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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The Debt of Tamar by Nicole Dweck

Review by Julie Joseph for the Jewish Book Council

A fantastical Jewish tale told by debut author Nicole Dweck, the Debt of Tamar travels beyond continents and outlives the sands of time. Beginning in sixteenth century Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, and Palestine, then jumping five centuries to Nazi-invaded Paris, then to the newly established State of Israel before landing in present-day Istanbul and New York City, the story manifests its own momentum. In each location, the reader encounters new characters that connect the insatiable love of five centuries to its twenty-first-century resolution.

Dweck’s fictional characters are inspired by the precarious status of the Jews in sixteenth century Europe, as conversos fled the Inquisition and found refuge on the shores of the Ottoman Empire. An innocent but forbidden love develops in Istanbul, where the lovers are torn apart by the father of the Jewish girl, Tamar. As a Portuguese refugee, he will not allow his daughter to abandon her faith and marry a Muslim, even though he may be the son of the Sultan. Her father witnessed what happened to Jews in Portugal when they worshipped openly: they were burned alive at the stake. Perhaps spurred by his painful memories of watching the auto de fe, he exiles Tamar to the Ottoman Protectorate of Palestine where she can be protected from abandoning her faith.

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Run You Down by Julia Dahl

By Zelda Shluker for Hadassah Magazine

In Julia Dahl’s first book, Invisible City, her central character, Rebekah Roberts, was a stringer, a rookie reporter trying to establish a foothold in a New York tabloid. After stubbornly, and intrepidly, solving a murder case, she now has enough credibility to catch a new assignment in the same ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn. As she continues to decipher the mores and sensibilities of the religious community–and figure out why Pessie Goldin, a lovely 22-year-old mother, was killed–she is also on a separate mission: To reconnect with Aviva, her once religious mother who had abandoned Rebekah after she was born to be raised by her non-Jewish father and his family in Florida.

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Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

By Stewart Kampel for Hadassah Magazine

Readers often assume that a first novel is autobiographical. Especially in the case of Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Russian-born author of Panic in a Suitcase, since she shares roots in Odessa and Brighton Beach with her major characters. Akhtiorskaya, a 30-year-old who is a sly, no-holds-barred writer, explores the confounding life of émigrés from Russian-speaking Ukraine trying to build new lives in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa.

The book spans two periods. It begins in 1993 when Pasha Nasmertov, a well-known poet and the last family member in Odessa, leaves the motherland to go to Brooklyn to visit his mother, Esther, the 65-year-old family matriarch who is stricken with breast cancer. Fifteen years later, young Frida, the poet’s niece, on a short hiatus from medical school, flies to Odessa in search of herself, only to find a perplexing and vexing world.

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Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

Review by Edyt Dickstein for Jewish Book Council

Short story writer Jessamyn Hope’s powerful debut novel draws on her experiences living in Israel in its depiction of a secluded kibbutz community. The primary protagonist, Adam, is a former drug addict who steals a family heirloom to pay for his vices; when his grandfather discovers that the brooch his missing, he has a heart attack and dies. Plagued by guilt, Adam uses the only clue he has—a letter from his grandfather’s young lover that accompanied the heirloom—to locate the woman and give her the brooch, hoping that by doing so he will have in some way absolved himself. Adam traces his grandfather’s footsteps back to the kibbutz where the two had met, but is unable to locate his grandfather’s former lover. Frustrated by his failures, Adam is unable to stay sober and slowly unravels.

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