A few details -- some more, some less -- on books which have been suggested
for "Books and Bagels" discussion as well as some I've read and
consider of "Jewish interest" one way or another. More authors,
titles, and comments coming.
Readers can share their own comments to tuxfamily at radix.net
*'d authors are Israeli or Palestinian. Their works, cited below, are
translations.
Amiry*
Gur*
Oz*
More books, with commentary coming --
Marcel Cohen. In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonia Saura. Trans.
by Raphael Rubinstein
Haim Nahman Bialik. Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, afterword by
Zali Gurevitch.
both from Ibis Editions, a German Colony Jerusalem publisher. www.ibiseditions.com
Jeffrey Shandler. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. --
Heard the author speak and show clips from shows such as Star Trek and the
Twilight Zone; I found it fascinating, and I usually steer clear of
Holocaust-focused stuff.
David Grossman. See Under: Love.
Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the
Construction of Identity. 1995 collection of essays on Jews in the texts of
non-Jewish authors and stories.
Aaron Lansky. Outwitting History: How One Man Rescued a Million Books and
Saved a Civilization. Subtitle scared me off this book for a few years (came
out in 2004), but I found a cheap copy and will give it a try.
Hettie Jones. How I Became Hettie Jones. Memoir of a "middle-class
Jew from Queens" who married LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and joined the
"bohemian life" of 1950s Greenwich Village. Library copies are
reference only, and I think this is out of print now, but I found a used copy
and it seems worthwhile.
Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman stories are fun for readers of mysteries
and contain some interesting story lines involving the shrinking Jewish
community within the Chicago limits.
***Author -- Suad Amiri
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries
Suad Amiry.
Available at DC Public Library
The author, an Arab resident of Ramallah, presents an engaging description of
life in the West Bank, including her struggle for legal residence and her
stints under curfew, using genuine humor where bitterness might be expected.
"Perhaps one day I may forgive you for putting us under curfew for
forty-two days," Amiry grumbles toward [then] prime minister Ariel
Sharon, "but I will never forgive you for making us live with my
mother-in-law for what seemed, then, more like forty-two years."
Much of this memoir originated as emails to friends, resulting in a
conversational 200 pages. It is available locally in trade paper and at the DC
Public Library.
***Author -- Maggie Anton
Anton developed her Jewish learning as an adult, in part through Talmud
classes taught by Rachel Adler. She lives in California. A detailed bio is
available on her webpage, http://www.rashisdaughters.com/author.html
.
Rashi's Daughters [to be a trilogy], Book One: Joheved
Glendale, CA: Banot Press, 2005
Available in trade paperback; some used copies are beginning to appear.
Engaging, if not particularly deep, exploration of medieval Jewish
life in France. Story includes, as it unfolds, some interesting matters of
Talmudic dispute -- women reciting a blessing for Shabbat candle-lighting, for
example -- as well as the expected issues of women wearing tefillin (Rashi's
daughters, along with the biblical Michal, are our prime exemplars) and
learning Talmud.
***Author -- Michael Chabon
_The Mystery of Pittsburgh_ by Michael Chabon
Suggested but I haven't investigated yet.
***Author -- Zev Chafetz
Chafetz, an Israeli-New Yorker, is a journalist who writes essays
and scholarly-type material. He also writes some of the funniest
mystery-thrillers around, usually with something interesting to say about
US-Israeli politics.
The Project
Zev Chafetz
Available at DC Public Library
Ostensibly a thriller about the first Jewish president of the US -- President
and VP are killed together in a boating accident, leaving the Jewish Speaker
of the House in charge -- this funny novel has some fascinating commentary on
"who is a Jew? and US-Israeli relations.
***Author -- Batya Gur
famous Israeli academic and writer of mysteries.
Literary Murder: A Michael Ohayon Mystery.
One of a series. Seems mysterious enough and probably worthwhile,
but oh so literary. Haven't had the patience yet.
***Author -- Shulamit Hareven
Israeli author Hareven was the only woman member of the Academy of the
Hebrew Language. She moved from Poland to pre-State Israel in 1940, was active
in Peace Now as well as refuge settlement, taught and served as a journalist.
She died in 2003
The Miracle Hater
Prophet
both from California's North Point Press and translated by Hillel
Halkin. A third book in the "Desert Trilogy," is apparently
available only as part of a one-volume set. All are out of print in
translation but available in used copies.
The prose mimics -- in its spareness and poetry -- the biblical text on
which these tales of Moses and extended family in the desert.
