People of the book

Judasim and Christianity - two different manifestos

2005-05-23T01:12:00.000+01:00

. see my review in the Jerusalem Post.

Joseph's Bones

2005-04-04T14:04:00.000+01:00

A while back a small collection of stories arrived in my mailbox: Joseph's Bones, by Ozzie Nogg. It sat atop my "to be blogged" pile for a while (here's where its small size comes in handy: the coffee-table book has been relegated to the base of the stack to keep the whole thing sturdy, but this little collection balances neatly on the top) and recently I finally picked it up to give it a skim. I wound up reading it the whole way through, not wanting to put it down.

The book contains twelve short stories, an introduction, and a glossary. The whole thing could fit in most ladies' purses, or in the side pocket of a briefcase. But there's more to this little book than its size might indicate.

These are sweet stories, familiar stories. If you're a second- or third-generation American, these tales may resonate especially well for you. In this book we meet Nogg's Bubbie, who repainted the cupboard every year after Purim until the cabinet doors wouldn't really close; her father, who taught her lessons about expectations by planting watermelons, and who modeled teshuvah by zipping across an interstate median to change directions; and Ozzie herself, and her intended Don, at the moment when their fathers decided to invite the entire Jewish community to their nuptials.

Maybe I like this little book because occasionally Nogg's father -- a rabbi from Lithuania, born at the tail-end of the nineteenth century -- reminds me of my grandfather, of blessed memory. My grandfather was born ten years after her dad; he came from Byelorus, not Lithuania; and though he could have pursued smicha, ordination, he chose medical school instead. But I hear his voice in her father's cadences and wry humor. Reading this book made me a little wistful sometimes. I think that's what Nogg intended.

Joseph's Bones isn't a groundbreaking book. It doesn't take the reader in new directions; the surprises it offers are small ones. Reading it is like taking the time to sit down with a relative you've never known very well; you might come away shaking your head, you might come away laughing, and for sure you'll come away knowing your time was well-spent.

Benjie the Bin Man featured in 'Granta'

2005-03-09T19:04:00.000Z

An extract from my review of the 'Granta' Jubilee issue in the Jerusalem Post, featuring well-known London character "Benjie the bin man":

..."As a quarterly, Granta has an excellent reputation for publishing new writing. This current edition does not disappoint, but it does surprise in a way which is of direct interest to Jewish readers - of the 19 varied essays and stories, at least six have central or peripheral Jewish interest.
The first essay is a journalistic profile of one of London's well-known eccentrics - master garbage-bin rifler Benjamin Pell, who "acquired an infamy for looting the dustbins of lawyers and agents of the rich and famous and selling their secrets to newspapers and magazines." Until his activities were legally curtailed, "Benjie the Binman," as he was known, was the unlikely center of several cause celebres in the 1990s. Mr. Pell is a religious Jew, 40-ish, who lives in Hendon with his parents. His close friends, and certainly Tim Adams, the author of this profile, would admit that he is not a totally easy person to befriend. The story is, however, sensitive, riveting and hilarious. It is rather like a sympathetic rummage in Benjie's own bin - a sort of middah k'neged middah (poetic justice). The title - "Benjamin Pell versus The Rest of The World" - says it all."

Triumph of style over taste

2005-03-07T23:53:00.000Z

According to Jewsweek, 'Queen of Kosher' Susie Fishbein's new cookbook, Kosher by Design Entertains,

has already exhausted it's (sic) initial printing of 30,000 -- all in only its first week of release. A second printing of an additional 20,000 copies have (sic) already begun.

If so, I find this extremely surprising. Kosher by Design was ambitious, beautiful, modern, and did set new standards for Kosher cookbooks. It didn't, however, do much for Jewish food. Let's be honest -- the recipes didn't hold a candle to the vastly superior Kosher Palette. Too many of them either didn't work very well, took too long to prepare or involved ingredients which were too obscure. I guess when you've already sold 30,000 copies one less won't make much difference, but I for one will not be buying a copy of the new book.

