Monday, December 31, 2012

Meet the Middlesteins


In Jami Attenberg's new novel The Middlesteins, the relationships between members of one suburban Chicago family are riddled with emotional landmines that all seem to link back to one woman: matriarch Edie Middlestein, sixty-something and morbidly obese. The novel centers around the family’s relationships with Edie, her food addiction, and the spiraling health problems which are now threatening her life.

The character of Edie is an unusual protagonist in contemporary American literature: a woman whose health struggles are front and center, whose physical being, in all its inelegant detail, is depicted viscerally on the page. This in itself makes The Middlesteins a notable new fall read, but the ensuing family mishugas makes it a juicy character drama as well.

The action begins with Edie’s husband, Richard, leaving her, protesting that he "couldn't watch her kill herself anymore." Now Richard cruises the internet for Chicago’s middle-aged Jewish widows and divorcees while negotiating the new, painful tension between himself and his grown children, who want little to do with him.

One of those children, the ever-brooding Robin, falls into a romantic relationship seemingly against her own will, and the other, Benny, starts balding under the stress of planning his twins' b'nai mitzvah of the century with his high-strung wife. It’s a tumultuous series of events complete with a blowout b’nai mitzvah party. Mazel tov!

Monday, December 24, 2012

So You Want to Dress Up As Santa?!


Kosher Christmas
By: Joshua Eli Plaut
So you want to dress up as Santa?!!! This is not as unusual as it might seem! I have covered this phenomenon in my recent book A Kosher Christmas; ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and other published articles. Interestingly, it is still a noteworthy occurrence as occasional reports of Jewish Santas still appear in the press. The phenomena of a Jewish Santa is still alive and kicking!

In a New York Times article (November 18, 2012) titled “Skinny Santa Who Fights Fires,” journalist Corey Kilgannon writes about Jonas Cohen, a member of the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Fire and Ambulance Corps. Jonas has played Santa for his department for over thirty years!

Also, take note of a fabulous short story by Nathan Englander, included in his debut collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Alfred Knopf, 1999). Englander recounts the story of Reb Kringle, an Orthodox rabbi, who, despite inner turmoil, plays Santa Claus in a department store for forty years. Reb Kringle’s motivation is purely economic. All starts to unravel when a young boy tells Santa that his new stepfather is imposing the celebration of Christmas on the household and then asks Santa for a menorah and to celebrate Hanukkah.

Lastly, comedian Alan King described his encounter with a Yiddish speaking Santa Claus at the corner of 57th Street in Manhattan. The Jewish immigrant from Ukraine justified the ho-ho-ho by quipping in Yiddish: “Men makht a lebn—it’s a living.”

The underpinnings for playing Santa Claus are myriad. Whether to enhance neighbors’ holiday Christmas celebration by promoting good neighborly relations between Jews and Christians, or whether from a yearning to be a participant in the good cheer of the Christmas holiday or whether purely for economic gain, Jews are enacting Jewish values that are syncretized with the Christmas message of bringing joy to the world. 

Monday, December 17, 2012

The Best Kids’ Books of 2012


It was the best of publishing years; it was the worst of publishing years. OK, mostly it was the worst. But it was a remarkably good year for books aimed at the 8- to 14-year-old crowd. I can’t remember another year with such a diverse, well-written, and fascinating crop of books with Jewish themes. 

Here’s a list of the best of the lot, just in time for Hanukkah, so you can find the perfect selection for the kids in your life. Because you know what the best gift is for a little Person of the Book? A book!

PICTURE BOOKS

As usual this year, I thought most of the picture books were pretty meh. Why are so many Jewish picture books so didactic? Why do they feature tooth-achingly cutesy or smeary-sappy pastel art? Why are the texts so leaden, the rhyme schemes so awkward? Don’t ask why. Just celebrate and buy the few good ones.

