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New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This week's new Jewish Book Council reviews:

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Find more of the latest reviews here.

When You’re A Jet You Stay A Jet

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:41:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Kathy Ebel wrote about Nice Jewish Girl protagonists from New York City. Her first novel, Claudia Silver to the Rescue (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is now available. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“Ashkenazi.” “Sephardic.” As a kid, wandering around the kiddish reception at our shul collecting cellophane ruffle-topped toothpicks in a plastic cup, I heard these terms bandied far above my head by adults and had no idea what they meant. Were these languages? Politicians? Street gangs, like in West Side Story? As a first-generation American and the daughter of German-Jewish refugees, I was pretty sure these mysterious terms didn’t have anything to do with me. We were Jews who kept kosher and went to shul, but we didn’t eat or do the things that seemed officially Jewy, like, Fiddler on the Roof-Jewy. My single mother didn’t bake kugel, or encircle the flames of the Shabbat candles with her hands when she made her brachot, or bobby pin a white nylon doily to the back of her head for services (nor would she have dreamed of wearing a kippah like some of her friends from her Consciousness Raising group). My mother used no Yiddishims in her speech, other than “shul” and “schlep” and, while cursing other drivers, “schmuck.” I wasn’t sent to Jewish sleepaway camp to meet my future spouse or bridesmaids or employers. And on Christmas Day, we did not go to the movies or eat Chinese food.

What I did know, always, was that we were German, from old families. We ate our pizza with a knife and fork. We liked marzipan, in whimsical shapes like fried eggs and, yes, piglets. We wore pinky rings stamped with a family crest based on the corporate logo of my industrialist ancestors’ metals business. We kept glass bottles of 4711 eau de cologne in the bathroom. Phrases like “yeah” and “okay” were frowned upon.

Somehow, I had always known the name of the enormous limestone home my paternal grandfather owned in Antwerp, where his own business was based: it was “the Rue Rembrandt,” where my grandparents lived as newlyweds among my grandmother’s extended family, several of whom, so deeply ensconced in their enclosed world of privilege, fatefully delayed their own departures from Europe and were murdered during the Shoah. As a little kid in the 1970’s, I had no real idea what this all meant, but a deeper idea was communicated. We were not entirely American, not entirely home, and needed to keep our ties to the past alive, because that’s where our impeccable pedigree – and our ghosts – were housed.

My beloved grandmother, whom we all called Moumie, was a woman of great style, in the tradition of a certain kind of tailored European lady. She had returned to Europe after the War. She wore shirtwaist dresses and low-heeled pumps, with a well-tied silk scarf and a leather purse held in the crook of her arm. She had a knack for arranging flowers, wrapping gifts, dashing off delightful note cards, and hosting simple, elegant afternoon teas. She lived in The Hague, and came to visit once a year, at Pesach. One afternoon, it occurred to me that she might possess the answer to the question burning in my mind.

“Moumie,” I asked her. “What’s the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic?”

“Ah,” she replied, with a sage nod, as though she had been waiting for this one. Her expression, as it often did, drifted into an elegant reverie. “In the Rue Rembrandt, our housekeeper was Ashkenazi.”

Many years later, when crafting the character of Claudia Silver in my debut novel, Claudia Silver to the Rescue, I dug in to my experiences of class, race and history. The perceptions and inner life of the character of Edith Mendelssohn, Claudia’s indomitable mother, are shaped by her refugee experiences and the grip of memory. Claudia, meanwhile, is coming of age in a housing project neighborhood in Brooklyn on the cusp of gentrification in the late 1980’s. Claudia is tuned in to the tension and the cross-pollination that rising property values in her neighborhood bring. And she is simultaneously imprinted by a tragic family history from which she is one generation removed. Claudia’s responsibility, like it or not – and mine – is to stay engaged with that history. When it comes to the recent disasters of our civilization – American slavery and the Holocaust among them – one generation removed is not much time at all.

Many years after my Grandmother didn’t explain what Ashkenazi meant, I laughingly re-told this story to my friend Dov during a kiddish lunch at IKAR, our Los Angeles shul. He’s Israeli.

“Ah-ha!” he exclaimed. “So you’re a Yekke!”

“A Yekke? What’s that?” I asked, never having heard that one before.

“A snob,” he replied.

Kathy Ebel, a first-generation American, was born in Manhattan. Her blog, Fatherland: There’s No Place Like Home, or How and Why a Nice Jewish Girl Asked Germany to Take Her Back, chronicles her quest to have her German citizenship restored. Kathy considers Brooklyn her hometown and currently lives with her family in Los Angeles. Claudia Silver to the Rescue (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is her first novel.

Book Cover of the Week: Some Day

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:08:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

New Vessel Press, an independent publishing house founded in NYC last year, is about to release their first six titles. Specializing in the translation of foreign literature into English, one of their first books is Some Day by Israeli novelist, film director, and screenwriter Shemi Zarhin. The work, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, will be published this fall. Read more about the Some Day here.

Bonus: The designer of Some Day's cover is none other than Liana Finck, this past year's Jewish Book Month poster designer and past Visiting Scribe. Can't say I'm surprised.

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

Related: Hebrew Literature Series

Interview: Jay Neugeboren

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

by Beth Kissileff

I recently had an opportunity to speak with veteran author Jay Neugeboren by phone for Jewish Book Council. This was appropriate because the ability “to conjure up the seen from the unseen” is the premise of his newest book, The American Sun and Wind Moving Picture Company, about a family making motion pictures in the years from 1915 to 1930; a proffered Skype interview wouldn’t have worked as well for a discussion of the work of this author who was a child and teen radio actor at the New York Board of Education’s radio station, WNYE-FM, in the Brooklyn of his youth. As in this newest novel, Neugeboren’s twentieth book, the author’s voice and storytelling ability carried our conversation. This is an abridged account of our discussion.

Beth Kissileff: Where do your stories come from?

Jay Neugeboren: The answer is—who knows? No particular source. That’s a question I am always asking. The stories always seem to be there waiting for me, though sometimes shrouded in mist and fog.

I grew up in Brooklyn during and after World War II, so some things are set in that milieu, and sometimes things that have actually happened in my life become transformed into fiction. But beyond that, I have no answer. Just as Irving Berlin made up new songs, and always seemed to have a new melody waiting, so with ideas and notions that are there for me, and eventually they become stories. They are not full-blown at first, but I know enough to begin, and find out the rest while I write. For me, part of the process lies in solving mysteries—in unlayering what is at first unknown to me.

In order to know about the lives of my characters and their ancestors, I had to create them.

In the early days of film—what we call silent films—they worked without scripts. There is a wonderful childlike wonder to that for me—a sense of 'let’s pretend.' As in 'I’m a mother, you’re a father, I have a dog—or a barn—so let’s make a movie.'

BK: How much research did you do for this book? There is such a wealth of detail in the novel about so many aspects of the early movie making process and I wonder how much of it is based in fact.

JN: I did not know a lot about the silent film era, and UMass-Amherst [where Neugeboren taught for many years] has an extensive library on film. I spent six to eight months watching movies and reading, lots. I read Anita Loos, biographies of D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, the 1001 Nights, Kevin Brownell (a film critic). I did my homework. I was fascinated by the technical aspects [of how films were made], and in the novel, for example, I make use of the fact that they edited films in the camera, cranking backwards and filming a scene again.

Like the proverbial hem of the skirt, I hope all my research doesn’t show. I try to let the research—the detail—serve the story.

BK: Since you are so fascinated by the movie-making process why did you write this as a novel, not a screenplay, since you have written screenplays too?

JN: The novel is my first love. I’ve written screenplays on occasion, mainly to get my kids through college, but things come to me in their particular forms or genres. This story said: “I am a novel.”

A novel, for me, relies on my imagination to inspire your (the reader’s) imagination. It is not all there for you. My novels or my stories come to me visually. I use words—what else?—to translate the novel I see inside my head into words that I hope will create a movie inside your head. A movie can evoke feelings, thoughts, it is all there and happening, there is no control over the images when you are watching a movie. You are transported for three hours to a world where you see real people. In a novel it is private—there’s only you, and words on pages. The landscape is in your mind and in your feelings. I hope this novel does for others what stories and novels did for me when I was a boy—I hope, that is, it will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in.

I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships.

The American & Wind Moving Picture Company is made up of six sections—six separate films, six woodcuts—and I tried to pare everything down to essentials, to carve a book with words, and then to compress, compress, compress—so that the effect is stark, and the scenes are as vivid as dreams.

BK: What would you do if you weren’t a writer?

JN: I grew up at Shaare Torah synagogue in Brooklyn and I would run the Saturday morning services when I was in college. One day the rabbi, Joseph Miller, called me in. He asked me to consider the rabbinate, and said that he would see that I would be supported financially. I thought about it, but I wanted to be a writer. Being a pulpit rabbi and a writer is rough, though it can be done. My rabbi from Northampton [Massachusetts, where Neugeboren is a past president of Congregation B’nai Israel], Phil Graubart, is a marvelous writer.

I didn’t feel a calling for it—it should be a calling, really—the way writing is for me. The rabbinate should be a calling, and not simply a way to earn a living.

BK: What helped you write this book?

JN: Joey’s voice. Once I found that, I was home free.

BK: What do you take pride in as a writer?

JN: As a writer I am proud that if you took my last four books, and they didn’t have my name on them, I don’t think readers would know they were by the same author. The same with this novel. I think what I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.

There is nothing wrong with a writer who has a distinct style in book after book, but I am not interested in repeating myself.

BK: Why do you write?

JN: I remain curious about all the lives I can’t have—and about the lives of others, real and imagined, past and present, and how people came to be who they are . . . and who they might yet be. I am enchanted by the landscape of possibility.

Read more about Jay Neugeboren here.

Beth Kissileff is the editor of Reading Genesis (Continuum Books, 2013) an anthology of academic writing about Genesis. Her novel Questioning Return is under consideration for publication and she is working on a second novel and volume of short stories.

Interview: Marc Tracy

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:54:00 GMT

by Elise Cooper

Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, which won a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, is a collection of essays compiled by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy of The New Republic. It’s a portrait of fifty Jews in sports—athletes, executives, and coaches—from different areas of the world and the roles they played in sports. I had the privilege of interviewing Marc Tracy for Jewish Book Council.

Elise Cooper: Why did you decide to put this book together?

Marc Tracy: Franklin Foer and I are big sports fans who identify with our Jewishness, and we’re also fans of good writing. We realized that this book could be a way to gather great writers, most of whom were Jewish. These are not professional sports writers; yet, they love sports. I am talking about big names such as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker; Simon Schama, a superstar English historian who wrote about the boxer Daniel Mendoza; Mark Leibovich of The New York Times, and Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, who wrote about Harold Solomon, the tennis player.

EC: How were the athletes chosen?

MT: There were different ways the writers and the subjects were chosen. For example, you cannot write about Jewish jocks without including Sandy Koufax. We asked the great sportswriter Jane Leavy, who wrote a fabulous biography of Koufax, to write an essay of new material on Koufax. She told the story of how Koufax came to her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Then there was Mark Oppenheimer, who wanted to write about Joel Silver. I said ‘Well, he is not really a Jewish jock but a Hollywood producer.’ He responded that the same Joel Silver who produced the Batman movies and “The Matrix” also invented Ultimate Frisbee.

EC: Why did you include Bobby Fischer and Corey Pavin and not include Moe Berg?

MT: For the fifty chosen there were fifty more whom we could have included, like Moe Berg, the Jewish major league catcher who was a spy in World War II. We also decided that any book about Jewish athletes had to include the good and the bad. The point of Wertheim’s essay about Pavin is that he was born and raised Jewish, yet converted to Christianity. Bobby Fischer was also born and raised Jewish and at the end of his life became a major anti-Semite. Ron Rosenbaum wrote a compelling essay on the gambler Arnold Rothstein. I enjoyed how he started it off by talking about the fictional character, Meyer Wolfsheim, in The Great Gatsby, whose life was based on Rothstein. Here is one of the most famous American novels ever written that has an anti-Semitic caricature based on a real life sports person who was also an unsavory gambler.

EC: Do you consider the essay about the 1972 Munich Olympics one of the most powerful?

MT: I do. We asked Deborah Lipstadt, a foremost historian, to write about this horrific incident. I think there were seven or eight other essays that mentioned this event. Lipstadt pointed out how these athletes came to Germany to compete in peace and instead were murdered. The Munich massacre illustrated what we point out in our introduction, how Jewish athleticism originally comes out of the instinct for self-defense, and how Zionism sprung from the violence against Jews. This is also emphasized in the essay by Shalom Auslander, who wrote about an older Jewish man confronted by two black kids on a New York subway: “And he turned around and pushed them back—hard—and they fell back down in the seat…And he said, 'We’re Jews, we won this war, we beat our enemies, we don’t take this stuff anymore.'”

EC: What was one of the most interesting facts in the book?

MT: Rich Cohen’s essay on Sid Luckman that included Benny Friedman, who was an All American quarterback at the University of Michigan, and who pioneered the passing game when he played for the New York Giants. Friedman, along with Luckman, who played for the Chicago Bears, invented the quarterback position as we know it today. They revolutionized football with the forward pass, and having the quarterback as the superstar. As Cohen writes, “It was the birth of the quarterback as we know him: the general who calmly leads his team down the field.”

EC: What do you want the readers to take out of the book?

MT: How the story of the Jews in sports is a microcosm for the story of sports in America. The story of Jews in sports is the story of sports. From Al Davis, who was a path breaker by integrating the NFL for head coaches, to Hank Greenberg who, as the general manager of the Indians, mistreated one of his players, Al Rosen, solely because he did not want to be seen as playing favorites to one of his own, another Jewish slugger.

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.

Nice Jewish Girls Finish Whole

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:36:00 GMT

I think of Claudia Silver, the eponymous heroine of my debut novel, Claudia Silver to the Rescue, as one in an anxious, spirited line of Nice Jewish Girl protagonists from New York City. This lineage starts with Lily Bart, Edith Wharton’s A-list flibbertigibbet in The House of Mirth, then moves on to Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (who put up with that scoundrel Noel Airman’s hijinks for about 100 riveting pages too long), Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine (if only 30 had been the new 20 in 1972), Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing, and Melissa Bank’s Jane Rosenal. Yes, I know that Lily Bart wasn’t Jewish. But if only she’d married Simon Rosedale! (Sob! Gnashing of teeth! She could’ve given him a make-under!)

Claudia Silver possesses some key traits that connect her to her literary sisters. She’s got a loud speaking voice and wobbly self-worth, she finds comfort in self-destructive habits and relationships, and she’s paralyzed by her own ambivalence. She’s helpful and selfish, fierce and vulnerable. She’s got a keen sense of class and caste, ranking herself ruthlessly in any given social situation. She knows how to dance, and how to accessorize. But unlike Lily and Marjorie, whom I adore, but let’s face it, whether it’s in the back of a hat shop or lower Westchester, they both die from denial, Claudia wakes up. And she does so along a particularly Jewish continuum.

It’s when Claudia hears her ill-fated soon-to-be-paramour, Paul Tate, recite the shehecheyanu prayer as grace over an assimilated Christmas dinner, that her interest in him shifts, fatefully. Once Claudia’s actions cause a multi-family train-wreck, she becomes aware that she has one chance to make it right – and that’s to undertake “teshuvah” – the humble pursuit of repentance. Now, I don’t know how the Rambam or Rav Kook or even my own Los Angeles rabbi, Sharon Brous, would define teshuvah. (Personally, I plucked my definition from the low hanging branch on the tree of knowledge known as Wikipedia.) But Claudia acknowledges her profound misdeed with humility, fesses up, will remember this one for the rest of her life, and even though there’s no sequel in the works, I promise you, dear reader, that she will refrain from committing this one in the future. In fact, once Claudia Silver accounts for her actions, she’s propelled forward to growth and emotional maturity. She marches straight into a possibly dangerous social event and yanks her younger sister free of it, apologizes sincerely to the Nice Jewish Boy Who Was There All Along and gets her love life on track, and even reunites with mother despite a dug-in estrangement. And none of this could have happened if Claudia hadn’t made the worst mistake of her life.

It’s my firm belief and my personal experience that patterns run through families faster than we can usually stop them, which is why we need both spiritual practice and literature – so that a wisdom greater than our own can escort us, lovingly, to awareness and eventually, to change. And it’s my opinion that Lily and Marjorie made huge freakin’ mistakes. Do I need to tell you that if Marjorie Morningstar had understood what Wally Wronken truly had to offer, she might’ve been at the TONY Awards last week in Calvin Klein? Possibly with Calvin Klein? Given her lineage, Claudia was powerfully teed up to repeat history. But having read her Wharton and her Wouk, she, through me, made a different choice. And as a result, the biggest mistake Claudia Silver ever made is the best thing that ever happened to her.

Find out more about Kathy Ebel and Claudia Silver to the Rescue here.

New Jewish Children's Book Reviews

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:18:00 GMT

Find the full list of the latest children's book reviews here.

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New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:07:00 GMT

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

Writing Contest Winners: The Catskills and the Holocaust

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:58:00 GMT

The Catskills Institute and the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University are delighted to announce the winners of the fiction and non-fiction writing contests: “The Catskills and the Holocaust.”

Bonnie Shusterman Eizikovitz is co-winner of the fiction contest for “Catskills Dreams and Pumpernickel,” a short story about a girl nicknamed Pumpernickel by a woman bungalow colony resident, a Holocaust survivor who is a parent figure for the youngster. The woman and her husband, despite his mechanical assistance to whomever asks a favor, are still outsiders because of their unique experience, while young Pumpernickel berates her own parents for their derision of these “greeners.” Memories of the smuggled shofar in the concentration camp mingle with the current holiday in America.

Rita Calderon is the other fiction co-winner for “Waiting for Dovid,” a short story centered in 1938 on a girl and the family’s effort to bring her father’s brother to the Catskills hotels where her mother is the chef. Uncle Dovid arrives, but alone, since visas were denied to the rest of his family. Memories of other brothers punctuate the conversations, and we see the juxtaposition of Catskills’ pleasures with Europe’s horrors. Through these lenses, family secrets are revealed, while Dovid returns to France to try to get his family out.

Michael Kirschenbaum won the non-fiction contest for “Forgiving God in the Catskills,” a chapter from his forthcoming memoir tentatively titled: A Jewish Chicken Farmer’s Son. “Forgiving God in the Catskills” focuses on a visit to Kutsher’s Country Club in the Catskills to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, with a Holocaust survivor and his sons. Memories of the Holocaust punctuate the holiday services, as the Catskills are themselves memorialized as the places where “The greeneh were happy to mingle with the others who still embraced and a Jewish culture with European roots.”

All three winners have written beautiful stories, each of which opens up the world of the Holocaust experience of people in the Catskills. We hope a wide audience will read these stories in order to expand the overall awareness of this critical place and time. You can read them on the website of the Catskills Institute (http://catskills.brown.edu) or the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University( http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/jewishstudies/).

The contest is sponsored by the Catskills Institute, the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University, Jewish Book Council, the “1939” Club, the Sigi Ziering Institute at American Jewish University, Brown University Judaic Studies Program, the Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium, AskAbigail.com, and the Four Seasons Lodge film group.

The contests originated as part of a book project, Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, edited by Dr. Holli Levitsky, Professor of English and Director of Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and Dr. Phil Brown, President of the Catskills Institute and Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences at Northeastern University. The book project provides a locus for original research and literature exploring the experience of the Holocaust in the Catskills. To expand knowledge of this subject, Levitsky and Brown welcome any data from readers about the experience in the Catskills of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath.

The contests were judged by two panels of eminent writers in the field of Jewish literature and scholarship. Non-fiction judges were Hasia R. Diner, Deborah Dash Moore, and Jonathan Sarna. Fiction judges were Eileen Pollack, Thane Rosenbaum, and Yale Strom.

Each contest winner receives $500 (for the fiction contest, that was split between the two fiction winners). Pending a book contract and the publisher’s agreement on the anthology’s contents, the winning entries will be published in the Levitsky and Brown book and may present their work in a public forum associated with its publication.

Crossing Delancey: Royal Young on Lee Brozgold

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:12:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Royal Young discussed his decision to change his name, interviewed his grandparents, and wrote about his parents' reaction to his debut memoir Fame Shark. He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

My father's artwork was always how I made sense of the world around me. The sometimes scary, ghetto Lower East Side I grew up in was beautiful, interesting and safe when shaded by his paints. His devotion to his artwork, but also creative, compassionate parenting inspired me early on to pursue my own artistic passions. I would sit in Dad's sun drenched studio dictating stories about suicidal whales before I could write.

Dad encouraged my taste for tragedy and drama by reading me bedtime stories beyond my years. With me in the cozy crook of his flannel arm, under soft yellow lamps he turned the pages and read ten year-old me Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, Dickens’s Great Expectations and Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain. These guilty, lonely, decadent, sexual stories were a dazzling escape from the Lower East Side of the early ‘90s. They infuse my writing to this day.

I also got my fascination for celebrity from my artist father. He was intrigued by what fame stood for; the levels of luxury, artistic recognition and happiness Americans believed it could get you. Yet, his was an outsider’s stance. He felt more comfortable around the edges. The works which gained him newspaper write-ups and radio interviews were skull shaped masks of American conservatives, people he felt propagated the unfair conservation of money and power. These death heads, wildly colorful in papier-mâché ranged from Nancy Reagan and George Bush Senior to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Andy Warhol.

And though, as a wild teenager I would throw myself right into this celebrity world my father so mistrusted, it was the loving foundation he had laid for me that ultimately saved me. There is always a dance between an artist’s ego as projected into their work and their own personal feelings of self-worth. Dad taught me that family was the most important grounding influence and throughout my young career as a writer it has been family that has constantly inspired me and brought me back down to earth when old streaks of megalomaniacal mad artistry threatened to take over my true sense of self.

Though, it hadn’t helped to often be my father’s model as a child. Seeing myself front and center both in the work of the Dad I loved but also hanging on gallery walls and public murals all over New York City was a heady experience; a seductive taste of celebrity that would later completely consume me.

Here, my mother, younger brother and I walk across Delancey Street:

My father took the photograph and had a monument modeled after the Eifel Tower superimposed in the background. This was part of a proposal by community artists to create ambitious pieces for the Lower East Side. My father’s idea was for a massive memorial dedicated to the lives of Jewish immigrant women lost in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. These were more innocent days, pre-gentrification when the whole world didn’t dream of adulation.

Royal Young's debut memoir Fame Shark will be released June 2013 from Heliotrope Books. Young contributes to Interview Magazine, New York Post, BOMB Magazine and The Lo Down.

Interview: Lesley Simpson

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:06:00 GMT

by Barbara Bietz

Lesley Simpson is the author of A Song for My Sister (Random House), a lovely picture book about simchat bat, the Jewish baby naming ritual. Lesley takes young readers on a humor filled journey as older sister Mira adapts to her new, very noisy baby sister! The charming illustrations by Tatjana Mai-Wyss are a perfect pairing for the lively story. I'm so excited to share this special book and welcome Lesley.

Barbara Bietz: What was the inspiration for Song for My Sister?

Lesley Simpson: The true story about this book is that I wrote a book called A Name for My Brother. It was full of toilet humour, bubbling with explosive burps and stinky farts. One publisher liked the concept but not the toilet humour and asked if I would consider a rewrite. I did a rewrite but out emerged a completely different book! That is one of the best things about writing-the surprise or what I call the loot bag factor. You do not always know what will emerge. I had read about a simchat bat ceremony for a girl that sounded meaningful. The ceremony featured showing light, for example, so the girl would create light in the world and each blessing contained a concrete example of its essence. I thought it was lovely way to welcome a new life into the world. For the record, I still have the stinky burpy book in my drawer if any publishers are curious.

BB: The Simchat Bat celebration may not be familiar to many readers. Why did you feel this was an important celebration to share with young readers?

LS: I love the notion of celebrating a new life of a girl with the wishes and blessings for what her life can be. I found out after I had submitted the book that it is the only English language picture book celebrating the naming of a girl in the Jewish world. I was flabbergasted but happy to begin filling the void.

BB: What were your thoughts when you saw the illustrations by Tatjana Mai-Wyss?

LS: I am a writer. And I say this as a writer of picture books. If the art does not 'sing' the book is dead. In my own imagination I wanted something that radiated warmth, whimsy with a sense of humour. These illustrations exceeded my expectations. I am honoured to have Tatjana's Mai-Wyss' work illuminate the story. The art is the lens through which the reader experiences the book. It is primary to the experience.

BB: Mira is a very relatable older sister as she struggles with the loud crying of her little sister. Is Mira's character based on someone you know?

LS: Mira exists in my imagination. She is plucky, honest, and good at cartwheels. (I am terrible at gymnastics for the record and somersaults used to make me feel carsick.)

BB: What is your favorite children's book?

LS: OK, it's impossible to pick one book. But I can tell you right now I do love Sweet Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, about a little pea who cannot eat his veggies until he gobbles up all of his sweets. I love Rosenthal's spirit of creativity, pluck and warmth.

BB: Thanks, Lesley!

