“Whores and Jews are always persecuted,” says one of the characters in Aharon Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness” (Schocken: $24.00, 288 pps., translated by Jeffrey M. Green). “There’s nothing to be done.”

The first thing you need to know about Joel Chasnoff’s “The 188th Crybaby Brigade: A Skinny Jewish Kid From Chicago Fights Hezbollah” (Free Press, $25) is that it’s
laugh-out-loud funny. It was tough for the rest of my household to concentrate on “The Bachelor” for all of my chortles and guffaws, and I was repeatedly asked: “What are you reading?”

A fraught moment in the encounter between men and women is the one in which an ailing woman seeks a cure from a healer — sometimes a physician, sometimes a psychotherapist, and sometimes a prophet.