Reading a really big Jewish book

2005-03-02T18:17:00.000Z

BCC News recently posted a story about the finishing of one daily Talmud-study cycle, and the beginning of another: Crowds flock to Jewish book party.

I've been contemplating getting in on the Daf Yomi action, though I spent much of February out of town, and now I realize I've missed the boat a little. Anyone here have daf sites/mailing lists/blogs to recommend?

For Women, Middle Ages Might Have Been Golden...

2005-03-01T23:54:00.000Z

My review of two books about Jewish women in the Middle Ages, discussed extensively on this blog, appears in the Forward this week.

Eight hundred years ago, thousands of Jewish Egyptian women refused to immerse in the ritual bath. Only Maimonides’s threat that they would lose their Ketubah money quelled the orchestrated rebellion, years after it began. A century later in Ashkenaz (Christian Europe), rabbis were astonished by the large number of Jewish women who refused to have marital relations with their husbands, asking instead to be proclaimed “rebellious wives” and divorced.
“Between the lines,” writes Avraham Grossman in a new book titled “Pious and Rebellious,” “echoes the voice of powerful women, very different from the ideal of the submissive and shy figure depicted by thinkers during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.”

Continue...

The Observant Reader

2005-01-31T13:28:00.000Z

Wendy Shalit writes an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the spurt, in recent years, of literature about the Haredi community. Her basic thesis is that some of the most successful books -- eg. Nathan Englander's For The Relief of Unbearable Urges , books by Tova Reich and Tova Mirvis -- are written by people who purport to be insiders, but have in fact left the fold or perhaps never even really belonged in it. As a result, they portray the community rather negatively, and without any really idealistic characters. She asks:

What is the market for this fiction? Does it simply satisfy our desire, as one of Mirvis's reviewers put it, to indulge in ''eavesdropping on a closed world''? Or is there a deeper urge: do some readers want to believe the ultra-Orthodox are crooked and hypocritical, and thus lacking any competing claim to the truth? Perhaps, on the other hand, readers are genuinely interested in traditional Judaism but don't know where to look for more nuanced portraits of this world.

Shalit contrasts this to Welcome to Heavenly Heights by Risa Miller and Seven Blessings by Ruchama King, both of which came out a couple of years ago. Writes Shalit:

Like Miller, King doesn't shy away from the problems that affect her world, but she also captures the subtlety and magic of its traditions. In particular, she convincingly describes the sublimated excitement that characterizes ultra-Orthodox dating as tiny gestures take on heightened meaning.

I think that Shalit is perhaps oversensitive here to the books being written by the Mirvises and Englanders of this world. I don't think you can read either of their books without gaining the impression that this is a world they both do -- in vastly different ways, and certainly vastly differently to the way Shalit does -- care about. (I can't comment about Tova Reich whom I've never read.)
In any case, the crux of Shalit's argument is that one portrayal is more 'real'/'authentic' than another. On this I disagree with her. As a Ba'alat Tshuva, she -- and Miller, and King -- see this community in a very different way to the way others who were either born and bred in it, or who grew up in close proximity see it. This does not mean one is 'wrong' and one is 'right.' People simply experience reality differently, and they're entitled to write about it as they see fit.
You could also ask to what extent any author portrays any community / experience 'realistically.' Does John LeCarre portray the spy world "realistically"?? Does Jilly Cooper portray the racing world "realistically"?? Did Bashevis Singer always portray the Shtetl world "realistically"?? I doubt it, and I'm not sure this is a valid criterion for measuring these books.
In any case, I should add that both Englander and Mirvis are, in my opinion, highly overrated, but Risa Miller and Ruchama King were downright awful. Their books had no real plot or tension; they were held together, barely, by the kind of 'atmosphere' which Shalit seems to laud them for. If you haven't heard of them, there's a reason for that. I'm sure there are many people out there who will happily buy more 'realistic' (and by that, Shalit means 'sympathetic') books about the Haredi world if only those which do come out were a little more gripping.

