Monday, March 28, 2016

The Two-Family House: A Novel by Lynda Cohen Loigman

Review by Evie Saphire-Bernstein for Jewish Book Council
Who is your family? That question is the simmering center of this novel, begging the reader to question so much of what he or she believes. Is it just your immediate family—your brothers, sisters, mother, father? Is it more than that—your cousins, your sisters-in-law, your aunt on your mother’s side? And if your family lies to you, betrays you—are they still your family? And if not, what are they? Who do they become?

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Monday, March 21, 2016

For Harry Houdini's Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick

By Julia M. Klein for The Jewish Daily Forward   

Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly


The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

The Irish poet’s words serve as a warning of sorts: This is not a book for the rationalists among us, given to seeing magic merely as a trick of the mind, a sleight of hand or — as in Houdini’s case — the product of superb physical conditioning and long practice. “Mrs. Houdini” is instead a brief for the mysterious and the unknown, as well as the transcendent, death-defying power of romantic love.

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Monday, March 14, 2016

Sami Rohr Prize 2016

Finalists

Jewish Book Council is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature:


Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel
by Dan Ephron

The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
by Aviya Kushner
The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust
by Lisa Moses Leff

The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire
by Adam D. Mendelsohn
Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution
by Yehudah Mirsky

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Monday, March 7, 2016

The Yid: A Novel by Paul Goldberg

Review by Gary Katz for Jewish Book Council

Paul Goldberg’s debut novel takes place over several long Russian winter days spanning February 24 to March 5, 1953, set against the frigid milieu of Joseph Stalin’s “Final Solution” plans to purge all the Jews from Russia.

Three government agents start their nightly routine of arrests in Moscow. They knock on the door of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, a marginal Yiddish actor from a closed Yiddish State Theater company, unexpectedly setting off a Kafkaesque path of no return to the bleak countryside accompanied by a bizarre cast of friends and acquaintances.

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