To learn more about Lesley, please visit her website at www.lesleysimpson.ca

Barbara Bietz is a freelance writer and children’s book reviewer. She is currently a member of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. Barbarais the author of the middle grade book, Like a Maccabee. She has a blog dedicated to Jewish books for children at www.BarbaraBBookBlog.Blogspot.com.

From Shtetl to Star: A Jewish Tradition of Changing Names

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Royal Young interviewed his grandparents and wrote about his parents' reaction to his debut memoir Fame Shark. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I changed my name from Hazak Brozgold to Royal Young when I was 20 years old. I was a drunk college drop-out who had moved back into my parent's Lower East Side apartment with big, unrealistic dreams and a drinking habit too large for my childhood bedroom. Getting rid of my hard to pronounce Hebrew name felt like a step toward escaping my youth and my disapproving Jewish parents. My moniker had set me apart in classrooms and the ghetto downtown streets I'd grown up in. The Lower East Side of my youth was broken glass on uneven sidewalks, fast domino games, sneakers hanging from streetlights, Hip Hop blasting bass heavy from car windows. My grandparent's days, when the neighborhood was an Eastern European shtetl transplant, were long gone. My parents had literally missed the boat.

They named me Hazak Brozgold to make up for it. Hazak means "strong" in Hebrew. But I always felt weak. A shy, quiet bookworm I shrank from the rough streets around me, finding escape in making my neuropsychologist mom administer me Rorsach tests instead of going on play dates, or painting crude canvasses with my artist/social worker father in his cluttered studio.

Perhaps I escaped too much into my parents. By 20, I wanted to run away from them and hide behind dive bars where they couldn't reach me or speak the slurred language.

Yet, what started out as a pompous challenge—changing my name to Royal Young (my younger brother changed his name to Fury Young in a show of stubborn solidarity)—strangely allowed me to become closer to my parents and my Hebrew heritage. I took to Royal naturally. I was used to sticking out. I cut down on drinking and started getting published under my new byline. Small articles that didn’t pay my rent but made me feel, for the first time in my life, able to provide for myself. I was more comfortable with a name that people pinned to a profession rather than a religion.

There are legions of Jews who have changed their names to take on larger than life careers in writing, acting, as artists. Taking on an identity that encouraged success seemed like a rite of passage to join this group of my fellow tribesmen and women. I began to wonder if picking your own persona had less to do with disguising your heritage and more to do with finding a shield to deal with the more unpleasant aspects of making your work public. Countless rejection, hate mail, harsh editing, scrutiny when my pieces were published, Royal took them all in stride. I’m not sure if Hazak would have been able to.

I also relished having a part of me that was private. My parents would never stop calling me Hazak. The way it tripped off my grandparents tongues was with the “Ch” Hebrew pronunciation at the beginning. I loved being able to catch up with my parents over weekly dinners and be reminded, simply by the name they had so lovingly given me, that I had a healthy, whole, strong family to support me when work became overwhelming.

It’s been eight years since I started calling myself Royal. Only this year, with the publication of Fame Shark, did I change my passport. The change is about coming into my own, accepting the past, but pushing forward. It’s not about shame, or leaving my roots behind. It’s a decision Hazak made. One he is finally ready to fully be proud of.

Royal Young's debut memoir Fame Shark will be released June 2013 from Heliotrope Books. Young contributes to Interview Magazine, New York Post, BOMB Magazine and The Lo Down.

Famous Roots: An Interview With My Babbi and Zayde

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:34:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Royal Young wrote about his parents' reaction to his debut memoir Fame Shark. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

My maternal grandmother fought to escape her Lower East Side. My Babbi was born in 1932 and raised on Pitt Street and Houston, a few blocks from where I would grow up years later. She was the daughter of Orthodox Austrian immigrants who came through Ellis Island in 1919 with thousands of other displaced Jews, gazing in awe at the Statue of Liberty from the steerage deck of a third-class freighter.

The Lower East Side of the ’30s was an Eastern European shtetl transplant, an unruly Jewish village struggling through the end of the Depression. Its tenements teemed with immigrants who practiced wild customs—matchmaking, interpreting prophesies from dreams— that they’d imported with silver menorahs hidden under rags during the ocean passage.

My handsome grandfather had a bachelor pad on Henry Street before he was a Zayde. They met when he taught my Babbi art and their hearts filled over many hours developing photographs in dim darkrooms. Images of her from that time are coy and striking, he bold and laughing. Their eyes gleam for adventure, conquest, love, glory, knowledge.

To this day my grandparents teach me about loving fully, they have always fully believed in my writing, encouraged me to pursue it no matter what the odds. In a career filled with rejection, this fighting spirit buoyed me. Their beautiful old home in Long Island with a swimming pool and lush garden is my refreshing escape from the downtown New York hustle I still live in. Their wisdom, tenacity and verve inspire me every day and so I decided to sit down with them before the publication of my memoir Fame Shark and talk about their first meeting, performance as love, competition, what art means to them, and the perils and pleasures of celebrity.

Royal: What was your sense of yourselves in the city when you were growing up?

Babbi: I was a very happy child because my family was a happy family. Every Shabbos we would go to shul together, everyone. Then out to a beer garden and we would have drinks and chickpeas. The children used to play with each other and laugh and we were all dressed up as beautiful dolls.

Royal: Yet, your family also had idiosyncrasies. Your mother would feed drunks on the Bowery.

Babbi: That’s right. My mom was very interesting from the point of view of her humanity. If my mother saw anyone who even looked hungry she would immediately give them food or make me go down to give them bread. Crazy people used to come to our apartment and knock on the door.

Royal: Did you feel stuck in the Lower East Side?

Babbi: No, I was always an adventurer.

Zayde: When I was sent off from home in Philadelphia to go to yeshiva in New York, I was expected to manage my own affairs at the age of 15. In my tenement I had a room with a window but it didn’t look outside. It looked into another room. I didn’t last there very long. But we survived.

Royal: You both always had a huge interest in arts. Do you think that helped you see that there was a larger world out there?

Zayde: Oh, yeah! Unbelievably.

Babbi: Oh yes and my mother was a dressmaker, she made clothing.

Zayde: You would call her a stylist these days [laughs].

Babbi: Okay, well she also helped heavyset women to fit into their clothing. We would sneak away to go to the museums or look at art in the windows of Cooper Union.

Zayde: My father lured me to leave for New York by taking me to the Educational Alliance art school.

Babbi: And then he ended up being a teacher there and I convinced my mother to sign me up for classes. She would say it was the best fifteen cents she ever spent.

Royal: How do you feel about the changes in the Lower East Side?

Zayde: Inevitable. In many ways regrettable.

Royal: What does performance mean to you in your life?

Babbi: I was certainly a performer as a professor. I enjoyed that aspect of it.

Zayde: My father was a cantor, I used to spend my hours listening to him rehearse for his performances in the synagogue. He sang his heart out. In addition to studying art and art history for many years, I also had a career as a rabbi and you have to realize you are a performer when you lead a congregation.

Babbi: For me I also think it was about competition. I had so many other children to compete with like my twin sisters, that I felt I had to act things out to gain attention.

Zayde: I translated my father’s memoirs from Yiddish and I would read them aloud. This too was a kind of acting performance. I put my soul into trying to recreate what my father had lived through.

Royal: Interesting that performance is equated to emotional connection. You want love, attention or understanding and in order to get those things you have to act out.

Babbi: Yes, of course you do. I could perform in front of my relatives all the time and I got presents for it, good food, nice cookies [laughs].

Royal: [laughs] So you had to sing for your supper!

Babbi: Yes.

Zayde: It’s not a compulsion, but it’s very satisfying.

Royal: But for you performance is not equated with fame. I think for the modern mentality it is.

Babbi: For me, performance is equated with love.

Royal: How do you feel about fame?

Zayde: Fame can be a terrible burden. It could hang around your neck. Be careful what you wish for when you wish for fame. The striving for fame can overwhelm you.

Royal: Now everyone knows about celebrity.

Zayde: [laughs] Yes, ever since Andy Warhol saying everyone was entitled to fifteen minutes of fame. I don’t agree with fame for its own sake. If you are talented and work and receive recognition for your art, fine. That’s about as far as I go. I like to feel people can appreciate what I offer, but it’s the offering of it that is more important than receiving accolades.

Babbi: Not celebrity, but the important level is that people recognize you do good work. If you know who you are and can project that, it’s so much better for you. People will listen to you if you know who you are.

Royal Young's debut memoir Fame Shark will be released later this month from Heliotrope Books.

My Family’s Reaction to Fame Shark

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:09:00 GMT

Royal Young's debut memoir Fame Shark will be released June 2013 from Heliotrope Books. Young contributes to Interview Magazine, New York Post, BOMB Magazine and The Lo Down. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

"I sound like a cheap, mean kyke," my father raged. "I sound like an idiot, a complete non-entity," my mother was furious too. I had been nervous about them reading my first memoir, Fame Shark, but none of my jitters had prepared me for this ballistic reaction. We were sitting down to breakfast at Castillo, a Dominican restaurant in New York's Lower East Side where I had grown up eating delicious homefries colored orange from Sofrito. Now they stuck in my throat.

For me, the book was a monument to the obvious: I was in love with both my parents. But raised by two Jews who were brilliant psychoanalysts, my love had a darkness, a depth, an introspection I'd learned from them. Wasn't that a good thing? Wasn't that flattering?

"So, it's basically fiction," Mom said,"a lot of this stuff never happened." It was true that I had purposefully pandered to a modern American culture that had the attention span of meth addicts. I'd cut all the "boring" bits out of my life in this telling. But fiction? No way. It had been hard, terrifying and humbling to write truths about myself: I had been bullied to the point of molestation as a kid, I had later exchanged sex for money and movie roles, cultivated friendships with drug dealers, sunk to supreme unhappiness at the altar of celebrity worship. I had begun writing Fame Shark still half in the throes of an idiotic, unoriginal fantasy that the book itself would lift me into celebrity. Only the therapeutic writing of it had helped take me out of my own narcissism/self-hatred (a diagnosis my parents had once agreed with, in our darkest conflicts).

It had been seven years since the last chapter of the book. Years I had spent doing hard work in real life. I had worked as a journalist at The Forward, Interview Magazine, New York Post and others. I had drastically cut back on drinking, stopped doing drugs, fallen in love with beautiful women, gotten my heart broken, fought hard through much rejection to see the publication of my debut memoir. But achievement was not redemption. Now, I feared my own creation was dragging me and my parents back to a black place of contention we had bravely worked past in family therapy sessions.

That first breakfast, my immediate reaction was to match their anger. Suddenly like a petulant teenager again, I swung between fury and sadness. I was outraged they didn't "get" my art; I was crushed I didn't have their seal of approval. Even more devastating, it seemed they felt the book was evidence of some deep malcontent I held toward them. The day ended with me crying on their couch.

Like any modern moron, I posted about my parent's outrage on Facebook. "I thought they came across as very endearing. Feel free to pass that on :)" wrote one friend. "If your parents aren't angry, then the memoir is no good. So congratulations!" typed another. It felt comforting to be supported by cyber solidarity.

But that didn't seal up the hole in my heart. I had hurt Mom and Dad and was no longer the too skinny, shitfaced, stubborn and stylishly blasé adolescent who didn't care a wit. I felt awful about it. Jewish guilt that got me angry all over again. Which I then felt awful about. It was a vicious Freudian cycle, a problem only a Jewish boy raised on the Lower East Side by two mental health professionals in the early '90s could have.

There is another version of my life. My parent's lives. My father is a handsome artist born in Detroit, who fled a conservative upbringing in the Midwest to pursue big city success. And he found it. He's been commissioned to do several public art projects, many of which still adorn New York. My mother is a smart beauty who speaks seven languages and helps countless people rehabilitate their lives. They have always been inspiring, loving, creative parents who encouraged me to realize my own dreams. And even when uncomfortable with their portrayal in my writing, they have remained understanding, proud and unshakably loving towards me. The truth is people are complicated.

My way of digesting and dealing with life is through writing. My father's through art. My mother's through therapy. We all have different ways of exploring the powerful bonds of family. We all try to make sense of our closest relationships in the best way we can. We hurt each other, heal each other, learn from each other. The most important thing is that we do all this together, as a family.

There have been many and varied reactions to my book so far. The way I have tackled the main subjects of fame and family. But the response that never changes is that as a family "you were all so involved. You cared about what happened to each other." And this aspect of my family is what enabled me to write so personally in the first place. Like it or not, my parent's enduring love allowed me to explore our conflicts in a way I couldn't have if we were fractured.

