Jewish Literary Review

My Jesus Year - The paperback trailer

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:15:00 -0600

Check out the trailer for the new paperback version of My Jesus Year, a great book written by my good friend Benyamin Cohen.

Newly translated Sholem Aleichem

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:12:00 -0600

This week's edition of The New Yorker had a brief item about "Wandering Stars," a novel by Shalom Aleichem that previously was available only as an abridged version.

Here's more:

Best known for his stories of Tevye the Milkman, a character later brought to Broadway in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Sholem Aleichem was a Russian humorist sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” In this romantic epic, previously available only in an abridgment, two lovers are enraptured when the Shchupak-Murovchik Yiddish theatre troupe arrives in their impoverished town, and they resolve to escape shtetl life and run off with the actors. Their gruelling journey takes them across continents and ends on New York’s Lower East Side, capturing, with whimsy and pathos, the experience of the Jewish diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century. As one of the lovers tells the other the night they first meet, “Stars do not fall, stars wander.”

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New book on Isaac Rosenfeld

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0600

A new book on Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein's "Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing," suggests that the late writer may have accomplished more than what the critics have given him credit for.

Yes, he died at the age of 38, having written just one critically acclaimed novel, "Passage from Home," and never reached the great heights of his buddy, Saul Bellow. But he still did a lot of noteworthy things in his 38 years on this earth.

At least, that's what Saul Rosenberg says in his review of the book for the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it.

As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his "failure."

Even so, the question remains: why didn't Rosenfeld produce more during his lifetime? Writing a review of "Rosenfeld's Lives," in the Forward, Glenn C. Altschuler takes us through some of the reasons why:

Was it his bohemian proclivity to live in the moment at the expense of all that is lasting? Was it his skeptical stance toward rationalism and science, which rendered his work abstract, vague and metaphysical? Was it his attachment to the wacky sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich?

Zipperstein isn’t all that certain. In his journal, Rosenfeld addressed his inadequacies: his failures as a husband and father; his intractable childhood phobias; his fears of homosexuality — and the toll they took on his writing. And yet, Zipperstein acknowledges, it’s by no means clear “how truthful, or better said, how truthfully characteristic journal entries are.” As vessels of angst, discontent, depression and self-loathing, journals, Cynthia Ozick has observed, “are notoriously fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power flourishes elsewhere.”

So, we may never know why but Zimmerman receives kudos from Rosenberg for his handling of Rosenfeld's life in this first full biography of the writer:

Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.

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Israel to celebrate Amos Oz's 70th birthday

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0600

As we approach his 70th birthday celebration, we can expect to see more and more about one of Israel’s foremost authors, Amos Oz.

He officially becomes a septuagenarian on May 4 and there will be a three-day celebration in Arad, Israel where President Shimon Peres will be in attendance on the opening night, according to Ha’Aretz. Later in the month, Ben-Gurion University will host a conference in honor of the author.

If you can’t make it to Israel for the festivities, there are two new books out that may help you feel like a true fan of Oz’s work.

First, Oz has come out with a new novella, “Rhyming Life and Death.” The New York Times’ Ethan Bonner called it a “somewhat brutal look at the life and sensibility of a literary celebrity.”

There’s also “The Amos Oz Reader,” a 400-page compendium of Oz’s work that draws from his novels as well as his nonfiction writing.

I was bored by the recent profiles of Oz I read in the Times and in Ha’Aretz (he seemed pretty bored by the interviews as well).

But, I’m always intrigued by the writing habits of authors and Ha’Aretz asked that obligatory question. Oz said he gets up at five without an alarm clock, sits down to write by six and continues writing until noon. In the afternoon, he eats and reads a bit and then goes back to his desk “to erase what I wrote in the morning,” he says.

I was surprised to learn that Oz always uses a pen for his first drafts. Here’s more from the interview in Ha’Aretz:

"I always write with a pen. I have a computer nearby, on the side, and when I've finished writing many drafts, I type very slowly with two fingers because I don't know how to touch-type. I type myself because no one else can read my handwriting. But I always write with a pen for sensual reasons, the arc between the pen and fingers, and the paper, the erasures and scribbles. You can't do that on a computer."