(Cross-posted to Bloghead)

The King's Persons by Joanne Greenberg. (Henry Holt, 1963).

2005-01-25T21:55:00.000Z

It is 1963. I am a 12-year-old ignoramus.
I am wandering around in a used bookstore in Brooklyn. I see a paperback with a lion and Magen David on the cover. A Jewish book!
I inhale books, especially novels and I'm always looking for somethingto read on the long Shabbos afternoons.
I plunk down 25 cents for the book. Twenty-five cents has irrevocably changed my life.
This was Joanne Greenberg's first novel. She gained some fame and a spot on the best-seller list a few years later with "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." Practically everyone I know has read "Rose Garden" or seen the movie. I have never ever met one person who has read, much less heard of "The King's Persons."
In the Christian year of 1182, Jews held a unique position in English society. Forbidden to own property, they were "the king's persons," whose lives were under his protection, and whose fate and fortune belonged to him and him alone. To support themselves, therefore, many Jews turned to moneylending, which was illegal but tolerated by the king for its contribution to the national economy. And indeed, for a short while this arrangement worked well; in York, Christians and Jews lived together harmoniously.
When economic conditions began to deteriorate, the already overtaxed Christian nobles looked for a scapegoat. On the coronation day of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the London crowd erupted in mass attacks on Jews, which spread rapidly northward and culminated in the massacres at York.
Against this richly evoked background, the author, at the height of her powers, portrays the experiences of everyday people of the time: Baruch of York, the Jewish moneylender; his sensitive and questioning son, Abram, in love with their Christian servant, Bett; and the young monk Simon, Abram's best friend. The lives of Christian and Jew alike are twisted and changed, and we come to understand the myriad subtle forces at work as we see neighbor rise against neighbor in an irrational onslaught of hate.
But what is most powerful, apart from the historic drama, is the elegant manner in which the author exposes the motives of the human heart with such insight that only compassion and sorrow are left.
Since childhood I have been a voracious reader, but no book has evercaptured my imagination like this powerful and beautifully written novel. The fiction that is championed by the intellectual elite neverspoke to me. I read Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. Mysteriously, they are labeled Jewish novelists, but I feel nothing genuinely Jewish in their work. All I sense is an ugly nihilism that has nothing to do with the Judaism as I live and experience it; these are fashionable novelists who are blind to the rich and multilayered Yiddishkayt that has flourished in my America. Their work is stylish and so very polished — but at the core it is void of any authentic Jewish spark.
Even now, as I read "The King's Persons" I weep for Bett, perhaps the most vividly etched character in the book. A Christian child, she issold by her blunt peasant parents as a kitchen maid to Baruch of York's family. Over the years, she has learned to read and write Hebrew in a society where most women are illiterate. So thoroughly has Bett been saturated in the laws, customs, thoughts and feelings of herJewish family that no Christian man will marry her. She is alienated from her own parents. They sense that she is ... different. Living with Jews has made her too fine, too smart and too verbal.
"Bett," says her confused father, "ye thinks too much for a common female."
And, finally, when the king proclaims that no Christian will be allowed to work for a Jew, Bett realizes that the world no longerholds a place for her.
"Perhaps I, too, must be afraid," she said.
Faithfully, I sit down once a year and read "The King's Persons." I still have the same dog-eared paperback that I bought for 25 cents. I do not so much read the words as breathe them in. I continue to marvelat the perfection of language, the totality of vision. I read the novel and I look around and I understand that this book, this story,these fully realized characters changed the course of my life. And just as surely as I am who I am because of who my parents are, because of who my wife and children are — I am a screenwriter and a novelist —because more than 40 years ago, "The King's Person's" gripped my soul, set my heart and mind aflame, and allowed me to follow a path that otherwise I never would have imagined.