As my parents come to terms with my book, I hope to show them how my cautionary confession can help other people. A compassion I learned from them. There will always be struggle with the people we love the most, but it's this love that remains our defining bond.

Besides, "You know I'm going to write about all of this too," I recently told Mom and Dad. My parents both laughed. They had grown a sense of humor about having a scribe in the family. Though actually, I think my next book will indeed be pure fiction.

Check back tomorrow to read more from Royal Young, author of the memoir Fame Shark.

JLit Links

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:10:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

This day in Jewish history: A publisher of classic Jewish books is established.
The second edition of Noah Beck's The Last Israelis is now available.
Know any Taglit Birthright Israel alums in Boston or Bay Area? Tell them about NEXT Book Clubs.

North America's First Jewish Poetry Retreat at KlezKanada

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:43:00 GMT

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Poets! JBC is proud to be a media sponsor for North America's first Jewish poetry retreat at KlezKanada. The retreat is August 19th-25th and will be led by poets Adeena Karasick and Jake Marmer.

Sessions include:

Can Poems Be Jewish? Identity, Rituals, Rebellions and Vernaculars
Found Poetry: Poetics of Klezmer – Remixing your World
Dialog & Rants: Talmudic and Hermeneutic Techniques
Transcendence and Transience: Poetry as Spiritual Experience

Curious about you retreat leaders? Find some useful links below:

Read Jake Marmer's posts for the Visiting Scribe, some of his poetry for Zeek, and additional poetry and videos on his website
Read about Adeena Karasick and her new book and check out her website

Find out more about the poetry retreat here and on Facebook.

Living in Hebrew, Thinking in Aramaic, Writing in English

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:07:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Janice Weizman wrote about writing historical fiction and the bildungsroman and the Jewish woman. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

“Many artists are 'underground',” a writing instructor of mine once remarked, “but no one is more underground than writers.” To that I would add that no one is more underground than writers who don’t write in the language of the place they live. It amounts to a sort of double life. On the outside, you function in the same language as everyone around you. But then you have this other world, where you think and create in the tongue of a stranger. Your boss, the next-door neighbors, the mother of your child’s best friend and Moshe from the makolet might be aware that you are working on a novel, but you know, from the very first word you write, that they will probably never read it.

While I was writing The Wayward Moon, a novel which takes place in the 9^th century Middle East, the situation was even more confusing. I was constantly alert to the fact that rather than Hebrew or English, my characters would have spoken something that sounds like Ha lachma anya di achalu avtania, and dizabin abah bitrei zuzei. If, like me, these phrases from the Haggadah are all the Aramaic you know, then you understand the difficulty. As I wrote the novel, I realized very early on that I could never really know how Rahel Bat Yair, the story’s heroine, really spoke. All I could do was try to imagine her “voice,” not only the sound of it, but the “music” of it, its point of view, its inherent assumptions and ways of seeing the world. It wasn’t a matter of getting it “right” or “wrong,” because due to the absence of Jewish women’s voices in the few documents that have come down to us from that time, it was impossible to know exactly what idioms she would have used to express herself. All I could do was read the limited material that is available (e.g., letters from the Cairo Geniza, writings by men of her time) and listen to the tones, attitudes and modes of expression as they play out in the folk tales, songs, films, and poetry of people who have lived their lives in the lands of Islam.

While this sort of linguistic alienation is challenging for a writer, it can nonetheless be conducive to writing. The sense of being isolated, of having to wrestle alone with the voices in your head, enacts something existential. Writing becomes a sort of refuge, a place where you can sink into the words and phrases and fully inhabit your state of aloneness.

Having said that, if any Israeli publishers are reading this, Moshe from the makolet is still waiting.

Janice Weizman was born in Toronto, and moved to Israel at the age of nineteen. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Bar-Ilan University, where she initiated and serves as managing editor of The Ilanot Review, an online literary journal. Janice’s fiction has appeared in various literary journals including Lilith, Jewish Fiction, and Scribblers on the Roof. Her first novel, The Wayward Moon, was recently awarded the Gold Medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and first place in the Midwest Book Awards, both in the category of Historical Fiction. Visit her website: http://janiceweizman.com/.

New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This week's new Jewish Book Council reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6713634}{module_webapps,14253,i,6713618}{module_webapps,14253,i,6650851}
{module_webapps,14253,i,6509560}{module_webapps,14253,i,6060610}{module_webapps,14253,i,6509609}

Find more of the latest reviews here.

On Writing a Novel About The Act of Writing a Novel

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:43:00 GMT

Earlier this week, David Samuel Levinson wrote about the beautiful catastrophe that is New York City and dedicating his first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (Algonquin Books). He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I’m sitting on the back porch of my temporary lodgings in Atlanta, while two spiders go at it, the smaller invading the larger’s web. (Why? Who knows. Maybe he or she is lonely.) Larger lunges at smaller, until smaller retreats, and both settle down again to await the arrival of an unsuspecting fly. Watching them, I am reminded of Charlotte’s Web, which I read when I was boy, and how caught up I became in the struggles of Charlotte and Wilbur and how I never wanted the story to end. Unfortunately, it did, yet fortunately for me I found many other stories to get tangled up in—Encyclopedia Brown, The Westing Game, The Tales of Narnia, and The Bridge to Terabithia.

Back then, I read only for pleasure and escape and erroneously imagined these books I so loved to be handed down through a series of magic tricks to end up in my favorite bookstore. I had no idea they were written by real people, who sat at real desks and typed them out on real typewriters, arduous page after arduous page. These books, these authors, changed the way I saw the world, but more than this they changed the way I interacted with it. I learned about sleuthing, betrayal, love, and death by falling headfirst into these created universes, which matched the reality of my own only insofar as they resembled the familiar—houses, trees, the sun and moon, stars, streets, etc. Other than this, they were as fantastical as they were absorbing; I couldn’t wait to flip the page to find out what happened next.

While working on my own novel, I had a similar experience, yet now I was in complete control (or so I thought) of what happened next. The process of writing and publishing Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence took ten years and through it, I learned many valuable lessons, the most important of which is this: we writers have little say in the fate of our characters, who ultimately dictate to us how they want the story to be told and what will happen to them. So it was that one writer after another began to appear in the pages of Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence and I had nothing to say about it. No, really. They turned up and took over and suddenly the novel became more than a novel about a fraught triangulation of widow, critic, and ingénue. It became a novel that asked where stories come from and who owns them, how we write novels and why we do. Like a fly, I was trapped in my novel’s web and the less I struggled, the more I discovered about the characters and myself and the more I discovered, the more the impossible began to occur—the characters told me what was going to happen and held me to this, refusing to let me go until they were satisfied I'd told their stories as honestly and as well as I could.

Learn more about David Samuel Levinson here.

The Story Will Out: Why Folktales Still Matter

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:28:00 GMT

by Sharon Elswit

Throughout the ages, folklore has spoken to people. From pulpits and hearth fires and in classrooms, these stories forge a connection between the generations, pass on the values of a community, teach lessons, and help us make sense of ourselves and understand the world around us. They connect us with each other, a shared history of knowing. They help us face our fears. They validate our dreams. They heal. They entertain. And they offer us choices. A story attributed to the Preacher of Dubno makes a case for Truth being much more palatable when it is dressed up as a Parable.

Times do change, but underlying human truths and struggles do not. Relationships within families, between people and government, between friends and lovers—these go on. These are the subjects of folktales. There will always be a gossip, a miser, and a cheater. There will always be loneliness, sickness, and loss. There will always be someone else who bravely speaks up or cleverly thwarts a nefarious plan. Our folktales take this messy world and help us think about it by taking us on a journey outside of our own lives. They help us remember. They challenge us to make the world a better place within our own communities and outside. As in the tale of a captive bird that learns from the example of his cousin how to feign death and fly away, stories themselves show us how.

First told orally and then written down, these stories have been passed down from grandparents to children and their children, from teachers, from rabbis, from storytellers. We now find them, too, printed in collections and picture books and on the web. Sharing folktales with others is a gift. There are even folktales about the value of participating by telling stories and by listening:

a father and daughter who have become separated recognize each other through a shared tale about a shofar
a story passed down about a certain ritual and prayer performed by the Baal Shem Tov continues to help save the world, though the story itself is all that remains
King Solomon gets at the truth by telling a story and judging people’s reactions
a disciple releases another man from the lie he has been living by bringing him a story which lets him know he has been forgiven
a man brings what comfort he can to others in Auschwitz by listening to their stories
a haughty rabbi learns to make a difference by changing the tone of the stories he tells
a king realizes how unfairly he has treated his wife when he overhears her telling a doll the story of her unhappiness
and finally, as Avi Weiss asserts, people need to interact with the fire of stories in the Torah to forge new connections through the generations.

The storyteller Joel ben Izzy makes a strong case in The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness for the relevance and necessity of folklore in resolving problems in one’s personal life. After he lost his voice, it was that title story—a folktale where King Solomon loses his identity when Asmodeus throws his ring across the world—which seemed to embody the storyteller’s own struggles to reclaim his world and his career.

There are stories for each stage of the life cycle. In one, Lailah, the angel, tells unborn children the history of mankind and their lives to be, and then touches them right above the upper lip so they forget all the moment they are born. Need a story to celebrate a couple getting married? Wish for the couple to have children who will thrive just like them, as told in “The Wedding Blessing” in Peninnah Schram’s Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another. Share “The Magic Gourd” by Debra Gordon Zaslow from Goldie Milgram’s Mitzvah Stories, where a couple postpones using a wedding gift which may only be used once by relying on themselves and each other throughout their lives together. Trouble with marriage? A man who has had no luck providing for his family is harshly sent by his wife to bang a drum in the cemetery, where he encounters a sympathetic bear. With children? In one tale, a father anguished by his teenage daughter’s escapades prays for her to become a bat. Aging? An elderly cantor does not take well to being replaced and sends his raspy voice to haunt the young new cantor. In another story, Moses pleads that it is not yet his time to die. Three sons, whose father has just died, wonder which of them now possesses the true ring. Two sons in another story try to puzzle out just what is the treasure their father said he was leaving them, as they continue to work the land they have inherited.

Folktales are not just for children. In one story, a man who doubts his wife’s fidelity takes revenge with an arrow shot through Rabbi Adam’s magic mirror. In another, a woman’s brothers bring the husband who has turned away from her to the king to hear a story of a trespassing lion so he will know that his wife did remain true to him. Howard Schwartz’s fantastical collections, such as Leaves from the Garden of Eden, Elijah’s Violin, Miriam’s Tambourine, and Lilith’s Cave spin timeless tales filled with sensual imagery and supernatural occurrences.

The stories that take hold of us and won’t let go, we keep and change. We need the narrative, the wonder, the danger, the humor, and the magic. Folktales are malleable. That is their resilience. Stories have changed with the teller and with the countries in which people live. Some sumptuous Jewish tales either inspired or were inspired by Tales from the Arabian Nights. Humorous Joha tales differ from the Djuha trickster/fool in Arabic lore only by some of the traditions portrayed. And Peninnah Schram and Rachayl Eckstein Davis turned the American story of the boy who goes looking for a little red house with no windows and no doors and a star inside into The Apple Tree’s Discovery, a tale of self-esteem, with special relevance for Rosh Hashannah. Some general Internet anecdotes that reflect Jewish values are included in Seymour Rossel’s newest collection The Essential Jewish Tales. Just about eight of the stories told by fifty-four rabbis in Laney Becker’s Three Times Chai, have been adapted from universal tales.

More recently, it seems that adaptation is also going the other way around, with Jewish stories as a base for other cultural adaptations. You might not call Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride a Jewish story, but his film certainly took flight from the Hasidic story of the young man who playfully places his wedding ring on a tree root he finds sticking up like a finger from the ground only to find out that he is now wedded to a demon. General versions of It Could Always Be Worse, that tale of the rabbi who keeps advising the man in the overcrowded house to bring more animals inside each day, abound. Eric A. Kimmel is our most prolific story culture mixer. He recently set an Arabic Joha character in a Jewish Yemenite story of “The Answered Prayer.” His out-of-print Mishka, Pishka, and Fishka combines Ukrainian and Jewish culture in tales told to him by his Jewish grandmother.

Good stories will out. You can find a version of “The Treasure,” where a man goes to Prague looking for the treasure he dreamt about only to discover that the treasure has been buried back at home, set in China. There is a Jewish version of “The Magic Pomegranate” and one with three Middle Eastern princes and a special orange. There are African and Chinese versions of the story where a man brings water instead of wine to the barrel for a communal celebration, thinking no one will notice when it mixes in, and several Jewish takes, including the one by Nina Jaffe where neither husband nor wife put in the coins they promised while saving up to buy hamantaschen for Purim. And stories with Chelm-like humor have been told by the Uygur People in western China.