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Pulitzer Prizes announced today

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:52:00 -0600

For fans of Jewish books, it was slim pickens among the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners announced today.

However, among the finalists for the prizes (they were announced today also), there was one book that caught my eye as something we could feature on this blog.

It was William I. Hitchcock's "The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe." The book has had a lot of great things said about it, including this bit of praise from Foreign Affairs:

In the hands of a less deft historian, this project could have come across as a revisionist attempt to question the necessity, or at least the manner, of the liberation, but Hitchcock avoids that trap. The stories he tells of the Normandy invasion, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the occupation of Germany may be familiar, but the prose is gripping and the perspective of the liberated a fresh twist. This is a remarkable work of history that also sheds light on present-day debates about the merits and the costs of liberating people by force.

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The Final Solution and ordinary Germans

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0600

This month's issue of The Atlantic contains a very good piece by the magazine's literary editor, Benjamin Schwarz, about the attitudes and opinions of ordinary Germans towards Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime.

Schwartz gives the reader a panoramic view of recent books that discuss the topic. His news peg is the publication last month of Richard J. Evans' newest tome, "The Third Reich at War," which is the third installment of Evans' trilogy of Nazi history that began with "The Coming of the Third Reich," and "The Third Reich in Power."

What's so significant about this recent scholarship is that it paints a very different picture of what ordinary Germans knew about The Final Solution compared what was said in the decades after the war. Here's Schwartz discussing the consensus of the research:

[D]espite their authors’ different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.

None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime’s lethal anti-Semitism (pace Daniel Goldhagen’s now largely discredited Hitler’s Willing Executioners). But both indirectly and explicitly, these books make clear that just as the Final Solution itself is now understood to inform so many aspects of Nazi Germany, so too the Germans’ knowledge of the murder of the Jews influenced and altered the history of the Third Reich and the war it started.

So, perhaps this is something many people had suspected anyway. How could the Germans not know about the murders? What's more interesting to me is taking a look at the German response to this knowledge. While interesting, this aspect also is, as Schwartz notes, all too predictable:

Nazi rule had penetrated and altered popular attitudes, so by 1939 most Germans believed that Jews should be segregated or removed from the “folk community.” But the anti-Semitism of most Germans stopped far short of genocide—only a small minority overtly approved of the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Of course, an even smaller number publicly condemned Nazi policy and were prepared to help the Jews: whatever their private feelings, most Germans responded outwardly with indifference, and with an attitude nicely characterized by [historian David] Bankier as knowing “enough to know that it was better not to know more.” Although certainly not a commendable stance, it’s hardly surprising.

Indeed. There just aren't many examples in history of people standing up to genocide. It's what makes hindsight condemnation unfair in some respects. After all, what would we do if we were ordinary Germans during the war?

But, at a certain point, you realize that the roots of the Holocaust were sowed decades before the war and that that was the time when ordinary Germans should have acted heroically rather than allow their country to descend into a haven for organized murder.

And perhaps that is why history has been harsh to ordinary Germans. The Holocaust did not start with Hitler and the Nazis: it began with the ordinary anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans.

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I'm in the Atlanta Jewish Times

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:52:00 -0600

I'm in this week's edition of the Atlanta Jewish Times. It's the cover story about my synagogue trip to New Orleans to help build houses.

I got a contributor line (although it doesn't appear in the online version).

Check it out when you get a chance. I used to work at that paper but I have not had a byline or contributor line since, like, 2002. That was several editors ago.

Interview with Charles Weinblatt, author of Jacob's Courage

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:00:00 -0600

On Tuesday, people around the world will observe Holocaust Remembrance Day or Yom HaShoah. To mark the occasion around these parts, I'd like to present this interview I conducted with author Charles S. Weinblatt.

Mr. Weinblatt's recent book, "Jacob's Courage," tells the story of two young lovers and their families during the Holocaust. He kindly answered my questions via email. Here's the full exchange:

Jewish Literary Review: There have been a lot of books about the Holocaust already. What's unique about your book? What message does it have that has not already been discussed?

