Monday, June 30, 2014

How to Write to Your Long-Lost Love, In Yiddish

Dear Mendlby Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Imagine, esteemed reader: Your son has recently arrived in America from your shtetl, and you want to warn him about the temptations of the goldene medina. But how do you find the right words in the right order to remind him to keep shabbes and not spend too much time at the theater? You need a guide—a brivnshteler.

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Monday, June 23, 2014

Bad Israeli Blood in a Holy Spanish City

by Leah Falk for Jewniverse 
  The RetrospectiveIn master novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s most recent book, The Retrospective (published in Israel in 2011), Yair Moses, an aging Israeli film director, arrives in the holy city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his earliest work. A rotation of Spanish monks, film connoisseurs, and his frequent and troubled star, Ruth, accompanies him. But on Moses's mind is the bad blood between him and his estranged screenwriter, with whom he collaborated on the honored films, and an unusual painting hanging in his hotel room.

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Monday, June 16, 2014

Top 12 Summer Reads of 2014

By Jordana Horn for Raising Kvell

Welcome to the Third Annual Jordana Horn Summer Reading List! This list is by no means conclusive, but it’s a list of books I’ve read in the past six months that I thought were particularly terrific. Please put your own ideas and suggestions for great reads in the comments, and friend me on GoodReads (I’m “Jordana Horn Gordon” there) so we can keep talking books, which I love passionately. Without further ado, here are some great reads that should sit on your shelf or device this summer, in no particular order.

To Rise Again1. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris

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Monday, June 9, 2014

Summer 2014 Jewish Book Preview

From the Jewish Book Council

Now that almost all of the books from our spring preview are available at your local bookstore, we're picking up where the last JBC Bookshelf left off with a few highlights from the summer list. We're excited to share a peek into next season's books! Look out for a biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe from Rabbi Joseph Telushkin; the next Jewish Book World book club pick, Boris Fishman's A Replacement Life; a fascinating history of two scientists who used their work toward a cure for typhus to sabotage the Nazis; Stephanie Feldman's novel, The Angel of Losses, described as The Tiger's Wife meets History of Love; and a slew of other great books.

Now there's another reason to look forward to summer!
 Summer 2014 Jewish Book Preview
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Monday, June 2, 2014

An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty

Review by Laurel Corona for jewishbookcouncil.org 

Readers picking up Renee Levine Melammed’s An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty expecting to find an undiscovered Keats or Dickinson may be disappointed, but those wanting insight into the world of Greek Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust are likely to find this unique work well worth their time. Melammed divides the book into two sections, providing a biographical, historical, and so­ciological essay to introduce Bouena’s poems about Salonika before the war. A second essay discussing the Holocaust and the aftermath introduces the second set of poems. These succinct, well written essays give the reader a sense of the culture and dynamic of this part of the Sephardic diaspora, spreading outward from Bouena Sarfatty’s personal story, to that of her town, and to Greece as a whole.

Readers unfamiliar with the tradition of “coplas” may find the poems a bit odd and even “unpoetic.” The traditional copla is an im­provised verse, typically praising or poking fun at a neighbor or commenting on something happening in the village, and ending with a toast to an individual, most often not even alluded to in the poem. “At the balls there is a dance card./ The boys write which dance they are going to dance./ If the girl has a lot of money, everyone waits his turn./ Let us drink to the health of Salomon Amar.” Most of Sarfatty’s 413 coplas in the first collection and 99 in the second follow this tradition, creating such a sense of intimacy with the town that readers will want to raise a glass in toast to people who have come to feel like their own neighbors.

Sarfatty’s tone is ironic, amused, sardonic, and tender in the first collection. In the second half, anger, horror, and bewilderment oc­casionally cause her to abandon the tradi­tional copla style altogether. Collaborators, particularly the Ashkenazic rabbi (an outsider who never bothered to learn Ladino and manipulates the situation to save his own life at the expense of other Jews) and Hasson (a neighbor turned thuggish enforcer for the Nazis), are frequent targets of her outrage. The last coplas were written after the war, as Sarfatty reflects on what was lost and the magnitude of the tragedy.

Those interested in Ladino will also enjoy the layout of this book, with Ladino versions of the coplas on the verso side and English translations by Melammed on the recto side.

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