Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter 

Apolo­gies for the silence! We’ve been busy with award sea­son here at the JBC. In case you missed it, the 2011 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award win­ners and final­ists were announced in ear­ly Jan­u­ary and the 2012 final­ists for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize (SRP) were announced last week. In the com­ing weeks, we’ll hear more from each of the SRP final­ists on the Pros­en­Peo­ple and we hope you’re as eager to hear what they have to say as we are! Last week, we added a new read­ing list on Sovi­et Jew­ry and announced our March Twit­ter Book Club with Nathan Eng­lan­der. And, as usu­al, we’re con­tin­u­ing to add to our ever-expand­ing book data­base (cur­rent­ly tack­ling 2006 – 2008 titles). Now, a few from the shelf that give a nod to our friends overseas:

Izak Goller: Select­ed Poems, Plays and Prose, Izak Goller; Gabriel A. Sivan, ed. (Jan­u­ary 2012, Val­len­tine Mitchell)
Izak Goller (18911939) was a gift­ed and inspir­ing teacher, poet, play­wright, nov­el­ist, and thinker from Liverpool

The Escape of Sig­mund Freud, David Cohen (March 2012, Over­look) 

The sto­ry of Freud’s escape from Vien­na and Anton Sauer­wald, the man who helped to make this a possiblity

Sud­den­ly, a Knock on the Door: Sto­ries, Etgar Keret; Nathan Eng­lan­der, Miri­am Shlesinger, Son­dra Sil­ver­ston, trans. (March 2012, FSG)
Read JBC’s review of Etgar Keret’s 2008 col­lec­tion, The Girl on the Fridge, plus check out the Some­thing Out of Some­thing, an Etgar Keret design contest

The Poet­ry of Kab­bal­ah: Mys­ti­cal Verse from the Jew­ish Tra­di­tion, Peter Cole (April 2012, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press) 

The lat­est col­lec­tion from Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award Win­ner Peter Cole

You Are Not Like Oth­er Moth­ers, Ange­li­ka Schrob­s­dorff; Steve Ren­dell, trans. (April 2012, Europa Edi­tions)
Ange­li­ka Schrob­s­dorf­f’s mem­oir of her moth­er, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished as Du bist nicht so wie andre Müt­ter” in 1992


Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.