Current retellers pick stories they love and dig into character and motivation to make them relevant in today’s environment. Some exciting story reinterpretations have made an appearance in picture book form in the last few years. Gathering Sparks by Howard Schwartz, Ann Redisch Stampler’s The Wooden Sword, and Kimmel’s Joseph and The Sabbath Fish reach out to connect with new subtleties and warmth. One can truly believe that the prince in Stampler’s The Rooster Prince of Breslov has accepted acting like a human when, on his own, he thinks to share the blanket with his shivering teacher. Each year brings new retellings of the Golem legend and “If Not Higher,” for these are stories which stir powerful emotions, unforgettably strong and beautiful. Possession in “The Dybbuk” has been explored through dance, puppets, video, and theater, some of them parodies.

There are original tales, too, created with beloved folklore characters. Kimmel caused a sensation in 1994 with Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, based on the character Hershel of Ostropol. He also refashioned some traditional Chelm stories in The Jar of Fools so that the events take place during Hanukkah and invented some of his own Chelm tales, a difficult task to do well.

When things have already happened, then it is poetry which brings succor or rejoices with us and gives words to our feelings so right on that a breath catches. When we stand on the cusp or in the middle of an event and decisions have to be made, then we need a story with characters to help guide us through. Here is the captive bird wondering how he will get free; here is the brother who has sent his own brother to Azazel, rather than help him prepare for Passover; here is the king who goes into a little hut to remind himself how it is for the people he rules; here is the wife whose husband has wrongly accused her of misconduct; here is the grandmother hugging her grandson after he almost drowns in the ocean and, in the same breath, berating God for not returning his hat; here is the daughter who does not want to wear her mother’s wedding dress. There are folktales for all of these situations. What happens next may be fantastical—demons holding the girl prisoner inside her new dress—but she has our empathy. Meaning grows from understanding. An old tale freshly told, one that has taken the hand of people through years and even centuries, may bring laughter and wisdom, warnings and warmth to befriend us. We may become the human heroes of our own journeys with folktales to light the way.

Related: Jewish Folktales Reading List

Sharon Elswit, head hibrarian at Léman Manhattan Preparatory School, is author of the first and second edition of The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 668 Tales Listing Subjects and Sources, as well as The East Asian Story Finder.

I Was Born a Rambling Man

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:19:00 GMT

Yesterday, David Samuel Levinson wrote about dedicating his first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (Algonquin Books). He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

When someone asks me where I’m from, I never hesitate to say that I’m from New York City. Then, a little ashamed, I often confess that I’m not really from New York, that I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. While I did not spend my formative years in the city, I have always considered myself a New Yorker, which probably has to do with all those summers I spent on Long Island with my mother’s parents. The day trips to Jones Beach and into the city to see a play or wander around Macy’s! Some of my favorite memories still involve being stopped between stations on the subway or the Long Island Railroad. And then our slow approach into Penn Station and the skyscrapers obliterating the sky and my mother leading my brother and me up into the beautiful, congested fray that is Manhattan.

Every step I took along those overpopulated sidewalks, every museum and bookstore I wandered through, every salty pretzel I pulled apart and devoured—all of it was leading me closer to my future self. At the time, I had little idea that years later I’d live in and among those crowds, museums, bookstores, and pretzel carts, though I should’ve suspected as much, given my early fondness for the city. When I was a boy, I fell head over heels in love with the city, yet it wasn’t until I finally moved there as a young adult that I came to really believe what Le Corbusier meant when he said, “A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.”

A beautiful catastrophe, unlike any other in the world, especially for a young man who wanted desperately to become a writer. Even now, when I think about it, I am still filled with a sense of the romantic and haunted by that earlier version of myself, who traversed the sketchier and verboten neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and Spanish Harlem on his bike, who lived on 107^th and Central Park West, in what was and would continue to be for ages the biggest, most amazing apartment he ever lived in—a doorman building with view of the park, our rent only $1,400 a month. I shared the apartment with a friend, another Columbia undergrad, and eventually set a short story there. It was hard to leave an apartment like that, but leave it we had to do. After graduation, I moved downtown, then ultimately to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where I stayed for over a decade, until it was time for me to go. I had become too hard, too covetous of what other people had, and New York was killing me.

From there, I went to DC, then to Gettysburg, PA, then back to New York for a brief stint that lasted a summer and fall. Then, it was to Berlin, then back to Gettysburg, then Durham, NC, then Gettysburg yet again. Now, I am in College Station, Texas, soon to be moving to Atlanta—but, but, but…I left my heart in New York, just like so many of my characters in Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence. No matter where I have gone, no matter where I have lived, New York always beckons me back. She is an impossible place to leave for long, even more of an impossible place to untangle from. Just ask Antonia Lively herself, or Henry Swallow, or Catherine Strayed. Just ask any of these characters where they’d rather be and they will tell you, “Well, New York City, naturally.”

Unfortunately, we do not always get to choose the places in which we live; some places choose us. Antonia, Henry, and Catherine live in Winslow, a small college town in upstate New York, and it chose them. It also chose me and it is where I have lived, in my imagination at least, for over ten years. I know the town just as well as I know New York City, perhaps even better than that, because I created it whereas, in some ways, New York City created me.

Learn more about David Samuel Levinson here.

Writing What You’ve Never Seen: Janice Weizman and Historical Fiction

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:38:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Janice Weizman wrote about the bildungsroman and the Jewish woman. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

All fiction writers have a streak of audacity. To make up something and then ask readers to suspend their disbelief and give themselves over to your vision is, well, a little outrageous. Among the most audacious are the writers of historical fiction. How can anyone presume to know what it was like to live and work and raise a family in a time other than their own? How can one comprehend the hopes, the limitations, and the challenges of people who lived their lives in historical periods with radically different circumstances and assumptions?

Logic says that it’s impossible. Yet the imagination insists that it’s not. It insists that, with a little bit of help, it can transcend space and time and understand something beyond the here and now.

Allow me to offer an example. Let’s say you want to write a scene in which a character goes to a bathhouse. You could do worse than to make your way to Acco, a city in the North of Israel. When you get there, you may want to linger for a few minutes on the boardwalk, enjoying the vista of the bright blue sea, but don’t stop there. Continue along the boardwalk, and head for the old city. You’ll know it by the shops and vendors at the entrance, selling nargillas, Armenian pottery, olive wood carvings, humous, and fresh pomegranate juice. Look for the signs on the walls pointing the way to the Hammam – the public bathhouse. When you get there, you’ll have to take the tour. Maybe you’re the type that doesn’t like tours, but do it anyway. That way you’ll get to see the inside. You’ll be shown the various pools, now dry and empty, and hear the stories about the generations of balanim – bathhouse attendants who would scrub you down with sponges and brushes and fill you in on the latest gossip. And then there will be a moment when the group moves on, but don’t follow them. Remain behind and linger a little longer.

Instead of the empty stone pools, think of steam rising from the hot water. Instead of the scent of moldy walls, imagine wafts of rosewater and jasmine oil. And now, in the dim light and the silence, try to hear the voices. Hear the groans of the women being scrubbed with rough sponges by stern-faced attendants, the trills of laughter from a group listening to the town matchmaker tell a racy joke, the soft whispering of two girls in the corner, pointing to a third and whispering, “Look at that stomach. If she isn’t pregnant, then I’m a Rabbi.”

If you can see all this, then you’ll feel it in your bones—how the very drama of life played out alongside the tiled bathing pools. And as you emerge into the alley that leads back to the market you’ll know, from some mysterious place in your head that you never knew existed, exactly how to write the scene in the bathhouse.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Book Dedications

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:23:00 GMT

David Samuel Levinson's stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and the Brooklyn Review, among others. He lives in New York City. Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence is his first novel. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I knew I was going to dedicate my first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence, to my maternal grandparents long before I ever set out to write it. Or let me rephrase that: until I was tasked with dedicating the novel, I had no idea just how clear it had been that I would dedicate it to them. During the years it took me to write the novel, I never thought about the dedication, nor did I think much about my dearly departed grandparents, though in retrospect they were always with me, whispering their story into my ear.

No, the novel isn’t about them, not literally anyway, but it does touch upon certain themes—displacement, trauma, assimilation, ambition—about which I would never have plumbed had I not known the intimate details of their struggles. Marianne and Stephan—Mimi and Steve to their friends—were both born in Vienna, where they met and married. Both full-blooded Jews, their Jewishness never played a significant role in their upbringing. They were Jewish, just not religious, and rarely attended schul.

Long before their conversion to Catholicism in 1930, long before they fled Austria in 1936, it seemed they had already begun the slow, arduous process of shedding themselves of their Jewish identities to live a Jewish-less life in America. They arrived on Ellis Island in 1938, after having spent time in Istanbul, then Geneva. They bought a house in Manhasset, NY, and there raised my mother and my aunt as good Catholic girls, never once alluding to the war, or to what they left behind in Europe.

Like my grandparents, who loved Vienna and missed it every day, many of the characters in Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence yearn both physically and emotionally for a place to which they cannot return. How then, my novel asks, do we make a home elsewhere? How then do we find happiness in a strange place when we have been stripped, or have stripped ourselves, of our identities, that which made us who we were?

I wrote the novel to answer this question, among many others, for myself. When you read it, I hope you will find an answer or two for yourself.

Learn more about David Samuel Levinson here.

Making the Invisible Visible: The Bildungsroman and the Jewish Woman

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Janice Weizman was born in Toronto, and moved to Israel at the age of nineteen. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Bar-Ilan University, where she initiated and serves as managing editor of The Ilanot Review, an online literary journal. Janice’s fiction has appeared in various literary journals including Lilith, Jewish Fiction, and Scribblers on the Roof. Her first novel, The Wayward Moon, was recently awarded the Gold Medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and first place in the Midwest Book Awards, both in the category of Historical Fiction. Visit her website: http://janiceweizman.com/. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

A young man leaves his home and sets out on a journey. He is impressionable, sensitive, and inexperienced in the ways of the world. Because he is young, everything is new, surprising, a revelation. He is awkward, but also hopeful. He knows little, but he is eager to learn. He is betrayed by those he trusts, and happily surprised by people he thought were his enemies. So it goes as he journeys in and out of chance meetings, mishaps, and adventures. And ultimately, after feeling the full weight of his experiences in his soul, he comes to understand a truth about himself, about the world, and his place in it.

The literary term for this sort of novel is the bildungsroman. In English, we might call it a novel of self-discovery and it is a classic genre in both Western and world literature. Our literary canon is full of such tales of self-realization. Tom Jones and David Copperfield are examples of the genre as are Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Though works involving a heroine are few, Jane Eyre comes to mind as a rare exception. But generally, women, and particularly Jewish women, are absent from the genre.

This is not at all surprising. Traditionally, Jewish women were not the protagonists of stories about self-discovery. Rather, they were usually married off and on their way to motherhood while still teenagers. The trajectory of a Jewish woman’s life was set out for her from the day she was born, and it did not involve venturing into the world to seek one’s fortune.

But what would have happened if a woman was forced by circumstance to undertake such a journey? What if she had to make her way in the world alone? What would be her fears? Her concerns? Her particular vulnerabilities? How would she survive? What would she learn about the world? What would she learn about herself?

In The Wayward Moon, I’ve put my heroine in precisely this situation. Rahel Bat Yair is a 17-year-old Jewish girl living in the Babylonian town of Sura in the 9^th century Middle East. The story opens on the eve of her engagement, and Rahel, entirely content in her own world, has no desire to travel anywhere. Unlike the typical male hero of a bildungsroman, she has no use for experience or adventure. When circumstance forces her to take to the road, like Homer’s Odysseus, she wants nothing more than to go home, but unlike him, she has no home to return to.

Typically, at the end of a bildungsroman, the hero has achieved a modicum of self-knowledge, and whether he returns home or begins anew, he is able to utilize his experiences in forging his life as an adult. Would Rahel Bat Yair be able to utilize her experiences? Would there be a way for her to draw on her hard-won knowledge to enable her to contribute to her community? Or would she choose to conceal what she has seen and done?

Considering how little has come down to us about women’s lives in Jewish society of her time, we can easily speculate about the answer.

Check back on Wednesday for Janice Weizman's next post for the Visiting Scribe.

New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 31 May 2013 17:04:00 GMT

This week's new Jewish Book Council reviews:

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{module_webapps,14253,i,6583910}{module_webapps,14253,i,6470893}{module_webapps,14253,i,6582391}
{module_webapps,14253,i,5274315}{module_webapps,14253,i,6578912}{module_webapps,14253,i,6582433}

Find more of the latest reviews here.

