The Pater: Exploring Childlessness from a (Jewish) Male Perspective

Varda Epstein HuffPost

What is it like to be childless as a Jew, when the very first Jewish commandment is to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28) and scripture likens the childless to the dead? What is it like to be childless in Israel, a country that values children above all, as a supreme value? These are just some of the questions Elliot Jager addresses in a brave new book, The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness.

Jager frames these questions from his perspective as having been abandoned as a young child by his father--the "Pater" as Jager has come to call him in his mind. What does it mean to be a father, he ponders. Was he robbed of a chance to prove himself a better man, a better father? Would he have been a better parent than his own father?

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Was Polish Anti-Semitism Actually Zionism?

By Gil S. Rubin for Tablet Magazine

Nazis sought to eliminate the Jews from their future racial empire. Poles wanted to create a state for them in Palestine. Historian Timothy Snyder makes the case that in the 1930s the two aims may have converged. But was Poland an ally of the Jews or a pioneer in the art of anti-Semitic politics?

One of the most unusual features of Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth, writes Christopher R. Browning in his New York Review of Books review, is the many pages Snyder devotes to Poland, Zionism, and Palestine. At the center of this story is the short-lived alliance between the Polish government and the Zionist Revisionist Movement during the late 1930s, explored in the book’s first four chapters (the third titled “The Promise of Palestine”) and revisited in the conclusion. After Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s death, the ruling circles in Poland advocated solving the country’s so-called Jewish problem through the emigration of 90 percent of the Jewish population (estimated at about 3 million on the eve of the war). For that purpose, Snyder recounts, the Polish government lent public support to Revisionist Zionist leaders and paramilitary groups and even financed and trained them. Their hope was that these Jews would wage a campaign of resistance and terror against the British mandatory authorities in Palestine and establish a Jewish state open to large-scale Jewish emigration.

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The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman

Review by Evie Saphire-Bernstein for Jewish Book Council

Alice Hoffman’s new novel, The Marriage of Opposites, begins and ends as if in a dream. Telling the fictionalized life of Rachel Pizzarro, the mother of the famous Impressionist Camille Pizzarro, the story unwinds slowly—beginning with Rachel in her youth, growing up in a strict Jewish community on the island of St. Thomas in the early 1800s. Rachel is a headstrong girl who becomes a fierce woman and mother of eleven, initially forced into an arranged marriage at a very young age. But when her older husband dies, she soon falls in love with her husband’s nephew, and her defiance and strength to be with the one she loves manages to supersede her community’s desire for discretion and adherence to custom.

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How Peggy Guggenheim Re-Invented Modernism

By Elaine Margolin for The Jewish Daily Forward

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern
By Francine Prose
Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25

I feel compelled to begin my review of the novelist Francine Prose’s biography of art dealer and collector Peggy Guggenheim with a lengthy quote from another writer, in this case the Russian playwright Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote about Guggenheim with an intensity of feeling, empathy and perception that is missing from Prose’s new work. He wrote:

    “Peggy Guggenheim was a seeker of adventures, a lioness in the private fashionable world of her father, who ended up at the bottom of the Titanic; an American exile from a family of millionaires, inclined towards changes of place, partners, lovers and Bohemian circles, a woman who spent her stormy existence nourishing her fascination with the new, never before seen art. She had a nose for genius, excellent taste and the tigerish cunning of an ambitious collector of the new. It is largely down to her that the world heard about Marcel Duchamp… Peggy helped Max Ernst become himself. She personally knew the geniuses of pre-war Paris. She snapped up paintings by the European Surrealists, Dadaists, Abstractionists, Futurists and Constructivists. After the war she was able to recognize the genius of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Robert Matta and Willem de Kooning. She assured herself of the cream of Modernism with meticulous consistency, filling her container with it. By 1951, it was full. Peggy sealed it and chose a place, in Venice, on the Grand Canal.”

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