(Posted on behalf of Robert Avrech)

Put your mouth where our blog is....

2005-01-21T18:42:00.000Z

JTA: Initiative helps U.S. libraries promote discussion of Jewish books -- the "national literary program, Let’s Talk About It: Jewish Literature, a joint venture between Nextbook and the American Library Association."

Novel Jews

2005-01-21T09:13:00.000Z

What: Novel Jews Book Club introductory meeting
When: Thursday, February 24, 7pm
Where: Uncle Ming's Bar: 225 Ave. B, 2nd Floor (Bet. 13th & 14th Sts.)
Book: "Gimpel the Fool" by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Price: $5

Novel Jews book club will discuss some of the classics of Jewish literature. People of all ages, tastes and experience are welcome. Novel Jews book club is a 14th Street Y class and is facilitated by Alana Newhouse, Arts and Culture Editor at the Forward.
The book club, after the introductory session, will follow a chronological arc of Jewish literature, beginning with the Yiddish masters of the late 19th-century and ending with the current emerging stars. It meets approximately every 6 weeks, with future dates and location forthcoming.

What makes Jewish literature so Jewish, anyway?

2005-01-20T17:46:00.000Z

In response to Shawn Landres' recent post, I'm making available a paper I wrote a while back which addresses the question of what makes Jewish literature Jewish.

I spent a semester of grad school exploring a cross-section of Jewish literature, with the intent of trying to define (or at least more clearly understand) what makes a Jewish book. I read classics (some Torah, natch, plus Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Delmore Schwartz, Malka Heifetz Tussman) alongside writers of today (Francine Prose, Hal Sirowitz, and Rodger Kamenetz, among others).

Aware that my own roots give me a tendency towards Ashkenazi-centrism, and wanting to combat that, I dipped into Ilan Stavans' Jewish Latin America series. (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas has one of the coolest titles ever.) I read secondary sources about Jewish literature (among them an excellent issue of the Pakn-Treger that happened to focus on this very question). I had a ridiculous amount of fun.

The...question I began with... [is] what makes a piece of writing Jewish. Must it be written by a Jew? If so, is the Jewishness of its author enough to make the writing itself Jewish? Conversely, what if a piece of writing (a story, a poem, a novel, a body of work) deals with Jewish characters and settings, but is not written by a Jew? What does it mean to deal with "Jewish characters and settings" in 1998, when a "Jewish character" (or a Jewish author) could as easily be a black lesbian feminist Jew-by-choice living in California as a white man of Eastern European descent living in New York city? What is a Jewish character, a Jewish author, a Jewish subject? Does language matter -- which is to say, is a piece of Yiddish fiction automatically Jewish? How about Hebrew poetry? Is there such a thing as a Jewish "essence," a Jewish neshamah, in a piece of writing -- and if so, what creates it? When I turned my eye towards this project six months ago, I dimly sensed these questions on my horizon.
The question I did not sense on my horizon, although perhaps I should have, is this: is Jewishness about looking in or looking out? Must Jewish writing be directed inwards within the Jewish community, or can it be universal?

I wound up writing roughly 7000 words on the subject. I can't claim to definitively answer the question (the more Jewish lit I read, and the more I think about what I've read, the less possible I think it is to concretely define the genre), but there's some interesting food for thought there.

The paper is available for download here:

A Question of Reading: Nu, What Makes Jewish Literature So Jewish, Anyway?

Hopefully you'll enjoy reading it a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it!

(Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

Book-blogging, book-banning....

2005-01-19T08:46:00.000Z

I don't have a great deal to write as we launch this new enterprise -- since my current literary companion is Orhan Pamuk's Snow -- except to note the irony of starting a J-book blog the week of the Slifkin ban, which appears to be as much about boundary maintenance as anything else.

