In her last posts, Anita Diamant wrote about the cover of her newest novel Day After Night and about where she gets her ideas from.

I will be on the road a fair amount this fall, introducing my new novel, Day After Night, to the reading public. (Check out www.anitadiamant.com for where and when.) I’m not looking forward to it.

But fear not. This is not another ungrateful rant about the drudgery of the commercial journey. I heard a writer once call book tour fatigue a “first-world” problem –- on the order of too many choices in the grocery store. Believe me, I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to meet readers, which is the best part of a book tour. Actually, it’s pretty much the only good part.

The problem is that I am always a very reluctant traveler. I head for the airport fighting the gravitational pull of my own home. On the eve of any trip –- a day in New York, a week in Jerusalem, it makes no difference — I am already longing for the consolation of my return. My husband’s unthinking daily kindness breaks my heart. I get melancholy moving laundry from the washer to the dryer.

It is unfashionable to dislike traveling. So many people I know love to travel, live to travel, that it seems like a weakness or even a moral failing not to embrace the adventure of distant places. Does this mean that I lack curiosity? Or maybe I’m just a wimp. My daughter has already lived on three continents and she is only 23 years old.

People assure me that my aversion to travel is due to with working trips, which inevitably lead from airport to hotel to bookstore or synagogue or lecture hall, then back to hotel and airport again. Minneapolis, Cleveland, and many parts of New Jersey are all a corporate blur.

But the truth is, vacations make me anxious on their own terms. I get overwhelmed with choices: where to look, what not to miss. The essential experience or unbeaten track? A conversation with natives or another museum? The museum is easier and you get to check it off the universal travel to-do list. Which leads people to utter sentences such as, “We did London.”

My favorite travel experiences have been utterly random; the wine tasting I attended with a couple of medical students (complete strangers) in Tel Aviv a few years ago; the conversation – in French – with a man from Naples as we sat at a family-style restaurant in Florence; the Israeli restaurateur in Costa Rica, who served us the best meal we ate all week.

You don’t plan stuff like that; it just happens. I just need to scrape up the hope to believe that experiences like that are possible wherever I go — including stops along a book tour.

Anita Diamant’s newest book, Day After Night, is now available. Visit www.anitadiamant.com, her official website.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

As we approach the new year, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin shares his thoughts on Rosh Hashanah and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature:

One of the most important images of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur derives from the world of books, most specifically, the Book of Life, and those who shall be inscribed in it.

It is perhaps symbolic that in the Jewish mind life is so associated with a book, for I know of no other culture in which books play so central a role. Obviously, at the heart of Judaism is the book, the Bible. For that matter, I don’t know of another culture in which its central book is carried around at prayer services, as people kiss it. The famous expression about the Jews, “people of the book,” was coined by, or is attributed to, Muhammad, and he meant by that expression the people of the Bible. But over the centuries, the expression became associated with a general sense of intellectualism and love of learning among Jews. That is why the Jewish Book Council considers it a great honor to administer the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and to encourage through this award and through ongoing conferences the coming generation of Jewish writers.

We still are the people of the book, the people of the Bible and Talmud, a people devoted to fiction and non-fiction, and a people who are trying to fashion a literature that will affect the world in our generation and in generations to come.

So, as we approach the New Year, we extend to all of you a wish for a year of good books, both holy books and wise secular ones, books that deepen you even as they bless the lives of generations to come. And may we all be inscribed for a year of sweetness, growth, and fine reading.

- Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

A kindegarten student in the northern Gilboa region of Israel receiving his first book and a Sifriyat Pijama book bag

In her last post, Anita Diamant wrote about the cover of her newest novel Day After Night.

This is one of those questions that most writers are inevitably asked. For me, the answer is different every time.

The Last Days of Dogtown was inspired by a locally-produced pamphlet I found in a bookstore. The Red Tent grew out of many sources including Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” and my exposure to the tradition of Midrash.

Day After Night was hatched over eight years ago, in 2000, when my daughter was a high school sophomore spending a semester in Israel on the Eisendrath International Exchange (EIE), a program of the Reform Movement. My husband and I went to visit Emilia on the parents’ trip – our first trip to Israel.

We spent a good part of the week accompanying the students on their field trips (tiyulim) around the country. These were part of a semester-long comprehensive Jewish History course, which had included an architectural dig and a trip to Poland. By the time we arrived, the curriculum was up to the founding of the state of Israel, which meant bus rides to Haifa and Tel Aviv, to Latrun and to Atlit.

There, in the prison camp that has been turned into a living history museum, EIE director Baruch Kraus gave a spellbinding tour and history, which included the breathtaking and completely unfamiliar story of the October 9 break-out/rescue by the Palmach of all the prisoners to safety.

I remember thinking, “Now there’s a novel.”

I was fortunate enough to visit Atlit two more times after that to talk with the wonderful staff that runs the place and is committed to preserving the history of Aliyah Bet, the post- war immigration that brought nearly 1,000,000 Jews to the land of Israel. Only a tiny fraction of that million passed through Atlit, but it stands as a vivid reminder of the courage, luck, and perseverance of all those who survived the Holocaust and then made Israel their home. Atlit will always be a place that echoes with stories told and untold.