Introducing Inspector Avraham Avraham

Fri, 31 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Today on the Visiting Scribe, D. A. Mishani continues with his series "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective," where he has been investigating why it's so difficult to write a detective in Israel. His first detective novel, The Missing File, was published in the U.S. by HarperCollins. The second novel in the series, A Possibility of Violence, will be published in the U.S. in 2014. He has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I can honestly say I was concerned by this "Mystery of the Hebrew Detective," mainly before and after writing the first installment in my literary detective series, The Missing File.

As I come from a family of Mizrahi origins, and since I admire the literary tradition of the realistic police-procedural, I chose not to back down. My protagonist, Inspector Avraham Avraham, is a peripheral character, from Mizrahi origins, like police officers in Israel usually are, and certainly like they are in Israeli culture.

He works in Holon, my home town, which is an urban, lower-middle-class, suburb of Tel Aviv. He didn't grow up in a kibbutz, he doesn't work for the Mossad, and the cases he's investigating don't have any national importance. He doesn't chase old hiding Nazi criminals and not even Muslim terrorists. In The Missing File, he's just looking for a sixteen-year-old boy, as unimportant as him, who went missing.

Still, I tried to address the problem of writing a detective in Israel in some ways.

For example, my inspector, in this first novel, is not very bright and not always successful. My plan is that he'll get better and better as the series continues, until he's as good as Sherlock Holmes. My hope is that his slow progression will make it easier to accept him as a realistic literary hero.

I also gave him a female boss, from Ashkenazi origins, toward whom he has complex feelings of admiration and fear. With this set-up, I tried to reflect the ethnic and social tensions which affect the possibility of him becoming a true Israeli hero.

Have I succeeded? Will Inspector Avraham become "a mythological character in Hebrew literature" as one of the novel's critics wrote?

I still don't know.

I do know that the response to his character and to the novel in foreign countries and languages to which it was translated, were sometimes even stronger than they were in Israel. It seemed to me that it was sometimes easier for foreign readers to accept him as true Israeli protagonist than it was for readers here.

But I can tell you one thing about Inspector Avraham Avraham—he never gives up.

And neither do I.

We're both determined to put an end to this "Mystery of the Hebrew Detective"—solve it, once and for all.

Learn more about D. A. Mishani here.

When 50 Happens to Good People: Part Two

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:56:00 GMT

Actress, author, and activist Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of two books—You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up and Fired!—and the e-book single Autumn Leaves (available from Zola Books), a chapter from her comedic memoir for Blue Rider imprint at Penguin, to be published in Spring 2014. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Read Part One of "When 50 Happens to Good People" here.

Ok, so I hadn’t done time in prison, I’d just spent one day there.

I’d just covered what was believed to be the first Bat Mitzvah in an American women’s prison for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. It was the only time I’d been in a temple where the person sitting next to me was tattooed with the words "Suicidal Freak." There’s a saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes,” but it should amended to, “and in penitentiaries.” If I am ever incarcerated you can bet I’ll be signing up for every form of religious education available as they serve snacks and the non-denominational chapel at Chino is air-conditioned. (In fact, there is a relatively new organization, Atheists in Foxholes, that does great work in the field, not sure about the quality of their snacks, though.) I figured if that rabbi could handle prisoners, he could do just fine with my son whose teenage years were starting to feel like a hostage situation.

Our son, Ezra, took to calling the rabbi a nickname, Rabbi Nudgey. He had so little experience with Judaism that he didn’t know that many rabbis hover in the vicinity of nudgey—that's their job, to nudge you away from delicious shellfish and towards God. It would be like I’d started calling my proctologist Dr. Thorough. Ok, I lied, I don’t have a proctologist, but I’m old enough that I should have one. That’s just another thing on my To-Do-Now-That-I’m-Aging List that I keep misplacing and re-write every week all over again. Really, my son should have called him, Rabbi to be Expected.

Here’s one thing I hadn’t expected to have to think through—where we would hold our event. Our home, with its temperamental seventy-year-old plumbing, is not ideal, and the rabbi’s congregation meets in a doublewide trailer on the grounds of the Chino Women’s Correctional Facility, so that wouldn’t seem to be the best choice. Ultimately, we snapped up a generous and unexpected offer of the large, airy meeting room at the Episcopal elementary school our son had attended. It was their first and I believe to this day only Bar Mitzvah.

Being an atheist had never stopped me from enjoying the ritual, community singing, gay friendly, and general “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” sentiment of the school’s Episcopal chapel services, plus, the school had amazing camping trips. A camping trip that includes margaritas? Really, what’s not to like? My son and I had also spent many hours volunteering in the soup kitchen feeding the local homeless population there, so to have the ceremony in the same space seemed ideal.

The administration apparently didn’t hold it against us that Ezra held the distinction of being the only kid to ever refuse participation in the annual kindergarten Christmas pageant. It wasn’t because he objected to the message. My son didn’t want to wear his costume. He was assigned to be an angel and he wanted to be a shepherd. If you saw my round-faced, golden-locked cherubim at that age, you would have cast him as an angel. People used to stop us on the street and say, “Your kid would have gotten a lot of work in Michelangelo’s time.” He looked like he’d floated down from the roof of the Sistine chapel. Normally, I wouldn’t have indulged this kind of behavior, but before I had a chance to intervene, his teacher had negotiated a deal with him. As long as he agreed not to recruit other students to boycott along with him and faithfully (as it were) attend rehearsals, he could recuse himself from the performance. That he kept his end of the bargain exhibited a certain maturity that I had to admire. Even during the play, when I leaned over and whispered, “Don’t you miss singing with your friends?” he remained firm and stated, “I’m singing along in my head.” I had to give it to him.

The Bar Mitzvah went off with just a few minor glitches. The only accommodation the rabbi had requested was that any crucifixes be removed or covered during the ceremony, something the church officials were kind enough to agree to. It wasn’t until the service was underway that my husband and I noticed our goof. We’d inadvertently placed him and our son in front of glass windows perfectly framing them between the two life size statues of Jesus in the courtyard garden. Thankfully, no one pointed it out to him and I thought it made a gorgeous ecumenical triptych.

After the ceremony, as I prepared to say a few words, my son leaned over to me and issued a stern warning, “One wrong word and you could ruin my life forever.” I’ve been around long enough to know how to share the spotlight, so I said very little, instead giving the stage to my much-funnier-than-me husband. Plus, we had a surprise up our sleeves. Jeff’s dad was too ill to travel, so we’d arranged for Jeff’s post-college roommate, the brilliant actor Harry Lennix, star of the upcoming NBC series The Blacklist, to stand in and deliver Bob’s prepared remarks. The Internet has been filled with stories speculating that Harry might be the next James Bond, and I hope it happens; I can’t think of a better candidate than Harry. He’s tall, handsome, charismatic and, selfishly, I could always hold it over my kid’s head that we got James Bond to speak at his Bar Mitzvah.

I jumped up and down with happiness that day—so much so that I broke the heel of my Dolce and Gabbana shoe—but it was worth it, because I know that if my kid waits until he’s the age that I was to get married (36), I’ll be 71. I’ve got make the most of every celebratory event while I’m still ambulatory. In fact, many people have deemed my generation as helicopter parents; it’s often said that we’ve fetishized raising kids, but maybe we’re just trying to make the most of every moment because we suspect we might not be around to see our grandchildren. Our children are our grandchildren as well. I am hoping that the vitamin D supplements I’m mainlining are doing something positive for my long-term health, and, in the meantime, I’m going for the joy.

Read more about Annabelle Gurwitch here.

Can a Policeman be an Israeli Hero?

Thu, 30 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Today on the Visiting Scribe, D. A. Mishani continues with his series "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective," where he has been investigating why it's so difficult to write a detective in Israel. His first detective novel, The Missing File, was published by Harper. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I'll try to summarize the new problem of writing a detective in Hebrew in a simple way. The biography of the typical hero of Israeli canonical literature, from its beginnings, is more or less this: he's a man; he was born in Europe, or in later periods to a family of European origins; he has survived the Holocaust, or was born to a family of survivors. He grew up in a kibbutz, joined the army and served in one of the elitist units, was maybe even injured in 1967 or 1973, and sometime later on joined the Mossad.

Unfortunately, the protagonist of the realistic crime novel set in Israel cannot have this biography. The Israeli police force, from its early days until today, is composed mainly of Mizrahim (Israelis coming to Israel from Arab or Muslim countries) and those who grew up in the social and cultural peripheries of Israel.

Thus, the cultural image of the police force and the police investigator in Israel is always slightly dejected. For example, the most memorable image of the cop in Israeli culture is by no doubt that of "Policeman Azoulay," the protagonist of the popular comic film made by Efraim Kishon in 1971. Azoulay is from Moroccan origins, and he is a pathetic – although heart-breaking – character. He can certainly be the protagonist of a popular comedy, but can he be the serious hero of a detective novel, meaning a character that's supposed to be brighter, sharp, and more intelligent than others?

This is, in brief, the dilemma that an aspiring crime writer faces when trying to write an Israeli realistic police-procedural that also aims to be canonical literature: Should he break the rules of Realism and create a police investigator that might have the same biography of the typical Israeli protagonist and thus can be accepted as a potential hero of Israeli culture? Or should he stick to an ambition to be realistic and create a Mizrahi police officer working in the peripheries of Israeli society, and face the probability of being condemned to literary marginality?

Or in other words: Can Israeli culture accept a Mizrahi police officer as the protagonist of a serious realistic canonical detective series, meaning as one of its heroes, just as Holmes is a hero of British culture, as Inspector Maigret is a hero of French Literature and culture, and as Phillip Marlowe is an American hero?

Read the final installment of D. A. Mishani's "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective" here.

A Tale of Two Cities: From London to New York

Wed, 29 May 2013 19:14:00 GMT

We prompted this year's Sami Rohr Prize awardees to write about "how they came to write their book." Over the past several weeks, we shared their responses:

Digging Deep into the Soul in the Heart of Iowa (Stuart Nadler)
Writing a Rooster (Asaf Schurr)
Writing Forever Stories (Shani Boianjiu)
Working Against the Image of the Conventional Novel (Ben Lerner)

Today, Francesca Segal, the winner of this year's Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, discusses how she came to write her award-winning novel The Innocents (Voice).

With the twentieth century vivid in our collective memory, it is perhaps unsurprising that we in the European Jewish communities can be more cautious about drawing attention to ourselves. And so for a Jewish writer, to come from that climate to this one is an elixir. To breathe the air in New York is instantly to become braver, and once it is deep in your lungs, it inoculates for life against that old, old fear. To write honestly— to write social satire, even—does not arm our enemies against us, it merely says the obvious: that in our struggles and strengths we are human, just like everybody else. The UK’s Jewish cultural scene is burgeoning, too—our first ever JCC will open soon, and Jewish Book Week has become a hugely impressive landmark in literary London. But there’s still a lot of catching up to do. I am a British-American hybrid and until recently I believed that I was equally familiar with Jewish life on both sides of the Atlantic, but after the publication of my first novel, The Innocents, I began to understand that I had completely underestimated one extraordinary facet of Jewish-American life—that here there is a broad, deep support for and an appreciation of contemporary Jewish fiction. It is both humbling and inspiring, and the very existence of the Jewish Book Council is a testament to its impressive scale. Everywhere you look, there’s dialogue. There’s disagreement. There’s vibrancy. Like Judaism itself, Jewish literary life is a very broad tent. Texts; stories; debating our conflicting narratives; these are the ways in which the Jews have always asked our questions, how we’ve always argued, how we’ve solved our problems, but it is nonetheless an art that needs nurturing—and with the support of unique prizes like the Sami Rohr Prize it is nurtured in America, and it is nurtured openly. I do not take that for granted.

But in my late twenties, New York offered me something else that I found equally seductive. It offered anonymity, a draw with which my native London simply couldn’t compete. I left behind a warm, loving, supportive, and often somewhat claustrophobic community. Jewish life in England offers a great deal, but I needed to breathe. I needed perspective. I needed to live in a city, for a while, in which I didn’t bump into someone who knew me, or a member of my family, every time I left the house to buy a pint of milk. And I needed space from north-west London in order to be able to write freely about north-west London.

And so it is perhaps no surprise that The Innocents was written during a period in which I was living in America, though it is, to its core, a very English novel. Set in the Jewish suburbs of contemporary north-west London, it explores the pressures and the expectations of life within that community. Adam Newman is newly engaged to Rachel Gilbert, who has been his girlfriend for more than a decade. Their lives and their families are entirely intertwined. Adam works for Rachel’s father, and has been going to the soccer with him since he was a teenager. And everything is easy and safe and settled and stable until Rachel’s cousin, Ellie, moves back to London from New York. If Rachel represents the values and climate of north-west London, Ellie embodies its antithesis—she is independent, promiscuous, vulnerable, palpably lonely, and Adam finds her deeply unsettling. She challenges him—but he also begins to understand the allure of everything she represents. She offers him a way out of the strictures, the judgment, and the increasing suffocation of everything he’d never thought to question.