So, in that spirit, let me begin with four questions:
1. What makes a "Jewish book" Jewish?
2. Can a Jewish author write a "non-Jewish" book?
3. Can a non-Jewish author write a "Jewish" book?
4. Why wasn't Jewish Lights among the exhibitors at the most recent meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies?

[UPDATE, January 23: I saw Jewish Lights's Stuart Matlins tonight at a Kalsman Institute event honoring Debbie Friedman. All is well -- and it was a great evening.]

And one more for good measure: now that we're all officially Jewish book bloggers, does this mean publishers will start sending us free review copies?

A favorite Ostriker poem

2005-01-18T15:03:00.000Z

I'm a big fan of Jewish feminist poet and midrashist Alicia Ostriker. Her nonfiction books (among them Writing Like a Woman, an exploration of female poets and their work; The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, which explores the Torah through the twin lenses of autobiography and midrash; and Dancing at the Devil's Party, which I reviewed a few years back) have prominent place on my shelves; ditto her collections of poetry, which are pretty splendid. I've had the pleasure of writing about Ostriker for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, and every time I get to reread her oeuvre, I enjoy her work more.

For kicks, here's one of my favorite Ostriker poems. It's called Everywoman Her Own Theology. Though it's not her most Judaic poem by a long shot (I'm not sure I could choose a single poem to fit that bill, though "A Meditation in Seven Days"--which explores the roles of women and images of femaleness within Jewish tradition, from Sarah to the Sabbath Queen--might come close) this poem "feels" Jewish to me in its playful approach to theology and its insistence on the importance of chesed, loving-kindness. Unlike some of Ostriker's more serious Judaic poems (as exemplified by her recent collection The Volcano Sequence, which rails against injustice with a prophet's ardor, and which speaks both to, and for, the shekhinah exiled in creation) this one approaches the anthropomorphizing of God with a sly, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

In the last stanza she describes her credo in stark contrast to the stone tablets Moses brought down from Sinai: these lines, unlike those, are tacked to a corkboard, written on perishable paper, small and mundane and soon to be spattered with the ordinary detritus of a life well-lived. Though third-wave feminists (myself among them) would argue that it's essentialist to declare any kind of theology entirely gendered, it's hard to escape the notion that this poem is meant to reflect a kind of woman's theology, concerned less with with halakhah than with the kitchen, with forgiveness, and with love.

Everywoman Her Own Theology

I am nailing them up to the cathedral door
Like Martin Luther. Actually, no,
I don't want to resemble that Schmutzkopf
(See Erik Erikson and N.O. Brown
On the Reformer's anal aberrations,
Not to mention his hatred of Jews and peasants),
So I am thumbtacking these ninety-five
Theses to the bulletin board in my kitchen.

My proposals, or should I say requirements,
Include at least one image of a god,
Virile, beard optional, one of a goddess,
Nubile, breast size approximating mine,
One divine baby, one lion, one lamb,
All nude as figs, all dancing wildly,
All shining. Reproducible
In marble, metal, in fact any material.

Ethically, I am looking for
An absolute endorsement of loving-kindness.
No loopholes except maybe mosquitoes.
Virtue and sin will henceforth be discouraged,
Along with suffering and martyrdom.
There will be no concept of infidels,
Consequently the faithful must entertain
Themselves some other way than killing infidels.

And so forth and so on. I understand
This piece of paper is going to be
Spattered with wine one night at a party
And covered over with newer pieces of paper.
That is how it goes with bulletin boards.
Nevertheless it will be there.
Like an invitation, a chalk pentangle,
It will emanate certain vibrations.

If something sacred wants to swoop from the universe
Through a ceiling, and materialize,
Folding its silver wings,
In a kitchen, and bump its chest against mine,
My paper will tell this being where to find me.

