Monday, April 27, 2015

Israeli Historian Otto Dov Kulka Tells Auschwitz Story of a Czech Family That Never Existed

Why Holocaust accounts—and their fictions or omissions—can be a threat to the history of a complicated, tragic human reality


By Anna Hájková for Tablet Magazine
In 2013 the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka published a recollection of his childhood in concentration camps, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Historians and general audiences praised the poetic and reflective tone of the book. Deported at 11 years of age from Theresienstadt, Kulka spent a year and half at Auschwitz and is one of the very few children of his age who survived. Quite unlike most other survivors’ accounts, Kulka’s book has little narrative: It is a collage of impressions, dreams, and metaphysical musings about the world of Auschwitz.

Yet this style masks the fundamental omission of a complicated family history, including adultery, bitter divorce, and a paternity suit. In short, what Kulka wrote was a book about a family that never was.

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Monday, April 20, 2015

Wherever You Go: A Novel

By Joan Leegant

Review By: Bonny V. Fetterman for ReformJudaism.org

Politics is front and center in Joan Leegant’s novel about American Jews in Israel—three strangers who arrive with different agendas and whose paths intersect in Jerusalem. Yona Stern has come from New York to make peace with her older sister, Dena Ben-Tzion, who lives on a settlement over the Green Line with her husband and five children. Yona and Dena had quarreled over a personal matter, but the political situation makes Yona feel uneasy from the moment she descends from the bulletproof bus into the community called Givat Baruch. Dena, rigid and self-righteous, does not want a reconciliation and only speaks to Yona through her children.

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Monday, April 13, 2015

Alexis Landau’s Merchant Ivory Novel

In a ‘richly appointed’ debut, ‘The Empire of the Senses,’ German Jews of the 1920s live in blissful ignorance


By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Picking up a book with the lush title The Empire of the Senses, you probably wouldn’t guess that it was a historical novel about German Jews in the early 20th century. Given the inevitable conclusion of any such story in the Holocaust, a title with words like “darkness” or “shadow” or “fate” might seem more appropriate. But in her richly appointed debut novel, Alexis Landau deliberately defies such expectations. Life at any time and place, her title and her prose seem to say, is full of sensual beauty, if you choose to live it that way and write about it that way. And her book functions as a kind of extended séance, conjuring up the look and feel of experiences from the glamorous—a decadent party in Weimar Berlin—to the arduous—a field hospital on the Eastern Front. Here, for instance, is Lev Perlmutter, the novel’s hero, visiting a miracle-working rabbi in Lithuania:

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Monday, April 6, 2015

Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life

Anita Shapira; Anthony Berris, trans.

Review by Bettina Berch for jewishbookcouncil.org

Although his life ended nearly a century ago, Hebrew writer Y. H. Brenner (1881-1921) remains a hero to generations of young Israelis. Perhaps there’s a sort of timelessness to any great writer’s anguish, which only grows more intense as the mythologies multiply. This might present difficulties for many biographers; after a certain point, the facts of the actual life can begin to seem meager next to the legends. Fortunately, Shapira avoids the larger-than-life Brenner and immerses readers in the details of the life of this “radical pessimist,” from his boyhood and military service in Russia, to his years as a Hebrew writer and publisher in London, to his sojourn in Galicia, to his life in the Yishuv, in Palestine, before his tragic death. Along the way, readers learn about the struggles between the Yiddishists and the champions of the Hebrew language, arguments over where to locate the Jewish homeland, tensions of young Jews over the appeal of assimilation, debates over how to live as a secular Jew, and other issues of Brenner’s days…and our own. Indeed, although the author refrains from reminding the reader of how modern Brenner’s struggles were, it’s certainly an element of his unending allure. This biography is dense and well-documented—not a light read, but a valuable addition to any collection focusing on the birth of Hebrew belles lettres. Illustrations, index, notes.

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