How Do dinosaurs....How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah?, by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague. The holiday season can make wee Jews feel like the odd kid out. So, it’s nice to be able to give them a book from a series familiar to the majority culture but aimed specifically at Jewish audiences. Most will already know the gazillion-selling “How Do Dinosaurs” series by Yolen and Teague. In this installment, naughty dinosaurs model bad Hanukkah behavior (a Dracorex dances around maniacally, sticking out its tongue as the text tsk-tsks, “Does a dinosaur act up/on Chanukah nights/when Mama comes in/with the holiday lights?”). Good dinos, of course, sing along with the prayers, take turns with the dreidel, clear the table, and are gracious to Bubbe and Zayde. Charming, oversized, beautifully published. Teague’s illustrations are funny, and your kid will learn new scientific dino names (written in tiny letters alongside each creature) along with good manners. What more do you want? (Ages 2-7)Jean Lafitte
Jean Laffite: The Pirate Who Saved America, by by Susan Goldman Rubin, illustrated by Jeff Himmelman. How the hell did I not know the pirate was a Jew? Lafitte led a double life as a dashing privateer on the high seas and a handsome, respected Jewish citizen of Louisiana. He grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the late 1700s, then saved New Orleans during the War of 1812 by foiling a British plot to invade the city. In an author’s note, Rubin explains that after the Spanish expulsion of 1492, many Jews hated Spain and were happy to hire themselves out to plunder Spanish ships. (One pirate-rabbi even had a kosher chef aboard his vessel!) I loved learning about this swashbuckling Hebrew and appreciated Rubin’s thoughtful afterword about Jewish piracy and Lafitte’s ambivalence toward slavery. The book is utterly compelling even though the stately, slightly stilted illustrations (done with Photoshop and paint) are not my thing. (Ages 6-10)

A Hen For IzzyA Hen for Izzy Pippik, by Aubrey Davis, illustrated by Marie LaFrance. A new book by the author of Bagels From Benny should make all Jewish parents sit up and take notice. This one is based on both Jewish and Islamic folktales. A little girl finds a gorgeous chicken, whose emerald green feathers have golden speckles. She knows it belongs to the absent Izzy Pippik and protects it and its ever-growing band of babies from the irked and greedy denizens of her village. The faux-naif, scratchboard-esque art is fun, with chicks running crazily all over the place. Spoiler alert: The little girl’s menschiness is rewarded, and the village lives happily ever after. (Ages 4-8)

Monday, December 10, 2012

I’ve adored illuminated manuscripts all my life — as a child and teenager, these were the postcards I’d take home from museum trips. I’ve done hundreds of ketubot and this is my third book project published in 7 years, and as absorbing as each of these projects has been, Arise! Arise! has the deepest claim on me.

Arise! Arise! is a memorial to my late husband, David, who passed away in March 2009 after a long struggle with a unique spinal cord cancer. A couple of afternoons before he died, my father-in-law, Arnold Band, a renowned scholar of Hebrew literature, and I were sitting and talking quietly beside David’s bed in our family room, which had now morphed into a home hospice. “So, you know what your next project is going to be?” he asked. I rolled my eyes and said something like, “I know you’re going to tell me.” He knew perfectly well that I’d been working on Esther insofar as the illness allowed. “Yes,” he said, “your next project is going to be “Shirat Devorah and do you know why? Because you are the Devorah.” The real reason, however, the one that neither of us could yet bring ourselves to say, was that this would be a memorial to the son and husband we were about to lose.

Why Shirat Devorah? This two-part tale from Judges —a prose narrative and the much older epic poem, one of the oldest chunks of the Tanakh— had been David’s bar mitzvah haftarah, and he really loved its blood and guts war story. Indeed, the previous night I’d asked our younger son, Gabi, to chant the haftarah for his Abba so that he could hear it one more time. So, Deborah intrigued me, but two aspects of the project presented a puzzle. Solving those puzzles, however, gave me something from “my own life” to focus on, a sense of future against the backdrop of the bitter absurdity and disaster of my husband’s loss.

Continue reading.

Debra Band's most recent book, Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah, is now available. Her work in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts, and Jewish tradition and learning. 

Monday, December 3, 2012

The Lawgiver’ Marks Return to Form


 At 97, a Writer Remembers the Past

What kind of author writes himself into his own novel? One with a great deal of hubris, it would seem. But if that writer is a 97-year-old Pulitzer Prize writer, with over 60 years of best-selling books behind him, we might judge him more sympathetically. His story, after all, amounts to literary history. And in the case of Herman Wouk, it is a highly unusual history.