-- Alicia Ostriker

The Sabbatean Prophets/ Matt Goldish

2005-01-18T03:47:00.000Z

SEE MY FULL REVIEW IN THE JERUSALEM POST 13 January 2005

This is a superb book, which has the potential of being a classic of Jewish intellectual history and of Jewish historiography. It deals with what one might term the 'expanding ripples' of Sabbateanism as destabilizing factors (and therefore enabling mechanisms) of early modern Judaism, and also is one of a number of recent books highlighting the Converso community as pivotal to the process. The real enjoyment of the book, however, is its comprehensive 'embedding' of Jewish Messianic prophecy of the period in its widest European context - showing how Sabbateanism was both a product of wider trends in Europe ("the comprehensive nexus of Enlightenment") and also, to a degree, contributed to them. It is the opposite of 'Jewish history seen backwards down a long narrow tube'. A real treat to read!

Natasha and Other Stories / David Bezmozgis

2004-11-16T13:05:00.000Z

My review of David Bezmozgis' smash hit about Jewish Russian immigrants to Toronto in the 1980s is printed in The Jewish Chronicle.

Did women's lib peak in the twelfth century?

2004-11-16T13:02:00.000Z

I am thoroughly enjoying Elisheva Baumgarten's Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. In the chapter I just finished, for example, she discuses the medieval circumcision ceremony in Ashkenaz communities. Baumgarten, a lecturer at Bar Ilan, explains that in the twelfth and thirteenth century, the sandek -- then known as a ba'al brit -- was actually often a ba'alat brit, or a woman. She would wash the baby, bring him into the synagogue, and hold him on her lap in the synagogue (in the male section) while he was being circumcised.
After the thirteenth century, the woman becomes absent from the men's section during the ceremony, and the term 'ba'alat habrit' refers to the wife of the 'ba'al habrit,' whose role simply consists of bringing the baby to the synagogue door. This followed a ruling by the Maharam, R. Meir of Rothenburg, who objected to women adorned with jewels entering the men's section, and objected to women 'snatching' mitzvot from men.
To put things in context, Baumgarten explains that in general, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there is lots of evidence of women taking upon themselves 'obligations that were traditionally male... among them, the donning of tefillin and zizit' -- and even, perhaps, acting as the mohel(et) -- although clearly, women acting as ba'alat brit was by far the most common of these, probably the only one which really was common.

"During the course of the thirteenth century, the Hebrew sources begin to express discomfort with women's adoption of such practices, and the objections became more prevalent.... The objections to women performing a variety of ritual activities -- ba'alot brit, tefillin and zizit -- as well as the question of the kind of blessing they were allowed to make when performing the rituals, were all widely discussed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."

Putting this in an even wider context, she explains that a similar process took place in the Christian world, where

"following a period of relative religious freedom for women, as is evident in the growth of lay piety and female orders in the twelfth century, church authorities of the thirteenth entury were determined to curb women's opportunities and especially their religious functions. Thus, for example, women who tried to preach were gravely reproached. Many of their religious practices, including fasting andother devotions, were criticized."

Could it be -- that in some spheres, the golden age for Jewish women was not the twentieth or twenty-first, but the twelfth century?

(Cross-posted to Bloghead)

The God gene

2004-11-16T13:00:00.000Z

A new book is causing waves by claiming that some people have a genetic predisposition towards spirituality/'self-transcendence':

Dr Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in America, asked volunteers 226 questions in order to determine how spiritually connected they felt to the universe. The higher their score, the greater a person's ability to believe in a greater spiritual force and, Dr Hamer found, the more likely they were to share the gene, VMAT2.
Studies on twins showed that those with this gene, a vesicular monoamine transporter that regulates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, were more likely to develop a spiritual belief.
Growing up in a religious environment was said to have little effect on belief. Dr Hamer, who in 1993 claimed to have identified a DNA sequence linked to male homosexuality, said the existence of the "god gene" explained why some people had more aptitude for spirituality than others.
"This is not a thing that is strictly handed down from parents to children" [he said.] "It could skip a generation - it's like intelligence."