It will not take the reader long to anticipate an impossible love triangle; beyond that, perhaps also to recognize that I have used the structure of Edith Wharton’s glorious, vicious, nostalgic novel The Age of Innocence as the foundation on which to build my own. It offered the perfect matrix on which to build a loving, honest, nuanced, and most importantly clear-eyed portrait of a world—a very specific world that I know inside-out, but which I was also certain would represent many others. With all its strengths, with all its foibles and weaknesses and rich, unexpected comedy, I believe the community in this novel could be almost any community, anywhere in the twenty-first century Diaspora. Anywhere there are Jewish parents trying to inculcate their children with Jewish values there will be Jewish sons struggling to live up to them; anywhere there is a Jewish life enfolded within a wider, secular city, there will be young people struggling to navigate a path between the security within, and the freedom without. Anywhere families build life-long friendships, there will be young adults who chafe against the restraints that that imposes, unable to define or redefine themselves before the knowing eyes of people who first met them in diapers. I wanted to write a novel that would resonate beyond the confines of the world that it depicts, and The Innocents was the result.

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, theGuardian, the Financial Times, and Vogue UK and US, amongst many others. She has been a features writer atTatler, and for three years wrote the Debut Fiction column in the Observer.

Detective Fiction and the Zionist Cultural Revolution

Wed, 29 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Today on the Visiting Scribe, D. A. Mishani continues with his series "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective," where he has been investigating why it's so difficult to write a detective in Israel. Read installment one here and installment two here. His first detective novel, The Missing File, was published by Harper. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Editor's Note: Below, D. A. Mishani continues where he left off yesterday: wondering about the evolution of popular literary genres in Israel and why powerful people didn't want "the detective" written at all.

Here is, for example, an important piece of evidence I found during my investigation: a fierce article written on detective fiction in a Hebrew newspaper in Palestine in the 1930's, when the first translations of detective fiction to Hebrew were made (mainly to Sherlock Holmes stories) and the first original detective stories in Hebrew were written:

"Who is it that poisons the soul of our children with this so-called literature – arouses in them the most savage and hideous feelings? All over the Diaspora, songs are being sung for the children of the Land of Israel (Palestine) and their complete, healthy souls – and who is this that dares to damage them, to damage the pure and the innocent within them? And why isn't there any public punishment for them? Aren't we going to finally put an end to this filthy commerce, commerce in the souls of our children?"

The critic's emphasis on the word "commerce" here is not innocent. I think it refers to the stereotypes of "Old" and "New" Jew – the first, the supposedly uprooted diasporic Jew, being concerned with money making, whilst the second, the new Palestinian Jew, the Hebrew, is concerned with curing the nation, physically as well as spiritually. By that time, in the early 1920's, popular literature in general and detective fiction in particular were already wide-spread in Yiddish. In this sense, the translations of detective stories into Hebrew in Palestine were perceived as a threat to the purity of the Zionist Cultural Revolution.

It's interesting to see that the defenders of detective fiction in this debate, whilst rejecting the arguments against the genre, used the same national terminology in order to promote it. Their argumentation relied on the contribution of detective fiction to the national project. Their main argument for introducing detective fiction into Hebrew literature referred to the genre's possible contribution to the revival of modern Hebrew language. They noticed the popularity of detective fiction among Jewish readers in Yiddish and argued that in order to persuade Jewish youth to learn Hebrew, it was crucial to develop Hebrew detective fiction that would attract readers.

These arguments have marked the condition of detective fiction written or translated into Hebrew from that moment on, and maybe until this very day. This is the reason for the relatively few translations of foreign crime fiction, at least until recent years, and why I found myself, at the age of 11 or 12, in front of empty library shelves.

This is also the answer to the question I asked myself: How did I come to read The Hound of the Baskervilles at the age of 8 or 9? Detective fiction, even when it was translated, was classified as children's fiction. Thus, until recently, Arthur Conan Doyle's novels and short stories were published in Hebrew editions aimed at children – and most of the original detective fiction in Hebrew from the 1930's until the late 1980's was written for children or was considered children's literature.

In fact, it was only in the late 1980's that detective fiction really appeared in Hebrew adult fiction, namely in the form of two serial detective-novels written by two female authors, Batya Gur and Shulamit Lapid. Gur's A Saturday Morning Murder, introducing police inspector Michael Ohayon, was first published in 1988, and Lapid's Local Paper, introducing amateur sleuth Lizi Badihi, was first published in 1989. Both gained commercial success and some critical appreciation and both revealed the second problem of writing a detective novel in Israel – that is, the problem of the Mizrahi (or Sepharadi) protagonist.

Read the fourth installment of D. A. Mishani's "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective" here.

When 50 Happens to Good People: Part One

Tue, 28 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Actress, author, and activist Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of two books—You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up and Fired!—and the e-book single Autumn Leaves (available from Zola Books), a chapter from her comedic memoir for Blue Rider imprint at Penguin, to be published in Spring 2014. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I turned 50. It wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I do yoga. I moisturize. I still fit into the same jeans I’ve had for the last 15 years, though they do sit differently, but you can’t escape it, no matter how Vitamin D you’re taking (even though some studies say it doesn’t do anything of significance). As an actress, I always played roles sometimes even a decade younger than myself. This was before IMDB made it impossible to lie about your age. I’d told so many people so many different ages over the years I’d even convinced myself that my driver’s license might not even be accurate. There is precedence for this in my family. My father’s mother, Rebecca, shaved a few years off when she arrived in Alabama as a teenager around 1919 from Russia—I can only assume to make her self more attractive marriage material—but then she tried to have it corrected to collect her Social Security earlier many years later. We’re Southern, so a bit of Blanche Dubois tends to seep in from time to time.

In my 20s, I was an erstwhile punk. I was ahead of my time. No need for a New York Times Magazine cover to convince me of how germs are good for you. On a sunny September morning in 1981, I picked up a tattered black leather motorcycle jacket for 25 dollars from a guy under the Cube on Astor Place, put in on and didn’t take it off again for the next 3-7 years; it was the 80’s, so who can remember the exact number. I furnished my entire apartment with items I found in dumpsters. Ok, the entire place was only about 200 square feet. But still. Now, time has caught up with me. It’s not like this happened overnight, but as the days approached leading up to my 50^thbirthday, I was waking up at night, well, at 4am, the witching hour for all hormonally challenged women, thinking there’s been a mistake. The math is wrong! I’m just not ready for that number yet. That number is so huge; but when you start experiencing your youth like it was yesterday, never mind that 30 years have come in between me and the time when a jacket could symbolize a life choice, well, that’s a sure sign that the math is right, a big birthday is afoot. That was also the last time in my life when I thought there were good people and bad people. Now I know there’s just people and I’ve done things that anyone could easily label bad, just ask my son; he’s got an entire list of my transgressions.

At the same time as I was speeding toward 50, my son was reaching a milestone age as well. 13. Again, this had to be a mistake. My son—who used to regularly spout adorable esoteric insights as children are want to do, like at age 7 when he announced, “When I was younger, Mom, I wasn’t sure life was going to be so great, but it’s so much better than I expected”—was now becoming my biggest critic. He’s Ben Brantley to my Alec Baldwin. For instance, I was on The Oprah Winfrey show giving millions of viewers a tour of a landfill, thinking I was serving a greater good, and hoping to make my son proud, but no, even this was not to his liking. “Mom, you picked up a volleyball in that pit and you called it a soccer ball! Who would ever listen to anything you say now? You suck.” My cooking, my clothing, my comments, everything was just horrible now to him.

That was just one of reasons why I decided he just had to have a Bar Mitzvah. It would be a way of bringing us together.

There was also a practical consideration. Both my husband and I are atheists and secular Jews. We came to the conclusion that if he’s inherited even a smidgeon of my opinionated personality, he should at least have a working knowledge of what he might later want to rebel against. I’m not proud of it, but it is a passion of mine to argue against things I know very little about. Movies, books, and people I haven’t met are some of my favorite targets, but I aspire for my son to be a more informed critic. All things considered, I told myself, it was a good thing I’d done some time in the Women’s Correctional Facility in Chino.

To be continued…

Read Part Two of "When 50 Happens to Good People" here.

Read more about Annabelle Gurwitch here.

The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective: The Investigation Begins

Tue, 28 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, D. A. Mishani wondered why it's so difficult to write a detective in Hebrew. His first detective novel, The Missing File, was published by Harper. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

So why is it so difficult to write a detective novel in Israel? Aren't we supposed to be a literary culture that appreciates a sharp character who knows how to solve a riddle? And didn't we produce one of the first recorded murder cases (that of Cain and Abel) and one of the first thrillers about an attempted murder prevented at the last moment (that of the Akeda)? As all detectives do, in order to solve the mystery I had to turn to history for some answers. And, in this case, it was the history of modern Hebrew literature.

I knew that modern Hebrew literature (i.e., literature in the modern and European sense, written not within liturgical or other religious contexts) began in the 18^th century, in central and eastern Europe, mainly in what is today Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Russia. During the 19^th century many of the newly-born modern European literary forms immigrated into Hebrew literary writing. And, although from its beginnings it understood and described itself as a national literature—like the German or the French—modern Hebrew literature has developed under unique circumstances, unfamiliar to most other national literatures.

First and foremost, it developed out of an unspoken language, meaning a language that was not used for daily purposes and communication. Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century mainly used local languages and the different local versions of Yiddish, the language of European Jewish Diaspora. Hebrew was the sacred language of the Bible and some of the Talmudic texts, a language of Midrash (study) and of prayer, and therefore a language known to a limited social stratum.

Secondly, and partly because of this unique linguistic condition, modern Hebrew literature has developed in special economical circumstances. Hebrew readership, meaning the number of readers who could read Hebrew and were also interested in modern or "enlightened" Hebrew literature, consisted of just a few thousands of readers.

Thirdly, the development of modern Hebrew literature can not be understood separately from the Jewish national project, meaning from the birth and evolution of Zionist thought and action.

Those unique conditions, within which modern Hebrew literature has evolved, had considerable effects on the evolution of popular literary genres in Hebrew, notably on the detective story. Hebrew literature—defining itself as cultural and ideological avant-garde, against the popular and not always Zionist literary writing in Yiddish language—has rejected any form of writing that wasn't national as unimportant and sometimes even destructive.

And the fate of the detective wasn't different. Very powerful people didn't want it written at all.

Read the third installment of D. A. Mishani's "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective" here.

D. A. Mishani and the Mystery of the Hebrew Detective

Mon, 27 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

D. A. Mishani is an Israeli crime writer, editor, and literary scholar, specializing in the history of detective fiction. His first detective novel, The Missing File, was published in by Harper. He will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

How I came to read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was only 8

My fascination with detectives started very early on.

I remember that one of my strongest reading experiences as a child—when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old—was discovering with growing terror and amazement The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I was reading at night, in bed, under the blanket, and I knew I was intimidated by this strange character, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, even more than I was by the monstrous giant dog he was chasing.

And there's another experience I remember very strongly:

I was 11 or 12 years old and I had already finished all the Agatha Christie novels available in the adult section of the municipal library in my home town, Holon, an urban suburb of Tel Aviv. I was standing in front of the library shelves that offered almost no other detective novels and asked myself: And now what? Are there really no other detectives in the world for me to read?

Many years later, as a young literary scholar pretending to write a PhD thesis on the detective novel, I found myself going back to these two important moments in my personal history of reading. This time I could ask myself the questions I couldn't formulate as a child: How did I come to read the terribly horrifying story of the hound of the Baskervilles when I was only 8 years old? And why was it that the shelves in the municipal library in Holon offered no other detective novels after having finished all of Hercule Poirot's investigations?

I understood then, that my own intimate history of reading, as a child in Israel in the 1980's couldn’t be separated from the bigger social history of reading in Modern Hebrew. I was facing the mystery of the Hebrew detective, or the mystery of the detective in Hebrew: Why is it so difficult to write a detective in Hebrew?

And for me, at that moment in life, it wasn't just a theoretical question, but a very personal one, almost a question of life and death, because secretly, without anybody knowing, I wasn't going to finish my PhD thesis on the genre; instead, I was planning to write my own detective, in Hebrew. I was going to write the first investigation of police inspector Avraham Avraham.

Read the second installment of D. A. Mishani's "The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective" here.

