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.

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

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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!

 

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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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Ruth: A Shavuot Story from Treasures of the Heart

Diane Wolkstein

Treasures of the Heart is a unique rendition of stories in the Hebrew Bible that are part of the foundation of Judaism and Western literature. Structured according to the Jewish calendar, Diane Wolkstein retells various stories that are traditionally read on each holliday. Below is the story of Ruth, which is read on Shavuot as an example of committment and devotion.

Where You Go, I Will Go

When the judges ruled Israel, there was chaos and terrible corruption in the land. There was no king and the people did as they wished. During this time, there was a famine, and a wealthy man named Elimelech left Bethlehem with his wife, Naomi and their two sons. They might have stayed to help their own people, but the husband, Elimelech, chose to go to the land of Moab, even though the Moabites had been enemies of Israel.

Soon after they settled in Moab, Elimelech died, and his wife, Naomi, was left alone with her two sons. The sons married Ruth and Orpah, daughters of Eglon, the king of Moab. Naomi welcomed her daughters-in-law. She rejoiced and danced at their weddings, but then misfortune struck the family--ten years of misfortune. Their horses died; their donkeys died; their camels died. They had no children. Then Naomi's sons both died, and she was left poor and bereft, a widow in a foreign land.

One day when Naomi was working in the fields, she overheard a wandering peddler telling the workers that God had remembered Judah. There was bread again in Bethlehem, and the famine was over. At once, Naomi left the fields where she had been working and the place where she had been living and set out barefoot for Judah. Her two daughters-in-law accompanied her.

After they had gone a short distance, Naomi stopped. She turned to her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah. She embraced them and said, "Thank you for accompanying me on my way, but now, each of you return to your own mother's house. How can I thank you? When your husbands died, you might have run after other men, but you stayed and comforted me, you fed and supported me. May God care for you with as much hesed, kindness, as you have shown to me. And may you be blessed with comfort and peace in the homes of new husbands."

Again Naomi kissed them. Standing on the road, the three women raised their voices and wept loudly, realizing that if Naomi went on to Judah and the younger women went back to Moab, they would never see one another again. Suddenly, the two younger women protested, saying, "No. We will go with you to your people."

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Fiction Meets Reality in Croatian Novel About Nazi's Son

Dasa Drndic's Work Invites Comparisons With 'War and Peace'

By Todd Gitlin for The Jewish Daily Forward
In Gorizia, near Trieste, near Italy’s border with Slovenia, an 83-year-old woman named Haya Tedeschi has been waiting 62 years — since 1944 — for the return of her abducted little boy, Antonio. For years she has been collecting shards of the history that surrounds her life story — writing notes, collecting old, cracked photos and news clippings, rearranging them “as if shuffling a pack of cards.” The promise of this grave, staggering book by the Croatian writer Daša Drndić is that we will eventually get to the bottom of a mystery. We will find out not only what became of Tedeschi’s son but why, as his mother awaits him, she remains “wildly calm.”

“Her story is a small one,” Drndić writes, but a necessary one, for Tedeschi, a mathematics teacher, knows that if she succeeds in “sweeping away the underbrush of her memory,” her testimony will take its place in “a vast cosmic patchwork,” and some truth might emerge about the grotesquely unnerving history she’s lived through.

Tedeschi’s forebears were citizens of the republic of displacement. They spoke Italian, German and Slovenian. Their saga begins long before 1944, in the southern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand pays a visit not long before heading for Sarajevo in 1914. From there, the saga bulges out in many directions, heading forward, backward and sideways, folding back upon itself more than once, swelling into a boundless weave of facts and inventions, so that everything in Tedeschi’s story touches a million other stories in a delirium through which a historical sequence pokes out, like bones.

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A Replacement Life

A new novel by Borish Fishman, coming out June 3, 2014

A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has – as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”?

High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him – Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American – but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.

Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a lasting price from his family.

A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

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Animating the Love, Hope, and Despair of the Forward’s Legendary Advice Column

In ‘A Bintel Brief,’ Liana Finck draws a love-letter to the cowards, stoolies, brides, and sons who inspired Abraham Cahan

By Seth Lipsky for Tablet Magazine

One of the mysteries of the life of Abraham Cahan is why in mid-career he quit writing fiction. By the end of World War I, Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, had met with much success with The Imported Bridegoom, Yekl, and The Rise of David Levinsky. Then suddenly, with more than 30 working years ahead of him, he quit. It bothered a lot of people, including H.L. Mencken. My own theory is that Cahan got wrapped up in the struggle against communism. But it may just be that the stories bubbling up on the Lower East Side were better in real life than anything Cahan could conjure.

A Bintel Brief, Love and Longing in Old New York, a wonderfully illustrated gem of a book by Liana Fink, would confirm the latter view. In it, Finck tells some of the tales from readers that came into the Forward each day and were answered by Cahan or the other editors in the famous column known as the “bundle of letters.” They wrote of missing the old country and being confused by the new. They sought advice on the problems that beset them in the new world. Some were mundane, such as how to use a handkerchief, or whether to play baseball. Others were profound.

The eleven stories illustrated by Finck are particularly choice. They start with one of the most famous letters, from the woman who told her son “not to be such a good boy.” But he worked in the sweatshop until his fingers bled and saved his pennies until he had enough money to buy a watch. At one point, the family pawned it to buy food, but got it back. Eventually, though, it “disappeared.” She suspects the woman down the hall, and writes to the Forward in hopes that the suspect will see the letter and return the watch. She promises “we will remain friends like we always have been.”

Cahan advises that the “letter-writer is in a bad situation” and that “it can be that she has let her imagination run away with her.” So he goes off on a harangue about the “wretchedness of the workers lot.” Not that Cahan is indifferent. He allows that the story “pierces our hearts” and adds: “If these lines were to portray how hundreds of workers kill themselves each day, it would make less of an impact than this small but extraordinarily human story about the watch and chain.” I’ve read that story several times over the years, but rarely savored it quite the way I did with Finck’s book.

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