The Midwife of Venice

 by Roberta Rich

Reviewed by Margaret Donsbach for historicalnovels.info

The Midwife of Venice is an imaginative, suspenseful tale about a sixteenth-century Jewish midwife from Venice's Ghetto Nuovo. Hannah Levi sorely misses her merchant husband, a captive in Malta after mercenaries attack his trading ship. "He had been fond of eating oranges in bed, feeding her sections as they chatted. She had not washed the blanket since Isaac had departed for the Levant to trade spices."

When a Christian nobleman comes to her house by dark of night and begs her to assist his wife, Hannah knows she must turn him down or risk torture for breaking the law. Jewish midwives are forbidden to deliver Christian babies. But the nobleman has heard Hannah is a wonder worker. Indeed, she has a dangerous secret for which she could be accused of witchcraft: "her birthing spoons, two silver ladles hinged together." The spoons can save lives, but they can kill, too. "At a recent confinement, she had exerted too much pressure and had crushed the skull of the baby instead of easing it out." But the nobleman is desperate and will pay her price, a sum high enough to ransom her husband away from the Knights of Malta.

With a baby at the center of the tale, The Midwife of Venice is as fast-paced as any thriller, the childbirth scene as gripping as any battle story. Cliffhanger chapter endings bounce readers back and forth between Hannah and her husband as each faces a series of potentially deadly perils. The setting is well researched, although the way Hannah pushes boundaries and encounters one worst-case scenario after the other can make the story seem frothy and implausible. Readers willing to suspend disbelief, though, will find her a swashbuckling midwife in a novel whose pages seem almost to turn themselves. (2011; 329 pages, including a bibliography and a brief Author's Note on the historical background)

They Called Her Rebbe

While rifling through the bargain bin at your local bookstore for a dime novel to read on the plane, you come across what looks like just the right smut: a classically pulpy woman on the cover, eyes cast down to the text in front of her. Even the title, with its exaggerated cursive font, seems right: They Called Her Rebbe.

Not a bodice-ripper after all, this 1991 release tells the story of Chana Rochel, the 19th-century girl Talmudist known as "the Maiden of Ludomir." While Jewish boys were spirited from their families to serve the czar and Hasidism swept Jewish practice from Kiev to Chernobyl, Chana Rochel became a controversial but charismatic Jewish leader.

After a solitary girlhood, Chana Rochel argued with her father, rabbis, and yeshiva-bocher fiancée for the right to study the way men do, jettisoning "the noodle board," in the words of I.B. Singer's Yentl. The book—written with a slight pop-psychology bent—is part hagiography, part egalitarian soapbox, and seems aimed more for the gender studies classroom than the beach. But with the side story of Chana Rochel's very long engagement (reader, she moved to Palestine instead), They Called Her Rebbe almost makes good on its pulpy cover.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

A New Era of Anti-Semitism Is Here. Daniel Goldhagen Blames Globalization.

In his new book, the controversial author warns against complacency, saying that prejudice against Jews is uniquely adaptable

By Vox Tablet

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen unleashed a fury of controversy when he published the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he argued that the Holocaust took place not because Germans were especially obedient to authority, or because a few bad apples came into power, but because an eliminationist prejudice against Jews was woven into the very fabric of German culture. Germans “considered the slaughter to be just,” Goldhagen wrote. His book hit a nerve—critics called Goldhagen out for using overly broad generalizations to indict an entire country—but that criticism didn’t hurt the book’s reception; it was a phenomenal success in Germany and around the world.

Nearly 20 years later, Goldhagen has broadened his scope in a new work. The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism offers an in-depth look at anti-Semitism around the world. He argues that it’s an almost pathological prejudice that spans centuries and cultures and therefore is a uniquely destructive force that has redoubled its strength thanks to a new age of globalization and information-sharing. Goldhagen joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss why anti-Semitism is distinct from other forms of prejudice, how globalization has contributed to its resurgence, and what we can do to combat this scourge. [Running time: 29:40.]

Click here to listen to interview.

The Ghost Shtetl of Trochenbrod

Once upon a time there was a shtetl named Trochenbrod. In its heyday, Trochenbrod, which is located in Western Ukraine just 30 kilometers northeast of the city of Lutsk, was home to approximately 5,000 Jews, with seven synagogues, and a rich farming culture. In typically frank Yiddish fashion, Trochenbrod means "bread without butter."

And then one day, Trochenbrod was wiped off the map. In 1942, the Nazis liquidated the shtetl, murdering all but 200 of its inhabitants.

Today, Trochenbrod isn't an easy find. It is so elusive, in fact, that Jonathan Safran Foer fictionalized his own journey to Trochenbrod in his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated.

Now author Avrom Bendavid-Val is exploring the place, too—only this time there's nothing fictional about it.

Lost Town, a haunting new documentary, follows Bendavid-Val, whose late father emigrated from Trochenbrod years before the Holocaust, on his voyage to track down his ancestral homeland. On the heels of his 2010 book on the same subject, the film is a poignant journey into the past, bringing Bendavid-Val into contact not only with survivors of the shtetl, but with his own personal history as well.

- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Kosher Pajamas and Cosmetic Surgery in Ritzy Tel Aviv

What do cosmetic shoulder blade surgery, flak jackets made of spider silk, high-end shopping sprees as a stage of grief, and The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling have in common? Nothing, perhaps, but their convergence in Textile, a newly translated novel by celebrated Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom.

Published in Hebrew in 2006, Textile features the quintessentially 21st-century coping mechanisms of the Grubers, a wealthy, anxiety-ridden family falling apart in a new, glitzy suburb of Tel Aviv. Amanda, the matriarch, runs the family kosher pajama factory and shields herself from her son's life as an army sniper by having countless plastic surgeries; Irad, her husband, is a scientific genius obsessed with his own virility. And their 22-year-old daughter Lirit masquerades as a kibbutznik, but would rather be shopping.
With her son on a sniper mission, Amanda undergoes shoulder blade enhancement surgery (which, don't worry, doesn't really exist). Meanwhile, an Israeli expatriate in Ithaca, NY invites Irad to learn top-secret scientific findings in the field they share. In lieu of a redemptive ending, Castel-Bloom maintains this sharp portrait of one family's self-made isolation structuring their ways of love and grief.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse