The ProsenPeople

Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear: Shame, Truth, and Reconciliation

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:58:00 GMT

In her first two installments of “Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear,” Randy Susan Meyers wrote about an essay in which the writer met with an elderly former SS officer and the plight of the ordinary German citizen during World War II. Her newest novel, The Comfort of Lies, is now available. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.” ― Simon Wiesenthal

I worked for many years with batterers—men who were adjudicated into a program for domestic violence prevention, men who had beaten, hit, punched, and sometimes killed their wives. They sat and stared at me, denying with the most innocent of eyes the very crimes I had laid out in photos in front of me.

She ran into my fist.

I grabbed her arm and then she ran in circles around me, and that is how she broke her own arm.

She had a soft head, and that is why she died when her head hit the iron railing.

People ask if the men ever changed and my answer remains the same: only if they are able to face their crimes and cruelty. Denial, and the shame these men felt (whether shame at being caught, shame at hurting people they should have loved, or shame at their hidden crimes being brought into the bright sunlight), blocked their change. How do you change if you can’t admit what happened?

Questions of shame and guilt spill to the next generation in families where domestic violence occurs. Are children of abusers doomed to abuse or be abused? Can they inherit a denial of familial guilt, which prevents them from comfort in their own skin and belief in their memories?

Does awareness that your people were killed in vast numbers (for being Jewish, which you are) leave one forever frightened?

What does it do to the frightened, to have that past denied?

What does it do to the children of perpetrators of violence? How does one put together love for a parent even in light of feeling revulsion for the deeds they did or the beliefs they carried?

Should there be a scale of pain and justice here, for these generations now and future? Or should we accept that everyone is the star of their own show, that pain is always relative?

For me, it’s all in the truth. I take no comfort in lies, half-truths, and fairy tales.

I learned from my scientist husband that what is, is. This lesson crystalized for me when, after a lifetime of trying to run from facing issues of fluctuating weight issues, I learned truth could be freeing. Like most women, the size of my dress rules my mood, while at the same time I veil myself from accepting the reality of that number. Pictures where I looked like a whale? Bad camera. Skirts tightening beyond the ability to button? Must be shrinkage at the dry cleaners. Don’t think about those waistbands. Put on an elasticized skirt.

What is, is.

After a lifetime of avoiding the scale, I began weighing myself. And continued to weigh myself every day. And, knowing the truth, I lost weight.

When a nation faces truth, perhaps the psychic weight begins to fall away and collective guilt lifts. Recently a series on German television, Our Mothers, Our Fathers, gripped the nation. According to War History Online:

Reviewers have praised the drama for breaking new ground by showing how the Nazi system reached into every corner of life. Christian Buss, a culture editor for the magazine Spiegel, wrote in a review of the drama that while the question of Germans’ collective guilt had been resolved, the role of individuals remained unclear.

“Who has had the conversation with their own parents and grandparents about the moral failings of their elders?” he wrote. “The history of the Third Reich has been examined down to the level of Hitler’s dog while our own family history is a deep dark crater.”

I want to see this series. The closest I can come to leaving my fear is by understanding how a vast number of people turned to evil—and that they are willing to examine it right. Pretending that nobody in their family ever knew what was going on is far more frightening. If a tiny portion of a nation could truly commit such horrors with nobody knowing but the smallest handful of people—what hope does a frightened child have? If the grandchildren of American slaves are told, “nobody knew it was happening,” why should they believe it couldn’t happen quite easily again?

When I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC the exhibit which most captivated me was a film of survivors talking about their experience—in specific, a man who said that while he was in the camps he thanked God each day in his prayers. I don’t remember the exact words, but the essence was this:

“What are you thanking God for?” he was asked.

“I am thanking God for not making me him,” he said, gesturing towards the guard.

There is pain in participating in evil—especially if one feels bullied into that involvement. Choosing a path of righteousness is always easier in one’s imaginings, but it’s also true that evil flourishes best in silence.

Compassion towards those who feel forced to participate in something as enormously evil as slavery or genocide (whether in Armenia, Rwanda, or Germany) is a kindness that can only be meted out when a perpetrator acknowledges his or her role. A wronged community needs justice and truth to reach reconciliation.

Anti-Semitism, racism, and hierarchies of cultural, racial, and religious power are alive and well. Compassion towards perpetrators of evil (and those who blinded themselves to the evil next door) must be leavened with keeping truth in place. Smothering reality with blankets of kindness is in the end no kindness: not if our goal is preventing future generations of children from living in collective fear.

Read more about Randy Susan Meyers's here.

New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:27:00 GMT

This week's new Jewish Book Council reviews:
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Find more of the latest reviews here.

Ben Lerner: Working Against the Image of the Conventional Novel

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:02:00 GMT

We prompted this year's Sami Rohr Prize awardees to write about "how they came to write their book." Over the next several weeks, we'll share their responses. Today, Ben Lerner discusses his novel Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press).

A little more than halfway through my novel, the narrator claims: “I will never write a novel.” It’s only one of many lies the radically unreliable Adam Gordon tells, but, like most of his lies, it contains an element of truth, indicating his resistance to many of the more conventional attributes of the genre: a tendency to reduce the irreducible messiness of experience to a neatly symmetrical plot, the way so many protagonists undergo an unambiguous journey of redemption. Adam Gordon—like me—is largely interested in something else: in depicting the arc and feel of (often neurotic) thinking, the texture of time as it passes in both dramatic and non-dramatic experience, and changes in personality that are too subtle or ambiguous to register in novels concerned with grand transformations. I came to write this novel, then, in part by working against an image of the conventional novel—by writing my resistance to the form into the form, narrating the pitfalls of narrative. Adam Gordon is a young poet abroad trying to figure out if he’s worthy of his art, if his art can endure in an age of mass media and spectacle, and so his coming of age as an artist—or, depending on your reading, his failure to come of age—isn’t just something the prose describes: it’s enacted in the writing itself.

Increasingly I feel that explanations of how a fiction arises are part of the fiction—that writers necessarily tell themselves a story about the origin of a work because it helps the work get written, or helps integrate it into a narrative that lets them move on to the next book. That said, part of why and how this novel originated feels clear to me. I’d just finished my third book of poems and felt like I’d temporarily exhausted my sense of the poetic line, that I wanted a break from the particular maddening challenges and pleasures of that form. Around the same time, I’d finished a long academic essay on the poems of John Ashbery, a poet who figures prominently in my novel (I stole the title, Leaving the Atocha Station, from one of his poems). Many of the concerns that I’d pursued in my poems and essays—how one makes verbal art with a language saturated by commercialism and militarism, the distance between what a poem aspires to do and what it can actually do, how the flow of time can be captured and intensified in a work of literature, etc.—remained my obsessions. I wanted to take these ideas about poetry and the arts and place them in a life, watch them spread out into a character’s experience, track their effects once they were placed in a particular body, mind, and time. One reason I love the novel—when I love it—as a genre is that it’s so absorptive; it can incorporate poems, the language of criticism, historical events, personal drama, etc. I think Leaving the Atocha Station came into being because at that particular juncture the novel allowed me to assimilate all my different languages and concerns into an overarching form.

Actually, I’m not sure I think that; I believed it when I wrote it, but now (a few days later), I think even that general description exaggerates the amount of conscious control I have over the direction my writing takes. As many writers would probably tell you, the form and content of an artwork largely have to be discovered in the act of composition; otherwise, what’s the point? Maybe I should just say that one day I started writing—I’m not sure why—sentences whose syntax captured the rhythm of this Adam Gordon character’s thinking. Even when I’d tried to write poems, all I could generate were more of Gordon’s sentences. In some ways he’s an exaggeration of my most unfortunate tendencies, and in other ways he’s entirely strange to me. The book that unfolded was as much an effect of his language controlling me as it was of my controlling his language. Tolstoy once told an acquaintance that he was hurrying home to see what Vronsky would do next, indicating, I think, how much a book develops according to concerns outside of authorial control. I suppose the novel itself is as close as I can get to an account of its genesis, describing, as it ultimately does, a young poet’s futile resistance to a novel’s demand to be written.

Ben Lerner is the author of novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.

Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear: Ordinary German Citizens During WWII

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:29:00 GMT

In her first installment of “Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear,” Randy Susan Meyers wrote about an essay in which the writer met with an elderly former SS officer. Her newest novel, The Comfort of Lies, is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” ― Elie Wiesel, Night

Like most Jewish children born in the fifties, the Holocaust was a constant shadow. If the German generation born after WWII suffered from collective guilt, trying to cast off the shame of their parents and grandparents, or convince themselves or the world of the innocence of their parents and grandparents, the generation of Jewish children born of the same time, suffered from collective fear.

I didn’t grow up in a traditional Jewish family (if such a thing exists) by any stretch of the imagination. The first time I entered a synagogue was for a friend’s Bar Mitzvah. But I read voraciously, and from the time I received my ‘adult’ card at the Brooklyn Public Library, I was reading accounts—fiction and nonfiction—of the Holocaust. The non-fairy tales of my youth were The Diary of Anne Frank, Mila 18, and Night (which then morphed to Jubilee and Roots, as I conflated the horrors of slavery and concentration camps into one mass of fright).

I grew up with a sense of doom—partly from these stories I consumed, partly due to my own family’s silence (my paternal great-grandparents emigrated from Germany, but I never knew why) and perhaps partially the hours spent looking at photos my father sent my mother from his post in Africa during WWII. That vast wasteland of desert merged in my mind with the nuclear wasteland I envisioned thanks to those elementary school drills spent under my classroom desk—the desks meant to shield us come the nuclear attack.

I never knew whether it was more likely I’d end up a survivor of a bomb, cowering under a desk, or sleeping on a wooden plank in an Auschwitz-like camp. Sophie’s Choice haunted me after my daughters were born. When I received an engagement ring, my crazy first and unbidden thought was that I could sew it into the lining of my coat if I needed to bribe a guard or save a child.

Should I compare my fear to the collective guilt of generations growing up on the other side, German children never wanting to question their parents or grandparents about their past? Can my inherited fear help me understand why the author of the essay, a woman whose parents and grandparents were in Germany during the war and post-war period, wanted to believe that the menorah on display at a SS officer’s house was likely to be a gift from a grateful patient as it was to be the spoils of war?

There has been a spate (or perhaps it’s always been there and I am just noticing it now) of novels about the trials of ordinary German citizens during the war. Many claim—a belief that seems most comfortable for many to live with—that the ordinary German had no clue what was happening. The entire Holocaust was carried about by a small slice of the population. Could this near-impossible-to-believe-assertion be possible? Or is it true, as reported in Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany:

The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised (SIC) as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.

Does this matter? Do we need to pound on the question of whether or not men and women in WWII Germany did or did not know about the horror unfolding around them? Does it matter whether or not this dying-out generation of SS officers and soldiers knew what they were doing? That their wives and neighbors knew there was a culture of genocide during these years?

For me, yes.

I believe lying and denial increases future racial and cultural terrors. Slavery bred concentrations camps, which bred Rwanda, which today breeds . . .

I want to know the plight of the ordinary German citizen—but I want to know it as it truly was—including deprivation and horror, but not painting away knowledge. I want to know how blind eyes were crafted—so these blindfolds can never be made again. I want to know more about the painful heritage of the children and grandchildren of the people of Germany who did know what was going on.

Check back on Friday for the final installment in "Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear." Read more about Randy Susan Meyers's here.

Michael Wex's Indiegogo Campaign to Fund Translation of Yiddish Novel

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:47:00 GMT

by Jackie Anzaroot

Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and well-known Yiddish scholar, is currently trying to crowd-fund his next project, a translation of a classic Yiddish novel by Joseph Opatoshu, on Indiegogo, a widely-used website that enables individuals to collect contributions for their intellectual or entrepreneurial pursuits from users all over the world.

The novel in question is called In Polish Forests and is said to contain a stunningly accurate portrayal of Jewish life in rural Poland, outside of the major cities and cultural centers where Jews were normally known to reside. According to Wex, Opatoshu wrote “some of the best prose ever published in Yiddish.” Opatoshu’s writing, while fairly well-known in his own time, never successfully made the transition into English. In Polish Forests, written in 1921, has already been published once in English in 1938, but the translation, which is characterized as lackluster, has virtually faded into oblivion.

Wex is trying to raise $75,000 by June 7th—if he doesn’t reach his goal, he’ll abandon the campaign and any individuals who have contributed will have their money refunded. If he does reach his goal, Wex plans to offer the translated novel as an e-book/PDF on his website for free, making it completely and indefinitely accessible to everyone who wants to read it. This, he claims, is immeasurably better than having the book published by a university press, which would only pay a small advance for the project and would likely only publish it under a small press run.

Having the translation funded through indiegogo also satisfies the project’s need for immediacy. As Wex argues, the potential for a new translation only continues to diminish as time goes on and the community of scholarly native Yiddish speakers gets smaller. For this project to ever be successful, it’s imperative that those involved in the translation still retain an authentic sense and knowledge of Polish Jewish culture as it was in the nineteenth century.

It’s clear that there are some very good reasons to contribute to the translation of this novel, besides for the perks that are being offered for donations. For contributions as small as one dollar you can get your name on the sponsor list—$5,000 and up, you can even dedicate a chapter of the novel. $60 and above will get you that print, posted right, on a t-shirt. From a cultural perspective, though, the novel would certainly be an excellent medium through which to sustain a connection to one of the most historically significant Jewish communities. And ultimately – whether you’re Jewish or not—if the prose is actually as engrossing as Wex claims it is, one dollar is a small price to pay for an enduring work of fiction that is both enlightening and entertaining.

You can learn more about the Opatoshu's novel from Wex's video, posted above, or from the project's Indiegogo page.

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Rebecca Miller on Gluckel of Hameln

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:31:00 GMT

This week on the Visiting Scribe, Rebecca Miller will be sharing texts that shed light on Jewish life in eighteenth-century France, the setting of her new novel, Jacob's Folly (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Gluckel of Hameln was an intrepid businesswoman, a mother of twelve children, a passionate wife, and a memoirist. She died in 1724, at the age of seventy-eight. Her memoirs are a rare window into the life of European Jewish women of the period. What struck me most vividly by her account of her days was her ability to bridge a business career (otherwise known as financial survival) and family concerns, living a unified, if exhausting, life.

“My father had me betrothed when I was a girl of barely twelve, and less than two years later I married.” So ends Gluckel’s childhood. As often happened, Gluckel’s marital deal included her being exported to another town. In this case, she was crammed into a peasant cart along with the rest of the wedding party (her mother was much put out, having expected carriages) and bustled off to the “dull and shabby hole” of Hameln, a small village. “There I was, a carefree child whisked in the flush of youth from my parents, friends, and everyone I knew, from a city like Hamburg into a back-country town where lived only two Jews.” After the wedding festivities were over, however, Gluckel adapted fast. She adored her father-in-law. After a year, however, her young husband’s ambitions were too big for Hameln and the married children moved to Hamburg, living with Gluckel’s family, where her father’s “pack of servants” helped them with daily life. There, as it was the fashion among gentiles to “wear solid gold chains, and gifts were all in gold”, her teenaged husband traded in gold, “plying his trade from house to house, to buy up the precious metal. Then he turned it over to goldsmiths, or resold it to merchants about to be married; and he earned thereby a tidy profit.” In addition to these efforts, Gluckel calls her husband “the perfect pattern of the pious Jew”; he set aside fixed times to study Torah each day, and fasted Mondays and Thursdays, to such an extent that he compromised his health. He was a tower of patience. In its maturity, their relationship was both harmonious and, in its way, egalitarian. Referring to the fact that her husband asked her advice about a business decision, Gluckel effuses, “my husband did nothing without my knowledge.”

By the time she was fifteen, Gluckel was pregnant, “and my mother along with me.” Coincidentally, both mother and daughter delivered within a week of each other. They both had girls, “so there was neither envy nor reproach between us.” Endless visitors arrived in the household, anxious to see “the marvel, a mother and daughter together in child bed.” But the situation could prove confusing. One night, Gluckel’s mother picked up the wrong baby to suckle, causing great alarm when Gluckel woke up and found her baby’s cradle empty. All was well in the end, but not after a furious argument as to whose baby was whose. “A little more, and we’d had to summon the blessed King Solomon himself.”

After a year, Gluckel’s little family struck out on their own, renting a house and engaging “a manservant and a maid.” The manservant, Abraham, looked after the children. So, the concept of a ‘manny’ is in fact not new. Abraham, Gluckel notes proudly, went on to marry and become a successful businessman “worth 10,000 Reichthalers or more”; within the Jewish community, servitude was not a class-dictated condition. One made one’s own circumstances to a large degree. Those with less worked for those who had more, until the servants changed their circumstances, at which point the lucky or industrious ones became employers.

It was in Gluckel’s life time that the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, achieved enormous fame. Thousands of Jews, among them her father-in-law, became convinced that Zevi was in fact the messiah. Throughout the world Jewish families rent themselves with repentance, prayer, and charity. Gluckel’s father-in-law packed chests with dried meat and dates for the trip to the holy land, and waited for the call to join the Messiah. But Sabbatai Zevi, who may have been suffering from delusions, or was possibly just a charlatan, was arrested in Turkey and converted to Islam. It was in part the collective depressive void that followed his unmasking which made space for the Hasidim, and their radical message of joyful worship.

At the age of fourty-four, Gluckel’s faith was tested on her beloved’s death bed. As her man lay dying, Gluckel, who was having her menses and hence was forbidden to touch her husband, asked transgressively, “Dearest heart, shall I embrace you—I am unclean?” but he answered: “God forbid, my child—it will not be long before you take your cleansing (ritual bath that Orthodox women take after menstruation and childbirth).” He died later that day and so she never got to kiss him one last time. The massive struggle of self control she went through in those final moments must have been a torment.

Once widowed, Gluckel redoubled her efforts at business, trading in gems, lending money, travelling frequently. She amassed a tidy fortune and managed to marry off all her children, but then remarried a man with no business sense who lost her money. She ended up in the home of one of her daughters. Yet there is no trace of bitterness in Gluckel’s memoirs. She is, rather, a joyful, enterprising survivor, filled to the brim with life—even now, three hundred years after her death, her life force burns from the page.

Read more about Jacob's Folly and Rebecca Miller here.

Randy Susan Meyers on Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:25:00 GMT

Randy Susan Meyers's most recent book, The Comfort of Lies, is now available. She is also the author of The Murderer’s Daughters, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.” - Alice Stone Blackwell

The Internet is a tricky beast. Sitting alone, cozy in ragged sweatpants, writing while curled on the couch, it’s easy to believe that you’re cloaked in isolation, even as you spill on that most public of forums. Thus, I hesitate before committing words online. After reading a recent well-intentioned post—about an SS officer—a piece written by a friend of a dear friend, an article meant in good will, I wrestled more than usual.

The essay focused on a particular slice of the copious research this first-generation American author did while writing a novel (which I have not read) about Germany before, during, and after WWII, from the point of view of a young German woman who falls in love with a Jewish man.

During her research, the writer (through her family ties in Germany) met with an elderly former SS officer—an officer and doctor— who the writer concludes was stationed on the front lines, not in a camp.

They met in the man’s home, where a German Mother’s Cross (a program begun by Hitler, encouraging German women to have more Aryan children, which yearly—on Hitler's mother's birthday—awarded women crosses centered with swastikas for fertility) hung on the wall, a menorah sat on top of a cabinet, and, in an album of wartime shots shared with the author, was a photo of the officer standing with Hitler.

The author doesn’t question these displayed and shown items: she doesn’t want to discomfort the family member who arranged the interview, upset the doctor’s wife, or continue the process of “collective guilt.” Perhaps the officer was forced into his role, the author suggests. The author herself was a victim of assumption, having been taunted by being called a Nazi because her parents were German.

Despite her sincere attempt to be fair (“who was I to judge him now?” she asks), after finishing the essay I was shaken. Badly. Before writing a comment, I spent hours pondering the wisdom of ignoring the post versus attempting conversation. I didn’t want to anger or insult the writer, or publicly ‘call her out,’ and thus hesitated to commit my feelings to public paper. Still, however well-intentioned, her words felt like slaps against my history. I couldn’t get the essay out of my mind.

Not writing didn’t seem like an option.

Check back tomorrow for the second installment in "Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear." Read more about Randy Susan Meyers's here.

Open Road Media's Ebooks for Jewish American Heritage Month

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:45:00 GMT

by Jackie Anzaroot

May is National Jewish American Heritage Month, a whole month dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness for the cultural and societal impact of Jews in America.

If you’re looking to catch up on Jewish American history this month, you are in luck. We’ve put together here a handy list of titles for you to check out full of biographies and books about Jews in American pop culture.

You’ll find several biographies of culturally significant Jewish Americans, such as actor/filmmaker Woody Allen, composer George Gershwin, playwright David Mamet and singer Leonard Cohen and other books about the sociology of Seinfeld, the history of American Yiddish theater and Jews in the music industry.

You can also take advantage of Open Road Media’s current sale on ebooks, curated specifically for Jewish American Heritage Month. The sale will continue until May 15th and features fifty ebooks written by Jewish American authors in the genres of Jewish fiction, culture and philosophy.

If you’re looking for a new engrossing read, check out some of their stellar fiction titles such as Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Mary Glickman’s One More River, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2011.

For a meatier, informative read check out Howard Fast’s classic The Jews: Story of a People or for something a bit more emotional and controversial, they’re also offering William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

You can't go wrong with any of this picks, so take advantage of it while it’s still going on.

The Mishpocheh Connection

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:27:00 GMT

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, contributes book reviews to the print and online editions and blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. Earlier this week, he wrote about Jewish resistance, restoring Herschel Grynszpan to the pages of history, Herschel Grynszpan's scandalous theory of defense, and Kristallnacht. He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“I’ve dictated a sharp article against the Jews,” Joseph Goebbels boasted in a journal entry in 1933. “At its mere announcement, the whole mischpoke [sic] broke down.”

The word used by the notorious propaganda chief of the Nazi party is a mangled version of the Yiddish word for ‘family’ (mishpocheh), and it conveys the cruelty and contempt that the Nazis held for the Jewish people. To hear the mamaloshen fall from the lips of a man who seeks to murder every Jewish man, woman, child and baby within his reach carries a special kind of horror.

I quote the journal entry in my new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright), and I use “mishpocheh’ as a kind of leitmotif in the story I tell. At the age of 15, Herschel was sent out of Nazi Germany by his doting mother and father, and the boy was passed along from uncle to uncle until he finally reached Paris, where he was given a place to live by his Uncle Abraham. They were all tragically wrong in assuming that France offered a safe refuge for the Grynszpans, but they acted loyally and courageously in an effort to save the life of the youngest member of the family.

While living in Paris, Herschel learned that his mother, father and older siblings back in Germany had been arrested by the Nazis and driven at gunpoint into the no-man’s-land on the Polish border along with some 12,000 other Polish Jews. Herschel was so distraught over the fate of his cherished family that he bought a revolver, contrived a ruse that allowed him to enter the German embassy in Paris, and assassinated a minor German diplomat as an act of protest and resistance. Ironically, Herschel and the uncle who sheltered him in Paris did not survive, but his father and brother were still alive to testify at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

As it happens, I first heard the story of Herschel Grynszpan from one of my own mishpocheh — my late father, Robert Reuven Kirsch. He was a literary critic for the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years and the author of many books of his own, and he told me in the late 1970s about the novel he intended to write about Herschel’s life and exploits. Sadly, my father fell ill and passed away before he could undertake the project, but I never forgot the strange and even scandalous details of Herschel’s life story. I decided to honor the memory of my beloved father by writing the book that he did not live long enough to write.

That’s why the word mishpocheh appears for the first time in my biography of Herschel Grynszpan on the dedication page: “For my father, Robert . . . and the mishpocheh for whom [his] memory is a blessing.”

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

Bonus Reading: Check out National Jewish Book Award Winner Daniel Torday's story about Herschel Grynszpan for Five Chapters, in which he imagines Herschel was still alive, living in Brooklyn, and owned a record store.

New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:51:00 GMT

This week's new Jewish Book Council reviews:

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Find more of the latest reviews here.

Kristallnacht and Herschel Grynszpan

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:21:00 GMT

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, contributes book reviews to the print and online editions and blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. Earlier this week, he wrote about Jewish resistance and restoring Herschel Grynszpan to the pages of history and Herschel Grynszpan's scandalous theory of defense. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Kristallnacht, the first incident of state-sponsored mass violence against the Jews of Nazi Germany, marks a turning point in history. Hitler used the shooting of a minor German diplomat named Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old Jewish boy in Paris — the story I tell in my new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright) — as the pretext for the sudden escalation of his war against the Jews on November 10, 1938. One of the overlooked but highly telling facts about Kristallnacht is that the Nazi regime issued a list of approved phrases to be painted on Jewish storefronts during the “spontaneous” demonstration of righteous German anger. Among the sanctioned graffiti was “Revenge for the murder of vom Rath.”

Here is another reason why history has not been kind to Herschel Grynszpan. When he fired a shot in anger at a Nazi diplomat on that day in 1938, much of the Jewish world was still convinced that passivity and patience offered the only strategy for survival in the face of Nazi anti-Semitism. The shot that Herschel fired in Paris was seen by his fellow Jews as nothing less than a catastrophe. So it was that one Jewish newspaper in Paris was moved to publish an open letter of apology to vom Rath’s mother in which the writer “expressed great sorrow on the death of her son” and implored her that “it was unjust to blame all Jews for her son’s death.”

Today we know that the Jewish response to the Final Solution was tragically misplaced. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, for example, Jews in Germany were required to surrender any weapons they might own. In my book, I tell the story of a man named Rosenberg in the town of Fürth who defied the order by throwing his Browning pistol into the Pegnitz River. A time would come soon when the ghetto fighters and partisans in eastern Europe would risk their lives to add a single battered weapon to their tragically sparse arsenals, and yet the thought apparently never occurred to Rosenberg that he might one day need a weapon to defend himself against the government that sent the Brownshirts into the streets on Kristallnacht.

Of course, the Nazis themselves claimed to see a threat in the Jewish population of Europe. Himmler, the master architect of the Holocaust, once told his Nazi comrades that it would have been “cowardly” for him to spare Jewish children form mass murder precisely because they would “grow up to be the avengers who would kill our fathers and our grandchildren.” That was the whole point of the show trial that Hitler planned and Herschel foiled. Jewish vengeance only came later and never posed a real obstacle to the Final Solution, but we cannot deny that Herschel Grynszpan was one of the first Jewish resisters. To dismiss young Herschel as nothing more than a distraught adolescent — or the aggrieved victim of a homosexual seduction — is to ignore the meaning that he fully intended to convey to the world when he picked up a gun.

“For three lines in history that will be written about the youth who fought and did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” declared Dolek Liebeskind, a member of the Zionist underground in the Cracow ghetto, “it is even worth dying.” One of my goals in writing The Short, Strange Live of Herschel Grynszpan has been to afford him something more than three lines in the history of Jewish resistance.

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

Gunmen: A Far-Fetched Analysis and Some Temporary Solutions

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:51:00 GMT

Helène Aylon is an Activist Artist whose work has been shown in MoMA, the Whitney and the Warhol museums. Her memoir, published by the Feminist Press, is called Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist. Earlier this week, Helene wrote about the macho male and wildlife. She has been blogging here this week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Before I’m labeled a raging feminist for mentioning that gunmen have been men, I’m telling you I love men but hate machismo. This is a call to purge the world of macho “gunitis” (to coin a new word) like it was hepatitis.

The Gun mystique is glaringly present world over: in every park or city square, there’s a monument mounted on high of some big general flashing his sword or some GI Joe clutching his bayonet. I used to wheel my baby grandson Mendy in Central Park and I made sure to point out (even though he was only two years old) that there was no glory in carrying a rifle, no pride in wearing a uniform. My indoctrination began when I saw his delicate baby face looking up at the fierce military statue on 71^st Street and fifth Avenue. A group of bronzed soldiers appear to be falling onto the ground. “Oh,” I whined, “my goodness, look, Sweetie, the soldiers are going to get all dirty; what do you think the soldiers should do?”

Baby Mendy blurted out loud and clear, “they should go home to their Mommies.”

Exactly.

It’s confounding, isn’t it, how some baby boys when they become toddlers, play “bang, bang, you’re dead.” Where did these darlings learn this?

Please don’t laugh and think it’s cute. Even toy water guns should be banned. A young woman I know argued there’s no use—that her kid would substitute a spoon or a stick or something else if he did not have his toy gun. I told her, “that’s fine. Let him shoot with a spoon or a stick—at least he won’t aim with what looks like a gun.”

At the birthday party of my grandson Adam when he was three—as he unwrapped the present from his baby sitter who brought this flashy toy gun all the way from China—I announced aloud, “Nana hates that toy gun.” I did not care whether my testy remark was heard in the noisy celebration; I even held my nose for emphasis as though the gun smelled bad as everyone stared at me.

Next time I visited, little Adam said, “Nana, I hid my gun in the drawer because I knew you were coming!”

“Goody,” I applauded. “Now I don’t have to see that terrible ugh, ugly, pukey gun.” And this time I wrinkled my nose and opened my mouth pretending I was about to throw up.” It’s a start. Better to indoctrinate a sense of loathing instead of raising shaking my head and shrugging off the boys-will-be-boys syndrome.

Notice how “gunitis” creeps into our nice well wishing:

Congratulations, make a killing!
It’s terrific, dynamite!
Don’t give up - stick by your guns!
It’s certain, surefire!
I’m not kidding - I’m dead serious!
You’ll be one of the top guns!
You’ll be one of the big shots!

Compliments are spiced with “Gunitis” too like when a guy raves about a gorgeous woman to his bar pals or locker room buddies:

Man, she's a pistol,
She’s a knockout,
She’s a bombshell,
She slays me!

The NY Times reported that Batman sales were high despite the shootings. “Studio officials in private spent the weekend marveling at the ability of The Dark Knight to maintain much of its momentum in the wake of the killings. The total cost of this PG movie was over 400 million dollars; they took in 162 million. This summer, Warner will release Man of Steel featuring an updated version of Superman.”

What’s creepier is the immediate reaction to the Colorado shooting reported in The NY Times as ”a scramble to buy guns.”

It’s The Great Disconnect.

The cry for gun control, a global keening, could not be heard through the wall of silence that has been built in tandem with the National Rifle Association. There are efforts to prohibit sugary drinks, but there had been no such effort for a prohibition on guns.

Only now, with the massacre of children in their school, has the wall of silence been pierced.

There is an urgency for a quick temporary solution until the crucial day when the sale of all guns becomes illegal except for use in the police and military:

1. Here is my own temporary solution:

OK, guns can be legally sold (go sell, go to hell); however, guns can only be legally sold to women!

(Watch ninety percent of gun sales go up in smoke!)

The regulations would include these rulings:

Armaments cannot be mailed: Metal detectors would be used in the post office as in the airport; women over the age of 21 may buy guns but only in person; the buyers and the sellers will be photographed; the buyer’s personal history will be recorded by police officers standing guard at gun stores – current and past addresses, name of spouse or partner, place of employment.

See, this temporary law makes perfect sense; males are not in need of protection from gunwomen, because for the most part there have been no gunwomen to fear.

2. Bullets should cost a million dollars, says Chris Rock. No one would be able to afford them.

3. My 13-year-old granddaughter, Melea, suggested that psychological workshops be mandatory in high school just as phys.ed is mandatory. Expert psychologists and drama therapists would discern problem tendencies and alert parents so that mental health workers can treat these symptoms before they become the poisonous insanity we have been witnessing.

4. Now, after the most tragic killing of children in the supposed safety of their school, the President had better ban the assault weapons that can kill one hundred at once. The President had better make sure there are required intensive background checks which does not take away (oh, g-d forbid!) owning guns.

Shani Boianjiu on Writing Forever Stories

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:08:00 GMT

We prompted this year's Sami Rohr Prize awardees to write about "how they came to write their book." Over the next several weeks, we'll share their responses. Today, Shani Boianjiu discusses writing her novel The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (Hogarth).

Jews are known for asking questions. From the Four Questions in the Passover Haggadah to the Jewish teaching style, questions have an important role in the histories of Jews from all corners of the Diaspora and are also a distinctive feature of Israeli culture. Brash Israelis like myself are famous for asking inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. Questions are also an integral part of stories. Every story I ever wrote was my attempt to answer a question that would not leave me alone.

Questions can make the one questioned defensive because they are all too often actually differing opinions rather than questions. Differing opinions being, of course, one more thing Jews are known for. I know that questions about my book can make me defensive. When I am asked why I wrote my book in English, what I hear is that I should have written it in Hebrew, my native language. When I am asked why my first novel focused on female Israeli soldiers, I wonder what is wrong with writing about that.

By far, the questions that leave me most speechless are the many political questions I receive from both left and right. This is because these questions are most often actually specific assertions of differing opinions. The person asking them wants to know why I did not use my fiction to advance his own political view regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict.

It was not my goal to advance one specific statement about anything when I wrote this book. I started writing fiction because I could not not write. I spent countless hours staring into sand during long army guarding shifts and the only way I could pass the time was through telling and re-telling stories to myself, tweaking every image and word dozens of times. By the time I finally got a few days at home and had access to a computer, I already knew the words I would write by heart.

A few years later, when I was in college in the U.S., I wrote entirely different stories, but the way in which I wrote did not change much. I would let sentences and characters and scenes live inside my head for a very long time, and only wrote them down when I felt that if I did not get rid of them my head would explode. I wrote to answer what were burning questions for me: what it meant to be young under certain conditions; what a certain realization might taste like in my characters’ mouths. I wanted to write forever stories, and what was most important to me was to aspire to reach the type of books that lived in my own head forever, even when most of the time when I began writing my first book I failed and had to start all over again.

I did not set out to write about female Israeli soldiers. When I wrote my first book I was only a couple of years past my own service days. It only made sense to me that the characters I most wanted to spend time with were close to me in age. And military service just happens to be a fact of life for young Israeli females. I did not set out to write a book about an experience rarely described in fiction. I wrote what I had to say.

By far the most difficult question for me to answer is why I chose to write my book in English. This is a legitimate question to ask any writer whose native language is not English. But for Israelis, who cherish the Hebrew language as our most prized accomplishment, this is a particularly loaded question. The opinion I hear hidden in this question is that I have abandoned the Hebrew language that others have worked so hard to save from oblivion.

Moreover, modern Hebrew is a recent creation; it is only in the last forty years that there have even been many people who grew up speaking no language but Hebrew. Jewish history is full of writers who wrote in their third or even fourth language, at times mixing and matching and bending the rules of the languages they were working with to create a language that was entirely their own as Jews immersed in their diverse places of residence. Judging by the many times I have been asked why I chose to write in English, this particular Jewish literary tradition is expected to have stopped with Israelis.

I always start my answer about writing in English by saying it was an accident. And, the fact is, it was an accident in the truest sense of the word. I fell in love. I fell in love with the endless well of words that exist in English. With the ambiguities and subtleties it allows, the richness of the cultures it swallows, the sound of Hebrew phrases and slang as I transported them into English.

When speaking with fellow Jews and in particular fellow Israelis, I used to start my answer about English by saying I was sorry, guilt being another known Jewish tradition. But the more I think about it and hear the world’s response to my first book, I realize that I am not sorry at all. Is it not the prerogative of a native Hebrew speaker to fall in love with a different language? To celebrate her native tongue by writing about it in another? Is that not what being a nation among nations could also truly mean?

I am certain that the next time I am asked about writing in English, or any other question about my writing, I will start by saying I am sorry. But I hope that one day soon I can follow that by saying: actually, I am not sorry, I am not sorry at all. This is what I have to say and this is the way I choose to say it. The most I can do is ask you to listen.

Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and is from an Iraqi and Romanian background. She was raised in a small town on the Lebanese border. At the age of eighteen, she entered the Israeli Defense Forces and served for two years. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is her first book.

A Scandalous Theory of Defense and Herschel Grynszpan

Wed, 08 May 2013 18:51:00 GMT

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, contributes book reviews to the print and online editions and blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. Earlier this week, he wrote about Jewish resistance and restoring Herschel Grynszpan to the pages of history. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

At the age of 17, as a refugee from Nazi Germany living illegally in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan saw the world in 1938 as a dire and dangerous place, a perception that he shared with all of his fellow Jews. Unlike them, however, he was capable of imagining the atrocities that the Germans would be willing to carry out in the next few years, and he resolved to call attention to the plight of the Jews by assassinating a Nazi diplomat. That’s the story I tell in my new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright).

“I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest,” he wrote to his parents in a confessional postcard that he was unable to mail before his arrest, “and this I intend to do.”

Herschel is not the only young Jew who showed more vision and more courage than his elders in those terrible times. After all, it was the youthful activists of the Bund and the Zionist movement, both left and right, who banded together in the ghetto uprisings in Warsaw and elsewhere while some older and supposedly wiser members of the Judenrat cooperated with the Germans in drafting the deportation lists. (To be sure, young people can be impulsive and even reckless — we have seen yet more evidence of this fact in recent headlines — but we should not deny that sometimes a hotheaded boy can be right.)

Yet it is the young ghetto fighters who are remembered, honored and celebrated, while Herschel Grynszpan is almost wholly ignored.

More than one reason can be cited to explain why Grynszpan has been derogated, diminished and sometimes entirely left out of the history of Jewish resistance during the Second World War. In my book, I explore all of the rumor and speculation that has attached itself to the Grynszpan case, including a catalogue of conspiracy theories, some focusing on the Jews and some on the Nazis, which have been offered to explain his exploits. (Hannah Arendt embraced one of the more bizarre theories in Eichmann in Jerusalem.) One reason, however, stands out.

At a crucial moment in the Grynszpan case, when the boy was awaiting his murder trial in Paris, Herschel’s attorney made a remarkable proposal to his client. The French were fearful of war with Germany, he pointed out, and no jury would dare to acquit him of the crime if they believed that he had murdered a Nazi diplomat as a gesture of protest against the Third Reich. But what if his motive was something more intimate? What if the Nazi diplomat whom he killed was a sexual predator who had seduced and then abandoned him? If so, the attorney suggested, the jury might be persuaded to regard the whole affair as case as a crime passionelle rather than a political assassination.

Grynszpan rejected the scandalous theory of defense and insisted on justifying his crime as a legitimate act of protest against Nazi mistreatment of the Jewish people. The idea was abandoned by his attorney, who dismissed Herschel as “that absurd little Jew,” but not by Herschel himself. Once in Germany custody, utterly alone in a Gestapo cell, he saw a single way to frustrate Hitler’s plan for a show trial. If put on trial, he courageously told his interrogators, he would testify that he murdered the Nazi diplomat as an act of revenge against a homosexual predator who had ruined and betrayed him.

Here was Herschel’s single greatest act of courage and vision. He understood that the Nazis hated homosexuals as much as they hated Jews, and he recognized that they would not stage a show trial if he were to sully the honor of the Third Reich by characterizing his victim as a gay man. The decision was made by Hitler himself after he had been warned of Herschel’s intentions by the trial planners, and the elaborate script that had been prepared for the Grynszpan trial was shelved. Herschel had sabotaged the Nazi plans for a propaganda coup, but he also managed to cast a shadow over his own motives. “I guarantee you, if everything about Grynszpan’s case was the same, except that he slept with Anne Frank,” wrote journalist Jonathan Marks in the New York Jewish Week in 2010, “there’d be floats in his honor at the Salute to Israel Parade.”

No hard historical evidence supports the allegation that he had been seduced and abandoned by the man he assassinated. Indeed, we do not know with certainty whether or not Herschel was gay at all. But it is beyond serious debate that the explosive issue of sexual orientation that he injected into the case while in German custody cast a pall over his exploits. The Nazis were hardly the only homophobes, then or now, and his avowed sexual orientation may help us understand why he is treated so coolly even in Jewish circles.

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

Philip Roth: Celebration of a Career

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:46:00 GMT

by Alan Cooper

With the 2013 publication of its final (eighth and ninth) volumes of Philip Roth’s collected works, The Library of America (LoA) has reprinted every word of Roth’s thirty-one books, twenty-eight of them works of fiction. There will be no more Roth books. These hand-holdable volumes “printed on light-weight, acid-free paper that will not turn yellow or brittle with age” have preserved Roth for the ages. It remains to be seen what, if anything, can guarantee a Roth readership.

This completion of the LoA project coincides with Roth’s eightieth birthday and with his growing conviction that the fiction-reading public is dwindling in the face of electronic quick fixes, perhaps consigning the traditional novel to a footnote in literary history. Roth has announced his retirement from the writing of fiction, echoing yet again what has been for him a triggering precept, Rilke’s “You must change your life.” Roth’s public and his readership (not always the same thing) have responded with due celebration and wishful disbelief.

Critical revaluations and predictions are popping up in print. Which are the great novels, which the merely good—or wonderfully good—and do the shortened works of his last five productive years match up to his standards? After fifty-four years of pounding it out, is he now tired? lonely? losing it? entitled to a life away from the keyboard? or to some celebration? He has authorized a biography and chosen the biographer. He has attended the naming of a street after him in his native Newark, NJ and the plaquing of his childhood home as a city landmark. Hundreds of people have taken bus tours of his Weequahic neighborhood to see, and hear rehearsed, the places and events of his novels. Two documentary films have been made about his life and works. Speculations are abuzz—perhaps there will be another full-length novel, about a man who un-retires; perhaps a Nobel Prize will top the dozen or so major awards already bestowed upon him; perhaps the Swedes will drop their anti-Semitism!

But at an eightieth birthday celebration at the Newark Museum, where an overflow audience heard praises of his astonishing talent by world- renowned authors and scholars and a moving response by Roth on the importance, especially to a writer, of mining life’s small moments and of accepting the finality of death, it became clear that his shutting down owes to the convergences of time. Other speakers stood, Roth sat. He walked with a bit of a shuffle, but his handshake was firm and his eye engaging.

In recent interviews Roth has acknowledged he gets tired, he has a medical history, he has sometimes felt lonely; yet he has a personal life about which he remains silent (it’s none of our business), and an irrepressible sense of humor. During his years as a writer he sometimes felt the panic of being between books, of not knowing what his next subject would be, of awaiting some thought or memory that could raise a question that writing might explore. He let the fiction come from the imagination at work during the writing, concentrating on the passage at hand and trusting that somehow it would suggest itself into plot, setting, character. Sometimes it did not. Any success might have had to await the rewriting. Authorship took time. Other claimants on that time might have been easily resented. His books were his children; his childhood got relived in his books.

It was a Jewish childhood; it has been a secular Jewish life. Alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman’s statement, “Jews are to history as Eskimos are to snow[.]” or Nathan’s discomfort in a church, where every symbol posited destruction of Jews, or the fictive Roth’s calling his fictive alter-ego “Moshe Pipick” (not to be expected from a John Updike) reflect a sensibility that has chronicled the Jewish experience in America from a humanist point of view. In his Newark Museum response, Roth read a seven-page reminiscence by his Mickey Sabbath: the gravestone messages of Jews—the “beloved” fathers, husbands, sons, friends. “The beloved are comfortably dead,’ he quipped warmly and softly, and then quoted Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” In an older Jewish context “…man lieth down and rises not;/Till the heavens be no more, they shall not wake,/ or be roused out of their sleep” (Job, 14:12). Good company for a Jewish humanist. Readers owe it to themselves to reread Philip Roth.

Alan Cooper 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). His latest book is the young-adult novel Prince Paskudnyak and the Giant Bats.

Restoring Herschel Grynszpan to the Pages of History

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:46:00 GMT

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, contributes book reviews to the print and online editions and blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. Earlier this week, he wrote about Jewish resistance and Herschel Grynszpan. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

My new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright), is the biography of a 17-year-old boy who sought to write himself into history but, ironically, has been almost wholly ignored in the scholarship of World War II and the Holocaust.

Herschel achieved a brief moment of fame in 1938, when he entered the German embassy in Paris and shot a Nazi diplomat. Indeed, his deed was the focus of a media frenzy, and one famous American journalist, columnist and broadcast Dorothy Thompson organized a defense committee that hired a famous French attorney to represent him in the courts. No less a world-historical figure than Leon Trotsky wrote about the case for the newspapers, and English composer Michael Tippett was inspired to write an oratorio about Herschel Grynszpan, A Child of Our Time.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, however, the world press moved on from coverage of the Grynszpan case, and he disappeared into a Gestapo prison cell after the German invasion of France. Significantly, “the Jew Grynszpan,” as the Nazis invariably called him, was well known to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler was eager to mount a show trial that would justify the mass murder of the Jews by focusing on the armed resistance of one Jew. For Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis, the Grynszpan case was not less than an obsession.

But Herschel himself, no longer represented by famous lawyers or championed by celebrated columnists, was forced to find his own to foil Hitler and his henchmen. As I explore in my book, and will revisit in my next blog, the scandalous sexual secret that he revealed to his German interrogators — Adolf Eichmann among them — succeeded in convincing Hitler to postpone the show trial, but it also explains why Herschel Grynszpan is not embraced as the Jewish hero he sought to be.

Today, the world is divided into a large number of people who have never heard of Herschel Grynszpan, and a much smaller number who recall his name and deed, although even these people rarely know the whole story or the real story. My mission in writing The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan has been to restore the 17-year-old boy to the pages of history. Ironically, that’s exactly where he aspired to put himself when he took up arms against Nazi Germany in a symbolic act of violence in Paris in 1938.

Hitler knew Grynszpan by name. So did Goebbels and Eichmann. And so should we.

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

Machismo: How The Macho Male Identifies With Wildlife Animals

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:03:00 GMT

Helène Aylon is an Activist Artist whose work has been shown in MoMA, the Whitney and the Warhol museums. Her memoir, published by the Feminist Press, is called Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist. She will be blogging here this week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Remember the bedtime story about the sly wolf propped up in Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s bed? Little boys must have cringed in fear then, but for some in adolescent years, the big bad wolf became the persona of the big bad guy who is tickled "pink" scaring females and making them uneasy. In the fifties, it was a common practice for street guys to give their jocular "wolf calls" at the sight of a pretty girl walking by; the girl would pretend not to hear the obscene “wolf call” hastening away, as the guys chuckled

At how they were put at their “dis-ease” - the late Mary Daly's term for the disease of machismo.)

Then there’s the bull, forced to provide the cruelest theater, the bullfight. Picasso's self-portraits as a bull are lusting – he’s the stud goading the bull to fight; he is half bull charging crazily within the spotlight.

The cockfight is a spectator sport that sets up two cocks to fight each other viciously. The cock is regarded by the macho mindset as the aggressive fowl amid the flurry of mother hens and ducklings. But in reality, the cock is merely a rooster that heralds a new morning much as the Robin Red Breast heralds the spring. The poor cock - not only because of the cockfights; it is the cock’s misfortune to be bestowed with the perverse honor of having male genitals linked to its name.

In juxtaposition to the identification with animals that the macho male perceives as savage beasts, his projections onto domestic animals reveal his misogyny. If a macho male does not like a woman's face, he calls her a dog. If she can answer back, she's a bitch. If he can't handle her pregnant body, she's a cow. If she's an elder, she's an old crow. If she's young, she's a chick. And for his pleasure, she may become a Playboy Bunny or land in a cathouse.

Yes, the sick fantasies of machismo – the conniving, plundering, killing and ruling are projected onto the mystical animals and birds in the natural world. After all, male entitlement is a given, prescribed in the bible: “Let man have dominion of his skies with its inhabitants, the earth with its inhabitants.” There is no other recourse for humanity except to leap over the decaying abyss of machismo to land on new terrain – a newborn feminized universe like the first Paradise – that is, until Cain killed Abel. And let’s bring back the 80s slogan when we called for a nuclear freeze, chanting, “take the toys away from the boys.”

Read more about Helène Aylon here.

Asaf Schurr on Writing a Rooster

Mon, 06 May 2013 21:08:00 GMT

We prompted this year's Sami Rohr Prize awardees to write about "how they came to write their book." Over the next several weeks, we'll share their responses. Today, Asaf Schurr discusses how he came to write his novel Motti.

