With best-selling books like \”The Harlot by the Side of the Road\” and \”Moses: A Life,\” Jonathan Kirsch has been pioneering an unusual genre that combines themes religious, historical and literary, written with a Jewish sensibility.
\”To write or not to write,\” Eva Gossman ponders in the first chapter of her Holocaust memoir, recounting the internal debate she had about whether to write this book. She asked many deep and tough questions: about whether it made sense, given all that has been written about the period, to write one more account; whether a personal narrative would add to historians\’ understanding; whether memory is reliable after so many years.
Some people like their Passover seders just as they remember them: the same lines recited by the same relatives with the same emphasis, the same songs, jokes and foods, the same delicate glassware that picks up the light in a certain way, reflecting past and present.
For the epigraph of his new book, Israeli journalist David Horovitz chooses two quotes.
Three words, among the last uttered by journalist Daniel Pearl before his murder two years ago this month (on Feb. 21, the public learned of the murder), have become a nucleus for thoughtfulness and creativity. \”I Am Jewish,\” edited by his parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl (Jewish Lights), is a collection of brief essays by almost 150 noted contributors who tease out meaning from these words and compose personal statements of Jewish identity.
The Israel that Donna Rosenthal depicts in her new book, \”The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land\” (Free Press) can sound like one very crowded apartment building, filled with interesting, passionate people from many backgrounds, often shouting in the hallways, sitting on the stoop, offering advice out their windows, sharing tragedies. But the tenants don\’t know much about those neighbors who aren\’t like them.
\”King of Odessa\” by Robert Rosenstone (Northwestern, $24.95).
In an impressive effort of literary boldness, historian Robert Rosenstone fills in some of the blanks in Issac Babel\’s life and work in a first novel, \”King of Odessa.\” He writes as though he has recovered a lost Babel manuscript, imagining what one of Babel\’s final years might have been like. Other than a few postcards sent to his family, no records remain of the summer and autumn of 1936, when Babel, then 42, returned to Odessa, the city of his birth.
>\”The secret of redemption is remembrance,\” as a sign announces in Israel\’s Yad Vashem, an institution dedicated to remembering the Holocaust.
\”Welcome to Heavenly Heights\” by Risa Miller (St. Martin\’s Press, $23.95).
Many writers have imagined the Jewish immigrant experience, setting their novels and short stories on the Lower East Side and places like that, where newcomers can forge their way to become Americans. Risa Miller\’s debut novel, \”Welcome to Heavenly Heights,\” is a different version of that story, with American Jews making new homes in Israel, reversing the exile. This transition can be more pressure cooker than melting pot, mixing idealism, religion, bureaucracy, family complexities, shifting expectations, love and, never far away, violence.
Some synagogues want a rabbi who\’s a good sermonizer, others want a scholar; some want someone who relates well to their teenagers, others want a rabbi they can call by first name and play tennis or basketball with; some want an individual well known in the larger community, others want a rabbi who knows them well; some go for formality, others for lots of hugging. Some want it all.
In \”The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader,\” investigative reporter Stephen Fried gets inside the congregational mindset the way no other writer has. He intensely follows the process of finding a replacement for Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, when he steps down after leading a Main Line Philadelphia synagogue, Har Zion, for 30 years. But the compelling book is as much about Judaism in America and the role of the rabbi, as it\’s about Har Zion. And it\’s as much about Fried\’s return to synagogue life as it\’s about Wolpe\’s departure.
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