Chuck Weinblatt: I wanted the reader to experience the complete brutality of the Holocaust through the eyes of young lovers in "Jacob's Courage." The tale is epic in content, covering the lives of the Jewish lovers and their families from 1939 through the end of the war in 1945. It's not a fast read and it is graphic at times. The characters are mostly fictitious, but the events, experiences and dates surrounding them are real. This is no whitewash of human ordeal. The truth of the Holocaust is atrocious. These people went through experiences that we can hardly imagine. Therefore, Jacob's Courage reveals the most brutal circumstances that a reader is likely to encounter. But, because it’s a love story, the reader also experiences romance, passion and intense emotional attachment.

I centered the story around two Jewish lovers in Salzburg Austria, at the time of the Auschluss, the German invasion and conquest to display the dichotomy of life in the Shoah (Holocaust). We are not always happy or sad, but a combination of both. So it was for our lovers. We experience the bliss of their desire, while life around them disintegrated into a morass of terror. In the Theresienstadt concentration camp, our lovers marry, play in the Jewish orchestra and teach in the camp school before escaping in a tunnel and joining the partisans. Our lovers displayed the courage to fight their brutal persecutors. Here, we also find a collective social bravery by observing that while the adult Jews of Theresienstadt knew that they were about to be murdered, they created an environment of normalcy in the camp for their children. Each of those things happened in reality. It was my desire to place ordinary people in the central roles, performing extraordinary acts of courage. I rarely strayed from the truth. In fact, a Holocaust survivor in Florida called me to ask how I knew exactly what it was like to live in Auschwitz. He said I described Auschwitz with minute detail and he was shocked to learn that I was not there during the Holocaust. We have since become friends.

Unlike a memoir, I was not held accountable for telling one specific story. Fiction enabled me to move my characters into and out of some of the most critical experiences of World War II. I believe this is unique for a Holocaust book. Unlike someone who experienced the Holocaust in one place and time, my characters travel from event to event as the Holocaust unfolds around them.

In stressing reality, my characters are not heroes. They are ordinary in almost every way. Yet, placed into unthinkable experiences, they performed extraordinary feats of bravery. This, I think, is at the center of our morality. Each of us would like to believe that we could perform extraordinary acts of courage, if necessary. We know that many Holocaust victims performed acts of incredible valor. Yet, historical fiction should not always be about heroes claiming improbable victory against overwhelming malevolence. Life is about real people, with character flaws and psychological imperfections. Our experiences are rarely black and white. We live in shades of gray. We are attractive and hideous, comforting and horrifying, vicious and compassionate; we worship and we loathe. We are not clouded by delusions of morality, but governed by them.

I also wanted a story with an uplifting ending, because some Jews fought back and some survived. Two thirds of the Jews of Europe perished, some of them my own relatives. Yet, one third survived. The seed of Israel emerged from the darkness of putrefying death to grow and flourish. Within three years, Israel was reborn. So, this is a story of a massive triumph of good over evil. Our lovers represent the seed of Israel, surviving against all odds.

Finally, as I was doing research for Jacob's Courage, I learned that almost two entire generations of my maternal extended family perished in the Holocaust. The shock of learning about my lost ancestors gave my writing added impetus. I began to feel that I was telling their story, in an unexpected epiphany of catharsis. It suddenly became increasingly important that people know how concentration camp victims were persecuted. The only way that I could tell that story was in its horrifying detail. Perhaps they were with me as I wrote.

JLR: Tell me about your writing process. Where do you do most of your writing? Do you keep a schedule? Prefer to write in the morning, evening, middle of the night?

Weinblatt: I write just about every afternoon. It’s become a habit, since I retired in 2004. I’m only 56 (I had to retire because of disability), so I believe that I have a second career as a writer. I write in my family room, which is a huge, bright white room. Here, under a two-story ceiling with skylights I can looking out over a densely wooded ravine and discover peace. When I’m close to completing a work, I devote more time and effort to it. The last few weeks of writing Jacob's Courage was a maddening, chaotic time. Otherwise, I take evenings and mornings off. Thankfully, I write more as a hobby than for income. So, I can be a little lazy at times.

JLR: Where did you get the idea for a romance set during the Holocaust?