So: there's this story of that emperor who wanted a picture of a rooster, and of the master artist he hired to paint it. And of how that master just spent a whole year in the court, rejoicing and dining and taking long walks and whatever it is you do in courts (at least when you're the emperor's guest and not part of the help). Eventually the emperor got sick and tired of it all, which is completely understandable, and walked straight up to the artist's quarters (one might guess the whole court was terrified by his frightful, angry stride), knocked on the door and demanded, "Where's my rooster, damn it!"

At which the artist just nodded, grabbed a quilt and a piece of paper that lay nearby, and in one fell swoop drew the most wonderful rooster anyone had ever seen (the most wonderful painting of a rooster, at least. For it was a kingdom known for its attractive roosters). And the emperor was understandably surprised, and he said, "What the hell? This only took like three seconds! What were you doing here for a whole year?!"

The artist went over to the inner room's door, and he opened it, and inside were hundreds and hundreds of paintings of hundreds and hundreds of roosters.

And that's how I wanted to write this book. Aiming at this one clean stroke. Or rather, aiming at becoming that specific person who could paint that specific rooster. Writing a book that you can love the same way you love a person (as my editor, Oded Wolkstein, said. What he meant was, loving the defects just as much. Loving it like one loves one's child, especially in these moments when you catch a glimpse of these parts of yourself you're ashamed of or impatient with, but seen in him or her are both unbearable and endearing).

So I wanted to paint a rooster that's beautiful and damaged, partial but all there. I wanted to make an object. Complete and distinct, almost spatial in nature, like a physical work of art (and probably just as pretentious).

But I can't paint worth a damn. So I wrote me a rooster feather by feather, and kept at it until it spread its wings. Naturally, it can't actually fly. It can't even lay an egg. All it does is wake you up at odd hours. But that's literature for you.

Asaf Schurr was born in Jerusalem in 1976 and has a BA in philosophy and theater from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At present he is a translator and writes literary reviews for the Hebrew press. Schurr has received the Bernstein Prize (2007), the Minister of Culture Prize (2007) for Amram, and the Prime Minister's Prize for Motti (2008).

Jonathan Kirsch on the Question of Jewish Resistance and Herschel Grynszpan

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:34:00 GMT

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, contributes book reviews to the print and online editions and blogs at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. His most recent book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris, was published under the Liveright imprint of W. W. Norton to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Last month, shortly before the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, my wife, Ann, and I took a tour of Terezín, the fortress near Prague where more than 100,000 Jewish men, women and children were briefly held by the Germans and their accomplices in a transit camp before being sent on to the death factories and the killing fields.

Our local guide felt it appropriate to tell us that the Jews in their tens of thousands were guarded only by 22 SS men.

The guide was dead wrong. “[B]y the end of 1941, [Terezín] housed some 7,000 German soldiers and Czech civilians,” writes Saul Friedländer in The Years of Extermination, the second volume of his masterwork, Nazi Germany and the Jews. But the subtext of the guide’s remark is not different from the question that Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner asked the survivors who appeared as witnesses at the Eichmann trial: Why did you not fight back?

A good deal of Holocaust scholarship, in fact, has been devoted to showing that the Jews did fight back in greater numbers and more various ways than our guide at Terezín was willing to admit. Yehuda Bauer has adopted the word Amidah, a reference to the “standing prayer” that is the centerpiece of the synagogue service, to honor the Jews who “stood up” against the Germans and their collaborators, some with “cold” weapons like sticks and stones, some with “hot” weapons like guns and bombs, some by smuggling food and medicine, and some by teaching a few words of Hebrew to the children before their lives were taken from them.

The question of Jewish resistance is sore point for me, too. When I set out to tell the story of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old boy who was among the earliest Jews to engage in an act of armed protest against Nazi Germany, I was both saddened and puzzled at the way he had been wholly written out of history, and as much by the Jewish community as by the rest of the world. At a time when the Jewish world was terrorized by the Nazis, Herschel sought to call the world’s attention to their plight, but he was shunned at the time and forgotten afterwards.

Why, then, is Herschel Grynszpan not celebrated as the hero he fully intended to be? “To bring the attention of the world to what was being done to the Jews was an act of resistance,” Prof. Friedländer told me in an interview. “Why Herschel Grynszpan has been overlooked, even if his act had unfortunate consequences, is strange and baffling.”

That’s precisely the question I sought to answer in my new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright). And it’s a question I will explore in my subsequent postings as a guest blogger for the Jewish Book Council.

As it turns out, I found a few clues to the mystery in Herschel’s scandalous life story, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

In Our Time: Book Covers from R. B. Kitaj’s Personal Library

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:35:00 GMT

by Jackie Anzaroot

The Jewish Museum has opened a new exhibit titled R. B. Kitaj: Personal Library featuring the work of R. B. Kitaj, famed Jewish American artist and poet (1932 – 2007). The exhibit, which opened April 5th and will be on view until August 11th, features 33 screenprints that are exact reproductions of select book covers from Kitaj’s own personal library. The collection, titled In Our Time, dates from 1969 and, stylistically, draws upon the influences of the Pop and Readymade artistic movements.

Kitaj, a lover of books with eclectic tastes, was himself a poet and author as well as an artist. In 1989 he published the First Diasporist Manifesto, a short book that combines prose, poetry and art to describe how the Jewish diaspora has affected his outlook on art and himself as an artist. Kitaj later followed up the first manifesto with the Second Diasporist Manifesto in 2007, the same year that he committed suicide at the age of 74. Kitaj’s brilliant melding of styles—Pop and Readymade—in his featured art collection was a trend that followed the artist throughout most of his career and is evidently mirrored in the hybridization of rhetoric styles in his literary work. The artist’s tendency to stylistically hybridize both his artistic and literary work is also a reflection of his identity as self-described “diasporist” Jew.

The gallery at The Jewish Museum is an intriguing exhibition and is certainly representational of all the cultural bounty that can come out of being a diasporist. The collection serves not only as a tribute to his beloved library, but also as a reproduction of Kitaj’s personal mementos from his various journeys—both cultural and physical—into different places, schools of thought and philosophies. The screenprints of book covers come from a wide of array of genres and Kitaj’s love of poetry can be seen in his inclusion of one book of Vachel Lindsay’s poetry and in his a reproduction of a cover of one of the volumes of transition, a literary journal that once featured greats such as William Carlos Williams and James Joyce. Some oddities have also been included, such as a cover of an annual budget report for the city of Burbank, year 1968 - 1969, a military intelligence bulletin from 1944, and a medical and public health technical manual. The artist’s interest in Holocaust studies can also be seen in one cover that bears the title, “The Jewish Question” and belonged to a collection of anti-semitic articles published by Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, during prewar America, and in another titled We Have Not Forgotten.

As a whole this collection is not overtly Jewish. But there’s a level subtext that suggests a celebration of the artist as both a Jew and cultural observer. There’s the suggestion that it was, in fact, Kitaj’s feelings of Jewish diaspora, of not-belonging to any particular nation and not being attached to any one school or culture, that allowed him to pick his way through different movements, adopt different traditions and assimilate them into his own unique Jewish identity.

Jackie Anzaroot is a graduate of Brooklyn College with degrees in English and Linguistics. She has held internships at Simon & Schuster and is currently interning at the Jewish Book Council.

New Reviews

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:31:00 GMT

This week's Jewish Book Council reviews:

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An Interview with Naomi Alderman

Fri, 03 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

by Ada Brunstein

Naomi Alderman was a finalist for the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and is a Sami Rohr Prize Literary Institute fellow. Her most recent book, The Liars' Gospel, was published by Little, Brown and Company. Win a copy of The Liars' Gospel here.

Ada Brunstein: What made you want to write this book?

Naomi Alderman: I first thought of the idea for this book about twenty years ago when I was sixteen or so. I was studying both Hebrew and Latin at the same time which gives you two quite interesting perspectives on the same period. And my Hebrew teacher was telling me that there were references to Jesus in some of the ancient Jewish texts of the period. And I said ‘Oh somebody should write a book about this,’ and she said, ‘no no no they shouldn’t; no one should write a book about the Jewish Jesus.’ And of course that kind of strong reaction will make it stick in your mind.

And then it was this idea that would recur to me every Easter when there would be all sorts of things on the BBC about Jesus and Easter and it would just be so simplistic as an understanding of what was going on at the time: there are nasty high priests who did nasty things and Jesus died. It’s so much more complicated than that.

AB: How did you choose the characters you chose for these four gospels from among all the characters in Jesus’s life?

NA: They are the ones who spoke to me.

I would have loved to have gotten something out of Mary Magdalene but I couldn’t make her say anything to me.

I suppose the high priest definitely chose himself because that character seemed so neglected and I think he’s my favorite of the four because it just feels like a perspective that I haven’t ever seen.

Barabbas was definitely the last one for me to choose and for a long time I wasn’t sure he was right, but as I thought about it he got more and more right.

Judas also I think basically chose himself. I was very interested in whether I could portray him as somebody who was incredibly sincere in his various beliefs rather than again a pantomime villain character, a blaggard.

AB: Your portrayal of Judas is indeed more nuanced than the way we usually see Judas portrayed. Can you say more about how that character evolved?

NA: In fact the character note for Judas I got directly from the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest gospel. This is what you get in the story of how that happened: You have two things juxtaposed right next to each other. There’s the story of how they go to Bethany, or Beith Anya, and this woman comes and pours perfume on Jesus’s head. In Mark it says one of the disciples said ‘why did you let her do that? The perfume could’ve been sold and money could’ve been given to the poor.’ And Jesus gives a really terrible answer. He says ‘why wouldn’t I let her do it? I will not be with you for too much longer, but the poor will always be with you.’ It’s a terrible answer. And then the very next line is ‘and then Judas went to betray him.’ And reading that as a novelist I thought well, ‘one of the disciples,’ that seems like it was obviously Judas and that was obviously his reason. And once you have that as the reason —because that’s quite a challenging question to which Jesus gives an evidently awful answer—that’s the basic note of that character.

Incidentally John, which was written much much later evidently came to the same conclusion as me. So he goes, ‘Judas said why did you let her do it, the perfume could’ve been sold and the money given to the poor.’ And then John adds another bit saying that Judas only asked this because he wanted to steal the money and keep it for himself.’ And you go ‘John, boytchik, you know you’re making that up. You saw what I saw in there which is that if you’re following a man who gives that answer then you can have a reason to feel like you have already been betrayed.’ This is the character note for Judas. He’s a man who betrays but he also feels he’s been betrayed.

Dr. Ron Wolfson on Cutting-Edge Work in the Jewish Community

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:10:00 GMT

Dr. Ron Wolfson, visionary educator and inspirational speaker, is Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and a cofounder of Synagogue 3000. His most recent book, Relational Judaism: Using the Power of Relationships to Transform the Jewish Community (Jewish Lights Publishing), is now available. Earlier this week, he wrote about the future of Jewish institutions in the twenty-first century. He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

In Relational Judaism, I report six case studies of organizations and individuals doing cutting-edge work in creating relational communities. Chabad is numero uno. Their first – and most important – “secret” of success: a warm welcome to everyone they meet and an invitation to share a meal, usually in the rabbi’s home and usually within five minutes of the first personal encounter. They practice what I have called “radical hospitality,” a passionate commitment to learning about each and every person they meet. Google “Chabad” and inevitably you will see results that include “no membership fees” and “free Hebrew school.” The truth is that Chabad is not “free.” What they have done is to turn the membership model upside down: instead of asking for dues upfront and then serving the members, Chabad offers hospitality and programming first and then aggressively asks for money. The vast majority of their funding comes from those grateful for their relationship with the Chabad rabbi and his family, almost always non-Orthodox Jews. Does it work? Estimates suggest Chabad raises well north of $1 billion annually.

Hillel is pioneering a relationship-based outreach effort called “Senior Jewish Educator/Campus Entrepreneur Initiative.” College sophomores and juniors are offered stipends and training to reach out to their circles of friends on campus who would rarely be caught inside a Hillel House. They are coached and taught by a full-time senior Jewish educator who also commits the time to reach 160 disengaged Jewish students annually.

Congregation-based community organizing is a strategy to surface concerns among congregants by conducting one-on-one conversations around questions such as “What keeps you up at night?” The conversation itself is a relational engagement experience that some synagogues use to mobilize social justice actions, but just as importantly leads to better connectedness among the membership.

There are several well-known efforts to engage the next generation of young Jewish professionals, among them Moishe House, NEXT (follow up with Birthright alumni), Jconnect in Seattle, and Next Dor – an initiative of Synagogue 3000 to place “engagement rabbis” and community organizers working from but outside mainstream synagogues to connect with young Jews ages 21-40.

No doubt that the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have enabled many to create and support relationships among friends and family. Jewish organizations are just beginning to marshal the power of these platforms for building online communities and for encouraging face-to-face communities.

Finally, it turns out the best fundraisers in the Jewish community all agree that relationships are at the heart of securing funding. For Relational Judaism, I interviewed the best of the best, among them Abraham Foxman, John Ruskay, David Ellenson, Arnold Eisen, Jerry Silverman and Esther Netter.

I believe the time has come for us to shift the paradigm of engagement from programmatic to relational. The goal is to build relationships with what I identify as “Nine Levels of Relationship” with the Jewish experience. The strategies are outlined in “Twelve Principles of Relational Engagement.” The six case studies prove that it is possible, that we can revive and strengthen our communal organizations if we put people first and then program for them. It is time for a Relational Judaism.

Check in with Ron at www.facebook.com/relationaljudaism and find additional JBC-reviewed titles by him here.

Maintaining Jewish Roots in the Military

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:25:00 GMT

by Elise Cooper

Although there are many themes to Alison Buckholtz’s book, Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War, one that stands out is the importance she places on her Jewish faith. She and her family relocated to the small town of Anacortes, Washington after her husband began a three-year assignment. She gives poignant examples on how Judaism helped her endure the hardships faced while her Navy husband, Scott, was deployed overseas.

The most heart-felt scenes involve her discussion on how she tried to instill the Jewish faith in her two young children, Ethan and Esther. The author explained that as a mom she faced challenges of being Jewish in a predominantly Christian military since proportionally there are far less Jewish members in the military than in the general population. She said in our interview, “I was concerned when I heard we were going to move to a remote area. How could I instill in my children Jewish traditions and values? Everything I had growing up, a Jewish education and time spent in Israel, did not leave me qualified to teach my children Jewish education. I was hoping to depend on Jewish organizations for that.”

The author devoted a whole chapter in the book on how she came to grips with living in Anacortes, Washington, while trying to maintain her Jewish roots. She writes, “Judaism is a religion that greatly values community, and none of us wanted to go it alone.” When she found out that the closest synagogue was a three hour round trip, she telephoned the chaplain’s office, hoping they had some ideas. To her horror, she was given the name of a Messianic synagogue. Alison noted, “I later learned that messianic Jews are attempting to infiltrate the military in order to target Jewish personnel for evangelization. My head exploded when I found that out and realized that Jews, like myself, who called the base for help were directed to this organization whose primary goal was to convert them to Christianity.” Through her efforts, the Navy chaplain on the base responded with a sense of urgency, striking the contact from the reference list.

Unfortunately, her problems of wanting to instill a Jewish identity in her children were not solved, and eventually Scott, Esther, Ethan, and Alison had to go it alone.They made the Jewish holidays special, which included finding a place to pray on a remote trail. As for the children, she improvised by using DVDs and CDs to teach them about their Jewish history. The Chabad representatives, closest to where the family lived, helped out, including reading the Megillah on base during the Purim holiday.

Her tenacity never stopped as she continued to search for other families with whom she could share the holidays. Eventually, a group was formed with Alison as the "CEO," organizing the Hanukkah Party, the Passover Seder, and making sure that all the families would convene for every major Jewish holiday.

What is especially poignant for any Jewish American reading this story is the blending of her experiences with her Jewish identity, many times with humor. For example, she wrote in the book, “I found it hard to believe we would have a snowy Passover; that kind of thing just doesn’t happen to desert people.”

In Standing By, Buckholtz also intertwines military life with her Jewish values. Unfortunately the War on Terror does not stop, even for solemn holidays such as Yom Kippur. As Scott left on Yom Kippur morning, Alison opened her prayer book and turned to the Unetaneh Tokef, a religious poem whose verses included “Who shall live and who shall die…who by water and who by fire.” She commented that her immediate thoughts were that Scott must fly jets on and off aircraft carriers and that phrase “sounded unthinkably cruel.”

She also writes about an incident, relating the American flag to a prayer book. “Then, one day, the heavens poured. I looked out from my bedroom window and saw the flag, soaked and heavy, drooping in the rain. I felt disrespectful, even guilty, as if I had left a prayer book outside.”

During our interview she reflected on how Judaism became relevant in her life, especially during Scott’s deployments. For her, it brought the traditions into the current day. There is a powerful passage in the book where she discusses the grief of separation and turns to her marriage contract, the ketubah for strength, “At the end of the long road…she saw him standing, waiting, for her, watching for her through the night.”

Further, she discusses the importance of a mitzvah. Alison writes, “A rabbi told me once that it’s critical to take care with small good deeds as with obviously important big ones.” She did that by performing a mitzvah, organizing fellow military spouses to report for duty, to come together to help and support one another. Alison felt a part of a team, a mitzvah committee, which performed their magic of kindness for that person in need.

Standing By, coming in paperback tomorrow, is a powerful book that shows how Buckholtz attempted to lead a normal Jewish life in a very abnormal situation. She stated in the interview, “A lot of times I turned to my Jewish values and experiences for comfort. In the midst of being surrounded by unfamiliarity it helped to bring back home something that was part of me.” Readers will understand her pressures, joys, rewards, and stresses, as she attempted to maintain a Jewish identity for herself and her family while living in a military setting.

Elise Cooper lives in Los Angeles and has written numerous national security articles supporting Israel. She writes book reviews and Q and A's for many different outlets including the Military Press. She has had the pleasure to interview bestselling authors from many different genres.

JBC: A New Home for Your Book Club

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:13:00 GMT

Posted by Miri Pomerantz Dauber

You already know that JBC's website is a great place to find book reviews, blog posts from authors, reading lists, and news from around the Jewish book world, but did you know that JBC now has a dedicated section (and staff person!) to give book clubs that little bit extra? JBC's new book club section puts reviews, discussion questions and reading lists all in one place, offers weekly book picks chosen with book clubs in mind, and has introduced two new services—personalized book recommendations and the chance for book clubs to video chat with authors!

Want to have the author at your next book club meeting and find out just what they meant with that ending? Register for JBC Live Chat! Do you dread coming up with suggestions for your next book? JBC will do it for you!

This is just the beginning...still to come: more readers' guides, sample reading lists, special features from the authors—new discussion questions, character maps, background info, etc.—book reviews from other book clubs.

Check back frequently; the pages—which will be changing and growing every week to feature new books, new ideas, and new programs—give book clubs a one-stop-shop for selecting a book and starting a conversation.

Is there something that would really help your book club? Let us know, we'll see if we can add it. Questions, comments, suggestions, or just want to talk book clubs? Email Miri Pomerantz Dauber at bookclub@jewishbooks.org.

Interview: Helene Wecker

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:04:00 GMT

by Dani Crickman

Helene Wecker is the author of the The Golem and the Jinni. The debut novel follows the converging stories of two mythical creatures who must find their place within turn-of-the-century immigrant New York.

Dani Crickman: I love the simplicity of the title The Golem and the Jinni and how well it encompasses the story. How did you come up with the title? Were there any others you considered?

Helene Wecker: The title never was anything other than that in my mind, from the first twelve pages that I wrote which was back when I was at Columbia and it was for a workshop. I thought it would be a children's book or a novella or something short, and it had that fairytale feel to it. It was meant to have a simple title, like those of the stories from The Thousand and One Nights.

When it started to become apparent that this was going to become a long, more adult book, and it was going to take me a while to write it, I had a number of people tell me, “You're going to have to change the title before it gets sold. No one knows what a golem is, not as many people know what a jinni is as you think.” There were a couple of times when I started to think of other titles, and I just couldn't come up with anything. Everything was too vague or metaphorical. Later on, my editor, my agent, and I were all working on titles, and we still couldn't come up with anything. For some reason, this book was just completely resistant to any other title. So that was what we ended up going with. It's a conundrum we resolved by not doing anything about it in the end.

DC: The golem and the jinni have believable personalities that are both admirable and flawed, as well as opposite yet compatible to each other's. Was it difficult to find characterizations for them that worked?

HW: Yes, it was. During the seven years it took me to write the book, it went through a number of iterations, and the characters themselves went through a number of iterations. Especially the golem. At first she was very much more like an automaton. She had her own free will, but she had much less insight into other people. Her ability to hear other people's desires and fears was added in three or four years after I started writing the book, because it was clear that she did not have enough agency. She did not interact very well with other characters because she didn't understand them well enough, and because of that she wasn't as interesting a character herself. It was like watching a robot move around and have to learn about people, which could be an interesting story, but it wasn't enough. Not for this.

The jinni was also hard to pin down because I wanted him to be arrogant and mercurial without being a total jerk. I wanted him to still be someone a reader could relate to or be interested in. With him, it was finding that balancing point. He was fun to write, in that it's sometimes fun to write the bad boy, but I didn't want to go to nuts with that.

They both took some fine-tuning, and it helped to think of them in relation to each other. They weren't created in a vacuum. I was thinking, How am I going to get them to spark off each other? What about the one is really going to piss off the other?

Dr. Ron Wolfson on the Future of Jewish Institutions

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Dr. Ron Wolfson, visionary educator and inspirational speaker, is Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and a cofounder of Synagogue 3000. His most recent book, Relational Judaism: Using the Power of Relationships to Transform the Jewish Community (Jewish Lights Publishing), is now available. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

As I travel around the country visiting Jewish institutions of all kinds, my "worry" quotient is growing daily. Nearly everywhere I go, I hear stories of declining membership, difficulties in attracting the next generation, peaking enrollments and flat fundraising campaigns. This is unusual for me; I have been an optimistic cheerleader for the Jewish community during my career. Bottom line: I am not worried about the future of the Jewish people; I am very worried about the future of Jewish institutions.

What's happening? In Relational Judaism (Jewish Lights Publishing), I outline the many challenges facing any Jewish organization seeking to engage people. A "biggy" is the Internet. Once upon a time, rabbis and Jewish educators held exclusive access to the wealth of Jewish practice and tradition. Not today. In the zeitgeist of DIY - "Do It Yourself," the Internet offers enormous resources for just about anything someone wants to learn or do. Another challenge: why should I pay thousands of dollars in membership fees if I can "rent-a-rabbi" to do a backyard Bar/Bat Mitzvah? In the larger Jewish population centers, there are plenty of rabbis who cannot find work in established congregations hanging a shingle and offering their services as independent contractors. Jewish Community Centers face increasing competition from well-equipped health clubs open 24/7. Day school tuition is so high it is pricing out a large segment of those who would like to send their kids.

All this begs the central question facing Jewish institutions: "What's the value-added of joining?" If the "offer" of affiliation is not truly attractive, I am afraid the membership base will continue to narrow as young people find alternative ways to "do Jewish" and aging baby boomer/empty nesters opt out.

For me, the value-added must be a face-to-face community of relationships that gives my life meaning and purpose, belonging and blessing. "Meaning" is an understanding of the significance of life. "Purpose" is an imperative to do what you are put on earth to do during your life. "Belonging" is a community of people who will be there for you and with you. "Blessing" is a feeling of deep satisfaction and gratitude, a calendar and life cycle of opportunities to celebrate the gifts of life.

In my research for writing Relational Judaism, I searched for organizations and individuals who "get" this, who understand that building relationships, not simply offering a calendar of programs, is the task of the moment. The book presents six case studies: Chabad, Hillel, congregation-based community organizing, next generation initiatives, social media and fundraisers. In my next posting, I will share some lessons learned from their pioneering work, work that I believe is the forward edge of creating a Relational Judaism for the twenty-first century.

Find additional JBC-reviewed titles by Dr. Ron Wolfson here.

Interview: Jessica Soffer

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:34:00 GMT

by Penny Metsch

Jessica Soffer's debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2013.