From what I've read, Hamer's scientific claims are still far from being scientifically substantiated -- and clearly, merely having a 'God gene' would not mean that someone had no choice but to end up religious, or vice versa. Still, the very concept raises some interesting questions. Would the existance of a 'God gene' result in religious people becoming be more accepted in a secular society -- or atheists (who presumably lack the gene) becoming be more accepted in religious societies? Would parents one day be able to genetically engineer their children to make them more or less spiritually inclined? And -- most importantly -- would proof that faith is influenced by genetics undermine or reinforce the notion of religion? I'd be interested to hear people's opinions on the latter question...

(Cross-posted to Bloghead)

The Maid of Ludmir / by Nathaniel Deutsch

2004-11-10T03:51:00.000Z

This is a beautifully written and comprehensive investigation into the intriguing personality of the Ludomirer Moid. Deutsch not only thoroughly investigates the literary and documentary evidence of her story, but sets both in thoughtful cultural contexts, both historic and contemporary. This involves mastery of an impressive range of disciplines, ranging from Hasidic / kabbalistic theology to radical feminism and gender theory. His investigations in Ludmir itself are poignant and elegaic. An excellent book.

Southern trees, strange fruit -- remembered

2004-11-09T23:13:00.000Z

Cornell Hillel, plus 'several university departments,' have launched a week-long series of events in honor of Leo Frank, who graduated from the institution in 1906. Frank, as you will recall, was convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan in 1913 in a trial clouded by anti-Semitism and hanged by a lynch mob after his death sentence was commuted to life two years later. His entire case -- which marked the revival of the KKK, the establishment of the ADL and which still haunts parts of Georgia -- was thrown back into the limelight last year with the publication of Steve Oney's absolutely fascinating book, And the Dead Shall Rise. Oney gives an exhaustive account of the murder, trial and its aftermath, and exposes for the first time some of the extremely prominent names behind the lynch mob. He does not prove beyond doubt who actually did commit the murder, but provides a more-than-likely alternative. If you haven't read it yet, do.

(Cross-posted to Bloghead)

Yiddish vs. Hebrew

2004-11-09T23:09:00.000Z

-- Foiglman by Aharon Megged -- I thoroughly enjoyed Megged's fabulous, seminal novel of Israeli-Diaspora relations, translated into English more than 15 years after its original publication in Hebrew.
Zvi Arbel, Israeli professor of Jewish History, is given a copy of Yiddish poems written by Parisian holocaust survivor Shmuel Foiglman. Foiglman gradually worms his way into Arbel's life, despite the fact that Arbel's wife, the biologist Nora, can't stand him or anything he represents. As Arbel agrees to pay for the translation of Foiglman's book into Hebrew out of his own pocket, and gets more and more involved in Foiglman's affairs, he fails to notice that his wife has sunk into a deep depression, and a tragic set of events is set in motion which ends with the dissolution of their marriage and his wife's suicide (as revealed in chapter 1).
While it has a strong plot, Foiglman is a novel of ideas. Essentially, the novel pits Yiddish -- representing Jewish history -- against Hebrew -- representing the Israeli present, and questions the Israeli attitude to the Diaspora and to its Jewish past. There is also a strong recurring theme of history (Arbel) vs. biology/science(Nora) vs. poetry/fiction (Foiglman) as ways of looking at and understanding the world. Ultimately, Arbel is criticised in the book for being so engrossed in analysing dry historical trends that he cannot see what's going on in the here and now and is oblivious to the human element. Says Arbel:
"It is the great writers, the novelists, who see deeper and further than us. And the reson is that they, unlike us, focus not on events but on people... And I, who have spent my entire life examining the minute details of events, did I hear the anguished cry of Nora's soul?"
It took me a while to get into this dense book -- it's quite slow to begin with. But I read the last 200 pages in one sitting and am still thinking about its multiple layers. Definitely recommended.
An extra plug, incidentally, for Jerusalem-based publisher The Toby Press. Almost everything they publish is really exciting -- look out for their books.