Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America

Review by Peter E. Kornblum for JewishBookCouncil.org

With a rising demand for farm and industrial workers, America opened its portals to approximately 20 million immigrants between 1892 and 1924. Fourteen million of these new, mainly European arrivals entered through Ellis Island, which had replaced the aging Castle Garden facility located at the Battery on the New York City shore. In his detailed and engrossing narrative of those years, historian Ronald H. Bayor offers an eye-level account of the perilous “journey to Ellis Island.” While he mainly depicts the particulars of this early-twentieth-century moment, he still points to the eerie continuity between that time and twenty-first-century America. Bayor observes that “two ideological views shaped U.S. immigration policy and still play a role in contemporary America.” On the one hand, a positive spirit of “civic national­ism” welcomed “diversity” and promised “equality and fairness to all who came to the United States.” On the other hand, Ellis Island and especially Angel Island on the West Coast could also signify an opposing spirit of crude nativism, bigotry, and “racial nationalism.”

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Miriam Michelson, American Jewish Feminist Literary Star of the Western Frontier

(And her brother Albert won the Nobel Prize in Physics)

By Karen E. H. Skinazi and Lori Harrison-Kahanfor Tablet Magazine


Abandoned by her off-the-derech Hasidic mother, Rebekah Roberts, the semi-autobiographical journalist-sleuth of reporter Julia Dahl’s Invisible City, published by Minotaur Books this past May, has little knowledge of her Jewish heritage, beyond the Hebraic spelling of her given name. So, when the rookie reporter is sent to investigate a murder in Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclave, she sees the assignment as a dual opportunity: Scoop the rival tabloids with an exclusive on the slain mother of four, whose naked body had been found in a Gowanus scrap heap, and reconnect with her own mother, who returned to the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, fold after her daughter’s birth, leaving Rebekah to be raised by her Christian father in Florida.

Over a century before Dahl, another Jewish writer turned her own sensational experiences as a newspaperwoman into a suspense-filled, bold-voiced work of popular fiction. The writer’s name was Miriam Michelson, and the novel, A Yellow Journalist, published in 1905, began as a series of short stories in The Saturday Evening Post. These interlocking stories chronicled the adventures of the author’s gutsy alter ego, Rhoda Massey, a “girl reporter” for a San Francisco newspaper in the time of Hearst and Pulitzer.

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New York Times Top 100 Books of the Year: Enchanted Connections

‘The Magician’s Land,’ by Lev Grossman

Review By Edan Lepucki

If Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” was like “The Secret History” crossed with “Harry Potter,” and if its sequel, “The Magician King,” was a descendant of “The Chronicles of Narnia” (with a touch of the 1990s flick “The Craft” thrown in), then what cultural mash-up does Lev Grossman conjure in “The Magician’s Land,” the trilogy’s final book? I can’t tell you, because I was too thoroughly swept away by this richly imagined and continually surprising novel to be concerned with cute comparisons.

“The Magician’s Land” is the strongest book in Grossman’s series. It not only offers a satisfying conclusion to Quentin Coldwater’s quests, earthly and otherwise, but also considers complex questions about identity and selfhood as profound as they are entertaining.

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The Mathematician's Shiva

A Novel by Stuart Rojstaczer; Review by Miriam Bradman Abrahams for Jewish Book Council

This wonderfully quirky novel celebrates the life of a famous, fictional mathematician, Rachela Karnokovitch. She is a Polish émigré to Madison, Wisconsin, a professor who is rumored to have solved the million-dollar Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem, and to have taken the solution to her grave.

When her son Sasha, who narrates the novel, sits shiva with his father, uncle, and cousin, surpris­ing things happen. Hordes of mathematician friends and enemies of Rachela come to pay their respects. Though some are genuinely bereaved, others are hoping to find any hint of the solution to the million-dollar problem. Sasha’s long-lost daughter from a short-lived marriage shows up at the shiva as well, bringing her own daughter, a granddaughter Sasha knew nothing about. Although Sasha and his father are both published researchers in their own right, their accomplish­ments pale in comparison with Rachela’s and they are proud and protective of her legacy. Sasha’s account of his mother’s funeral and shiva, while dealing with his new-found progeny and the crowd that descends on his home, is interspersed with chapters from Rachela’s memoirs, A Lifetime in Mathematics, which describes the incredible hardships of her life in Poland, her strong deter­mination to survive, the benefits of skiing in icy cold weather, and the cutthroat competitiveness among mathematicians. This bittersweet novel, which depicts family loyalty and the love between a mother and son, is reminiscent of Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You in its humorous descriptions of human relationships, eccentricities, and challenges.


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Chanukah Romance

The Listopia votes are in.  Here are the top "Romance Novels set around Chanukah" from Goodreads

 

1     Festival of Nights  by Cara North
2     A Candle for a Marine  by Heather Long
3     A Candle for Nick by Lorna Michaels     
4     A Very Scandalous Holiday      by Nancy Fraser
5      Scenes From A Holiday by Laurie Graff


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