Penny Metsch: Every aspect of your story is so timely, yet so enduring. Issues of immigration, parenting, teenage angst, and food, wonderful, beautifully prepared food, are with us every day. Yet, you have given us a fresh view of it all. The characters are each compelling in his or her own right, but also inter-woven like a precious rug. How did it all come together?

Jessica Soffer: That’s a really generous way of describing the book. Thank you so much. I didn’t think too terribly much about those concepts while writing. For the most part, I am inspired by characters and by images. The story was born from Lorca (a teenage pain addict, whom I’d written a story about while I was in graduate school) and an image that suddenly came to me and persisted: two people—an old woman and a young girl—cooking together in a kitchen. What grew out of that, around that, was a way of situating those elements.

PGM: Victoria and Joseph are Iraqi Jews. Their immigration journey has a very personal connection to your family’s history. Would you elaborate?

JS: My father was an Iraqi Jew who came to the United States at roughly the same time that Victoria and Joseph (two characters in Apricots) did. At one time, and for a very long time, the Jews in Baghdad flourished. They were the sophisticates, the intellectuals, a huge and important part of the political and cultural landscape. But after the Brits left Iraq in 1942, there was turmoil and instability—and the Nazis took advantage of that. Everything changed. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, 120,000 out of 135,000 Jews fled. First, before 1947, legally and safely. After, they were given the option to leave everything—their passports, belongings, everything—and be airlifted to Israel. Most did. My father didn’t. He went through Iran, into hiding, and eventually was given false papers, which enabled him to travel to Ellis Island.

PGM: I think I will remember Lorca for as long as I read. Her yearning for love and her self-mutilating response at rejection is heart wrenching. Did you ever know anyone like her?

JS: What a lovely thing to say. Thank you again. I knew some cutters growing up, but no one intimately. I was never present when they cut, nor was I ever in a position to intervene, which I am grateful for. But self-harm is an epidemic and one that has always interested me. In a lot of ways it’s the opposite of escapism. It’s an attempt to feel, to inhabit one’s body, the world, more. And feeling more is at the heart of what good writing should do, force us to inhabit another person’s life, another world.

Digging Deep into the Soul in the Heart of Iowa

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

We prompted this year's Sami Rohr Prize awardees to write about "how they came to write their book." Over the next several weeks, we'll share their responses. Today, Stuart Nadler discusses how he came to write his short story collection The Book of Life.

I wrote all but one of the stories in The Book of Life while I was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I hadn’t gone to Iowa thinking I would leave with a collection. In truth, I hadn’t even realized I was working on a collection until most of these stories were finished, and I recognized, looking over everything, that there was so much common ground in the work, places where the stories touched and diverged, characters who shared the same anxieties and concerns. As a reader, what I love most about short story collections is that, invariably, they represent in some way an author’s preoccupations and obsessions. And this, surely, was true about me and the stories in this book.

A good deal of The Book of Life is about family—fathers and sons, brothers, husbands and wives—and about the sins people commit against the people they love most. Invariably, I’ve come into the lives of these characters at their very worst moments. In one story, a father reacts poorly to his son’s sudden interest in Judaism, while trying to exist in an open marriage. In another, a father takes his son to meet his own estranged father, a man he’s pretended has been dead for decades. I was on a treadmill at the gym when the idea for this story came to me. It’s the only time this has ever happened: the whole story, in its entirety. In "Catherine and Henry" a woman, unsure of her boyfriend’s faithfulness, tests him with a prostitute. This was the story I was working on when I came to the Workshop. I’d end up rewriting it for six years before it was published.

I was already fixated on the central ideas in this book by the time I arrived in Iowa: sin and redemption and the way these transgressions intersect with religion, or a lack of religion. I have never been particularly observant, but that first autumn, when the High Holidays arrived, I found myself taking bread down to the Iowa River to celebrate tashlich. In Hebrew, tashlich means “casting off.” It’s a simple exercise, in which you take pieces of bread and throw them into a river, an act that is supposed to symbolize casting off a year’s sins. The idea comes from the prophet Micah, who says that God “will cast all our sins/Into the depths of the sea.” I had never done this before, or even heard of the practice before I did it, and, to be entirely truthful, I haven’t done it since. The title of my book comes from the part of the High Holiday liturgy that has always been my favorite: On Rosh Hashanah It is Written, On Yom Kippur It is Sealed. The idea of a book of life has always fascinated me, as has the generous notion that its pages are opened fresh every year, and that one’s private sins can be forgiven communally.

This—On Rosh Hashanah It is Written, On Yom Kippur It is Sealed—was the initial title for the first story in my book. In it, a man has an affair with his best friend's grown daughter. I wrote the first draft of this story over the course of a frigid week in February. In many ways, the story was a breakthrough. Here was what I had been looking for. How people react when they’re tempted. How people suffer at their missed opportunities at love. How they seek out their faith, even if, as it is true for almost all of my characters, they don’t know or remember how to connect with that faith. The rest of the stories came quickly after that, and when I left Iowa that spring I had a bigger, baggier version of what this book would become. In the end, putting the book together was a process of assembly, and what remained after all the cutting and discarding and revision was the core of that initial preoccupation of mine—these characters who are cheaters and adulterers and liars and bad parents, bad brothers, bad friends, all of them trying to negotiate theirs sins and their guilt.

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he was also the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Wise Men, and the story collection The Book of Life.

New Reviews

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

{module_webapps,14253,i,6352736}{module_webapps,14253,i,6340575}{module_webapps,14253,i,6338699}
{module_webapps,14253,i,6336174}{module_webapps,14253,i,6336151}{module_webapps,14253,i,6230899}

Statues and Golems

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Helene Wecker shared a golem-centric reading list and wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and Dorkdom. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I was 28 before I first saw the Statue of Liberty in person. I'd been accepted to grad school in New York City, and my husband (then fiancé) and I flew out together to see the school—and, in my case, to see the city for the first time. It was a hasty trip, with a red-eye flight and a hodgepodge itinerary. We had friends of friends in Chelsea, and they graciously allowed us to crash at their place. It turned out they lived on one of the busiest corners in the city, and the incessant cab-honking kept us awake most of the night. It was a very New York welcome.

That first afternoon, still fuzzy with jet lag, we took a walk out to the Hudson Park greenway. At Chelsea Piers we stopped to watch the trapeze students swinging through the air above us, looking nervous in their leotards and safety harnesses. We walked out to the end of one of the piers, and that's where I caught my first real-life glimpse of her.

Wow, I thought. Here I am. There she is.

At that distance she was just a slim gray silhouette, motionless on her pedestal. Tour boats churned at her feet; helicopters swooped past her like dragonflies. She seemed like the only still object in a moving world. Looking at her, I felt what I'd later come recognize as a particularly New York-style cognitive dissonance: the weird fact of this huge, iconic thing just sitting there, minding her own business, while the city went about its afternoon.

A few years after I stood on Chelsea Pier, I gave a character in The Golem and the Jinni the traditional immigrant arrival in America: a steamship cruising past the statue, the waving hands and the tears of joy. Except that my character is far from a traditional immigrant. She's a golem, newly created and alone. She has no knowledge or understanding of the statue; she doesn't even know what liberty is—though she's newly liberated herself, her master having just died. But she recognizes that the people around her love the statue, and she takes comfort in the fact that it is clearly a constructed woman, like herself.

If you think about it, the Statue of Liberty is an oddity among monuments. We Americans like our statues to be of real people, of presidents and heroes and civic leaders. But the Statue of Liberty is a personification, a portrait of an idea, and a female one to boot. (Name one other woman whose face is so closely associated with the idea of America.) She's become such an everyday image that it's hard to remember that The Statue of Liberty isn't just her name, but her function, the purpose for which she was built. A Statue, representing Liberty. And as it turns out, Bartholdi and his workers were merely her first set of creators. In the years that followed she was brought to life again and again, a multitude of animations, as each immigrant en route to Ellis Island filled her with a new set of hopes and fears, longings and disappointments. In that sense, she's the ultimate American golem.

Read more about Helene Wecker here.

Related: Emma Lazarus

Under the Influence of Golems

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and Dorkdom. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Here's a confession: I haven't read that many golem stories. Or at least, as many as someone who's written a book called The Golem and the Jinni probably should've. I haven't read Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers, or Marge Piercy's He, She and It. I haven't cracked Thane Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham, or the more golem-centered volumes of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

When I started writing The Golem and the Jinni, I was really, really unsure of myself. I was embarking on what I knew was my first real book, and it was like all newborn things, delicate and easily disturbed. Something warned me that if I filled my head with the golem stories of other, far more talented writers, I would crowd my own barely-formed golem right out of my brain, or unintentionally mash it into a different image.

Over the years, that intimidation became an almost superstitious avoidance. Maybe now that the book is finished, I can finally crack The Puttermesser Papers without worrying that Ozick's golem will feel more real to me than my own. But in any case, here are a few golem stories that I do know, and that added their own particular flavors to my book, whether I meant them to or not.

1) The old, classic stories of Rabbi Loew and his golem. Honestly, I'm not sure when I first heard these stories. At Sunday school? That sort of Old World folk culture didn't fit with our modern Reform curriculum. My grandparents? My mom's parents were cosmopolitan German Jews; this wasn't really their thing. My dad's folks were the Yiddish speakers, but I don't remember them telling me folk tales. Usually they were too busy trying to get me to eat things. So where did I learn them? It feels like the stories were always there, floating through the ether: Rabbi Loew and his golem, the protector of Prague's medieval Jews during the pogroms. Years later, after I'd started writing The Golem and the Jinni, first my parents and then my in-laws visited Prague and brought me back little translated volumes of golem stories. A few were variations I hadn't read before, but mostly they were already familiar.

2) Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. If you haven't read this yet, seriously, treat yourself. The golem in Kavalier and Clay is the golem, Rabbi Loew's legendary creation. It's a real-world presence in the first part of the book—one of the characters attempts to smuggle it out of Pragu—and a recurring motif through the rest of the book, one of its many threads of longing and sadness. (Really, you've read this, right? Because I can lend you my copy if you haven't.)

3) James Sturm, The Golem's Mighty Swing. Sturm's graphic novel follows a 1920s all-Jewish baseball team facing anti-Semitism as they travel the Midwest. Going broke and looking for a gimmick to fill the seats, they dress the team's one African-American player as a golem, and advertise his prowess. Then, of course, things start to go awry. It's a sad but satisfying tale, and a good baseball yarn as well.

4) Naomi Kritzer, "The Golem." "The golem woke on December 1st, 1941, and saw the future before her like an unrolled scroll." With a first line like that, how can you not read more? This particular golem—the first female golem I ever encountered—is built by two women in Prague who hope to survive the unsurvivable. Kritzer (whom I've known since college) uses her prescient golem to examine ideas of free will, destiny, and choice. (You can find "The Golem" in 2001's Year's Best Fantasy, and in Kritzer's digital collection Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.)

5) The X-Files, "Kaddish." Maybe I'm cheating a little here, but shows like The X-Files have been as formative to my imagination as the books I’ve read. In this fourth-season episode, Mulder and Scully go to Brooklyn to investigate the strangulation of a neo-Nazi who murdered a Hasidic Jew. I remember feeling proud that the show was tackling a golem story, but also thinking that the supporting players suffered from the unfortunate exoticization that happened whenever The X-Files dealt with an ethnic beastie. That golem, though: pretty creepy.

Read more about Helene Wecker here.

Related: ProsenPeople Reading Lists

Book Cover of the Week: The New Persian Kitchen

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

JBC Network author Louisa Shafia returns with her latest cookbook, The New Persian Kitchen (Ten Speed Press). If this one is anything like her last (she published the mouthwatering Lucid Food in 2009), you won't be disappointed.

Tip: I was lucky enough to take a great cooking class with Louisa several years ago (and hoping for round two this year). If she's visiting a city near you, it's a must.

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Related: Persian Food from the Non-Persian Bride: And Other Sephardic Kosher Recipes You Will Love

Lower East Side Reading List

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

On Writing a Novel in Two Cultures

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about Dorkdom and writing while Jewish. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Yesterday I wrote that my novel, The Golem and the Jinni, is "pretty darn Jewish." In truth, that's only half the story. There are two cultures in my novel, set in New York at the turn of the 20th century: the Jews of the Lower East Side, and the Syrian immigrants who lived in what's now New York's Financial district.

When I started writing this book, I was incredibly daunted at the idea of writing about a culture that wasn't my own. At a guess, I know slightly more about Syrian culture than your average American Jew: my husband is Arab American, so I married into the knowledge, as it were. But it's one thing to know the foods and the holidays and the etiquette, and to learn how to say salaam aleikum and shukran and insh'allah when the cousins visit. It's quite another to create fictional characters who belong to that culture, hopefully true to life and free of generalizations. I really, really didn't want anyone to read my book and cringe, like a British person watching Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

And as soon as I started to research, it became all too clear just how little I knew. The residents of "Little Syria," as it was called, weren't Muslim but Christian, mostly Maronite Catholic and Eastern Orthodox from what's now Lebanon. I'd always been flummoxed by the various and subtle differences between Christianities, and now I felt even more daunted. I tried to plug my ignorance with books and informational websites, and often ended up more confused than when I started. I went so far as to order a back issue of a Catholic magazine that had an article I wanted to read. Before long they'd given my name to every Catholic mailing list in America. One charity even mailed me a rosary. I still have it, hidden in the back of my sock drawer, as though from God's prying eyes. How the hell do you throw out a rosary?

After a while I'd read enough to feel like I could start writing. It was important to me that the Jewish and Syrian sections of the book be roughly equal: in length, in weight, in the importance of the characters. I didn't want one side of the book to be merely a catalyst or booster for the other, like the stalwart friend in a romantic comedy. This led to a number of interesting decisions. After some back and forth, I decided not to use any Yiddish sayings in the book. If I couldn't say it in Arabic, then I wouldn't say it in Yiddish either. (I had a couple of salaam aleikums in there before someone told me that only Muslims say it, not Arab Christians—exactly the sort of mistake I was looking to avoid.) I tried to use religious and cultural details sparingly, because a little goes a long way, and I wanted to keep my blunder opportunities to a minimum.

And frankly, my fears weren't confined to the Arab-American half of the book. I grew up Reform, but most of the Jewish characters in my book are Orthodox, which sometimes feels to me like a different religion entirely. It did help, a little perversely, that I'd often find multiple and conflicting answers to a question. Two Jews, three opinions, as the saying goes, and the same thing happened when I'd try to pin down an Arab Christian detail. We Jews don't exactly have a monopoly on that particular trait.

Eventually I decided not to obsess so much over the impossibility of truly knowing something that I myself haven't lived. The only other option would be to worry myself to a standstill—and that was one thing I wasn't willing to do. By its very nature, writing a book is an act of hubris. Here are my ideas, you say, and they're worth your money, time, and attention! But it's also a leap of faith: trust your intentions and stay true to the story, and the effort will be worth it. I'll leave it up to my readers to decide whether or not I've succeeded.

Read more about Helene Wecker here.

The Most Jewish Thing I Do

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

When I started looking through the extensive and awe-inspiring Visiting Scribe archives, one theme kept popping out at me: the perennial question, "What Does It Mean to Be a Jewish Writer?" I decided I'd use my space here to offer my own take, but as I thought about it, the question kept shifting into something else. Not what does it mean to be a Jewish writer, but why am I a Jewish writer?

Because I am, undeniably. True, I've only written one book so far, The Golem and the Jinni, but it's pretty darn Jewish. My one other published piece, a short story called "Divestment," is about a German Jewish woman in the last years of her life. When I think about possible future projects—novels, short stories, maybe a screenplay?—inevitably it contains some element of Judaism, either at its center or creeping in around the edges.

This surprises me more than you might think. I don't live what anyone would call a visibly Jewish life. On Friday nights you'll find me on the couch, eating takeout and watching Doctor Who. My weekly dose of group spirituality comes on Sundays, when I drive 45 minutes to a Buddhist meditation center. My husband is a nice young Arab-American man I met in college. (Bashert!) There's no Mogen David around my neck, and no mezuzah at the door, though we do have a lovely silver menorah and an antique page from the Quran. My toddler daughter has only one Jewish-themed board book on her groaning shelf, titled Let's Nosh!—and, let's face it, that sums up a lot of my religious expression right there.

So if it's true what they say, that Judaism is a religion of actions rather than beliefs, then my list is looking kind of skimpy. Except, of course, for the writing.

It's hard to pin down why my writing is the most Jewish thing I do—except that a large part of writing is about exploring a life's undercurrents, whether they belong to the characters or (consciously or not) the writer. And as far as undercurrents go, my Judaism is practically a riptide. Like so many of us, a lot of my first stories were Bible stories, Noah and Jonah and let my people go, and I devoured them, their rhythms and their themes. I'm the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and I grew up with those stories too—first told in weighty silences, then in brief but ominous glosses, before finally, when I was old enough, the truth. My family belonged to a Reform congregation that downplayed God and belief in favor of "the Jewish life cycle," and my early years were set inside that structure: Sunday school, Hebrew school, Bat Mitzvah, confirmation, the whole shebang.

In Libertyville, the Mayberry-esque Chicago suburb where I grew up, that made me different. And that difference somehow tied in the other ways that I was different, or at least the ways I felt different. I roll my eyes when I hear others reminisce with bitter pride about their gawky, geeky, Star-Trek-and-X-Men-filled childhoods—yes, you were a dork, we were all dorks, let it go—but it's easy to forget how it could make you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Much has been made of the Jewishness of Superman: the hidden alien, secret and alone, blinking incognito behind those nebbishy glasses. Of course Superman's powers would be flight and invulnerability, and not invisibility. What was so great about invisibility? We dorks already had it in spades.

So there I was, a big ol' Jewish dork, sneaking reads of the latest Dragonlance novel instead of studying my Torah portion. And as I got older, through college and early adulthood, the "life cycle" touchstones and rituals began to fall away. Perhaps it was because they never gained their own intrinsic meaning for me, just a sense of obligation: the whispers from the murdered great-greats and the cousins who never were, hovering somewhere over my shoulder. You do this because it's what Jews do. You do this because we couldn't. But somehow—and there are days when I deeply regret this—it wasn't quite enough.

The stories stayed with me, though, grooved deep into my brain, and were joined by the urge to tell stores—and by some strange transitive property of the subconscious, that urge felt Jewish. Like when I was a kid, and my dad turned me onto Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, and that felt Jewish. And how walking between junior-high classes with my nose buried in a book felt Jewish. And when, in my mid-twenties, I took a serious look at my unhappy career and decided to hell with it, I'm gonna write —that, too, felt Jewish.

So there it is, unfortunately. I don't light candles on Friday night, and my daughter will grow up eating cheeseburgers and moo shu prawns. (Or watching me eat them, at least. Maybe she'll be a vegetarian, who knows?) This is what I do instead. I write, and I write Jewish stories. And even if someday (heaven forefend!) I write a story that has no hint of Jews at all, no turn-of-the-century golems or space rabbis or even so much as an irradiated latke, you can guarantee that that story will still feel to me, in some weird and ineffable way, Jewish.

Read more about Helene Wecker here.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:33:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Read about the Polish tribute here and learn more about the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising with the following books:

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New Reviews

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:25:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

{module_webapps,14253,i,6314072}{module_webapps,14253,i,6313966} {module_webapps,14253,i,5284786} {module_webapps,14253,i,6313958}{module_webapps,14253,i,6224808}{module_webapps,14253,i,6299433} {module_webapps,14253,i,6312016}{module_webapps,14253,i,6312017}{module_webapps,14253,i,6031153}

Allison Amend's JBC Network Lessons

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:17:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Allison Amend wrote about writing, and not writing, Jewish fiction and the Jewish connection to art. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

In 2011, I was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Thanks to this honor, I was invited to speak at several Jewish book groups all over the country. I would hate to keep the expertise in Jewish book groups all to myself, and so, forthwith, here are:

1. Jews buy books. I don’t know what the statistics are on this, but I’d guess that Jewish women are singlehandedly floating the entire publishing business. They even buy hardcovers.

2. The mad dash at the end of your reading is not to have you sign your magnum opus for posterity, but rather to partake of the slightly dry coffee cake.

3. Members of the JBC Network read your book, and if they don’t like it, they will let you know.

4. Everyone claims to know someone who they want to set you up with, but no one ever follows through on it.

5. It is acceptable to order bacon-wrapped scallops at a pre-reading dinner.

6. In every group, there is always someone who knows my mother.

7. Most people know my father too.

8. The questions I get asked most often: How do you think of your ideas? Did you have to do a lot of research?

9. The two questions I get asked least often: What do you like to eat for breakfast? Why are so many in your generation marrying outside the faith?

10. If you think you’ve met someone before, it’s probably just that she looks like one of your cousins.

Allison Amend's most recent novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, is now available. Read more about Allison here.

Book Cover of the Week: Zinsky the Obscure

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:21:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Out this week: Ilan Mochari's debut novel Zinsky the Obscure. Read more about Ilan Mochari here and find the book's official website here.

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Almost Jewish

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:29:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Allison Amend wrote about the Jewish connection to art. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

So why would a nice Jewish girl not write nice Jewish fiction? My last book, Stations West, was about Jewish immigrants in 19^th century Oklahoma. It was very “Jewish.” It was so Jewish it was nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize (but not so Jewish that it won). One would expect that my next book would be even more “Jewish.” Yet, on the outside it perhaps doesn’t appear to be.

The book jacket calls my new novel A Nearly Perfect Copy "a smart and affecting novel of family and forgery set amidst the rarefied international art world. Elm Howells has a loving family and a distinguished career at an elite Manhattan auction house. But after a tragic loss throws her into an emotional crisis, she pursues a reckless course of action that jeopardizes her personal and professional success. Meanwhile, talented artist Gabriel Connois wearies of remaining at the margins of the capricious Parisian art scene, and, desperate for recognition, he embarks on a scheme that threatens his burgeoning reputation. As these narratives converge, with disastrous consequences, A Nearly Perfect Copy boldly challenges our presumptions about originality and authenticity, loss and replacement, and the perilous pursuit of perfection."

There is also a subplot involving a famous ceramicist Holocaust survivor and an art dealer seeking reparations for European Jewish families whose art was stolen by the Nazis. But the main protagonists aren’t Jewish. I would argue, though, that it is still a Jewish novel.

Stations West’s characters were outsiders who, through successive generations, never managed to assimilate into American culture. Similarly, Gabriel is a Spanish artist who feels othered by his language and culture. Despite the fact that he’s resided in Paris almost longer than in his native Spain, he views French culture from the outside looking in. The other protagonist, Elm, is likewise alienated, first, because her branch of her illustrious family is out of favor and second because her grief at the death of her son has created a rift between her and reality. She is no longer able to relate to others in her family or at work.

This experience of being simultaneously outside a culture while attempting to assimilate is a particularly Jewish one. The struggle with issues of national identity, of feigning integration in your own country is one that we all deal with every day, and this way of viewing the world—in the case of A Nearly Perfect Copy, a world created by a Jewish author—makes this book in its own way as Jewish as my first novel. Well, almost as Jewish.

Read more about Allison here.

April Jewish Book Carnival

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:23:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Welcome to the April 2013 Jewish Book Carnival! To start of this month's edition, a few links of note from the Jewish Book Council's own website:

Read about the 2013 winner of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature here
Join Jewish Book Council and Jewcy for our next #JLit Twitter Book Club with Ben Katchor on April 29th
Read Allison Amend and Austin Ratner's "Kvetchy Correspondence" for the ProsenPeople here
Check out our Earth Day Reading List

Moving on...

