The Plot Against America

Political zealots had a field day during the recent presidential election. Right-wingers painted Obama as a Kenyan communist. Leftists painted Romney as a plutocrat who would steal bread from babies.

A new low? Not really. Fear-mongering has a long, nasty history in American politics, and Philip Roth’s 2004 The Plot Against America has never seemed more relevant. The novel explores this unfortunate American tradition through the eyes of a nerdy Jewish boy in Newark, N.J. named Philip Roth. The novel asks: What if aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who became a prominent—and anti-Semitic voice—of American isolationism in the 1930s, had won the 1940 presidency?

You might have guessed: It turns out badly for the Jews. Anti-Semitism sweeps the country. The Roth family disintegrates. The Jewish neighborhood is decimated. The novel climaxes with a conspiracy that invokes Amelia Earhart, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, all at once. In a 2009 TV interview, Roth said he never intended The Plot Against America as a cautionary tale, but acknowledged it struck a nerve among many Americans. "The atmosphere of fear…touches something that’s alive in their experience," Roth said. And as November’s election illustrated, the same seems true today.

Persian Literature, in Hebrew

When Orly Noy did a Hebrew-language Google search for "Persian literature" Google asked her: "Do you mean Russian literature?" Amazingly, not a single Persian novel had ever been translated into Hebrew.

Noy, whose family left Iran for Israel shortly after the Islamic Revolution, when she was 9 years old, was already an accomplished translator when she decided to translate two novels from the language of her childhood to the language of her adopted country. The first, Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon (1973), is a popular comic Iranian novel set during the 1940s, and the second, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel, was deemed subversive by Iranian authorities and was published in German translation in 2009 instead.

For most translators, selecting a work is the easy part. Not so for Noy, who tasked herself with a historic burden: "You're talking about 6,000 years of culture and civilization, and not a single translation," she said in an interview.

The Hebrew translations that result are major feats of not just literary and cultural merit, but of political value as well. It was a challenge, Noy says, "to get the Israeli reader to see how much [Iranians and Israelis] actually have in common, what happens when great ideologies and great thoughts and hopes and revolutions become violent and lose their humanity." Through this literature, Noy is aiming to undercut ideology—in both her native and adoptive countries— and restore what humanity has been lost.

Treasure Hunt in Prague

In the late 1500s, Prague was a cultural hotspot. The reigning monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Rudolf  II, was a patron of the arts and humanities, including scholars, sculptors, and mystics.

Rudolf also had a close relationship with the Jews of the region. Rabbi Judah Loew, the reputed creator of the Golem, was a guest at the Emperor’s castle--and, according to some historical accounts, Loew taught the Emperor about kabbalah and other Jewish mystical ideas.

The new novel The Book of Blood and Shadow, by Robin Wasserman, starts in the present day--but it doesn't remain there for long. A group of friends have been working on a college project, translating a series of letters from the 1500s. Soon, their work attracts the attention of a secret society, and the friends find themselves traveling to Prague, retracing the footsteps of Rudolf's inner circle of artists. This leads the students right to Rabbi Loew's old haunts, the Old-New Synagogue and the Old Jewish Cemetery.

It's thrilling to read as the friends find themselves trapped in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, following clues they find tucked inside a centuries-old mezuzah. The story's climax is like all the good parts of The Da Vinci Code layered together, but without the extended history lessons, and with some cool winks to those of us who know about Judaism. It's half historical mystery, half thriller…and wholly amazing.

Telegraph Avenue

Critics have been speculating for years about who will pen the next Great American Jewish Novel. All signs pointed to Michael Chabon when his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union conceived of an alternate history in which a Jewish homeland was established in Alaska instead of Israel. But Chabon’s latest release is sending critics and Jewish-literature soothsayers back to their laptops and crystal balls.

Chabon’s new novel, Telegraph Avenue, is markedly not so Jewish. The novel tells the story of Brokeland Records, a used vinyl store in 2004 Berkeley, CA. It explores the friendship of the shop’s two co-owners, as well as the lives and dynamics of their families.

Instead of defining the basic idea of the novel as in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the Jewishness of Telegraph Avenue, Chabon says, is "not an overt theme of the book." We see it, rather, in the way the characters live their lives: in the tensions between the black and Jewish families at the center of the story and, as Chabon said in one interview, in "the thread of Jewish involvement both in the production and distribution of [black popular] music." But, the author insists: "The book is not about that… It’s about two guys who own a record store."