Anita Diamant’s newest book, Day After Night, is now available. Visit www.anitadiamant.com, her official website, and come back right here, where she’ll be blogging all week.

Anita Diamant, author of Day After Night, is guest-blogging for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

My new novel, Day After Night, is based on the true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than 200 prisoners from the Atlit internment camp, a prison for “illegal” immigrants run by the British military near the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. The story is told through the eyes of four young women at the camp who survived the Holocaust with profoundly different stories: Shayndel, a Polish Zionist; Leonie, a Parisian beauty; Tedi, a hidden Dutch Jew; and Sorah, a concentration camp survivor. Haunted by the past, the four of them find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of recreating themselves in a strange new country.

I love the cover. I can’t say that about all the books that bear my name, but I think this one is perfect.

The photograph was found by the persistent, patient, and talented art director Rex Bonomelli at Scribner. Because there are four main protagonists in the book, the search focused on an image of four girls. Some lovely shots were proffered, but because the four main characters – Tedi, Leonie, Zorah, and Shayndel – are described so fully in the novel, the pictures all seemed wrong for one reason or another: clothes, hair color, setting. Many emails were exchanged; many pictures were rejected.

This image arrived via email under the subject line “I think this is it.” Everyone agreed.

The photo comes from the archive of Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld, who were well known in Israel as photographers of Jewish settlers in Palestine in the mid-1940s. Indeed, the Sonnenfelds are said to have helped shape the image -– and self-image -– of the state.

The picture was not taken in Palestine at all; it comes from Germany in 1935 at the Ruednitz youth aliyah (Aliyat Hanoar) camp. This pre-immigration training center allowed young people to test their ability to live collectively and try out the demanding agricultural work of kibbutz life in the land of Israel.

Herbert Sonnenfeld (1906-1972) was a Berlin-born photojournalist who, with his wife, Leni (1907-2004) chronicled Jewish life in Germany until they fled the Nazis in 1939. At that point, they tried to immigrate to Palestine, then under British Mandatory rule, but were denied entry. Instead, they settled in the United States and traveled widely, photographing Jewish communities in Iran, Morocco, Spain, and ultimately Israel.

The image on the book cover haunts me. They look so joyful in their dance, in their shorts. There is no record, however, of their names. Did some of these kids make it to Israel? Did any of them?

Anita Diamant’s newest book, Day After Night, is now available. Visit www.anitadiamant.com, her official website, and come back right here, where she’ll be blogging all week.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

The New York Times published an interesting article yesterday by Alexis Mainland on reading while traveling on the NYC subway system. Mainland looks at what commuters are reading on different transit lines and, in one section of the article, asks Harry and David Zinstein what they’re reading on the B line:

To learn the Talmud, many of its students read one of its 2,711 pages each day. And it helps to have a chevruta, or study partner. Harry and David Zinstein, brothers from Washington Heights, generally conduct their Daf Yomi — page of the day, in Hebrew — study sessions en route to work on the Upper West Side.

Except on Wednesday, which turns out to be a kind of day of rest for Harry, the elder of the two Zinsteins at 28. A manager at Mike’s Bistro, a kosher restaurant on West 72nd Street, Harry Zinstein forgoes his subway Talmud study those days to read the Dining section of The New York Times.

Read the complete article.

Mainland also suggests that subway readers check out the Subway Book Club Blog.

What do you read on your daily commute?

In her last posts Maggie Anton, the author of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, reviewed Elie Wiesel’s Rashi and wrote on being a historical novelist.

When I first decided to write a trilogy of historical novels about Rashi’s daughters, one for each, I knew that the third book, on Rachel, would contain scenes occurring in the First Crusade. In particular I would be writing about the destruction of Rhineland Jewry in the Spring of 1096. Anticipating that researching this subject could be painful, I deliberately put it off as long as possible. And while some ‘eyewitness’ accounts were indeed horrific, I discovered that much of what I thought I knew about how the First Crusade affected European Jewry was more misconception than reality.

The biggest misconception Jews have about the First Crusade is that it directly caused the destruction of medieval French and German Jewry. But it is only with 20-20 hindsight that we can see European Jews beginning to lose status and anti-Semitism rising after the First Crusade. Judging by its almost complete absence in contemporaneous Jewish writings, most Jews took little notice of events in the Rhineland in 1096, just as they had ignored the Berbers’ destruction of Jewish life in Tunisia fifty years earlier. A large number of people were killed during the First Crusade, and the 10,000 German Jews who died, either by their own hand or at the hands of crusaders, was dwarfed by the over 100,000 peasants of the People’s Crusade who perished without reaching the Holy Land and tens of thousands of knights who died on the journey.