Herman WoukWouk’s life work presents some unusual literary statistics. How many writers have the opportunity to update one of their best-selling novels, 55 years after its original publication? How many have contributed to American literature on the scale of Herman Wouk? Approaching his centenary, Mr. Wouk has been writing for the majority of that time, showing considerable range in style and subject. A strong candidate for the “most widely-read American Jewish novelist,” Wouk won a Pulitzer for “The Caine Mutiny,” appeared on the cover of Time. His books, including “Marjorie Morningstar,” “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” have been made into movies, Broadway plays and television miniseries.

Highlights of Wouk’s past books are on display in his latest novel, “The Lawgiver.” The story follows the making of a movie about the biblical figure, Moses — a topic that the character of “Herman Wouk” just happens to be trying to tackle in a novel. Although it is a fine place for Wouk beginners to start, “The Lawgiver” offers a trip down memory lane for those familiar with his oeuvre. In particular, Wouk looks back to his 1955 “Marjorie Morningstar.”

“Marjorie,” a novel with a long gestation period, caused Wouk much anxiety, coming as it did after the Pulitzer prize-winning “The Caine Mutiny.” In 1952, Wouk wrote in his journal (portions of which are now housed at Columbia University’s Manuscripts and Archives): “At the moment I’m all muscle bound — rusty, aware of the Mutiny, vague, unsure of where or how to get going. But all this will pass and the cork will come out of the bottle, and Marjorie will let live. She does live. She asks only ink and paper and some honest sitting at the desk.” 


Continue reading. 

Monday, November 26, 2012

Books for Children This Hanukkah


Looking for some great Jewish books for children this Hanukkah?  Look no further than Jvillage's Pinterest page.  A whole slew of Jewish books, Hanukkah and non-Hanukkah themed, for your child's reading pleasure.

Monday, November 19, 2012

The Dream of Scipio

When you think of Provence you probably think of the region’s famous French scenery and wine. But when novelist Iain Pears thinks of Provence he thinks of its deep—and often dark—history.

His 2002 novel The Dream of Scipio weaves together three Provencal stories. One concerns a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with preserving Roman civilization in the midst of its fall. The next concerns a medieval poet involved in the Papal Court at Avignon during the Black Death. And the third, set during World War II, features a French scholar deciding whether to cooperate with the Vichy government. Linking these three men is their obsession with "The Dream of Scipio," a classical text that poses philosophical questions as pertinent in the Middle Ages as they are today.

Though The Dream of Scipio does not seem primarily concerned with Jewish matters, Pears illustrates how anti-Semitism and Jewish scapegoating have, throughout history, been employed to solidify communities threatened by barbarian invasions, the Black Death, and economic decline. In each section, we, along with Pears's characters, wonder at how often Jews become cast as a threat.

With Hanukkah around the corner, The Dream of Scipio could be a perfect gift for a history buff, a philosophy student, or anyone who loves a gripping read.

Monday, November 12, 2012

One Book, Two Holocaust Novels



TThe_Canvashe next great Jewish novel is coming from the heart of Germany.

The Canvas by Berlin-born Benjamin Stein, is a mystery novel with an innovative form. It's actually two books in one: Start from one side, read your way through, then flip the book over and find a separate novel waiting for you on the other. The Canvas features two distinct stories that are tied together through some common characters and the same mysterious, final event.

Amnon is a young ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student in Israel. One day, he discovers a locked cabinet in his parents' house containing secular books. Shortly later, when a rabbi at school catches him with an Oscar Wilde novel tucked inside his Talmud, he is sent away to Switzerland, where he meets an elderly man with a riveting Holocaust history. He convinces the man to write a book.

On the novel’s flip-side is Jan Wechsler, father of two. He lives in Munich, where he's a recently-Orthodox baal teshuva and a member of the city's small Jewish community. One day, a suitcase arrives at his house bearing his name containing books that he's apparently written, though he has no recollection of writing them. Through these books Wechsler discovers that he had once investigated a fake Holocaust memoir by an elderly Swiss man.

The way these two storylines--and three characters--spiral together is perplexing, but seductive. Not just an ingenious riddle, The Canvas is a tantalizing, innovative, and psychologically complex story.


Monday, November 5, 2012

Jewish Spies and Arab Wives


In movies and TV, intelligence operations are often portrayed as glamorously dangerous human chess matches with a series of sexual entanglements and ingenious double crosses. The operatives are master manipulators, forming intimate relationships they must cast off at mission’s end.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover just how closely these storylines reflect reality.