Weinblatt: I decided to create a fictitious seventeen-year-old male as my primary character (Jacob Silverman). To reference reality, I used my own experiences from that age. As it happens, I was dating my future wife at that time. The glory and beauty of young love is exceedingly special to me. It represents one of the most exciting and satisfying experiences of a lifetime. Jacob’s lover, Rachael, was created in large part from my wife, as she was at that age. I felt compelled to write a love story because there were young Jewish lovers during the Holocaust and they must certainly have experienced the greatest beauty and the most terrifying brutality at the same time. This is a huge challenge for a writer, because the characters are constantly buffeted by the winds of tremendous and opposing emotions. We experience the pure beauty of lovemaking with them. And, later, we experience the heartbreaking devastation of genocide and the loss of loved ones. It’s a wild ride for the reader and not always for the best.

JLR: What writers do you admire or enjoy reading?

Weinblatt: I’ve always been a fan of Michener, Wouk, Wiesel, Tolstoy, Wilder, From, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. On the less serious side, I enjoy Tolkien, Clancy (what man doesn’t?), King, Auslander, Hosseini and Eggars. One of my hobbies is collecting the compositions of Mozart. So, my library is filled with a great deal of non-fiction about the famous composer. I try to read at one work of fiction and non-fiction at the same time. I think it keeps me fresh. Finally, I enjoy books that sweep the reader along in emotional tales of excitement. To that end, I admire epics like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Here within unforgettable characters, we experience remarkable courage, passion and the thrilling victory of pure good over terrifying evil. I hope that I was able to take the reader of Jacob's Courage along for such a ride. That the Holocaust happened in reality, exterminating millions of innocent people, makes the story that much more intriguing to me.

JLR: What are your future writing plans? Any follow up for your novel or plans for other types of writing?

Weinblatt: I have a sequel in mind for Jacob's Courage. However, it’s currently on the shelf as a project. I won’t reveal what will happen to our young lovers in the sequel. Suffice it to say, there will be a huge effort in research, including the necessary acquisition of idioms in a language other than English, within a vastly different culture than Europe. It’s going to be a ton of work. I also believe that a writer improves his or her skill by crossing genres and themes.

Currently, I’m working on a children’s book and a science fiction novel. The children’s book is a great change and refreshing. The science fiction novel is a great deal of fun to write. To be honest, it’s my favorite genre. I even dabble in poetry, on occasion.

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Goodbye, Portnoy? I don't think so.

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:06:00 -0600

There's a fairly new 'web exclusive' article on the Vanity Fair Web site and it talks about the rise of the 'New Yiddishists.' The terms refers to "today's talented crop of young Jewish writers, such as Nathan Englander, Michael Chabon, and Dara Horn."

Now, as much as I applaud David Sax's efforts in shaping and defining this phenomenon in contemporary Jewish writing, I cannot agree with his central premise of saying that these authors are "weaving tales bound in a newfound ethnic pride."

After reading the piece, you come away with the sense that these contemporary authors represent some sort of a prideful response to the Jewish loathing found in the characters of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. I just don't see it.

If anything, it seems to me that much of modern Jewish fiction writing is an extension of Roth's portrayals of Jews. Chabon and Englander certainly do not shy away from Roth's 'warts and all' depictions of the Jewish community. Many of the modern Jewish writers Sax talks about struggle with the same types of questions that Roth, Bellow and their contemporaries struggled with: assimilation, Jewish identity, tradition versus modernity and the continuing allure of shiksas. These struggles are taking a slightly different tack among the modern writers but we're basically still hearing the thoughts and feelings of Nathan Zuckerman, Alexander Portnoy and Moses Herzog.

I'm not complaining here. I like what I've read (mostly). I'm just saying that what we're seeing is an extension of Roth, not a move in a direction away from him.

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New book on S.Y. Agnon

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:55:00 -0600

Syracuse University Press will continue its series "Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art" with the publication of "Language, Absence, Play," a new book that takes a close reading of S.Y. Agnon's work.

Agnon, one of the foremost writers of modern Hebrew fiction, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. The author of the new book, Yaniv Hagbi, is a professor at the University of Amsterdam who has previously written a novel, "The Yemenite Guide for the Writing of Legends."