Leora Wenger reviews Ester and Ruzya
Over at "The Book of Life," a podcast interview with Emily Bergman, member of the ALA Sophie Brody Award for Jewish literature
Lorri M. reviews Doublelife: One Family Two Faiths and a Journey of Hope, a book that most people can relate to, whether Jewish or otherwise
Kathe Pinchuck, who blogs at "Life Is Like a Library," writes about meeting two authors and a film maker
In honor of National Poetry Month, Kathleen M. Bloomfield shares a poem by Marge Piercy and writes about her recent move to DC
Over at "Rhapsody in Books," Jill Broderick reviews The Imposter Bride (read Jewish Book Council's review here)
"Needle in the Bookstacks" interviews Rabbi Joshua Garroway about his latest book, Paul’s Gentile-Jews: neither Jew nor Gentile, but Both, which explores the formative years of Christianity
On My Machberet, Erika Dreifus recommends three books that are new this spring: Ayelet Tsabari's The Best Place on Earth, Rebecca Kanner's Sinners and the Sea, and Merrill Joan Gerber's The Hysterectomy Waltz
AJL has created a Jewish Library Advocacy Kit to assist libraries as they educate their communities about the value of their services. The kit includes materials that can simply be handed to administrators, as well as documents to be adapted and recrafted for each library's individual situation. The pdf may also be found here.
At "Bagels, Books and Schmooze," Susan Curtis reviews The Lost Wife, Raquela, and Haven. Also, check out her post in honor of Ruth Gruber here.

Finally, Sami Rohr Prize finalist Haim Watzman, whose books are now available as e-books, shares four stories from his forthcoming book of short stories:

The Jewish Connection to Art

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:03:00 GMT

Allison Amend's most recent novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, is now available. Allison was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her novel Stations West. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

People ask me how much research I had to do on art forgery for my new book A Nearly Perfect Copy. The answer is: a lot. Some of it was even necessary. Some of it was just procrastination.

To that end, I wandered into the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris on one hot day, more in search of a bathroom than in search of wisdom. But, reader I found both (and if you’ve been to Paris, you know how valuable a quality public bathroom is).

The exhibits were what you’d expect (Sephardic artifacts, Vichy government deportation narratives, synagogue records, suitcases—Jewish museums always have a lot of suitcases…), but the true gem here is the library. It’s small but comprehensive, and the librarian was exceedingly helpful when I asked for information

I’m not sure I found anything I couldn’t have found in other English language archives, but this pleasant air conditioned afternoon in a quiet and free study space made me think of two things.

First, there are an extraordinary number of Jewish museums. I am in the middle of a project with two friends in which we visit every museum in the five boroughs of New York City (a project that started out interesting and fun and has deteriorated into a duty as we slog through the last 29 museums. You can find a blog about the project here). There are seven Jewish museums out of the 110 museums in New York (eight if you count the Tenement Museum, ten if you count museums founded by Jews). No other ethnicity or culture or religion has as many museums devoted to it (and we’re not even counting memorials, which are not technically museums).

There are of course many reasons for the proliferation of Jewish museums: there is the rich history of the Jewish presence in New York; museums can be seen as a response to the Holocaust’s attempt to wipe out Judaism. But there is also the long history of Jewish involvement in the arts.

A subplot in my new novel A Nearly Perfect Copy is the attempt to gain reparations for art stolen from Jews during the Holocaust. These attempts continue in real life, and encounter thorny legal issues. How can a family prove ownership when the records were destroyed? How do you award a painting to what is now dozens of inheritors? What if the current owners acquired the painting by legal means? Who determines the value of the paintings, and what government should be responsible for paying reparations? In my book, characters exploit these complicated ethical issues for their own financial benefit.

Though I ultimately chose not to focus on this battle (other books, fiction and non have done an excellent job of chronicling the theft—particularly from dealer and collector Paul Rosenberg—and the Nazis’ interest in art), it is worth thinking about the Jewish connection to art.

Read more about Allison here.

New Reviews

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

{module_webapps,14253,i,6289541}{module_webapps,14253,i,6288907} {module_webapps,14253,i,6254096}
{module_webapps,14253,i,6286211}{module_webapps,14253,i,6284598}{module_webapps,14253,i,6284560}

Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut Reading List

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:15:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Yom Hazikaron, Israel's official Memorial Day, is right around the corner. The holiday, followed by Yom Ha'atzmaut ("Independence Day"), which commemorates Israel's declaration of Independence in 1948, begins on April 14th. Click below for recommended reading:

What is the Story?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Jennifer Gilmore wrote about the overlap between her personal concerns and writerly concerns. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

The Mothers is the first book I’ve written that does not primarily consist of Jewish characters. It’s a little weird that with my first book—where there are pretty much only Jews, even in the department stores and hotels, at the theater and the market—I had no idea I was writing an American Jewish novel. I was just telling this family’s extensive story. I was writing an American story.

This book is also an American story. But similarly, I had no idea that this book was dealing with “cross cultural issues,” which is what some reviewers and readers have reported. I wrote a book chronicling a couple’s struggle to have children. But what I didn’t realize is that, because they are from different backgrounds—the wife, Jesse, is Jewish, the husband, Ramon, is first generation Italian and Spanish—they handle their highs and lows of their experience differently. Though her family has not been particularly observant, Jesse’s memories and her experiences are distinctly Jewish, in addition to being particularly American. She has memories of Passovers with her family, as well as growing up with her sister in suburban Virginia. She remembers the seventies when her mother working was an unusual situation. Her mother was one of the few women she knew who held a job.

Ramon is European and his experience—of speaking many languages and traversing a European landscape embedded in the past—differs from Jesse’s. The two argue over how they will raise the child they don’t even yet have. They don’t know the gender or the race of their potential child, nor do they know where in the country he or she will come from, or when, and still these issues of identity and how the child will be raised are of huge concern to them.

What happens when how we raise our children becomes an intellectual pursuit? Jesse has had more time than most to think about what it means to be a mother. As we know, it all becomes clear once a child arrives, but Jesse is stuck in a zone where she can only think about the future hypothetically. What is lost and what is gained from a shift in cultures? As a mother, what will she bring with her from her past? What will she choose or be forced to leave behind?

Do writers always know what we are writing? No. I am always—always—surprised by what readers take from my books. And they catch things that a writer doesn’t. This book is about Jesse’s struggle to become a mother, but it is also about a marriage. Because this is a story about two families joining up. It’s about sameness; it’s about difference. It’s about being yoked to another and about being freed. I think this is a story about wanting. But you, reader, might find an entirely new and other story being told.

Jennifer Gilmore's newest novel, The Mothers, is now available. Read more about her here.

Two Israeli Writers to Keep on Your Radar

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:09:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Best Untranslated Writers: Gadi Taub
Winner of Israel's Sapir Prize: Shimon Adaf

NYC Subway System Best Seller List

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:57:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Traveling home from a recent Jewish Book Council event, I came across Stephen Witt, author of the novels American Moses and The Street Singer, pitching his books on the subway. Stephen happened to be in the middle of writing this excellent article for me on self-publishing in the Jewish world (he also wrote up a great list of online resources for those looking to self-publish), and I tried to capture a video of his "pitch," but, alas, I couldn't get my phone out fast enough! Lucky for you, Stephen had the same idea and filmed his subway pitch for his double book trailer.

Check it out below:

Book Cover of the Week: The Book of Schmaltz

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:50:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Michael Ruhlman's The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song of a Forgotten Fat, which is currently available for iPads, will be published as an old school (hardcover) cookbook by Little, Brown in August:

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

2013 Winner of Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:07:00 GMT

Francesca Segal, author of The Innocents, just won the 2013 $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station, was awarded the $25,000 Choice Award. Read more here and click on their images below to read about each finalist:

Lost Stories

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:25:00 GMT

Jennifer Gilmore's newest novel, The Mothers, is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

The Mothers is my third novel but it’s the first novel I’ve written that tracks so closely with my own life. I had to make a leap as a novelist to write in the first person, to examine a single woman’s inner life, as opposed to the bigger sweep of the multi-generational novels, Golden Country and Something Red, that were written with an eye toward history and the way it affects families.

This book is all about families really, or about a couple who wants to make one desperately. If my other books deal with what happens to families over time, this character—Jesse Weintraub—is most concerned about time stopping. About the story, as it were, ending with her.

I, like Jesse, struggled for a long time to make my family (even though I do believe that it’s not just children that make a family…). And like her, my spouse and I were involved in a terribly long and particularly harsh adoption process that has only ended a few weeks ago. My most private concerns, a sadness I could only tell myself, were the same concerns I am interested in as a writer. These were in part involving what gets passed down through the generations. The history of our families, the voices of my grandparents and what they went through. What if it all that stopped with me?

What if all the stories just stopped with me? All those voices? At the bottom of it, this is what Jesse feels deeply. She wants to see a new generation grow. She gets a little despairing, she acts a little wild, but at the bottom of it, she wants to pass on all of it, the good, the bad, the painful, the joyous, so the cycle will keep going, so everyone’s story, including hers, gets told.

Read more about Jennifer Gilmore here.

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...Asaf Schurr

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:09:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Over the past month, we've introduced you to to Stuart Nadler, Shani Boianjiu, Ben Lerner, and Francesca Segal. Today we introduce you to Sami Rohr Prize finalist Asaf Schurr, author of the metafictional novel Motti, which was translated into English by Todd Hasak-Lowy. Haaretz wrote of Motti: "Those who don't read Asaf Schurr’s new book are simply losing out." We agree. Below, Asaf writes about writing a book as it needs to be written, the importance of music while he writes, and some of his favorite books:

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

Getting yourself to actually do it. Then, making sure you don't write the same book over and over again. Then, overcoming the urge to take the easiest and fastest way out. Then, wrapping it up and getting your personality back in one piece.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

Books.

Who is your intended audience?

People who can read. And are actually willing. Maybe a better answer would be "People who are willing to make the effort to read kindly and frankly."

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes.

What are you reading now?

Noga Albalach's The Push (the first book by a young and talented Hebrew author, to the best of my knowledge not yet translated to other languages), Saramago's Cain (despite my ambivalence), Robert Crease's The Great Equations. And I've got a new Hebrew translation of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge waiting for me.

Top 5 Favorite Books

Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy
Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain
John Irving's Cider House Rules
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
and for some odd reason, Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I'm not certain there actually was a moment of such an explicit decision. Though publishing a second book must have given me a clue.

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

Being adored for the right reasons, by the right people (and for whatever reasons by all the rest). More specifically and perhaps frankly, it's writing a book as it needs to be written, making it take the form it actually needs and being the object it actually aims to be - as opposed to writing something in order just to please myself or others. Being able to do that without being idiosyncratic is definitely a success (also, not starving).

How do you write — what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

Finding the right music is very important. (For a while it was A Whisper in the Noise. Lately, it's mostly Joanna Newsom.) I'm rather reluctant to talk about the rest, which by itself is probably part of the answer.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

At the risk of sounding terribly pretentious, I wish to make people better, myself included. Not to educate, but to somehow get us back to something that's linguistically, emotionally and ethically fundamental and important. Staring each other in the true face, so to speak.

A Kvetchy Correspondence

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:34:00 GMT

Between February 15, 2013 and March 10, 2013, Allison Amend and Austin Ratner, two members of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize "class," discussed literary fiction in society, their JBC Network tours, and the publication of their new novels—Allison's new novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, will be published this week, and Austin's new novel, In the Land of the Living, was published last month. Read their redacted kvetchy correspondence below:

Dear Austin,

So great to be having an email conversation with you. Having won the Sami Rohr Prize, you are official a Really Big Deal. My first question: How does it feel to be a Really Big Deal?

Allison

Ha! I wish I did feel that way. There are so many anxieties surrounding the publication of a book. What if no one likes it? What if I should have written a different book in a different way? What if it is in fact a great book but the robots are about to take over? What if the robots find it boring?

Anyway, this leads me to a question for you: There are so many challenges that lie in the way of creating a book—no amount of whining can ever really tell the tale of how hard it is—and yet when the victory comes and the author copies arrive, I can barely enjoy it. Can you? If so, how?

Dear Austin,

I worry a bit more about the zombie apocalypse rather than the robot revolution, but that's just my meshugas...

I believe we cannot enjoy the moment for two reasons. One, we are writers, and so are a particularly navel-gazing bunch. When we look up from the navel, we worry that even though our books are doing well, they could have done better…

I don't have children, but I imagine publishing must be like sending your child to kindergarten. You're proud, and yes, she is ready to go out on her own, but what if someone throws sand at her on the playground?

Two, we are Jewish, and I was raised by my grandmother to believe that if anything good happens and you enjoy it, you're just begging for Almighty to cut you down to size.

And speaking of being Jewish, did you go to a lot of JBC Network events, and, if so, do you have favorite moments (change the names/locations to protect the innocent)?

Allison

The JBC Network is a magnificent resource to Jewish writers. Of course, some of the events go better than others. Here is one particularly memorable story that sticks in my mind:

[The following correspondence has been partially redacted.]

The ****** event was ******. I was picked up at the airport by ************************. They asked ******************************* ****************** like, "************************************ *************************?" I explained about ***************** *************************. They seemed ********* and *** that the **************************************. ********, they explained, *** ***********************. ******************************************** ************************. (This is really true; it turned out that ******************************************************************* **************.) When we got to the ************ ***—this is also true—exactly *** *********************, and I think he was demented and had been looking for the toilet. So I ********* ************************************************************: the *********** JCC coordinator (who ***************************** *** *************** to ***** ************ and *************, she ******** *********************************); ******************************** *********************** *************************** fell asleep.

Meanwhile, I am about to move out of my apartment, which is the one quiet place I've ever lived in in NYC. (The irony being that my extremely loud children live inside it with me.) Proust supposedly lined his office walls with cork. Any trouble with noise? Any solutions?

Austin

[The following correspondence has been partially redacted.]

Network memories... At one event the woman who picked me up *****************. We had to go around and pick up everyone who couldn't drive anymore. Then we went to the kosher deli and she put the rolls in her purse.

I also remember a ******** woman who claimed that the demise of Judaism was being effected by my generation marrying outside the faith. I pointed out I wasn't married—to a Jew or a gentile—but if she knew anyone she should let me know.

As to noise, I'm not terribly sensitive, but there's noise, and then there's the noise of little children wanting to play with you, which, along with waterboarding and sleep deprivation, has been declared a torture method by our government.

I have belonged to writing spaces for years, mostly to get out of the house so I have to get dressed in the morning and converse with other humans. For a long time I belonged to the Writers Room in New York. Then I needed to look at different walls, so I joined Paragraph on 14th street. I love having an "office" to go to, and meeting in the kitchen to talk about writing. I've met lots of people who have introduced me to others in the community, and now I never stand awkwardly at a party again! And there's free coffee.

Ok, on a different topic, did you take time off of writing to promote/finish up In the Land of the Living? How do you juggle different projects in different phases? I’m trying to write something new, but I'm having trouble concentrating in anticipation of the book’s release.

I guess… there's a pleasing rhythm to your work as a writer if you have the good fortune to publish more than one book: you take a break from the creative work on the next book to do a little bit of work promoting the last one or earning some money. Even non-writing activities can be a welcome relief, since doing nothing but open yourself to the muses can be a kind of torture in its unadulterated form.

Let's pretend we had a genie in a bottle and could make a wish. Given the many difficulties of writing and publishing fiction, what one thing would you change about the way society treats writers of literary fiction?

Let's see... what I would like most from literary publishing would be to 1. earn a living wage from writing novels and 2. be paid a true advance like writers used to be paid. I get to live in New York, and I love to teach, but sometimes writing necessarily takes a secondary role to more pressing duties…there's often just not a lot of creative energy left over.

If you could wave your magic wand, what would you wish for?

I think I would cast a spell on myself that made it impossible for me to lose perspective when I hit all the little bumps and snags along the way in the writing life. Call it the bird's-eye view spell: avitus oculus visum. Serenity now.

Another question: how do you like giving elevator pitches about your book? You know, when people say what is it "about." What is your book about? And what would your elevator pitch be if you already knew you were speaking to your ideal reader?

I know all about the elevator pitch from some time I spent in LA, where you should always have a log line to your movie ready in case you get into an elevator with Steven Spielberg. (It just occurred to me that his last name is SPIELberg. Awesome.) I do try to have a 10-word answer prepared and a 75-word answer, just in case.

10-word: It's about art forgery and the impossibility of duplication or replication. (ok, it's 11 words)

75 word: It's the story of a woman who is the director of 18th-19th Century prints and drawings at a prestigious auction house in New York who is grieving her dead son. The other protagonist is a frustrated Spanish artist living in Paris who turns to forging artwork stolen by the Nazis during World War Two for recognition and money. Eventually their stories converge, and the book asks questions about authenticity and replication of the irreplaceable. (That's 76 words).

I have to resist the 1000 word answer, which is what I'd really like to give, to gift the reader all the nuances I've crammed into those 300 pages, but no one really wants to listen to that: It's about love! And death! And science! And art! And marriage! And being an artist! And growing older! And raising children! And living in Paris! And New York! And art stolen by Nazis! And the insufficiency of reparations!

The only question I hate getting, though, is "What kind of writing do you do?" I usually answer: "Literary fiction." When the person stares at me blankly I add: "You know, stuff they read in college or in Oprah's Book Club. Stuff no one buys."

Wait, there's a question I hate more: "How many pages is your book?" If I answer that, what will that tell you? I know it's just a question people ask when they don't know anything about writing and want to express polite interest.

I'm thrilled when someone wants to know that I do… and I'll happily give that 1000 word explanation to whomever is interested.

Your elevator pitch?

Your book sounds great to me. I love your idea of "replication of the irreplaceable."

My book is about loss in early, early childhood and how it projects itself throughout the rest of a person's life. The theme is played out across two generations of a Jewish family from Cleveland, Ohio.

Sounds like an important theme you’re exploring—I can’t wait to read it. Maybe I could even have a copy signed by the author?

This has been so much fun corresponding with you. I’m glad the JBC introduced us!

Likewise! Now, to the bar!

Read more about Allison Amend here and read more about Austin Ratner here.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:31:00 GMT

Click below for Holocaust Remembrance Day reading:

A Question for You

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:26:00 GMT

Boaz Yakin has been blogging here all week for JBC and MJL. Editor's Note: The views expressed by Visiting Scribes are their own.

Hey, I have a question for you: How important is it for you to identify as a Jew? As a liberal or conservative one? As a Zionist or anti-Zionist? As religious or secular? How important to you is your tribal identification? How much room does it inhabit in your psyche? How much power does it hold in those parts of your mind that employ language and structure and iconography to help you situate yourself in the moment and provide you with a map, a compass, a barometer, so that you might feel you know who and where you are at any given point in time? Do you question it much, or do you simply accept it as a useful base from which to operate? And speaking of usefulness, how’s it working for you? Is it helping you? Bolstering your strength, both inner and outer, aiding you in achieving warmth and intimacy and connection in your personal relationships, allowing you to live your life as fully as possible? Or is it hurting you? Giving you something easy and pre-fabricated to fall back on and identify with rather than making an effort to expand yourself outward, limiting your relationships, circumscribing your life? Is it just a useful or unuseful label to stick on yourself, or is it much more than a label, an entire ecosystem of biology and behavior both born and bred that comprises what makes you you as truly as the particular composition of atoms into molecules into cells etc etc etc that define your shape, as mutable and impermanent as that might be? Is it a comfortable niche to sit it, because niches are comfortable, even when they might subject you to all manner of torture and affliction, because despite all that, nothing is less comfortable than standing in the middle of a vast nothingness with no landmarks or architecture to give you a sense of place or belonging?

I'm asking you this—but it's actually a question that, on the occasion that I think of myself as a Jew, which occurs often enough, I tend to ask myself. And I can’t say I’ve come up with any kind of definitive answer for it, or believe that I ever will.

Boaz Yakin is a screenwriter and film director based in New York City. Yakin studied filmmaking at New York City College and New York University.

A Love/Hate Relationship

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:12:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Boaz Yakin wrote about his father's stories growing up in British Mandate Palestine and empathy and conflict. He has been blogging here all week for JBC and MJL. Editor's Note: The views expressed by Visiting Scribes are their own.

How weird is it that here in America the very people who used to hate on the Jews something fierce now love us the way PETA loves animals? And that even more than Jews in general, they love them some Israel? How fast did it go from you can’t get into the country club—or in my case, heading home from school past the tough goy boys on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (it was the 70’s, there were still tough goys out there) and having a rock whipped at me along with an accompanying snort of “Jewboy” if I had somehow forgotten to take off my yarmulka—to turning on the news every day to the spectacle of some good ol’ boy politician on his knees desperately fellating anything circumcised that might fall within his purview? It’s been a strange confluence of events and ideology and who knows what else. Like, what exactly was it?

First the Christian Millennialists can’t get over the fact that there are Jews running the show in Judea again, which means the battle of Armageddon is approaching, and their Boy (ours originally, but whatever) will soon be riding down from the clouds with a flaming sword in his mouth and all that special effects meshugas that they can hardly wait for for a single minute longer. It also means as a result of those hopes that they are even more opposed to a two-state solution in Israel, or Judea, or Palestine, or whatever you want to call it, than the most rabid Zionist, as it runs contrary to Biblical prophecy and will cock-block the whole thing. Meanwhile the Cold War ends, and we get dragged into the Gulf War by our fearless leaders, and the Twin Towers are destroyed, and more war in the Middle East and a new awareness amongst our generally myopic populace of Islam spreading like a thought-virus all over the world, and—BANG—Muslims, who since the rise of the Israeli State tend to hate Jews almost as much (but not quite as much) as the Christians used to, are suddenly Public Enemy Number One; so it follows that the Jews they hated must now be America’s new best Pals. And let’s not forget all the old Yids who have been migrating to the Deep Southern state of Florida for the warmth and the waters, and now find themselves in the enviable position of being able to swing a national election this way or that…

So, the attitude shift kind of makes sense when you break it down, connect the dots and all that, but to a Jew with some years on him and some sense of history it still feels weird, is all I can say. And so many Jews both in America and Israel are like—whatever—I don’t give a shit why they’re kissing my ass all day all of a sudden, I just know it feels good, better than, say, being shoved into a ghetto or fleeing a pogrom or a Holocaust or whatever other fun we’ve been subjected to for the last 2000 years, so don’t ask too many questions, lean back and enjoy the lap dance. And I understand that sentiment well, and sympathize with it—I mean, we live in the moment, not in "history"—and the moment feels nice.

But for those inclined to think about the future, whatever that means, you know, the kind of people who worry about a rainy day coming, what they’re leaving their kids and all that kind of thing, it might be a good idea to remember that Jesus ain’t never coming back, ever, and that at some point our new pals are going to start getting antsy about it, and then the term “fair weather friend” will take on a whole new meaning. Or not. Who knows? Certainly not me.

Boaz Yakin is a screenwriter and film director based in New York City. Yakin studied filmmaking at New York City College and New York University.

New Reviews

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:13:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6278477}{module_webapps,14253,i,6277557}{module_webapps,14253,i,6277545}

Book Cover of the Week: A Guide to Being Born

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:56:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

JBC Network author Ramona Ausubel, whose debut novel No One is Here Except All of Us was one of my favorite book's of 2012, has a new book coming out next month from Riverhead! A Guide to Being Born is a collection of stories "that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition." To hold you over until May:

Ramona's short story "Tributaries" over at Electric Literature's Recommended Reading (a "single sentence animation" from the story can be found below)
Her blog posts for the Visiting Scribe

Single Sentence Animation

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Beyond Words

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, Boaz Yakin wrote about empathy and conflict. He will be blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week. Editor's Note: The views expressed by Visiting Scribes are their own.

I grew up listening to stories about those days, and that place— Jerusalem.

In New York City, in our Upper West Side apartment, my little brother and I watched my father act out the events and characters of his youth in British Mandate Palestine. He was a pantomime by trade and a teacher of physical acting, and when he told a story he didn’t just relate it with words— he performed it with every muscle in his face, with every physical gesture in his vast repertoire. And even then, though I thrilled and laughed at his exploits, I suspected that perhaps there was something exaggerated, slightly of the grotesque, in his portrayals of the multifarious denizens of that remote, ancient city; a city on the one hand so tiny and provincial, on the other so vast and timeless and redolent of eternity. A city against whose harsh, stony face the human dramas enacted by my father stood out in sharp, colorful relief, like a commedia dell’arte performance. Tragic, hilarious, and surely daubed with a huge dollop of fancy.

Then my parents would pack up for the summer and we would fly to spend several months with my father’s family in Israel… Get in the taxi from Tel Aviv and make the hour and half drive up to Jerusalem… Arrive at the corner of Jaffa Street across from the shouk, where my uncle lives with his huge family in the house that my great grandfather built over half a century before, in the precincts of what was then British Jerusalem… Get out of the cab, and breathe the suddenly dry, elevated air… Take in the sunlight glowing pink on the stone buildings, the strange, grotesque faces and postures of the city’s colorful, multifarious denizens… and then… realize, once again… that it was all true.

The truth of my father’s every gesture, every exaggeration, every outright lie, was borne out by the details of the real city I found myself in. And when I wrote this story I tried to put myself in my father’s shoes, as he told stories to my brother and me in our little apartment in New York City— mimicking voices, adopting postures, prancing, slouching and posing. Recreating what was into what is.

Boaz Yakin is a screenwriter and film director based in New York City. Yakin studied filmmaking at New York City College and New York University.

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...Francesca Segal

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:48:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Last week, Ben Lerner expressed his desire for readers to be active participants in the construction of what a poem or novel means. Today we hear from Sami Rohr Prize finalist Francesca Segal, author of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award winning novel The Innocents. The National Jewish Book Award judges wrote:

Edith Wharton’s novels were at once penetrating sociology and bestselling stories, and so it’s no accident that Francesca Segal’s The Innocents, modeled on Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, can dissect a community’s behaviors and beliefs nimbly while telling a charming page-turning tale. Set among traditional but not exactly Orthodox Jewish Londoners, and peppered with precise details of the way some of us live now, the novel sets up a romantic triangle—a good girl, a good boy who wants to be bad, and a "bad"girl, tinged with scandal—demonstrating that the old tension between community and individual that engendered modern Jewish literature over a century ago is still alive and well, at least in certain neighborhoods. What power do our communities possess to keep the young in the fold, and at what price do they wield it? Segal manages to expose a signal truth of contemporary Jewish life with warmth and wit.

Below, Francesca Segal writes about her need for peace and quiet and her desire to keep learning:

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

The lack of immediate feedback can be hard – one has to sit on the impulse to show one’s work too early. It’s vital to have the space and quiet in order to be creative, and I’m a firm believer in finishing a complete first draft before letting anyone else near it, but it can be hard if you need a little reassurance.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

Reading fiction. There are so many writers who have altered my perspective, subtle shifts that have stayed with me, and to whom I owe whatever wisdom I possess.

Who is your intended audience?

I don’t write with an audience in mind – if I allowed myself to imagine that anyone would read what I write, I would be too self-conscious to produce anything. I have to believe it will go no further than my own desk, and with that comes a little liberation.

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes, I’m at the beginning of the next novel. It’s exciting and (extremely) nerve-wracking.

What are you reading now?

I’m reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjui, and The Free World by David Bezmozgis. I like to have a few on the go at once.

Top 5 Favorite Books

This is almost impossible so I've stayed relatively contemporary but –

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
Still Life by A. S. Byatt

When did you decide to be a writer?

I don’t remember ever wanting to be anything else.

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

All I’ve ever wanted is the opportunity to keep writing, to keep learning, to keep getting better. Success for me is the chance to publish my second book, and then hopefully a third and forth. It’s such an unstable job –my definition of success is to earn the trust of a readership in the hopes that they will stay with you.

How do you write — what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

All I really need is peace and quiet – although that’s sometimes quite a tall order. I used to write in cafes when I needed to get out of my apartment, until I read a wonderful interview with Etgar Keret, who I admire hugely, saying that he thinks we become more self-conscious in social spaces and that it makes writers more self-conscious in their prose. I believe that. So now I just battle the cabin fever at home. That, and a great deal of caffeine.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I hope that it prompts readers to ask questions – about community, about family, about marriage. And I don’t think it’s trivializing to say that books should give pleasure, so I do hope that readers enjoy the novel, and that it feels emotionally honest.

Francesca Segal was born in London in 1980. Brought up between the UK and America, she studied at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, before becoming a journalist and writer. Her work has appeared in Granta, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Vogue UK and US, amongst many others. She has been a features writer at Tatler, and for three years wrote the Debut Fiction column in the Observer.

National Poetry Month

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:39:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Celebrate National Poetry Month with some recommended reading from Jewish Book Council and poetry-related blog posts from past Visiting Scribes:

Empathy and Conflict

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Boaz Yakin's most recent graphic novel, Jerusalem: A Family Portrait, illustrated by Nick Bertozzi, will be published later this month. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning. Editor's Note: The views expressed by Visiting Scribes are their own.

It seems to me that it’s hard for a feeling, empathetic person to know where to place himself in the midst of conflict. Since most people possess some degree of feeling and empathy, in order to live with themselves they don’t necessarily divorce themselves from these senses as they make decisions as to how and where to direct them. These decisions are determined by a host of factors—different in each individual and situation.

The bravest among us, of whom there are few, courageously allow their empathetic sense to extend outward in a manner that generously encompasses a wide variety of people, perspectives and feelings that might be in violent, seemingly intractable opposition to one another— and even more courageously allow their practical behavior and decisions to be strongly influenced by that understanding. The least brave, who number many, allow their empathy to encompass their family, their friends, their tribe— however far they choose to extend the net— and then shut themselves off to everyone and everything else in order to justify behavior that is born of the most primitive fears, anger, and desires. The rest of us, well, we live somewhere in the middle, constantly extending and withdrawing our empathy and understanding like a snail poking its antennae out of its shell as we try to balance our desire for openness, brotherhood and freedom with our anxieties, anger and fears.

Jerusalem, a graphic novel I wrote, inspired by the multitude of myths, stories, diatribes and musings I have been exposed to throughout my life by family, friends, enemies, and teachers, is an attempt to explore this struggle in others and within myself.

Boaz Yakin is a screenwriter and film director based in New York City. Yakin studied filmmaking at New York City College and New York University.

Jews and Baseball

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 21:15:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

The 2013 Major League Baseball season begins tomorrow!

Browse our site for a range of books that focus on Jews and baseball:

JBC Bookshelf: Baseball Edition

Reading List: Jews and Baseball

New Reviews

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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The Nuts and Bolts of Writing

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Jessica Soffer wrote about learning to breathe and a precious treat from the Passover seder plate. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Quite recently, someone asked me about my “process.” This someone wasn’t asking about the creative parts—the meandering through the dark, schlepping a bag full of puzzle pieces and seeking out the elusive slots where they might fit—but quite literally about what I do during my waking hours, which hours those might be, and when and if I stop for snacks. She was asking about the nuts and bolts.

What I wanted to say is that I know nothing (and that of course I stop for snacks). I’m just winging it. I’m still waiting to be found out. Still, I wrote 336 pages that will be printed and bound and on (some) shelves in just a few weeks, which is something one teensy bit better than nothing.

1. Get dressed every day (except when you feel like the very heart of what you’re writing is delicately wound into the fiber of your socks and robe)

2. Stop and move for food (except when you must, just must, have your fingers centimeters from your computer at all times)

3. Exercise in any form: stand up, walk, run, go to a yoga class (except when all the jostling around risks dispersing your very precious thoughts, and then stay put, very very put)

4. Get by with a little help from your friends (except when talking to anyone at all about anything at all will sully everything, make you forget or derailed or soft or sleepy)

5. Find inspiration in art, music, literature (except when they might be toxic to your work and undo all your efforts to find voice)

There you have it. Fool’s gold.

In the end, I think, anything you can do is my actual answer.

Also: do the best you can, however you can, every day that you can. Take care of your body, your wrists, knees and eyes. Take care of your computer, and back up what matters. Take care of your bills because Verizon doesn’t care that you’re writing the Next Great American Novel. Take care of the people that love you. They will be there when you pick your head up, but only if you play your cards right.

The process is long, there is no end to it—at least, not really—so don’t be dramatic and pull eight all-nighters just to show us that you can. Or do, if you can. Do.

Win a signed copy of Jessica Soffer's debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, here.

Related: Iraqi Jews Reading List

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...Ben Lerner

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

In our last two installments of "Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...", Stuart Nadler championed the short story and Shani Boianjiu shared her desire to write forever stories. Today we hear from Ben Lerner, author of the lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. With several awards, three collections of poetry, and a novel under his belt, JBC was thrilled to welcome Ben into the Sami Rohr Prize family. Read an interview with him over at The Believer and his short story "The Golden Vanity" in the The New Yorker. Below, find Ben Lerner on writing as time travel and writing that blurs fiction and reality:

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

I find all writing challenging. I sometimes think that a writer is a person who finds working with language more challenging than the average person does—that it’s less that the writer has a way with words than that the words have a way with the writer. One particular challenge that attends writing fiction: how to avoid reducing the messiness of lived experience to a tidy geometrical plot. I’m interested in fiction that acknowledges the irreducible complexity of reality, not fiction that cleans it up.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

I’m particularly interested in writers and books that blur the boundary between fact and fiction in order to dramatize how inseparable they ultimately are in our lived experience. To choose just one recent inspiration: W.G. Sebald.

Who is your intended audience?

I’m really not sure. I certainly write with the writers I love and respect in mind as possible readers. But one of the most exciting things about writing is the possibility your work will find and connect with someone you could never imagine in advance. I also feel like writing is a kind of time travel—I sometimes feel like I’m addressing the dead, or some imagined future reader, or like I’m a medium through which voices from the past might pass. Maybe that sounds a little crazy or grand, but I believe the language speaks through us as much as we speak through it.

Are you working on anything new right now?

I’m working on a new novel and also on a book of poems. And one of the poems seems to be creeping into the novel.

What are you reading now?

At the moment I’m reading two brilliant books of literary criticism: Writing Against Time (Michael Clune) and Our Aesthetic Categories (Sianne Ngai). I’ve also just reread Keith Waldrop’s quiet masterpiece, his memoir, Light While There Is Light.

Top 5 Favorite Books

I have no idea how to choose! And my favorites are always shifting. Here are five books I love off the top of my head in no particular order:

Jakob Von Gunten (Robert Walser)
My Life (Lyn Hejinian)
Three Poems (John Ashbery)
Dictee (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha)
Mimesis (Erich Auerbach)

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I think I was in Topeka, Kansas. But I don’t really remember a particular moment of decision. Language has always been primary in my experience and writing is a way of wrestling with it.

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

I think of writing as always involving failure. But I don’t mean that to be as depressing as it sounds—it’s the result of trying to do something impossible with language. So I guess success for me is writing something that manages to gesture beyond itself, to point towards what I can’t say.

How do you write — what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

Besides coffee, I have no reliable prop. One of the best and worst things about writing (at least for me) is that I always feel like I’m starting over. Having written a poem or novel doesn’t teach me how to write the next poem or novel. It’s always about what I can discover in the act of composition, so no amount of planning in advance really helps. This is probably one of the reasons so many writers go crazy.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I hope a reader will find that my narrator’s struggle to figure out the possibility of authentic experience in the arts and beyond captures something about our contemporary structures of feeling and thought. And I hope it’s more entertaining than that sounds. But ultimately I hope readers get something out of the book I didn’t know was there. I like to think the reader is an active participant in the construction of what a poem or novel means—not just a recipient of messages the author has consciously placed there.

Learning to Breathe

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Jessica Soffer wrote about a precious treat from the Passover seder plate. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I needed something. Everyone was dying. Or at least a lot of people were dying and it felt like everyone might, including me, die at the drop of a hat. I was having panic attacks on the subway. I was avoiding elevators and scaffolding and spinach and caffeine and planes and hospitals and graveyards.

I couldn’t breathe.

My parents are not religious. Someone told me to try yoga.

I was a gymnast for the great majority of my childhood. Yoga came easily. I breezed through the ranks.

I ended up in an Ashtanga class in Amagansett and had no idea what I was in for.

Ashtanga doesn’t bill itself as the “yoga of forced breathing,” but it might as well. It’s the same series, “system” of movements done (or supposed to be done) every morning, every day. It is strenuous and sequential and smart. At the core of it is the notion of synchronizing breath with movement. For every movement, a breath, which sounds nice enough but is challenging. Very. Because of the intensity of the poses, most people sweat. A lot. It’s different from Bikram in that the heat you create is from the inside out. It’s all you. Ujjayi breathing, or “victorious breath,” consists of steady inhales and exhales through the nose, equal in duration, accompanied by the “ocean sound” made by constricting the throat as one does to whisper. Ujjayi’s purpose: improve endurance, decrease distractions, release tension, warm the blood, which improves circulation and cleanses toxins and regulates heat. Too, and most importantly to me, Ujjayi calms the mind. Breath becomes a rhythm, a lullaby. In and out and in and out and in and out.

My first Ashtanga class nearly killed me—and got me completely hooked. My first Ashtanga teacher has been my only one really, or at least the only one that’s really mattered. She’s a die-hard. If she cannot hear your “ocean sound,” she says so. If she sees your mouth open, she says so. And if you cannot breathe, in and out and in and out and in and out, you cannot. You just cannot. It took me many months to get a place where I was comfortable with the poses, and then even longer to a place where the breath was as crucial as the positions. But eventually it was. So much so. In and out and in and out and in and out.

At first, I stopped thinking about dying because I was focused on the movements, on not messing up. After a while, I stopped thinking about dying because I was trying to do the movements better. When I became halfway decent, I stopped thinking because I was focused on the breath. On better breath.

I am aware that I said “better,” regarding yoga. Kill me. I am no longer afraid. On a plane, in turbulent moments, I practice Ujjayi. Elevators don’t paralyze me. Bring on the spinach. I am better.

In Ashtanga, I didn’t find God. I did, however, learn to breathe. I breathed like I meant it and then I breathed because I had to. You have to. In and out and in and out and in and out. And by breathing I realized that I wasn’t dead yet. Just the opposite. I was all breath.

Win a signed copy of Jessica Soffer's debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, here.

Related: Iraqi Jews Reading List

Precious Haroset

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Jessica Soffer's debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, will be published on April 16th. Win a signed copy here. She will be blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

I am bored to death, dying of starvation and on the brink of losing my mind at Passover dinner at my father’s sister’s house on Long Island. I’m four, maybe five. My mother has refilled my grape juice many more than four times but it’s not cutting it. She has a look on her face like she would have made a PB&J if she’d known what she was in for—what we were both in for—but she didn’t. There are many more relatives visiting from Israel than usual, which means, apparently, that there is no goofing around and no snacking. Who knew? We didn’t. I will die of starvation, I think to myself. They will find me in a puddle of grape juice with the yarmulke I’ve demanded to wear over my face, dead.

But I don’t die. Instead, I put my head into my mother’s lap and quickly fall into a deep sleep. Eventually, she nudges me awake. I sit up. Why am I awake? Same stuff, different blessing. But then I see. From across the table, my father is giving me the eye. I look around, everyone is engrossed in the text and so I slink under the table, lift up a bit of tablecloth to let in light. There are twenty sets of adult shoes and I have the urge to untie every one. But I’ve got bigger fish to fry. My father’s got a handful of romaine lettuce from who knows where and I snatch it up, scarf it down, barely chewing. I’m a rabbit on speed. I yank on his pant leg for more. What else you got? He lifts his index finger. One second. He can do better, I’m thinking. I know he can do better. I pray like they do in the movies. It’s Passover, after all. Moments later, the whitecap curl of a hardboiled egg has arrived. I’ve willed it here, I think. I should pray more often. I nearly skin my father’s fingers with my teeth. I wonder why I don’t eat eggs at every moment of every day. They are heaven. Nothing better. But I’m still hungry. I’m dying again. I wait. Is that it? I start untying my father’s shoes. He catches my drift. Another egg. Untying. Then another. Now, I’m over eggs. I never want to see an egg again.

Still, I wait.

Just before I lose hope, die not of starvation but egg overdose, my father’s palm is open and flat in front of me, as if revealing the tiniest baby bird. But it’s better than that. It’s a raft of matzo, a cluster of haroset balancing on top, shimmering and precious like something stolen from the Hall of Minerals and Gems at the Museum of Natural History. I treat it as he did, lift it from his hand into mine with care. Ever so gently. Little tiny nibbles. The sweetest. The most amazing. This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Why don’t I eat this every moment of every day? I savor it.

My father claps his hands without making a sound. Show’s over, folks, and just in time. I make my way back to my seat, my mother brushing a crumb off my bottom lip, the parsley is being passed around and I’m up. “No,” I say but my mother ignores me, puts a pile of it on my plate. “I’m full,” I begin to say but she covers my mouth with her hand, and smiles graciously at the crowd. “She’s starving,” she says and I know to nod.

Read more about Jessica Soffer here.

Related: Iraqi Jews Reading List

New Reviews

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:10:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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Book Cover of the Week: Kosher

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:01:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

A new title pubbing from Harvard University Press in May, Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food (Timothy D. Lytton), explores kosher food regulation. Read a Q&A with Lytton here.

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Self-Published Jewish-Themed Books Come of Age

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

by Stephen Witt

In the brave new digital world of the book business, self-published authors enjoy a new clout. And every week this translates into more self-published titles appearing on best seller lists across the nation than ever before. At the same time, traditional publishers, reviewers, and bookstores that once shunned self-published titles are now embracing these changes or risk falling into antiquity.

“Certainly, the validity of publishing on your own is now unquestioned,” says Jon Fine, Amazon.com’s director (the first) of author & publisher relations. “Even traditional publishers regularly trumpet the authors they’ve discovered from the self-published ranks. And traditionally successful authors are increasingly using services like Kindle Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, and others to reach their audiences in new and creative ways. The opportunity to tell your story, to a few or to many, has never been greater."

This trend is also reflected in the growing number of Jewish writers who are bucking the traditional publishing business and self-publishing their books, including Arizona-based Linda Pressman, whose Holocaust-related tome, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, was named the 2012 Grand Prize Winner in the 20th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Contest.

“I was previously represented by an agent who was unable to sell an earlier version of my manuscript,” said Pressman. “After our relationship ended I spent quite a while fixing the manuscript and building up my name recognition. I knew that the editors and publishing houses were being extremely cautious about what they were publishing and I felt it was unlikely that I'd be able to get a deal, having been turned down previously. Luckily, self-publishing had grown in the same time period and was a great option for me since I had built a reader base ready to read my work.”

Pressman’s reader base comes from both her humorous blog, BarMitzvahzilla, and her involvement as an editor and blogger for Poetica Magazine, a self-described vanity press that includes a print and online literary journal focusing on contemporary Jewish thought. But she also displays marketing savvy.

“I hired two publicists in the time period since my book was published. The cost makes this somewhat prohibitive. Of great help was one who helped me with book tours, local appearances, and submissions to various reviewers,” said Pressman.

“Much of my marketing was through social media that I did on my own. From finding Facebook Groups focused on topics in my book (Skokie, Survivors, Chicago, Memoir writers, etc.), to Twitter and blogging – these were all immensely helpful in marketing and promoting the book. An Amazon Author page and Looking Up Facebook page, both to post news about the book and author appearances, has also been helpful,” she added.

Pressman said the most amazing thing about self-publishing is the thing that's also the hardest: it's all up to you. There won't be a huge publishing house standing behind you, promoting your work, but you'll also have the satisfaction of knowing that any success is also your own,” she said.

“From a Jewish standpoint, I found that my work, being stereotyped as "Holocaust," did not find its place in traditional publishing but that there's actually a huge readership out there for Jewish writers and Jewish topics,” said Pressman.

Another self-published Jewish Holocaust author is Rimma Rose, a young Russian-American, whose debut novel, Cursed to Survive, has been garnering favorable reviews and is finding its own market. Rose’s take on the Holocaust is a beauty-and-beast story that reads more like a mystical mystery influenced by the Twilight series, and is, in fact, the first of a series of books featuring many of the same characters.

“I decided to self-publish my first book, because I was terrified of sending my manuscript to various places without knowing what would happen to it,” said Rose. “I read about self-publishing and it seemed easy and fast and I went for it. The biggest advantage of self-publishing is a total control I have over my work. The biggest pitfall of self-publishing is the fact that along with total control, the author is also responsible for promotions, public relations, and everything else.”

While self-published authors continue taking a greater market share this also means a reduced role in the book industry for editors, marketers, and promoters in traditional publishing houses along with their related network of agents, distributors, reviewers, and both chain and independent bookstores. Believers in this traditional model quickly point out its role as gatekeeper for readers, with the ability to curate what they see and judge as redeemable literature. They also point out some of the growing pains in self-publishing, such as the frequent lack of proper editing and professional book design.

But self-published authors counter that they enjoy a more mobile advantage and lower financial overhead than the traditional publishing model with its layers of decision makers. They are free, for example, to redesign covers and include stronger copy and story editing in subsequent editions at manageable costs. They can even utilize these improvements to re-launch their book, garnering even more promotion.

On the promotional end, self-published Jewish authors can easily find a multitude of Jewish-themed websites and blogs that cater to everything from the most observant Jews to the most secular and alternative Jewish lifestyles.

On the manufacturing side, Amazon’s CreateSpace service has been a game changer. With price ranges that fit almost every self-published author’s budget, CreateSpace will design and format both the cover and interior of the work plus carry it for distribution and sales on its website and list it on their promotional networks. They also give good discounts for author copies and a much higher royalty rate than traditional publishers through sales on Amazon.

Amazon is also a leader in e-books with its Kindle device, while other companies, such as BookBaby, convert an author’s work into other e-book formats compatible with such devices as the Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo.

“I've found that, with the lower price of my e-book version, I sell many more of them than the hard copies per month,” said Pressman. “Due to the size of my book (348 pages) and the manufacturing costs, I can't lower the price on the physical book to encourage greater sales, but I can do so with the e-book version.”

My road to self-publishing began in 2002 when I started chatting up the African-American self-published novelists and poets who sell their books on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. At the time I was a full-time reporter at a chain of papers in Brooklyn and every night I’d go home and squeeze out 500 words writing my first novel, American Moses. My mindset back then was I wanted a mainstream publishing deal. After hundreds of rejections a small agent finally agreed to take on American Moses and then the rejections started pouring in from publishing houses big and small.

Meanwhile, as I wrote draft after draft, the Fulton Street authors shared with me their triumphs and pitfalls to self-publishing and recommended books about it, which I read. Finally, in 2008, I decided that if these writers of contemporary urban literature were being locked out of the publishing industry for whatever reason then I was in excellent company. So I fired my agent and took the plunge by registering Never Sink Books (NSB) as my publishing business.

In 2009, I published American Moses to very good reviews, and a YouTube interview of me about the novel has over 20,000 hits and counting. American Moses has made its money back and continues to sell.

Then in 2010, I took a buyout from my job as a reporter to write my second novel, The Street Singer: A Tale of Sex, Money and Power in a Changing Brooklyn, which I self-published in September 2012. It’s a satire about a subway musician who gets involved with helping Brooklyn land a basketball team. Both the daily Metro and the Daily News wrote stories on it and the Daily News gave it an excellent review. In November, I sold the book publishing rights to Changing Lives Press.

Currently, I’m on a guerilla marketing plan in that I sell both of my novels in the subway, car-to-car. You may have even heard my pitch. “That’s right, ladies and gentleman – for ten dollars – the price of two cups of Starbucks coffee – you can enrich your mind.”

By far, the coolest thing about selling my novels in the subway is the people I meet. They include agents and readers, doers and dreamers. A number of people have given me their positive essence in the space of one subway stop in the form of words of encouragement and/or purchases of my books.

Also cool is the fact that I have two published novels on the market and I’m working on my third. As Pressman says, the bottom line is that how an author is published now means much less than what it is that the author publishes.

“I believe that, because of consumer demand, books will become lower priced, creating more of an equal playing field, and I don’t know exactly how this will look, but I know there will have to be some web-based method of finding the books, like Internet bookstore browsing, where perhaps the site owners curate the offerings (much as independent bookstores do now) and readers trust their recommendations,” she said.

Stephen Witt's Top Five "Online Resources for Writers Looking to Self-Publish" can be found here.

Stephen Witt is an award-winning journalist with two novels. This includes the self-published American Moses (2009) on his Never Sink Books imprint, and The Street Singer (2012) published by Changing Lives Press. Reach him at info@NeverSinkBooks.com.

