An Israeli Writer’s Great American Novel

In his prize-winning new novel, Reuven Namdar asks whether American Jewry is a house on fire. His answer is. . . .

By Michael Weingrad for Mosaic Magazine
 
Israeli reviewers have repeatedly invoked the word “ambitious” to describe Reuven Namdar’s Hebrew novel, Habayit asher neḥerav (“The House That Was Destroyed”), which in January won the Sapir prize, Israel’s equivalent of Britain’s Man Booker award. The term is richly deserved. In The House That Was Destroyed, Namdar, an Israeli of Persian descent who for the past fifteen years has made his home in New York, has given us, simultaneously, four kinds of novel. Each is worth describing in order to grasp what may be the book’s culminating, if most elusive ambition: to be read one day by the American Jews who are implicated in its pages.

First, Habayit asher neḥerav is a campus novel. Andrew Cohen, its American Jewish protagonist, is a successful, fifty-two-year-old professor in the “department of comparative culture” at New York University. A popular teacher, he writes highly regarded academic essays in the fashionable postmodern mode; his current effort bears the provisional title “Woody Warhol and Andy Allen: Representations of Inversion or the Inversion of Representation.” When not hosting dinner parties in his elegantly minimalist Upper West Side apartment, he fills his social calendar with gallery openings, museum exhibits, and meals at fashionable Manhattan restaurants. Still, bad trouble looms: his standing at the university is challenged when his politically correct colleagues protest that a white male lacks the moral authority to chair the department. They also suspect him as a Jew who, while known to protest Israeli policies, does not display quite as great a passion as theirs for the Palestinian cause. Satire, or realism? It is fair to ask.

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Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Kenneth Bonert

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter, The ProsenPeople

With the recent announcement of the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize finalists, we thought you might want to learn a little more about the five outstanding writers who made the list. Last week we introduced you to Ayelet Tsabari, who wrote a collection of short stories called the The Best Place on Earth. Today we turn our attention to Kenneth Bonert, whose novel, The Lion Seeker, won a 2013 National Jewish Book Award. Set in South Africa, Bonert's novel stretches across the 1930s and 1940s, following a Jewish family as they seek to find their place in a new culture, having escaped their war-torn homeland.

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

I think writing well depends on being able to concentrate for long periods of time. You need to have patience, you need to make a sustained effort, to stick with it when it doesn't seem to be working. If your mind wanders, you need to train it to come back to the task at hand. I suppose it's like a kind of meditation. Eventually you come out the other side and find those moments of soaring excitement and clarity that carry you along. That rush of creative expression––it’s what I live for.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

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An Abridged Biography of Your Great-Grandfather (Probably)

Podcast

Everything about the immigrant peddler that you never thought to ask

By Vox Tablet of Tablet Magazine


“Pack peddlers,” known in other parts of the world as smous, ambulantes, kloppers, weekly men, and a host of other names, are a staple of Jewish family lore everyplace that Jews headed when they left Europe starting in the 19th century.

But the specifics of that job, and the impact it had on Jews’ success or failure in their new homelands, have not been much considered until now. In Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, New York University historian Hasia Diner examines what the lives of Jewish peddlers were really like day to day.

Where did they sleep every night? What did they sell and to whom? What became of their wives, if they had them, when they went away? What kinds of barriers—in terms of race, religion, and gender—did they cross when they walked into a new home?

Diner joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss both the nitty-gritty and the larger issues of how workers in the peddling trade helped Jews integrate in new societies.

Plus, Zak Rosen shadows two boys in suburban Detroit at the beginning of their bar mitzvah preparations—specifically, that bewildering stage when they embark on 12 weeks of dance classes at Joe Cornell Entertainment so they can learn to ask a girl onto the dance floor and not embarrass themselves once they’re there.

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J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

Review by Bob Goldfarb for Jewish Book Council

The word “Jew” does not appear even once in Howard Jacobson's dark, urgent new novel, but Jews haunt its world. That world is an imagined England of perhaps the 2070s, in the aftermath of a nameless social cataclysm. Though set in the future, it sounds a warning for our own time.

A man and a woman meet, seemingly by accident, in a small coastal village. Who are they? They are not entirely sure themselves. Like everyone else, they know very little of their family history. Personal and national history has been suppressed; technology has been repudiated. Family names and place names have been erased and replaced in a national mandate called Project Ishmael. The result is that everyone's new surname is something like Cohen, Solomons, Rabinowitz, Nussbaum, Heilbronn, Kroplik, Gutkind—but no one is Jewish.

At least, not any more. A couple of genera­tions before, the question was “What to do with those about whom something needed to be done... foreigners who had what they called a country only by taking someone else's.” The final solution, it can only be whispered, was a "campaign to drive them from the face of the earth, to make of them vagabonds and fugitives."

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Isaac Bashevis Singer and His Women

by Ruth Wisse for Mosaic

Writers have their way with the world until they depart from it, and then they are at the mercy of those who interpret them. This mischievous turnabout would have appealed to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), possibly the most prolific and certainly the most famous Yiddish writer of the 20th century, whose reputation is now in the hands of types he once turned into fiction. But if The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a new documentary movie by the Israeli directors Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser, is any portent, the afterlife of this particular writer may be graced by the same improbable good fortune he enjoyed on earth.

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The Muses of Bashevis Singer - trailer from Cinephil on Vimeo.


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Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950

Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, eds.

Review by Randall C. Belinfante for Jewish Book Council

Sephardi Lives presents the reader with an outstanding collection of primary source documents portraying a broad spectrum of experience in the lives of the Judeo-Spanish population expelled from the Iberian peninsula during the late 14th and 15th Centuries. In contrast to other documentary histories this compilation focuses not only on the political, the famous, and the infamous, but also on the everyday affairs of the people. It highlights elements as diverse as children’s lessons, diary entries, a woman’s grievances in the face of eviction, and the laments of Jewish conscripts in the Ottoman army. It recounts criticism of women singing on the Sabbath, expressions of hope for the redemption, memories of Holocaust survivors, and pleas for the study of Ladino in Mexico.

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Why Robert Stone Was One of Greatest Non-Jewish Jewish Writers

Remembering the Lapsed Catholic Who Wrote 'Damascus Gate'

By Abe Mezrich for The Forward

Robert Stone wasn’t Jewish, of course. He was a lapsed Catholic.

I am writing about him here because his sixth novel, “Damascus Gate,” was a retelling of the Shabtai Tzvi story, set amongst drug-addled wanderers in Jerusalem in the 1990s. It’s a book deeply engaged with Judaism, kabbalah, and the meaning of monotheism. It is also a book whose main character, a half-Jew from his father’s side, watches the Chosen people half-outside.

Stone was a man who was keenly aware of Judaism and thought about it much. In the time we were close—I was his student at Yale for three semester in the 90’s—it was never a surprise when he talked through a point from Gershom Scholem, or that he immediately understood the story I was working on about a Chasidic man losing his faith. It wasn’t a surprise that he found great meaning in Kabballah, either. Abandoned by his father and raised by his schizophrenic mother, and then in an orphanage, he likely found comfort in the vision of tzimtzum, the Kabbalistic doctrine of God having retracted at the beginning of time to make room for the world. For Stone, as for the Kaballah, the missing father-figure proved a primordial source of creativity.

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