According to the release put out by the publisher, the book "explores Agnon’s theological and philosophical attitudes toward language, attitudes that to a large extent shaped his poetics and aesthetic values. Drawing on anthologies compiled by Agnon, among others, Hagbi examines his theoretical orientation and the ways he integrated into his poetics ideas about language that are rooted in Jewish theology. In doing so, Hagbi casts light on profound parallels between religiously inspired Jewish hermeneutics and the language-centered superstructuralist theories that have dominated academic discourse in the humanities since the mid–twentieth century."

Seems a little too academic for my tastes but it might be a good read for those with a passion for Agnon. A Hebrew version of "Language, Absence, Play" came out in 2007.

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Genocides, past, present and Holocaust literature

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:06:00 -0600

This past weekend, I had the privilege of listening to a refugee from Darfur speak during Shabbat morning services.

The timing was no accident. We're coming up on Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, on Tuesday, April 21. I was moved by this man's story — he witnessed brutal violence, suffered harassment from government soldiers who wrongfully accused him of being associated with rebel militias and watched helplessly as his village was destroyed. As my rabbi noted after the talk, when you need to escape to Egypt to find refuge, you know it's bad.

As I sat listening, I began to think about a recent essay I read on The New Republic's Web site entitled "Primary Source." The essay, which originally appeared on Nextbook.org and was written by Adam Kirsch, asked the question of whether the Armenian genocide had its own Primo Levi.

It turns out they did, although I doubt he's reached even one tenth the recognition of Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. That's not to say that Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel don't deserve recognition. They do and their eyewitness accounts play a powerful role in helping to prevent genocide and anti-Semitism. But, I'm a strong believer in the idea that every genocide needs a witness to document the tragedy, to let others know what happened.

When it comes to the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918, there is a writer named Grigoris Balakian who, as Kirsch notes, "offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel." His book, "Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918," was written in 1918 and it has just been translated into English for the first time. I guess 90-plus years was long enough.

In his essay, Kirsch says Balakian's account will seem familiar to those who've read the works of Levi and Wiesel:

Readers familiar with the literature of the Holocaust will read Armenian Golgotha with a combination of recognition and estrangement. Many of the events Balakian writes about could be taking place in Poland or the Ukraine 20 years later. Again and again, we hear about how Turkish policemen would tell the residents of a village to assemble for a long journey, herd people into carriages, then drive them to a remote spot, where they would be murdered and their possessions divided up among the murderers. Armenians were told that they were simply being relocated to the Syrian desert province of Der Zor, just as Jews were told that they were being resettled in the East; the name of Der Zor takes on, in Balakian's account, the same aura of nightmare and death that "the East" did for Jewish victims. Balakian even wonders, as have some Jewish observers of the Holocaust, why more of the victims did not fight back. "They had the psychology of a herd of dumb sheep, going to their death without complaint," he complains about one group of deportees who failed to seize the chance to flee.

The man I heard last Saturday morning was able to flee and now he's telling his story. But I had to wonder: does the Darfur tragedy have its own Primo Levi? A quick search on Amazon turned up Dave Eggers' "What is the What," a fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan who made it out and resettled in the United States. There's also "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War," by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal as well as "Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival," by Jen Marlowe, with Aisha Bain and Adam Shapiro. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention Deborah Scroggins' highly praised "Emma's War."

So, those are a few books that bear witness to the tragedy happening in Darfur. Not sure which one of those authors might be the Primo Levi of Sudan but, nevertheless, they have an important story to tell. And, as many will undoubtedly note on April 21, we Jews have a special obligation to listen.

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What's selling on Jewish Literary Review (Part II)

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0600

It's been a long time since I last did this so I figured I'd post a quick update on what's selling on Jewish Literary Review.

As many of you know, The bulk of my revenue comes through the Amazon Associates program. When visitors click the Amazon links on this site (either the banner ads or the text links inside the blog posts) and they purchase something from Amazon, I get a small commission.

This blog doesn't make much money but we're able to take home a little at the end of each month. That said, I thought our readers might be interested to see what others are buying through this site. Some of the titles are surprising.

As I've stated before, Amazon does not tell me who specifically purchased each book, only that a copy was purchased through my site.