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...Shani Boianjiu

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Over the next several weeks, we'll be introducing you to the five fiction finalists for this year's Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Last week, we introduced you to Stuart Nadler, who shared his love for the shorty story with our readers. Today, we hear from Shani Boianjiu, an Israeli writer who was named the youngest recipient ever of the National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 and whose debut novel The People of Forever Are Not Afraid was excerpted in the New Yorker. In a recent JBC/Jewcy #JLit Twitter Book Club, Shani discussed why she's NOT the voice of her generation ("My book is weird, and mine, and does not represnt anyone"), the many reviews and articles about her book, and the Israeli army. Below, find out more about the author who, in her first novel, "shows considerable range, creating surreal, absurd dilemmas for her characters:"

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

That the stakes are so high—there are so many wonderful books out there, so you must write something that buys you a seat at the table or not do it at all. Also, being alone.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

When I was in the army I used to make up stories during long guarding shifts and keep them in my head for weeks, retelling them to myself and tweeking them a bit in my head until I reached a computer and finally typed the story down. So I would say that waiting had been my inspiration for writing fiction. Also my love of books. Reading makes me feel alive in a way nothing else ever had.

Who is your intended audience?

A twenty-four-year-old Chinese American girl from Marlborough, MA who works at Target. Also a couple of other people I love.

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes. It is a book!

What are you reading now?

Contemporary memoirs. Basically every memoir that was written in the last five years. All of them. And at the same time. I have no idea why. Also, [the forthcoming novel] We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo and Bruno Schulz’s stories.

Top 5 Favorite Books

That’s impossible for me to answer, and it changes every minute, but if I had to choose five right now I’d say:

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
El Atsmi book series by Galila Ron-Feder Amit (because I am actually a kid)
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The Prime of Miss Jean Brody by Muriel Spark
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I never decided to become a writer; I decided to write. I think the first time I decided to do that I was seventeen, and waiting for a train. I still have to decide to write every time I do it though.

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

I wish to write forever stories—stories that only I can write and that will live in people’s heads and have lives of their own inside those heads. It does not matter to me how many heads, only that the story be worthy to live forever in someone’s head. I am still far from that, which is why I have to work hard.

How do you write — what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I usually get an idea for a story or a scene or a character and then I keep it in my head and retell it to myself hundreds of times until I feel like my head will explode if I don’t type the story down immediately. When I do type down what I have in my head, I spend ten percent of my time actually writing and the rest jumping around in my room and listening to music.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I want them to care and think deeply about the lives of people who don’t exist and who they cannot imagine being.

New Reviews

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:13:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6239691}{module_webapps,14253,i,6239708}{module_webapps,14253,i,6238276}

Rabbi Gafni's Revenge

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:57:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Yuval Elizur examined religious political power in Israel and January's elections and Lawrence Malkin discussed the tension between tradition and modernity in contemporary Judaism and its consequences. Today, Yuval Elizur reveals Rabbi Moshe Gafni's powerful hand. Yuval and Lawrence are the co-authors of the recently published The War Within: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation. They have been blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

Of all the representatives of the religious parties in Israel’s Knesset, none have been more powerful or outspoken than Moshe Gafni, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who served as Chairman of the Finance Committee in the last parliament. In this key fiscal position, the rabbi was a master at diverting funds to haredi causes, especially yeshiva subsidies to the separate school system devoted mainly to teaching and debating the Torah—the religious academies that some secular Jews have angrily characterized as Jewish madrassas.

Now that secular representatives are in the ascendant following January’s national elections, Gafni has turned angrily on Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing his former political ally of betrayal. But in order to form a coalition Netanyahu needs the votes of two new parties, one the tribune of religious nationalists and the other of secular Israelis. Both refuse to serve in any government that includes ultras like Rabbi Gafni, largely because his supporters demand continued exemption from military service.

In the snake pit of Israeli politics, it could be payback time for Bibi for abandoning his ultra-Orthodox supporters in order to stay in power as prime minister, and this could have international repercussions far beyond the local problems of the yeshivot. The rabbi has warned that Netanyahu will soon "be sorry" for deceiving him and the other representatives of the ultras by "shamefully" leaving them out of power.

In an article in the popular daily Yedioth Aharonot, Rabbi Gafni admitted that although in his former capacity as Finance Committee chairman he was supposed to oversee the expenditures formally approved by the Knesset, almost every day money was dispensed "under the radar"—his words—for the benefit of Netanyahu’s Likud party, then the dominant parliamentary group. Since Gafni now has blown the whistle on what are politely called “unofficial” budgets, that almost certainly means the end of such disbursements, not only for the religious parties but for the parties that will serve in government when the new coalition is formed, probably later this month.

What disturbs Gafni and his religious colleagues most are the warnings expressed not only by the politicians but above all by the technicians and experts of the Ministry of Finance. They were, of course, fully aware of the tricks used to pad budgets and transfer government money off the books, but they dared not clash with any Likud finance minister or with Gafni’s own Knesset Finance Committee.

That leaves Gafni holding a powerful hand that could embarrass Netanyahu if he shows it. The rabbi made it clear that through the years he had accumulated substantial information about how to tamper with the budget and would have no hesitation in using it against the ruling parties that are willing to shut him out of government and probably will succeed. His most powerful trump most likely would be disclosing payments believed to have been funneled through Bibi’s former government to support illegal West Bank settlements, for example the ones that put down a few armed families in trailers atop Palestinian hilltops and then spread, seeking official recognition.

The establishment and expansion of these and other more organized settlements is viewed by the Obama administration as a principal barrier to any peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, and Netanyahu has always insisted they do not have the support of his government. It is not hard to imagine how it would put him at a disadvantage if all this comes out while he is dealing with Washington.

Yuval Elizur is a sixth generation Israeli, living in Jerusalem. The author of several books, he is a former deputy editor and economics reporter for Israel’s largest daily newspaper Ma’ariv, and has served as a Jerusalem correspondent for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. A veteran of two wars, he was the Columbia School of Journalism’s first Israeli graduate.

A Novel About Early Childhood

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:49:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize winner Austin Ratner discussed the land of the living versus the land of "The Princess Bride." He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Some academics have observed that young Jewish writers do not mine their personal lives for material in the same way that Jewish writers did a generation ago. In my own case, this is and isn't true. My first novel, The Jump Artist, was based on someone else’s life and took place in lands and days disparate from my own. My second novel, In the Land of the Living, which is being released by Little Brown this week, draws on my own personal experiences and on events in the history of my own family. It’s first and foremost about loss at a tender age, and finding your way out from under the pall of grief, back to the land of the living, and to all that makes life worth living. (Why am I not on Oprah’s book list?)

If a book gets its license to exist from a fresh or unique subject, then my book’s claim would lie in its manner of depicting early childhood. Most novels do not incorporate early childhood into their storylines or into their characters at all, except in metaphorical ways. Mary Shelley and Toni Morrison are two writers who invented rather ingenious novelistic contraptions to represent early childhood: Shelley did it by writing of a human man made from scratch and educated (and abused) like a child, Morrison by turning a dead child into an adult ghost in Beloved. In his autobiographical novel Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Tolstoy wrote about his mother’s death, which happened when he was two, but he revised his age to something like eight to make the scenes more artistically manageable. James Joyce writes directly of early childhood in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but he does so impressionistically and does not draw any firm connections between those opening early childhood scenes and later ones. I have taken a different approach by depicting early childhood experiences directly and carrying through their implications in every other scene of the book.

Having said that, there is something suspicious to me in the notion that a novel needs “uniqueness” in order to be valuable. “Uniqueness” sounds a lot like “competitive advantage”—a phrase from the world of commerce, not literature. A writer sets out to portray what is true to him or her, and also, usually, what is beautiful. New styles, new philosophies, new insights into character, forays into unknown subject matter—these things come about automatically when new voices do a good job examining the same old world on a cutting edge that is provided to them by time itself: another day.

Austin Ratner's new novel, In the Land of the Living, is now available.

A Trip to Russ & Daughters

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:32:00 GMT

JBC's Justin Petrillo travels to Russ & Daughters for some very important research for his review of Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built:

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Book Cover of the Week: Jacob's Folly

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:59:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Last week, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Rebecca Miller's new novel Jacob's Folly, "a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book, brimful of sparkling, unexpected characters, that takes on desire, faith, love, [and] acting." Oh, and the main character, Jacob Cerf, an eighteenth-century Parisian Jew, has been reincarnated as a ﬂy in the Long Island suburbs of twenty-first-century America. Read more about Jacob's Folly, and the influence of Kafka, over at NPR here, and check out Rebecca Miller's official website here.

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Follow the Talmud or a Jewish Sharia?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:10:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Yuval Elizur examined religious political power in Israel and January's elections. Today, Lawrence Malkin discusses the tension between tradition and modernity in contemporary Judaism and its consequences. Yuval and Lawrence are the co-authors of the recently published The War Within: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation. They will be blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

No American Jew could have experienced a more inspiring introduction to Israel that I did upon arriving in darkness aboard the first plane from London after the start of the Six-Day War. Within hours I was in Jerusalem watching the Battle for the Old City from the terrace of the King David Hotel. In the morning we drove a rented Volkswagen along the tank tracks to avoid mines and soon came upon soldiers celebrating their historic conquest by praying at the Western Wall. Never observant, I joined in prayers with this elite brigade of Jewish paratroopers, recruited mainly from secular kibbutzim. Their tribune was no less than Israel's chief rabbi blowing the shofar—a ram's horn blast that stirred Jewish souls around the world.

I remained for several weeks to report on the problems facing the victorious nation, most notably the unforeseen conquest of the West Bank from Jordan. It was during that assignment that I first met and befriended Yuval Elizur, then the Jerusalem correspondent of The Washington Post and now the co-author of our book, The War Within. I endured the baleful stares in the Mea Shearim, a dozen blocks set aside for ultra-Orthodox, then a tourist curiosity because it was widely believed that this anachronistic sect would wither away in modern Israel. How wrong we were. Years later, they have become a powerful minority determined to set the tone for society in the Holy City, and the leaders of American Jewry have tread carefully to avoid antagonizing them.

Although the majority of American Jews belong to Reform and Conservative congregations, the American Jewish establishment has maintained connections with the Israeli parties representing the Orthodox, which until now were an essential part of the nation's coalition governments. For example, within days of the military conquest of the holiest place of worship for all Jews, the Orthodox rabbinate took control of the Western Wall, banned Reformist devotions, and literally walled off women who came to pray. Even when the women were given access to a small sector, there was no serious criticism by major American Jewish organizations lest it be seen as an attack on the government that would give comfort to Israel's enemies.

American defenders of the Orthodox argue that there are "many shades of black." But the deepest shade have long had the most political influence and in consequence enjoy the most egregious privileges, the largest subsidies, and the greatest isolation from Israeli society. No American Jew outside the Orthodox enclaves in Brooklyn and around New York City—sects with respected elders recently convicted of fraud and sexual abuses—would agree to a public subsidy of sixty per cent of ultra-Orthodox males who are unemployed, or almost one hundred thousand able-bodied and subsidized yeshiva students who escape military service while they study nothing but sacred texts and learned commentary.

Jews have thrived and won acceptance as both Jews and Americans by adapting our religious observance and culture to the customs of the country. Whenever permitted by local rulers, Jews have always done so. That is a fundamental theme of the Talmud: how does a Jew in a strange land live as a Jew? Of course it is easier in a country of religious tolerance like ours, but surely Jewish survival does not depend on literal adherence to 613 biblical commandments dating back several thousand years: it depends on adapting those rules to modern life—and certainly not on re-creating the Jewish ghettoes that we have spent centuries trying to escape. That is a formula for alienation, irrelevance, rejection, and eventually the disappearance of all Jews, and it applies with equal force to the embattled nation of Israel, which has succeeded against all odds by adopting modernity as its culture

It is an axiom of warfare that the longer one faces an enemy, the more each side has to adopt the other's tactics to survive and thus willy-nilly start to resemble the other. Israel will not be strengthened by falling into the same fundamentalist trap as proponents of Muslim sharia in their own countries; on the contrary, both sides risk falling back into the past by refusing to embrace the present.

Lawrence Malkin is an award-winning journalist and writer. Assigned to Jerusalem and the West Bank during the Six-Day War, his foreign reporting has appeared in Time magazine, The International Herald Tribune, and The Associated Press. He is the author of several books, including Kreuger’s Men, which inspired the Oscar-winning film “The Counterfeiters.” Visit him online at http://www.lawrencemalkin.com.

My Name Is Inigo Montoya

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:03:00 GMT

Austin Ratner won the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his first novel, The Jump Artist. His new novel, In the Land of the Living, is now available. He will be blogging here this week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Remember Mandy Patinkin’s character Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride? When Montoya was a child, the story goes, the six-fingered man killed his father. He also slashed Montoya’s face, leaving him with scars on both cheeks. Montoya spends the rest of his life training to exact vengeance on his father’s killer. He practices not only his swordsmanship but just what he’ll say when he finally finds and confronts the six-fingered man: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

The main character in my second novel In the Land of the Living is a boy like that, a boy with a dead father, a boy bent on recompense and committed to its pursuit for as long as it takes. His problem is that there is no six-fingered man to kill.

Instead, he attempts to resurrect his father in a manner of speaking—by hewing to certain superhuman ideals in order to safeguard his father’s legacy from the oblivion of the grave. He will brook no failure in his career or his personal life and strives to excel everybody at everything (with the exception of phys ed). Anyone and everyone who gets in his way is the six-fingered man.

William Goldman, the screenwriter of The Princess Bride, has a cynical streak. It’s evident in his first novel Temple of Gold and it’s evident in the way he wreathes so many ironies into the sentimentality of The Princess Bride. A little of that cynicism comes out when Inigo Montoya actually does confront the six-fingered man. His lifelong search has come to an end at last, and Montoya delivers his practiced line, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” He battles his enemy by sword as planned, but the six-fingered man appears to defeat him. Montoya slumps backward, mortally wounded, and gives up with a line that still sucks the air from my lungs: “Sorry, Father. I tried.” It doesn’t seem to be Inigo Montoya the man that’s defeated then; it’s the boy who took on a task that was much too big for him out of love for the father that should have been there to help him.

Being a feel-good Hollywood movie, Montoya of course fights back from the edge of defeat. But in a way, what follows is even more cynical. The six-fingered man begs for his life. He promises Montoya anything he wants in exchange for mercy and Montoya answers, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch,” and he kills the six-fingered man.

He doesn’t fail his father after all, but because he can’t have the one thing he wants—for his father to be alive—he does in a sense fail himself. He asks his friend what he ought to do with his life now that his quest is over, and when his friend suggests he become a pirate, it seems ridiculous even according to the unreal, comedic laws of Hollywood fantasy. With his face alone, Mandy Patinkin smuggles into the scene a look of haunting ennui before the comedy-romance carries on with its merry business.

My book, In the Land of the Living, is a pretty funny book—it needs to be, to balance out the tragedy at the core of it—but it’s no Hollywood comedy. It’s a realist novel, and its protagonist doesn’t have the option of sailing away as the Dread Pirate Roberts, much as he’d like to. The land of the living is a less forgiving place than the land of The Princess Bride. Neither the death of the six-fingered man nor suicide solve the problem of grief. The only way forward is to figure out how to live a good life. And that is where my main character’s odyssey begins. Off he goes through graveyards and hospitals, loving and losing, traveling with his brother from L.A. to Cleveland in search of an answer to the question of how to live.

I think of it as a modern-day Don Quixote. In Part I, I used chapter titles that satirize medieval romance just as Cervantes did. It’s a novel that purposely dwells in an unstable region between comedy and tragedy, dream and reality, which is to say that it dwells in the real world, where the laws of nature are unyielding, and the human heart unflagging.

Check back on Thursday for more from Austin Ratner.

Passover Roundup

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:08:00 GMT

Posted by Jackie Anzaroot

Passover is only two weeks away! For Passover book recommendations, check out our list of our Passover favorites as well as our list of children's Passover books. Our longer Passover reading list can be found here.

For some more ideas on Haggadot to use, here are some that we've featured on our ProsenPeople blog over the years: the artistic Passover Haggadah by Dov Bleichfeld; In Every Generation, the JDC Haggadah; Alef Betty's Urban Family Haggadah; and Slate's highly condensed version of the Haggadah, "A Passover Service for the Impatient." Also check out last week's Visiting Scribe posts by Jan Aronson, where she discusses illustrating the new Bronfmann Haggadah.

If you're still unsure about your choice of Haggadah or are looking to try something new, we've asked some of our readers about their choices for this year and the most popular Haggadah seems to be Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander's The New American Haggadah. Other popular choices include the classic Maxwell House Haggadah, A Passover Haggadah: As Commented Upon by Elie Wiesel and Illustrated by Mark Podwal and A Night to Remember by Mishael and Noam Zion.

You can also take advantage of the offer at the top (and left) of this page for a 20% discount off of Sharing the Journey: The Haggadah for the Contemporary Family.

New Kids' Cookbook Has a Story to Tell

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:28:00 GMT

Posted by Miri Pomerantz-Dauber

"A fun book for family sharing" is the description on the back cover of Jewish Fairy Tale Feasts (Crocodile Books USA, 2013), and, looking through the book, it really is! The book, which features Jewish folktales paired with a corresponding recipe and beautiful illustrations, is intended for children ages 5-11, but it crosses generations in a way that is unusual—both the stories and the recipes will appeal to adults and kids equally. The project is a collaboration between the mother-daughter team of master storyteller Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple, the cook behind the book's recipes, with illustrations by Sima Elizabeth Shefrin.

Here's a little taste from the Main Course section of the book, reprinted with permission:

The Pomegranate Seed

“May it be Your will, O Lord our God, that our good deeds will increase like the seeds of the pomegranate.”

—ROSH HASHANAH PRAYER

A hungry Jew, whose family was starving, stole a loaf of bread from the market. But as soon as he slipped the loaf into the waistband of his trousers, the stall owner began to shriek, “Thief! Thief!”

The man began to run, but he was no better at running than he was at stealing. Within three or four steps he felt the heavy hands of the sultan’s guards on his shoulder.

They marched him off to prison, where in the near dark of his cell he found a single pomegranate seed on the dirt floor.

“Why is the Lord plaguing me?” he thought. “Here I am about to be executed for stealing a loaf of bread so that my children would not starve, and He sends me a pomegranate seed.”

But, since the rabbis always said, “The Lord does not toy with us,” he gave that seed much thought.

When the guards brought him out to the open courtyard for his execution, the Jew was ready. He turned his face up to the executioner and spoke so loudly, everyone—including the sultan, himself—could hear, “Kill me as you must, but do not throw away my magic pomegranate seed.”

“What nonsense is this?” growled the executioner.

“Not nonsense at all. If you plant it, it will grow instantly into a great pomegranate tree, laden with ripe fruit. But …” the Jew shrugged.

“But what?” The executioner lowered his axe and leaned forward.

“The seed will only grow if you have never stolen anything. So you see, it is useless to me now.”

The executioner trembled. “I have taken things from the pockets of those I have executed, instead of giving it to their heirs. I cannot plant the seed.”

The Jew held up the seed to the guards. “Is there one among you who can plant the seed?”

The guards conferred amongst themselves. Finally, one came forward. “We have each taken golden spoons from the sultan’s table. We cannot plant the seed.”

The thief turned to the sultan’s vizier. “And you, mighty sir?”

The vizier trembled. “I have … um … occasionally pocketed coins from the sultan’s treasury. Ummmm … coins owed to me.” He looked quickly down at the ground.

“Then, magnificent sultan, it is up to you to plant the seed,” the Jew said.

The sultan smiled. “And haven’t I taken entire countries from other sultans? I doubt I could plant that seed.”

“Oh mighty and powerful people, you have taken trinkets, coins, golden spoons, entire countries, and still retain your high status and wealth. And here am I, a poor Jew, who only wanted to feed his starving children. Yet you will live and I will die.”

The sultan laughed. “What a clever man you are. I need someone like you around to remind me how a life can be saved by a simple pomegranate seed.” He made the Jew a royal gardener and moved his family into the palace, where they never went hungry again.

We found four versions of this story: in Peninnah Schram’s The Hungry Clothes and Other Jewish Folktales, as “The Pomegranate Seed”; in Sheldon Oberman’s Solomon and the Ant and Other Jewish Stories, as “The Magic Seed”; in Nathan Ausubel’s A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, as “The Wise Rogue”; and in Barbara Diamond Goldin’s A Child’s Book of Midrash, as “The Clever Thief.”

This story is originally from Morocco, but stories about Jews (and Arabs) who manage by cleverness to get themselves out of impossible situations are quite popular throughout the Middle East.

In some tellings, the thief is Jewish, in others he is not. But the story is a popular one amongst Middle Eastern Jews.

This is Tale Type 929—“Clever Defenses” and K 500—“Escape from Arrest by Trickery.”

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist...Stuart Nadler

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Earlier this month, JBC announced the five fiction finalists for this year's $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The authors are as diverse as the books themselves, so, here at the ProsenPeople, we thought we'd give you the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the 2013 Rohr contenders. We asked each author a few questions about writing, their Rohr finalist book, favorite books, and, of course, what's up next for them. Today we hear from Stuart Nadler, author of the short story collection The Book of Life. Stuart actually just published his debut novel, Wise Men, so if you haven't had time to read it, go on out and grab yourself a copy.

No stranger to the Jewish Book Council, in 2011, Stuart blogged for our Visiting Scribe series, was interviewed for our Emerging Voices column, and participated in a #JLit Twitter Book Club. If that wasn't enough, JBC reviewer Phil Sandick stated that:

With [The Book of Life], Nadler firmly establishes himself within the tradition of short story writers such as John Cheever and Richard Ford, and announces himself as a promising voice in contemporary fiction.

Below, Stuart discusses the books of his youth, writing without internet, and his love for the short story:

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

Everything about writing is a challenge. Writing fiction is that rare task in which practice and repetition and some perceived confidence only seem to make it harder to do well.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

I’ve always wanted to write. When I was young––maybe seven or eight––I got as a gift a set of classic novels simplified for children. These were the first books I ever really loved. Most of them were adventure stories: Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine. Ever since then I’ve wanted to write.

Who is your intended audience?

I’m not sure if I have an intended audience in mind when I work. The best and most surprising thing about writing a book is that it goes out into the world, and you never know who might pick it up and read it and find a connection in the work.

Are you working on anything new right now?

I’ve just published a new novel called Wise Men. Apart from that, I’m in the middle of two projects. Both of them are novels––or at least, right now they are.

What are you reading now?

I’ve just started Richard Ford’s Canada, and so far it’s terrific.

Top 5 Favorite Books

This is impossible to do, but here are five books I love:

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Stories of John Cheever
The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I’ve always wanted to write, as long as I can remember.

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

If there is a mountaintop, I would hope, simply, that it means that I’ve had the opportunity to keep working and writing.

How do you write — what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I’ve shed just about all the superstitions and limits and quotas and page-limits that I used to toy with and try. I prefer to write early, and often. I write on a computer without any internet access, and although it never used to be this way, increasingly I write in silence, without music on in the background. And I always leave myself a hint for the next day’s work.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

Although I’m writing another novel now, I’d love it if people read The Book of Life and sought out more short fiction because of it. I love the short story. It’s a beautiful art form and one that I think is under appreciated. That’s what I would love.

Religious Political Power in Israel Comes to a Halt

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:06:00 GMT

Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin are the co-authors of the new book The War Within: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation. They will be blogging here all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning. Today, Yuval Elizur takes a look at religious political power in Israel and January's elections.

For many years the political power of Israel's Orthodox minority spread as if it would never reach a limit. While their number of seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, remained small in relation to their power and also remarkably stable, the Orthodox rabbis and their political representatives influenced government policy by offering to vote as a bloc to sustain any ruling coalition. There was a price, of course: exemption from military service and subsidies for strict religious education and the welfare of the yeshiva students. These and their other favorite projects expanded after each election campaign. No wonder that an increasing number of Israeli intellectuals, including a noted sociology professor at Hebrew University, warned that Israel might soon become a theocratic state not unlike Iran.

