It was a pleasure to work with Steve—a wonderful person and part of our spiritual storytelling family”; Corinne Stavish, a storyteller in Detroit, wrote: “Steve was really the heart of the Jewish Storytelling Network communication center.”

Remember by Marcia W. Posner Steve has stood by my side throughout the years in good times and bad, always helpful, cheerful, and ready with another project. Whether accompanying a friend in a hospital waiting room, celebrating Sukkot in a mutual friend’s backyard, coordinating the National Jewish Book Awards audio visual needs, or aiding my early attempts at joining the Web generation, Steve was there for me and for JBC and for each and every one of his many friends. He livened any gathering; he consoled those in need and celebrated with everyone’s good news. May his name be for a blessing!

index

A complete alphabetical listing of titles included in issue 30-1 of Jewish Book World “A”, Zukofsky, NR After Weegee, Morris, NR Alfred Kazin’s Journals, Cook, NR All These Vows, Hoffman, BN And the Bridge Is Love, Moskowitz, BN Anti-Jewish Violence, Dekel-Chen, NR The Auslander, Dowsell, CR Aversion and Erasure, Dean, BN

46 40 34 60 60 40 58 62

Beautiful Souls, Press, BN Becoming Jewish, Reuben, NR Beyond the Tower, Marriot, BN Bible and Music, Stern, BN The Book of Amazing Facts and Feats 2, Hurvitz, CR Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear, Alroey, BN Bringing the Prophets to Life, Winkler, BN Broadway Baby, Shapiro, FR Building After Auschwitz, Rosenfeld, NR

61 37 61 62

The Cats in the Doll Shop, McDonough, CR The Chafetz Chaim, Ezrachi, CR Chanukah Lights, Rosen, CR City of Promise, Sterling, FR A Common Justice, Simonsohn, BN Contesting Histories, Schuldiner, NR Creating Lively Passover Seders, Arnow, NR A Dangerous Legacy, Reijzer, BN David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance, Aronson, NR Donkeys on the Roof, Orbach, CR The Dragon Turn, Peacock, CR

58 62 62 26 48 50 50 50 26 62 42 37 62 34 50 51

Elmo's Little Dreidel, Kleinberg, CR 51 Estie the Mensch, Kohuth, CR 51 Experience Modern Israel, Werner, CR 58 Far Away from Where?, Grenimann, BN Farm 54, Seliktar, FR Feed Me Bubbe, Honig, NR The First Lady of Fleet Street, Negev, NR

61 49 38

The God Upgrade, Korngold, BN The Golem’s Latkes, Kimmel, CR Good Living Street, Bonyhady, NR The Great Sea, Abulafia, BN

60 59 32 62

The Hanukkah Hop!, Silverman, CR Hanukkah Stories, Rips, BN Hashem Is Truly Everywhere, Altein, CR Heinrich Himmler, Longerich, NR Hitler’s Foreign Executioners, Hale, NR Home in the Morning, Glickman, FR

52 60

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52 35 43 25

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How Judaism Became a Religion, Batnitzky, NR 45 How Strange the Change, Caplan, BN 63 The Inquisitor’s Apprentice, Moriarty, CR In the Name of God, Gordon, FR Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto, Goldman, CR Israeli Statecraft, Dror, NR Itmar Makes Friends, Hasten, CR I Will Come Back For You, Russo, CR

59 26 53 44 54 52

Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, Kobrin, NR 41 Jewish Economies, Kuznets, BN 63 Jewish Migration, Bliss, CR 53 Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840, Scrivener, BN 63 Jews and Booze, Davis, NR 40 The Jews in Poland and Russia, Polonsky, NR 42 Kafkaesque, Kessel, BN Kids Speak 6, Walder, CR Kiev, Jewish Metropolis, Meir, NR

61 54 41

Leon Trotsky, Rubenstein, NR Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust, Boehling, NR The Lily Pond, Thor, CR Lily Renee, Escape Artist, Robbins, CR The Linen Queen, Falvey, FR Local History, Glajar, NR Love and Shame and Love, Orner, FR Love’s Voice, Zimler, NR Lucky Bruce, Friedman, NR

The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, Avey, NR MetaMaus, Spiegelman, NR me, you, De Luca, BN Midnight Zoo, Hartnett, CR The Midwife of Venice, Rich, FR Mitzvah Man, Clayton, FR The Muse of Ocean Parkway, Lampart, FR Music for Silenced Voices, Lesser, NR Music from a Speeding Train, Murav, BN Muslims and Jews in America, Aslan, NR

43 54 54 26 43 27 46 32 44 49 61 55 27 27 27 36 62 32

Naamah and the Ark at Night, Bartoletti, CR

One Hundred Great Jewish Books, Hoffman, NR Open Minded Torah, Kolbrener, NR Ordinary Jews, Perle, FR The Other Jewish Question, Geller, BN

37 46 28 63

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FR = Fiction Review NR = Nonfiction Review CR = Children’s Book Review BN = BookNote

Paul on Mazursky, Wasson, NR Philosemitism in History, Karp, NR Place and Ideology in Contemporary Jewish Literature, Grumberg, BN The Prague Cemetery, Eco, FR Proverbs, Shapiro, BN Pulp and Paper, Rolnick, FR

36 42

Religion of Reason, Ben-Chaim, BN The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem, Cohen, NR

Sabrina, Lewis, CR The Sacred Table, Zamore, NR Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, Ingber, NR Selected Writings, Atlan, BN The Shabbat Princess, Meltzer, CR Singing Me Home, Lipszye, NR Song of Teshuvah, Weinberger, BN The Spinoza Problem, Yalom, FR Spiritual Envy, Krasny, NR The Story of Hanukkah, Adler, CR Strictly Kosher Reading, Finkelman, NR Sweet Like Sugar, Hoffman, FR

55 38

63 28 60 29

45 60 56 47 60 29 33 56 38 30

Teenagers Educated the Village Way, Peri, BN THEN, Gleitzman, CR Today I Am a Woman, Vinick, NR To Hope and Back, Kacer, CR Too Many Latkes, Codor, CR Treasures from the Attic, Pressler, NR

61 56 48 56 57 44

Until the Dawn’s Light, Appelfeld, FR

Varieties in Jewish Experience, Lichtenstein, BN The View from the Other Side, Carter, BN

Walking with Justice, Marti, BN What They Saved, Miller, NR When Life Gives You O.J., Perl, CR Why Trilling Matters, Kirsch, NR

60 33 57 35

Yiddishkeit, Pekar, NR 49 Your Friend in Fashion, Abby Shapiro, Axelrod, CR 57

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