Joanna Hershon on Assimilation and Romanticizing the Past

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:23:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Joanna Hershon wrote about an insult and a memorial service she attended for a friend's father. Her new novel, A Dual Inheritance, was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. She has been blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

My paternal grandparents lived across from a canal in Long Beach on Long Island. We went to their house every weekend and—at least in the confusing palace of memory—I spent much of my childhood sitting on their porch, rocking back and forth on a glider in the shade. I remember my grandmother’s pliant arms, her strong opinions, my grandfather’s worry, his strength, his pale blue eyes. I could have listened to them telling stories for hours, and often did.

Because my grandfather was religious, it’s him that I think of first when I think of being Jewish: his broad back in his gray suit and his quiet sense of bearing the weight of the world. I often think that if he were a foul-tempered man instead of gentle and beloved, I might have had negative associations with Judaism. But my grandfather trudging off to temple is linked for me to how he was a landlord who could never bring himself to collect rent if the tenant’s child played a musical instrument; it’s linked to the poetic stories he told me about how the bluebird became blue. His Jewishness is linked with his goodness, and I see him in every talis, every yarmulke.

We tend to romanticize the past, the older generation. They sang Passover songs with so much more feeling, with more gusto than my parents. Now my parents are the eldest and they sing with more gusto than me. In that house by the canal, there were so many great aunts and uncles: dashing and troubled, sweet-tempered and oddly formal, fat and funny and weary. We miss our elders, their less polished style; their more (how, exactly?) obviously Jewish voices. We miss their more direct line to the old country—whichever country, the borders were always changing—somewhere in Eastern Europe. We miss them but we are not like them. We are more like everyone else.

Read more about Joanna Hershon here.

New Jewish Book Council Reviews

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:17:00 GMT

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

The Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes by Edouard de Pomiane

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:22:00 GMT

Last week, Rebecca Miller wrote about Gluckel of Hameln. She has been sharing texts that shed light on the history of Jewish life in France, the setting of her new novel, Jacob's Folly (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning's Visiting Scribe series.

When I was researching my last novel, my friend Michael Rohatyn found a book at the Strand he thought I might like: The Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes, by Edouard de Pomiane. De Pomiane (1875-1964), a physician, was also one of the most famous chefs and cookery writers of his day. Born Eduard Pozerski, he was born into the Polish aristocracy, brought up poor but refined. Both his parents were Polish patriots who fought against Russian domination of their homeland; his mother fled to France with the young Eduard when his father was deported to Siberia for insurrection against the Russians. Coming of age within the close-knit community of Polish exiles in Paris, he was sympathetic to liberal causes and was a proponent of the Dreyfus cause.

His ethnographic book about Polish Jewish culture and cooking, written in 1928, was originally entitled Cuisine Juive; Ghetto Modernes (Jewish Cooking; Modern Ghettos). It is, perhaps, the weirdest book I have ever read. A tantalizingly vague recipe for Carpe a la Juive (“Take a large, live carp. Kill it…”) follows a horrifying description of a pogrom, relayed to de Pomiane by a museum guide who had survived the massacre by hiding under a heap of hay in which his sister suffocated overnight: “A corpse, belly ripped open, lay with its guts wrapped around its neck…A child wandered aimlessly, haggard, mute, crazed, its body beaten to a pulp.”

In de Pomiane’s writing, appreciative paragraphs about the accomplishment of certain refined Jews rubs shoulders with unwittingly racist pseudo-science. “I observed as a biologist…wrote as a scientist,” claims de Pomiane, as he cheerfully divides all male Jews into three types:

1. “The dark-haired Jew, with a long beard and a delicate, aquiline nose. His lips are often thin, his ears lie flat against his head. His eyes are deep, almost mystical. He is less excitable than the others. It could be said that he belongs to an ethnic aristocracy. He has an Egyptian profile.”

2. “This type is also dark-haired, and much more common. His beard is black, shorter, his eyes are bulging and bloodshot, his nose is squat, his lips are thick and very red, and he enormous, flat eats. This is the excitable Jewish type. When he laughs, he sniggers. The face, overall, has a cruel and bestial appearance. Certainly this type of Jew would frighten a child in France, even if that child were himself Jewish.”

3. “A third, and rarer, type is completely red-headed. The beard is shorter and divided in two. He has the same negroid facial charactersitics as the preceeding type. The lips look even thicker and frame the teeth with two red borders of eaqual sixe. Although they are red, the peissy look brown from being rolled, twisted, and curled between fingers that are constantly being licked.”

Having provided us with this helpful diagram of Jewish types, he takes us on a tour of Jewish Poland, beginning with Kazimierz, the Jewish Ghetto in Crakow since the Middle Ages:

“The whole place seems fairly, and in some places, extremely, poverty-stricken. The more so since the population is dirty and strange. In Kazimierz, everyone dresses in black, everyone rushes about in a hurry, they all bustle about irritably, pushing, shouting, arguing. One would think the whole city were in the grip of some nervous disease.”

De Pomiane believes that these poor, nervous Jews give us a sense of what the tribes of Israel must have been like, “these people who when settled among us became the educated and refined individuals with whom we are familiar.” So, De Pomiane argues, the less “Jew-y” the Jews are, the more European, the more refined they are—and hence, it seems, equal to non-Jews. Unfortunately in only a few years there was no refinement that could save a Jew in Poland, or indeed, France: being Jewish was considered a racial fact, not a cultural subtlety. But de Pomiane’s distinctions are fascinating because they are being spouted by a man who was actually sympathetic to Jewish culture.

De Pomiane’s observations are strikingly detailed. Describing the typical kaftan, he states, “they wear a long black cloth gown which descends to their feet. It is not waisted like an overcoat, but is slightly fuller. Two rows of buttons secure it over the chest. This kaftan is quite high-necked.”

And then, he describes a head-covering that can be found in contemporary Williamsburg: “Older Jews wear black hats of brushed felt. These head-coverings are worn very far forward, a little over the eyes, because on the crown of the head, under the hat, they wear a little black scull-cap.”

He speaks of prostitution: “Just as in the Orient, one sees in the streets of Cracow and Warsaw, Jews attempting to draw in the passerby to admire a supposed daughter or niece.”

And the book is not short of anecdotes: a friend of de Pomiane’s was tempted by an old man who spoke of a girl “as beautiful and fresh as a mountain stream.” Tantalized, he followed the old man into an ancient house and through a rather dark and very smelly courtyard. “The Jew opened a door; my friend entered a room which was quite clean and saw a young girl in profile.” She was a perfect beauty. Then she turned to face him and he saw that one of her eyes had been gouged out. When he left in a panic, the old man cried, “It wasn’t for an eye that you followed me here!”

De Pomiane takes us to a stylish health resort called Zakopane. There, de Pomiane finds a lot of rich Jews. “What is so surprising?” he asks. “They alone…engage in trade. They alone are rich, and they alone can afford to vacation in Zakopane.”

Spending time with these wealthy, assimilated Jews, Pomiane is amazed at their patriotism. A doctor he met “defended both Zakopane and the whole of Poland…he was a proud Polish nationalist. There are men like these among Jewish intellectuals who have achieved a certain status in life… having left the kaftan and the ghetto behind…they have almost forgotten Yiddish, replacing it with very good German. They call themselves Polish.”

De Pomiane the ethnographer paints a fascinating portrait of a class divide amongst the assimilated versus the unassimilated Jews:

“Try and imagine a Jew in his worn, shiny, discolored kaftan, with his beard and side-locks on his temples. Imagine him strolling down the Avenue Henri-Martin in Paris, which is inhabited almost exclusively by wealthy French Jews. Would he be welcomed as a compatriot by those elegant ladies getting out of their automobiles, whose children speak English to their nannies? Definitely not. These “Israelites” [a term favored at the time by assimilated Jews as more politically correct than ‘Jew’] avoid the Polish Jew, whom they have dubbed ‘Polak’.”

The book encapsulates contradictions and subtleties within the Polish Jewish population between the wars, but also within the writer himself, a Polish Francophile exile who loved food and had an abiding interest in Jewish cuisine. Beef Bouillon with Sauerkraut, Chicken Soup with Almonds, Goose Soup with Barley, Carp a la Juive—these recipes and many more are all lovingly preserved for the curious gourmand in this most curious of books.

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

Joanna Hershon, an Insult, and a Very Jewish Conversation

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:53:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Joanna Hershon wrote about a memorial service she attended for a friend's father. Her new novel, A Dual Inheritance, was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

When I was twenty, I met a charming elderly man on a train in Greece who told me I looked like an angel. He insisted on escorting me to my destination. At some point during our time together, during the man’s patient explanation of Greek history, he explained to me that the Jews were evil.

I looked him in the eyes and said: But I’m Jewish.

No, he said, no, no. As if I was merely confused.

Yes, I assured him. I’m a Jew. This was one hundred percent true and my family (as far as we know) is one hundred percent Jewish. There was nothing complicated about that fact.

And I was raised by my parents to marry someone Jewish. There was no ambivalence there, no liberal-minded wiggle room.

When I met my husband in my mid-twenties, he was living in a small town at the bottom of the Baja Peninsula. He is neither Mexican nor is he Jewish. We fell madly in love and that was that. Though he is not a fan of organized religion, he agreed to raise our future children Jewish, but this was going to be my responsibility. How, I wondered, was I going to nurture a religious identity, when my own life didn’t include much in the way of religious ritual?

Before our twin boys were born, I tried to articulate what I wanted in terms of passing on Jewish tradition, and I usually returned to this: I want them to feel Jewish.

But they will, my husband always calmly explained. You’ll make sure they do, because it’s important to you.

But is it? I wondered.

It is, he assured me.

We’ve always spent most of our winters living in Mexico, and this was the fourth winter our boys have gone to school there. We have an international community of friends and it’s a life we treasure. This past winter one of my seven-year-old sons came home from school and he looked upset.

What’s the matter? I asked.

He told me how a boy had announced that Christians were better than Jews. And that hurt my feelings, my son said, because I’m a Jew.

It was obviously a distressing moment, but I admit I felt a tiny twist of relief. Because despite having lived a largely secular life, despite being part of a family tree that is one half gentile, there was no question that my son felt personally insulted. And though of course I don’t want my child to feel insulted, I was also grateful to know he felt this sense of Jewish belonging. What followed, that afternoon, was a discussion about identity and religion and bigotry. We asked each other questions, my son and I. We each went on at length. It was—I realized—a very Jewish conversation.

Read more about Joanna Hershon here.

Joanna Hershon and the Memorial

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:56:00 GMT

Joanna Hershon's most recent novel, A Dual Inheritance, was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

I recently attended my friend’s father’s memorial. It was held at the Faculty House of Columbia University in a perfectly lovely nondescript room with a bar. An elegant man with an appealingly mysterious accent led the service. I imagined he’d been a student of my friend’s father, who was a playwright and professor, or perhaps he worked for the University in some capacity. As the memorial unfolded, three things immediately came to mind: the deceased was roughly the age of the two protagonists in my new novel, A Dual Inheritance; like my protagonists, he’d gone to Harvard, and—though I knew my friend’s father was Jewish—there was no reference to it here. It was an entirely secular experience.

I thought of how my mother always says that there’s something cold and empty when an official service has no religious framework, and as so many friends and family paid loving and witty tribute to this obviously talented, stubborn, erudite, caring man, I carried on a mental argument with my mother, whose Judaism is expressed differently—more politically, more conservatively, less fraught—than mine is. I argued in my head for secularism. Here was a great example, I reasoned; here was a deep tribute without being defined by a religion into which my friend’s father happened to be born. He’d been orphaned fairly young, had a massive heart attack as a young man, had never thought he’d live past forty. He’d also been widowed young and had raised a daughter—my friend—who was now happily living in Berlin, raising a German-speaking son with a non-Jewish husband. You see, I told my mother in my silent protest, life can be so much bigger than religion.

At the end of the evening, after many remembrances, the man who’d led the service stood. He introduced himself as not only a friend of the deceased, but his rabbi. Though my friend’s father hadn’t led a religious life, he’d evidently been interested—especially toward the end—in questions of faith. The rabbi then introduced the deceased’s friend from Harvard, a man as not-Jewish as one can possibly be, an opera singer who stated it was his friend’s request that he sing this particular song, a song he imagined his dear friend enjoyed assigning because it was one that the opera singer didn’t know. I think he also knew how much I’d enjoy learning it, he said.

Then he sang.

It was the Mourner’s Kaddish.

And—despite all of those (deeply held!) mental arguments with my mother—that’s when I finally started to cry.

Read more about Joanna Hershon here.

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.

Related:

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.

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:

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{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.