But finally came a pushback in the decades-long battle between State and Synagogue. The results of this January’s elections proved that a good part of the political strength of the Orthodox may have been a myth. It finally may be receding toward a reality more representative of Israeli society, which is predominantly secular in practice although committed to Judaism as a religion.

It all began in 1948 during the first Israeli government when Prime Minister David Ben Gurion excused a mere 400 Orthodox yeshiva students from serving in the army and ceded to the rabbinical courts total jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jewish women in the new state. This set the pattern for the small religious parties’ clever manipulation of the ruling parties, which needed their parliamentary votes to hold power –whether the leftist Labor governments of the early days of the state or the rightist governments of recent years.

To the surprise of many Israelis, the elections demonstrated that religious parties can be a serious political liability and no longer an asset purchased by budgets and political concessions. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu they have become a menacing factor that are literally stuck in his throat as he struggles to form a new coalition. For more than a month since the January 22nd elections, the leader of Israel's largest political party, Halikud Beitenu, has been unable to form a government without antagonizing the religious parties. According to Israeli law, Netanyahu has until mid-March to form a government. If he can’t, President Shimon Peres must declare new elections.

Trying to work out deals under this sword of Damocles, it seems likely that Netanyahu will somehow succeed in forming a government with or without the votes of the religious parties. Yet there is a lesson to be learned from the present debacle: The political leverage of the religious parties has been dramatically reduced. From now on, both right- and left-wing leaders will try to form governments on their own from the nation’s handful of parties and perhaps even reform Israel's political system without the need to depend on the support of the religious parties by kowtowing to them.

Let one thing be clear: all this political maneuvering has very little to do with the influence of religion on life in Israel. That will continue to be substantial. Even with the religious parties in the opposition, Israel will be still a country where most yeshiva students will not serve in the army, the Sabbath will be an officially enforced day of rest, and only kosher food will still be served in the army. There will still be rabbinical marriages although civil marriages may finally be possible through a series of interim arrangements.

But whatever the shape – and stability – of the ruling coalition that finally emerges, the veto power of the rabbis has been blunted and may finally be broken.

2013 Children's Passover Favorites: New and Old

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT

JBC children's editor Michal Malen compiled a list of children's Passover books below, including new and recent titles, as well as older favorites. Feel free to comment and let us know your own favorite Passover books for children!

Recently Published

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Older Favorites

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Book Cover of the Week: The Slippage

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:34:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Not only does Ben Greenman have a great cover for his newest book, The Slippage: A Novel (pubbing from Harper Perennial on April 23rd), but an awesome website to boot. Spend some time catching up on all things Ben Greenman over there until you can get your hands on this beauty (and, just a guess, but I imagine the contents will give the cover a run for its money):

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

Why I Put a Map in The Bronfman Haggadah

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:19:00 GMT

Earlier this week, artist Jan Aronson wrote about how she became an illustrator and her illustrations for The Bronfman Haggadah. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Many people have asked why I included a biblical map in The Bronfman Haggadah. Well, for starters, I love maps and I guess I assume that other people love them as well.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time poring over maps. Growing up in New Orleans, maps helped me figure out where I was in relation to the world. I wanted to know, for instance, where I was in relation to Europe. Where was Paris?

I also loved the colors of maps, as maps are very beautiful. Indeed, I think they are beautiful for a reason: so that we may enjoy and admire them as we investigate the world and place ourselves within a certain universe.

For that reason, I thought it would be useful and important to be able to turn to a page in the Haggadah and see the part of the world that we're talking about. I also realized that I’d never seen a map in a Haggadah—and I have looked at countless illustrated Haggadot. And so, I decided that a map would indeed be a very interesting, unique, and informative detail.

This led to many days of research about biblical geography, and that’s when things got complicated. There’s an open-endedness about our story and it is nearly impossible to pinpoint specifics. It turns out that there are five possible sites for Mount Sinai, and there are at least three possible routes taken by the Jews—there were established trade routes, important cities flourishing, and various tribes settled among the land.

I know that I am not alone in loving maps, so I hope that including one in The Bronfman Haggadah will not only entertain and inform readers, but also open their eyes to a new aspect of the Passover story.

Visit Jan Aronson's official website here.

The Best Place on Earth

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:15:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Nancy Richler discussed the perspective of her novel The Imposter Bride and why she decided to forgo research. She has been blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

A few weeks ago I was asked to provide a blurb for an about-to-be-published collection of short stories, The Best Place on Earth, by a young Israeli born writer named Ayelet Tsabari. Set against a backdrop of war, conflict and the army service, with underlying themes of displacement, the quest for ‘home,’ love and loss, the stories in this collection pulse with raw energy as they unfurl along the fault lines within Israeli society. The author stretches herself to write from a broad variety of perspectives, and while not every story works perfectly she captures the particular intensity, urgency and ambivalence of the young Israelis she depicts, and there is a compelling urgency to each of the stories and to the collection as a whole that reflects the multifaceted society she brings to life.

Tsabari is an Israeli of Yemeni descent, and her stories are all told from the perspective of Mizrahi Israelis. I realized as I was reading it how rarely I have seen that sector of Israeli society represented in fiction and how hungry I am for more fiction about the lives of non-Ashkenazi Israelis. A recent visit to Ethiopia intensified that interest, so if anyone can recommend fiction by Mizrahi and/or Ethiopian Israelis that has been translated into English I would really appreciate it. (I wish I didn’t have to rely on English translations or books written in English as Tsabari’s is but, alas, my Hebrew is not up to the task) You can write to me at contact@nancyrichler.com.

Comment below to let us know which books you would recommend! Find out more about Nancy here.

New Reviews

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:49:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6228004}{module_webapps,14253,i,6017166}{module_webapps,14253,i,6223612}

How I Became an Illustrator

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:22:00 GMT

Earlier this week, artist Jan Aronson wrote about her illustrations for The Bronfman Haggadah. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

When Edgar asked me to illustrate the text of The Bronfman Haggadah, which at that point he had been writing for several years, my first response was: “But I’m not an illustrator!”

“Good. I don’t want an illustrator. I want you to do it,” was his swift reply.

And so began a project that was the opportunity of a lifetime. An artist does not often get the chance to have complete and full creative freedom to do what they want with something that is so meaningful—both in a personal and spiritual sense.

Not once was there anyone looking over my shoulder trying to edit what I was doing. Certainly not Edgar or even Rizzoli, the publisher.

This project was a chance to actually branch out and use all of my creative juices. And it was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do at this point in my life as an artist. I’ve spent many years in my studio alone creating various bodies of work, so to finally have the opportunity to collaborate—with my husband no less—was a tremendous joy.

Looking back, Edgar’s request was truly a blessing in disguise. For an artist, the biggest challenges often yield work of a totally unforeseen—and remarkable—quality. I was continuously striving to present the material in the most stimulating ways possible. How would I keep adults interested? How do I encourage the children, who would be at the table for their first and tenth times alike, to open the Haggadah and to look forward to turning the page?

My new inhabitance of the mind of an illustrator was, as it turned out, something of a metamorphosis. It changed the way that I approached my art, the way I perceived the art world, and the way I presented my work.

Visit Jan Aronson's official website here.

Deciding to Forgo Research

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:25:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Nancy Richler discussed the perspective of her novel The Imposter Bride. She will be blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

One of the great pleasures of writing for me is researching historical events and details that help me understand and more fully realize the lived experience of my characters. The research I did for my second novel, Your Mouth is Lovely, for example, opened up a world to me—that of early 20^th century life in the villages and prisons of the Russian Pale of Settlement—that I had previously only encountered filtered through the imaginations of the great fiction writers of that era. For my most recent novel, however, I decided not to do to any formal research. The Imposter Bride is set in the Jewish community of Montreal in the years immediately following the Second World War. It is told from the perspective of a young woman named Ruthie who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I wanted to stay true to the knowledge Ruthie would have had at that time—the 1950’s and early 60’s—both within her own family and within the larger Jewish community, rather than superimpose onto her narrative the knowledge that we now have about the Holocaust. I wanted to convey what it was like to be a child—as I myself was—at a time when the truth of what had happened to many of the adults in the community was just slowly beginning to emerge.

In the years immediately following the war the details about what had happened in Europe were not widely discussed and taught as they are today. The refugees coming over from Europe faced a wide variety of reactions, including compassion, of course, but also aversion, a certain condescension and varying degrees of ignorance. What had happened during the Holocaust was not yet taught in schools, and was not written down in history books, nor did the adult survivors who lived among us expressly articulate what they had experienced. The truth of what happened in Europe was revealed to us slowly and often indirectly, through behaviors, the lingering fears and reactions that we witnessed, the tattooed numbers that we could see on the arms of some of our teachers and parents, and only the occasional verbal comment or description. It was Ruthie’s experience of that time that I wanted to convey and to do that I relied on my own memories of that era and those of my siblings, friends and cousins, rather than doing formal research about the facts of the time.

Find out more about Nancy here.

RA and Jewish Lights Publishing Form Joint Publishing Imprint

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Posted by Jackie Anzaroot

It was announced last week that two major players in the Jewish book world, Jewish Lights Publishing and the Rabbinical Assembly, will be collaborating on a new joint imprint that will publish books pertaining to the theology and philosophy of Conservative Judaism.

In the spirit of the Jewish Lights Publishing’s overall mission, the new imprint will publish books of Jewish wisdom and philosophy rather than traditional Judaica and will be geared toward readership on a universal level. In a statement from Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, she informed readers that the books will be appropriate for “people of faith” and will give them the guidance to follow their own spiritual path using wisdom provided by Conservative Judaism.

Jewish Lights Publishing is a major publisher of Jewish-themed books targeted towards an interfaith readership and offers a substantial backlist devoted solely to interfaith resources. They are also the publisher of LifeLights, their imprint for informational booklets offering advice inspired by Jewish philosophy for difficult, everyday situations. They have also published a popular collection of essays titled I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl that discusses what it means to be Jewish from the perspective of fairly prominent Jewish thinkers, personalities and authors.

Their new joint imprint with the Rabbinical Assembly will publish its first book, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, this fall. The book will focus on a continuation of Rabbi Artson’s exploration of Process theology, a religious and philosophical standpoint that rejects the notion of an almighty, punitive God in favor of transformative, beneficent God that serves as our source of inspiration and divinity.

A partnership between these two prominent organizations will clearly be beneficial for both sides, with the Rabbinical Assembly as a powerful source of Jewish thought, scholarship and philosophy and Jewish Lights Publishing as an experienced and well-known publisher. Their collaboration will likely help to enhance the level of readership for books on the matters of Jewish thought and will lead to many important and insightful works in the realm of Conservative Judaism.

Jackie Anzaroot is a graduate of Brooklyn College with degrees in English and Linguistics. She has held internships at Simon & Schuster and is currently interning at the Jewish Book Council.

A Departure From the Traditional: The Bronfman Haggadah

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:37:00 GMT

Jan Aronson is the illustrator of the The Bronfman Haggadah published by Rizzoli. Born in New Orleans, New York-based artist Jan Aronson has had more than seventy solo and group exhibitions. Read more about Jan here. She will be blogging here for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning all week.

When I set out to create the illustrations for The Bronfman Haggadah, I knew I wanted it to be historically accurate. But I also wanted it to be imaginative, surprising, and distinct from all other Haggadot. Of course I knew there were many iconic ideas that needed to be expressed, but I didn't want to make them so rote.

As an artist I was drawn to the symbolism in the Exodus story. Ultimately, my embrace of the Haggadah as metaphor is what allowed and contributed to the co-mingling of both historical accuracy and the flights of my imagination throughout the project.

Moses’s basket, an emblematic part of the Passover story, is a perfect example of the challenges I faced in terms of departing from the traditional, whilst still remaining loyal to the narrative, and of course, history.

The discovery of the basket in the Nile by the princess, where you see the princess looking down at it, is a scene depicted in endless Haggadot, and I knew I didn’t want to create that kind of an illustration. Instead, I was drawn in by the vastness of the Nile. So many people don’t realize just how enormous it is at some parts. I thought the most interesting way to work with this scene was to focus on the juxtaposition of this tiny little basket against this huge river.

In keeping with my dedication to historical accuracy, the majority of my illustrations are made up of patterns. When I started the Haggadah, and I began thinking about what imagery I would use, my first impulse was to go back to the source—what kind of imagery would the Jews have been exposed to at the time? I realized that it would’ve been mostly Egyptian art and artifacts, plus the influence of Greek and Roman cultures. I am also drawn to African textile patterns and used these in many of the paintings. Geometric patterns are widespread in all traditions, and they complemented my vision for a distinct Haggadah.

My overall goal was to create a Haggadah that was constantly surprising. I wanted the reader to feel that each page was different from the next, hopefully inspiring a sense of discovery and wonder but mostly to make our seder experience interesting.

Visit Jan Aronson's official website here.

Whose Story Is It?

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Nancy Richler's previous novel, Your Mouth is Lovely, won the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction. Her newest novel, The Imposter Bride, is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

The first step for me in writing fiction is deciding which of my characters is telling the story. I might sense an entire novel taking form inside of me but if I start writing from the wrong point of view I cannot find the story I want to tell. My most recent novel, The Imposter Bride, is a case in point. The first scene of the novel seemed to write itself. It describes a young woman named Lily arriving in Montreal immediately following the Second World War, having taken someone else’s identity to cross borders and gain entry to a new life in a new country. The first drafts of the early chapters told the story from Lily’s point of view but each time I tried to move beyond that first scene I hit a wall. A first person account of a Holocaust survivor’s life during and after the war simply did not feel like it was mine to tell, nor did it feel like I was gaining entry into the heart of the novel I felt within me. I kept writing and rewriting from Lily’s perspective for longer than I care to admit, aware that it wasn’t working but not pinpointing that the problem was one of perspective and point of view. Finally, one morning another voice came into my head. It was the voice of a six-year-old girl, the daughter of Lily, living in Montreal in the 1950’s. As I began to follow that voice the story opened to me. The details and story lines that had eluded me for so long poured out. It became a story of the intergenerational effects of trauma within a family and within the community in which I was raised.

Find out more about Nancy here.

Women's History Month

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:27:00 GMT

March is Women's History Month. Celebrate with a few of the important Jewish women who have truly made a difference. Find the complete list here.

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Why it Matters that Marshall was Never Nominated for the Supreme Court

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:47:00 GMT

Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall's archive and explored why it took so long for someone to write a full-length biography of this important figure in American Jewish history. He has been blogging here this week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

The main challenge I faced when preparing a biography of Louis Marshall stemmed from the gap between the perceptual confidence that characterizes American Jewish life in the 21^st century and the tensions and insecurities of Jewish life in the United States during the first decades of the 20^th century. The trick, I believed, was to create an intelligible dialogue between these differing modes of thought and feeling. To recreate historical events uncritically, exactly as Marshall and his peers saw them, would draw contemporary readers into a morass of inhibition about being "too Jewish" that is foreign to them, whereas to overlook realities and attitudes that were indisputably part of Marshall's American Jewish milieu would be condescending and, worse, injurious to empirical rules of historical scholarship.

American Jewish history is happily devoid of the angst that characterizes Jewish life on other continents and in other contexts. It is perfectly reasonable for contemporary readers to assess critically the self-defense labors of previous generations of American Jews, and conclude, in some instances, that past Jewish leaderships were overly defensive and inhibited, even in ways that could be paranoiac or self-defeating.

Yet this critical license to look at the past heroes of American Jewish life as high-strung, occasionally histrionic, figures can be taken much too far; and to my mind, at least, much of the finest recently published scholarship on American Jewish life in periods and context applicable to Marshall's life, such as the Roaring Twenties, is flawed to some extent by researchers' anachronistic projection of Jewish life in America in the late 20^th century or early 21^st century onto the American Jewish past. Scholars who focus on how Jews came to feel "at home" in America in a period like the 1920s tend to under-emphasize the extent to which anti-Semitism was a constant presence in the minds and real life circumstances of both well-established Jews, and struggling immigrant Jews.

Writing draft chapters of the biography, I recalled how the great English historian E.P. Thompson, whom I idolized in my college years, warned about how the "enormous condescension of posterity" can lead historians toward breathtakingly incorrect conclusions about the life choices reached by the heroes of the past. Along these lines, I ruminated about how anachronistic soft-pedaling of anti-Semitism as a real force to be reckoned with on the landscape of early 20^th century America could produce blind spots in a biographer's evaluation of Marshall's life course.

A revealing case in point is the story of why Louis Marshall never won a Supreme Court appointment. In view of Marshall's stellar accomplishments as an attorney, which were lauded by legal luminaries such as Benjamin Cardozo, and the fact that Marshall himself lobbied in at least two instances for an appointment and had powerful allies such as Jacob Schiff on his side, scholars have long pondered about the non-attainment of this goal. Misinterpreting a cryptic remark attributed to William Howard Taft, the President who did not appoint him to the Supreme Court bench, generations of scholars concluded that the story's gist has to do with political partisanship (the Republican Taft's remark about Marshall's non-appointment referred to the latter's law partner, Samuel Untermyer, an outspoken Democrat), or other relatively innocuous topics.

Though I stumbled onto the answer to the riddle of the non-appointment early in my research, I originally planned to relegate the subject to an extended footnote, largely because of the discomfit inherent in correcting my teachers' teachers in the role of an impish smart aleck. Everything that had ever been written on this topic was dead wrong, but ultimately the point is moot because Taft nominated the eminently qualified Charles Evans Hughes, and any conclusion as to whether he "almost" or "might have" tapped Marshall for the job would be predicated speculatively on the President's state of mind.

As chapter fragments began (much to my surprise) to consolidate as the draft of a full biography, it became obvious that the subject could not be kicked downstairs into a footnote. In spring 1910 Marshall badly wanted to became a Supreme Court Justice, and the disappoint which this frustrated ambition engendered clearly had biographical consequences that couldn't be ignored.

Moreover, to remove from the tale of Marshall's life the character responsible for making his Supreme Court bid a non-starter, Hearst newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, probably the most influential journalist of the era, would have excised from the biography one of its most compelling and dramatically poignant ironies. As it turns out, the same person responsible for the most crushing disappointment in Marshall's professional career, was later a decisive collaborator in the most inspiring accomplishment of Marshall's work as a Jewish advocate (Henry Ford conditioned the release of his apology to the Jews on Brisbane's involvement, and Brisbane cooperated fully with Marshall in this triumphant moment).

The issue, I realized, had been incorrectly formulated, largely because of anachronistic wishful thinking about American sociopolitical realities a century ago. The way the question has to be posed is not "why did Marshall lose his Supreme Court bid," but rather "why was such a nomination a non-starter"? Were we to ignore how saturated by Jew hatred Marshall's circumstances became once his desire for a place on the bench became public knowledge, we would be in danger of misunderstanding how he calibrated levels of assertiveness in subsequent Jewish defense efforts against Ford, the KKK and others anti-Semites. In fact, we might overlook the roots of his motivation as a Jewish leader in America were we not to see what he saw when he pursued his highest career ambition, and feel what he felt when he saw that desire derided savagely in mass media attacks that were rife with anti-Semitic innuendo about greedy corporate lawyers being unworthy of the highest bench in the land. Louis Marshall's law firm, wrote Arthur Brisbane in a syndicated column that opposed and ridiculed his bid for the Supreme Court, is founded on the "contention that the poor have no rights when their presence interferes with the delicate sensibilities of the rich." One need not fret about Marshall's quashed ambition, the Hearst papers exulted in upper case glee, because his firm "WILL PROBABLY HAVE PLENTY OF IMPORTANT LUCRATIVE WORK ON ITS HANDS FOR MANY YEARS TO COME!"

So, what did Louis Marshall see when he threw his hat in the ring for the Supreme Court bench? What was President Taft really talking about when he asked Jacob Schiff sarcastically "would you name Sam Untermyer's partner to the Supreme Court?" Well that's a story about resort cottages, tuberculosis treatment, Macy's department store, Lakewood New Jersey and many things I never imagined needing to write about when I began this biography project, and ended up detailing to avoid a free fall into the abyss of enormous condescension evoked by E.P. Thompson's stricture.

Join M. M. Silver for the Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography book launch on March 12th at Congregation Emanu-El in NYC. More information about this event can be found here

Book Cover of the Week: What We Talk About When We Talk About...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:48:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

The paperback edition of Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories will be published on March 5th by Knopf:

View past "Book Cover of the Week" posts here.

New Reviews

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:41:00 GMT

This week's reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6170735}{module_webapps,14253,i,6191204}{module_webapps,14253,i,6188720}

2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:41:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Congratulations to Shalom Auslander, who was just named the 2013 winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for his first novel Hope: A Tragedy.

“Shalom Auslander has done the unthinkable – he's smashed the biggest Jewish icon and made comedy from the ashes of our past,” says Rachel Lasserson, Editor of the Jewish Quarterly.

Read more about the prize here and find the complete shortlist below:

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New Children's Reviews

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:08:00 GMT

Find the full list of children's reviews found in the Spring 2013 issue of Jewish Book World here.

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6191623}{module_webapps,14253,i,5262751}

Transforming the Magical

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:04:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Baruch and Judy Sterman wrote about their obsession with blue. They have been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

We were sitting in an upscale café in Northern Tel Aviv waiting to meet with Knesset member Yitzchak “Bougie” Herzog. As number two in the Israeli Labor party, he was in the middle of campaigning for the upcoming elections, and we were grateful to have a few minutes of his time. The purpose of our meeting was to present him with a copy of our book, The Rarest Blue, and to thank him for the information he had provided while we were preparing it. The dedication that we had inscribed in the book included our desire “to express our inestimable appreciation for the work of your namesake, your grandfather the great Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog, whose contributions to the study of tekhelet were unparalleled.”

Tekhelet, the precious blue that, in accordance with the biblical commandment, colored one string of the tzitzit worn by Jews in ancient times, was the subject of our book and also the theme of Rabbi Herzog’s doctoral dissertation for the University of London almost a century ago. His thesis investigated all aspects of the topic in an attempt to determine why the technology of manufacturing the dye had disappeared from the world, when exactly it had been lost, and what was the mysterious source of the valuable dye. His doctorate was the beginning of a life-long passion whose ultimate goal – the restoration of the forgotten biblical commandment – would not be realized until after Rabbi Herzog’s death.

As our exploration into the Rabbi’s life and work progressed, our admiration for him grew. He was a unique sort of genius: a brilliant Talmudist, he also was thoroughly versed in diverse fields from history to law to chemistry, and was fluent in 12 languages. But Herzog was no scholar in a cloistered library. He was a man of action who felt a burning responsibility for his people. Chief Rabbi, first of Ireland (1919-1936), then of Palestine, and eventually of the State of Israel (a position he held until his death in 1959), his tenure was one that coincided with the most devastating horrors for the Jewish people as well as their greatest moments of triumph.

Rabbi Herzog’s scholarly work radically transformed the traditional Jewish perception of tekhelet. Before him, many if not most religious Jews believed that the hillazon, the sea animal that, according to the Talmud, produced the precious dye, was some kind of magical, mythical creature akin to the shamir – the legendary worm capable of boring through any material and used to hew the stone for the altar in the Temple, or the Leviathan on which it is said the righteous will feast in the World to Come. Tekhelet, most Jews thought, would be restored only when the third temple descended from Heaven, since both belonged to that miraculous realm. But Rabbi Herzog argued that tekhelet was a natural phenomenon and that the hillazon was a physical albeit elusive sea snail that could be rediscovered through intense scientific, historical, and archeological research. And that is exactly what happened. Because of Rabbi Herzog’s paradigm shift, today hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world wear the tekhelet that had been lost for 1,300 years.

The ability to innovate that Rabbi Herzog displayed in his doctorate became a hallmark characteristic of his work throughout his life. His most significant achievements had to do with the application of Jewish law in ingenious and often daring ways in order to achieve a harmony within the complex interplay of values confronting the modern, democratic, religious state of Israel – an entity that had never been conceived of before.

Rabbi Herzog stands as a role model for all, challenging us not only to study as much as we can, not only to take action to realize our dreams, but to stretch the very boundaries of our imagination and create completely novel ways of thinking, and to transform the magical into the practical.

Baruch and Judy Sterman's The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered is now available. Read more about the book here.