A new book by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Spies Against Armaggedon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, tells the history of Israel’s intelligence establishment, whose main (known) arms are the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), the Mossad (foreign intelligence), and Aman (military intelligence).

One of the book’s most vividly described operations launched in 1952. A Shin Bet unit of Iraqi Jews infiltrated Arab villages to monitor the population as a potential "fifth column" that might join with Israel’s enemies in case of war. The spies lived in these villages and most of them married local women and had children. As time passed, the intelligence provided by the men "proved to be almost worthless," according to Melman and Raviv, but the emotional toll suffered by agents and their families was profound.

The unit was disbanded in 1959, and the spies’ wives, who faced particular hardship, were given the choice of being relocated to an Arab country or resettling with their husbands in Jewish communities in Israel. Almost all chose to stay with their husbands. Decades later, the project’s commander is still haunted by the social and psychological trauma the operation had on the children of these marriages.  

Monday, October 29, 2012

The Secrets of Arab Men


Sayed Kashua has made a career out of being an anomaly: A Hebrew-speaking Muslim Israeli Arab. As a writer, he pens a weekly column for Ha'aretz, a major Israeli newspaper, and he writes the hilarious sitcom Arab Labor for Israeli TV.

His new novel, Second Person Singular, is about being Arab in a majority-Jewish country, and it's also about being a man, and a husband, and a father. In the set-up, an Arab lawyer from Jerusalem--we never learn his name--finds a love letter inside a secondhand book, written in his wife's handwriting. It's addressed to someone named Yonatan--a Jewish name. Consumed with jealousy, the lawyer attempts to track down the letter's original recipient, a quest which takes him across the country--ending in a poor Arab village, just like the one where he grew up.

Most of the book takes place inside the lawyer's head, but it's about very real conflicts--with the lawyer's wife, who was the first woman he ever dated (and whom he still doesn't know very well), and with Israeli Jews, whose upward mobility he identifies with, but whose social and sexual mores threaten him.

Second Person Singular is a startling novel about a culture in Israel that's all but invisible. As the lawyer becomes consumed by tracking down Yonatan, the pressure builds to a crescendo in his head--showing us the very real insanity caused by clashes of both relationships and cultures.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Are You a Member of the Scribe? You Can Become One


ABOUT MEMBERS OF THE SCRIBE

The latest in Jewish literature, culled from all ages and all genres. Members of the Scribe is a collaboration between MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council, a blog written by the authors of some of today's best new books. Each week, we'll have a different author helming the blog and writing about their book, their Judaism, their own favorite authors, and whatever inspired madness they choose to bring.

Storytellers

By: Stefanie Pervos Bregman 

 As a Jewish blogger and editor, I always say that the period leading up to Jewish Book Month is one of my favorite times of the year. So many books come across my desk for review—I only wish I had the time to read them all. Each author, each new book, is not just a potential article for my magazine or blog post. To me, every author—whether they write fiction or non-fiction— is a storyteller, adding their own piece to our collective Jewish story.

living jewishlyThis year the tables have turned, and I’m the one hoping and wishing that Jewish editors and writers will choose my book from among the great pile for review—the thought makes me feel proud, humble and frightened all at once.

In putting together my new anthology, Living Jewishly: A Snapshot of a Generation, I hoped to be a storyteller as well. In the Jewish world, engaging 20- and 30-somethings is a hot button issue—questions like ‘How do we get young Jews to feel connected to Israel? To affiliate with traditional Jewish institutions? To care about Jewish continuity, ritual and tradition?’ float around waiting to be answered.


Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Jewish Don Quixote


Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote is considered one of the greatest books of all time. So it's no surprise that the epic is subject to plenty of parodies and spoofs, including a Jewish version, written by one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Shalom Yakov Abramowich, commonly known by the name of his most famous character, Mendele the Book Peddler.

In Abramowich’s novella The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third, we're told the story of two "fools" from a poor Jewish town who get the travel bug in a major way—yearning  to find the Jewish kingdom that they have read about in the legends of the Ten Lost Tribes.

But like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Benjamin and his crony Sendrel don't make it very far. In fact, they barely make it past their own town limits before falling into hijinx after hijinx.

The title of the book itself refers to a well-known travelogue by the medieval Spanish-Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, making Benjamin the Third a book steeped in the influence of other texts.