So, without further ado, here’s an alphabetical list of what sold in recent months:

• "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War," by Benny Morris

• "An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain," by Diane Ackerman

• "An opposing man," by Ernst Fischer

• "Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will," by John Baer (Editor), James C. Kaufman (Editor), Roy F. Baumeister (Editor)

• "Away: A Novel," by Amy Bloom

• "Benjamin Franklin : An American Life," by Walter Isaacson

• "Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality," by Thomas Lynch

• "Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science and Spirituality," by B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel

• "Founding Brothers," by Joseph J. Ellis

• "Fugitive Pieces," by Anne Michaels

• "Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939," by Saul Friedlander

• "Origami Paper Traditional Prints 8 1/4" 49 Sheets,"

• "Origami to Astonish and Amuse," by Jeremy Shafer

• "People of the Book: A Novel," by Geraldine Brooks

• "Prelude to Terror: the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network the Compromising of American Intelligence," by Joseph J. Trento

• "The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy)," by Rick Atkinson

• "The Joy of Origami," by Margaret Van Sicklen

• "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World," by Lucette Lagnado

• "The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work," by Curtis White

• "The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945," by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns

• "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Nazi Germany and the Jews)," by Saul Friedlander

• "The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story," by Diane Ackerman

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New book from Gabriel Schoenfeld

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0600

Gabriel Schoenfeld will expand the March 2006 essay he wrote for Commentary magazine entitled, "Has the 'New York Times' Violated the Espionage Act?," into a book that further explores the topic of leaking classified information to the media.

According to Publishers Weekly, Norton purchased the North American rights to Schoenfeld's latest, entitled, "Necessary Secrets."

This will be the second book from Schoenfeld, a former senior editor at Commentary and currently a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J. His first book, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," was published by Encounter Books in 2004.

His 2006 essay in Commentary called for the government to prosecute several reporters and editors at the New York Times, saying the newspaper committed a crime by publishing details of the National Security Agency's warrentless surveillance of people in the United States. According to his Wikipedia entry, Schoenfeld later testified before Congress "on the responsibilities of the press in wartime."

Tentative publication for the new book is 2011.

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Meir Shalev in Words Without Borders

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:00:00 -0600

I've heard wonderful things about Meir Shalev but I have not (yet) had time to read his novel, "A Pigeon and a Boy."

So, it was with some delight that I found a bit of his work posted recently on Words Without Borders, a wonderful resource for finding new literature in translation.

Shalev's piece, "The First Love," was translated by Stuart Schoffman. Here's a taste:

The Israeli-Arab conflict, I realized, isn't only about land or holy places. It's a dispute over something more difficult: love. Specifically, a father's love. And to make things even more complicated, this is not love that is expressed in the gift of a coat of many colors, or by a better blessing, but rather in the very worst act to be found in the book of Genesis—the binding of Isaac. It is written in the Bible: "Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love," and offer him as a burnt offering. It's a bit hard for the descendants of Ishmael to see the name Isaac attached to the words "your favorite son, whom you love."

Ishmael and Isaac themselves, by the way, were not rivals. Certainly not like Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The real rivalry in the family was between the two mothers, Sarah and her maidservant Hagar. The fact that two separate religions would someday spring from Ishmael and Isaac was as yet unknown. But when God said "your favored one, whom you love" about Isaac—Ishmael and his mother having been banished from Abraham's house—the emotional basis for the problem that afflicts us to this day was set in place.

Head over to the Words Without Borders site to read the whole piece. It's worth it.

A fresh challenge to ArtScroll dominance

steve.nospam@nospam.jewishliteraryreview.com (Steve Pollak) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:31:00 -0600

Had to bring this one to our readers' attention. This is from the JTA:

In May, Koren Publishers Jerusalem will release the first English edition of its popular Hebrew siddur featuring a commentary and translation by the chief rabbi of England, Sir Jonathan Sacks. And the Orthodox Union has launched a new publishing arm, which its backers describe as filling a “niche” in the Orthodox world, principally through the publication of the writings of the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading thinker of Modern Orthodoxy.

“It is almost like the ArtScroll siddur is a household word,” said Carolyn Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council. “The Koren siddur is really remarkable, but it's going to take a long time until they meet the marketing expectations that ArtScroll has already achieved.”

I have to agree. I think ArtScroll has achieved a lot because, frankly, they make a good product. It's going to take a lot to convince me to part with my Artscroll Transliterated Linear Siddur (hardcover, of course).

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