***Author -- Adam Langer
Crossing California
Washington Story
Adam Langer
Two novels about life in the 1970s and early 1980s in Chicago, east and
west of California Avenue. Primary plot lines follow several teens and their
families, Jews and blacks, in an area of the city that was once heavily
Jewish; one thread throughout both books involves the complicated relationship
of Jews and Blacks in the recording business (blues, jazz, and onward).
Some laugh-out-loud material; some stuff only a Chicagoan could love; and
some very astute observations about race, class, gender, and institutional
Judaism. (Explicit sexual content, of which there is a fair amount, is rather
juvenile, but then so are the participants for the most part.)
***Author -- Jennifer Miller
Young, local author (Chevy Chase, MD) who attended Georgetown Day; her father
helped negotiate the Oslo Accords; her mother is involved in Seeds of Peace.
Inheriting the Holy Land
Jennifer Miller.
Available at DC Public Library
Miller interviewed some fascinating people key to understanding the land of
Israel. Her subjects include ordinary people -- in the US, Israel, and the
territories -- with many different perspectives as well as influential people
such as Colin Powell, Ehud Barak, and the late Yasir Arafat.
I read this book when it was new (two years or so ago) and found its style
easy and its content worthwhile. The Washington Post called it "highly
readable... and a voice worth listening to," while both the Jerusalem
Post and the Arab News remarked on her ability to present many, conflicting
views honestly.
You might also be interested in reading an http://www.powells.com/essays/miller.html
of hers posted at Powell's bookstore.
***Author -- Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley, whose works appear on the African American author
shelves in most bookstores, was born to a Jewish mother and, although his
mystery/fiction concerns blacks in L.A., I believe he offers some of the most
Jewish fiction around.
Easy Rawlins excerpt on homeschooling
If you're looking for some GREAT literature on teshuvah
(repentance/return), consider reading the Socrates Fortlaw books -- Always
Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog.
For a fictional scene that presents one of the clearest discussions of
what it means to seek/offer tzedakah (justice) in the world, see the
beginning of Little Scarlet (another Easy Rawlins story), which takes
place in the wake of the Watts riots.
***Author -- Amos Oz
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Available at DC Public Library
Still investigating.
***Author -- Cynthia Ozick
Heir to the Glimmering World
Cynthia Ozick
Available at DC Public Library
This novel is rife with literary allusions and devices. Many reviewers
loved it. Although I was initially interested, I found the novel a chore to read.
Skimming to the end, I discovered that the true main character is not the
young woman introduced at the start of the book but a man who had the
fortune/misfortune to have been the main character in children's books written
by his father and who now plays an important role in the household the young
woman serves. Additional plot lines include the Karaite studies of the father
of the household, the mother's mental difficulties stemming from the family's
escape from Nazi Europe, the family's move to the Bronx, and several
characters' involvement, and subsequent disaffection, with communism.It is a
rich tale, and someone with more patience might enjoy it, but I was eventually
made so tired by how hard the book tries (not sure what it's trying to
do, exactly, but my feeling is that the reader should never see the effort,
only the result) that I surrendered.
Some reviews and readers guides are available at http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0618470492-0
http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm?book_number=1472
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/ozick_heir.shtml
***Author -- Oliver Sacks
Uncle Tungsten
Available at DC Public Library
This book has gotten rave reviews, e.g., -- http://www.powells.com/review/2002_01_11.html
-- but I somehow missed the warmth others found in it, and I confess that
I did not finish it.
Publishers Weekly notes that Sacks lived in a "household steeped in
learning, religion and politics (both his parents were doctors and his aunts
were ardent Zionists," but my own search for what might be called
"Jewish content" yielded only one chapter that had any particular
association with Judaism or Jewish cultural life.
***Author -- Leon Sciaky
Bio lifted from Powells: Leon Sciaky was born in 1894, when the Turkish
flag still waved over Salonica. His family left their beloved but turbulent
homeland in 1915, settling in New York City. Sciaky lived in America--mainly
upstate New York--with his wife, Frances, and son until his death in 1958. He
taught at a number of progressive schools and camps and, in his last years,
owned and operated a school and camp with Frances.
Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads
Leon Sciaky
Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2003
I only glanced through this book before lending it out, but it seemed a
well-written, engaging memoir of an interesting time and place.
Publisher's blurb: At the crossroads of East and West, Salonika (now
Thessaloniki) was an oasis in a swirl of conflicting powers and interests, a
vibrant world of varied peoples. Until 1912, the city was an economic center
of the Ottoman Empire and a cultural hub of Sephardic Jews. Leon Sciaky
recreates his magical childhood at the turn of the 20th century in the midst
of this polyglot world.
This smaller press, Paul Dry Books,
by the way, offers other titles of Jewish interest and some related curriculum guides.
***Author -- A.B. Yehoshua
Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and now lives and teaches in Haifa.
The Liberated Bride
A.B. Yehoshua.
Available from DC Public Library and in trade paperback.
This novel explore the realities of life in Israel and the territories and
their interconnections. The book has been described as "profoundly funny
and simply profound" and "deeply serious and highly
entertaining" by various reviewers. I found it enjoyable and
thought-provoking. It is longish, over 500 pages, and takes a bit of time to
absorb; its words are worth savoring, even in translation:
"...perhaps in the hope of saving the threatened sanctity of the
Sabbath,which Rivlin could hear being thrashed in a washing machine."
"...as if Arabic lacked a word to express the cuddly Israeli concept
of wilderness."
A readers guide is available http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpage.asp?isbn=0151006539&option+reading
***Author -- Tamar Yellin
Yellin was born in the north of England to the daughter of a Polish immigrant
and a third-generation Jerusalemite. She studied Aramaic and Hebrew at Oxford.
Pretty seriously random Author
interview
Genizah at the House of Shepher
Tamar Yellin
New Millford, CT: The Toby Press, 2005
Hardcover: ISBN: 1-59264-085-0
Publisher's blurb: Shulamit, a biblical scholar from England, returns to
her grandparents? home in Jerusalem for a visit, after an absence of many
years. Almost immediately she becomes embroiled in a family feud over
possession of the so-called Shepher Codex, a mysterious and valuable
manuscript which has been discovered in the attic. In tracing the origins of
the Codex she uncovers the history of the Shepher family itself: of her
great-grandfather, who traveled to Babylon in search of the ten lost tribes;
of her grandfather, a dreamer whose Zionist ideals brought him into confl ict
with his religion; of her parents, and their tormented love affair; and of her
own orphaned and unhappy past. At the same time, she struggles to find answers
to pressing questions: what is the significance of the Codex and where does it
come from?
This book won the Ribalow (Hadassah Magazine) Prize for Jewish Literature
in 2006.
My thoughts: This novel jumps from a "mythical" past -- the
narrator's attempt to piece together the life of her ancestors in pre-Israel
Palestine (19th Century CE and earlier) -- to the narrator's
"fictional" present (20th Century CE England and Jerusalem), with
forays into retelling of traditional midrashic fantasies about Moses. No time
period was clearly evoked for me, and the characters never quite took shape.
Perhaps the author was ambivalent about how clearly she wished to paint
autobiographical material. Or maybe -- echoing the novel's theme of
ambivalence toward variant texts -- this is a literary statement about attempts
to uncover the past. As fiction, however, it was a little disorienting, I
thought, if pleasant enough.
I thought this Author
essay was at least as interesting as the novel itself
Kafka in Bronteland and Other Stories
Tamar Yellin
New Millford, CT: The Toby Press, 2006
Hardcover: ISBN: 1-59264-153-9
Publisher's Blurb: Thirteen stories by the author of the critically
acclaimed The Genizah at the House of Shepher address universal themes
of yearning and displacement, love, loss and the struggle to belong. A
latter-day Jewish Odysseus spends his life planning an intricate journey to
the Promised Land, while an English father stranded in London mourns for his
faraway Italian son. A man without a past searches the world for potential
relatives, while in the title story, a Jew and a Muslim cast adrift in a
Yorkshire landscape find momentary sisterhood over a copy of the Koran.
Blending irony with pathos, the mythical with the mundane, Kafka in Bronteland
gives voice to a rich mix of characters living outside traditional patterns of
identity in a world of complex migrations and tumultuous change.
This book won the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction in 2006.
My thoughts: Many of these stories were written and/or published before
the Genizah at the House of Shepher. I have not finished the collection
yet but find character and theme much sharper in these stories compared with
the novel. I also see in these stories the kind of humor evidenced in the
author interview linked above. As in the novel, Yellin gives us Reuben, the
lost older brother of a female Hebrew scholar; in the space of a few short
story pages, the short story more clearly illuminates Reuben -- who, after six
months of Hebrew Circle, "can order a beer" -- and Devorah -- who,
following six years at Talmud Torah, has a deep love of Hebrew text -- than
the novel ever draws Reuben and Shulamit. Reading these stories, I am
enthusiastic to see what this author next produces.