Yet I firmly believe that the First Crusade was instrumental in bringing about the Jews’ decline – first for economic reasons. Until the crusaders came en masse to Byzantium and the Holy Land, Jews had a monopoly on long distance trade between Christian Europe and the Muslim Levant, buying surplus produce cheap in one locale and selling at a profit in the other. Franks and Germans paid high prices for silk and spice, just as Egyptians and Arabs paid high prices for woolens and wine, with neither group knowing how little these items cost in their native lands.

Once Christians reached the Levant, two things happened: 1) they grew angry at how the Jews had ‘overcharged’ them; 2) they realized how profitable the business was and [Italians in particular] became merchants themselves. In less than 100 years, the great Italian city-states had not only broken the Jewish trading monopoly, they had supplanted the Jews as the chief financial powers in Europe. Over the same time period, the rise of craftsman’s guilds affiliated with specific churches [which obviously excluded Jews] led to further limiting of Jews’ choice of occupations. Given a choice between doing business with Jews and Christians, most Europeans patronized their compatriots, further eroding the Jews’ income.

But the massacres of the First Crusade had another, more insidious, effect on relations between Christians and Jews. Christians were horrified to see Jews kill themselves to avoid baptism. They were outraged that Jews would kill their own children rather than let them be captured, and the only explanation Christians could imagine was that Jews were somehow lacking in human feelings. It was only a small step to believe that Jews must be something other than human, something less than human, demonic even. Judaism was no longer Christianity’s ‘little brother’ who shared the same Bible, but an enemy of Christianity with its own heretical text, the Talmud.

Jews, knowing that German burghers opened their city gates to the crusading hordes and joined in their attacks, began to distrust Christians in general. Each side viewed the other with increasing enmity. When many German Jews who were forced to apostatize returned to Judaism [and were viewed as heretics by the Church], those who remained Christians were never quite accepted. The expansion of the Inquisition, originally created to root out Cathars and Albigensians, focused the Church’s attention not only on converted Jews suspected of being Christians in name only, but also on Jews who encouraged their former coreligionists to backslide. No one with Jewish ‘blood’ was safe from their scrutiny, and anyone with a grudge against either a Jew or former Jew had only to report them to the Church to get revenge. Thus anti-Semitism grew into a thriving entity that has continued for almost 1000 years, one that was only indirectly caused by the First Crusade.

Maggie Anton’s newest book, Rashi’s Daughters, Book III: Rachel: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France, is now available. Visit http://www.rashisdaughters.com, her official website.

In her last post Maggie Anton, the author of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, reviewed Elie Wiesel’s Rashi. Below, Anton writes on being a historical novelist.

Because the main characters in my Rashi’s Daughters trilogy are real, historical figures, the family of the great medieval Jewish scholar, my readers are both concerned and curious about what is fact and what is fiction in my novels. This important consideration leads to a basic question: what is the difference between a historian and a historical novelist? Answer: the historian must be right, but the historical novelist cannot be wrong. In other words, as long as nobody can prove the fiction author is mistaken, she can write what she likes. Legally, you cannot libel the dead.

But the novelist must have some integrity. Obviously if forks weren’t invented until the 14th century, then Rashi’s family, living in the 11th century, can’t use them. Yet because nobody knows what my heroines did for a living, I felt free to make Miriam a midwife and Rachel a clothier. After all, the majority of long-distance trade, a Jewish monopoly at this time, involved luxury woolens and silk. And there were certainly plenty of midwives in medieval France [it’s not as if I made Rashi a midwife]. The author must also be accurate about details such as what her characters eat, how they dress, where they lived. For Rashi’s household, this meant I had to know what was Jewish Law in his community and how it differed from halacha today. And since I considered my characters sophisticated enough to gossip about local court politics, I insisted on ferreting out events and scandals that actually occurred in Champagne and Paris, as well as the names of the nobles and clerics involved.

What about legends? Certainly a novelist should weave legends into the story, perhaps excepting those that have been absolutely discredited. But the details should be authentic. Not everyone agrees that Rashi was a vintner, but when I chose to give him this profession, I became an expert on medieval winemaking. One famous legend says that Rashi’s daughters were learned in a time when most women were forbidden to study the holy texts. So I created realistic scenes in which their father first began to teach them, then decide what texts they’d study and how their husbands and communities would react to this breach of custom. When I discovered a legend that Rashi’s daughters wrote his Talmud commentary on Tractate Nedarim [which is definitely not his], I couldn’t resist having them write it in the final volume of the trilogy, Book III–Rachel.

One final caveat. If the author wants to invoke legends, or even write something with no evidence whatsoever, she owes it to her readers to inform them of this in an afterword or ‘note to readers’ at the novel’s conclusion.”

Maggie Anton’s newest book, Rashi’s Daughters, Book III: Rachel: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France, is now available. Visit http://www.rashisdaughters.com, her official website.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Steve Coates of the NY Times Paper Cuts Blog shares readers’ letters in response to Tony Horwitz’s review of Israel Is Real (Rich Cohen) on July 26th here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Benyamin Cohen’s paperback book trailer for My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith: