Neither of these characters, driving at breakneck speed toward each other, are seeing anything too clearly. So a crash is expected. But with the prolific Joyce Carol Oates\’ deft and dark hands on both wheels, the carnage is far worse than is easily imagined.
Lori Justice-Shocket thought that the traditional praying experience was just a bit too black and white. Not the prayers, themselves, per se, but the siddurim (prayer books), with their plain black typeface on white pages and the archaic traditional language, made davening, for her at least, formal, stiff and lacking in the visual and emotional engagement that she thought prayer should have.
So Justice-Shocket, vice president of conceptual development at the Los Angeles-based nail polish company, OPI, decided to take matters into her own presumably well-manicured hands and create a prayer book that could visually and intellectually inspire worshippers.
Can a work of fiction be important without being successful? If so, it would look pretty much like \”Foiglman,\” by the distinguished Israeli author, Aharon Megged.
\”Foiglman\” was originally published in Israel in 1988 and is being issued here for the first time in English by Toby Press, a Connecticut-based firm with an active editorial office in Jerusalem that has been busily acquiring backlists of leading Israeli writers.
Megged\’s book is a novel of ideas in which ideas completely overpower the novel itself.
Earlier this year, two remarkable authors came to town and changed the way I thought about being Jewish.\n\nFrederic Brenner, the French photographer, came to speak about his new book, \”Diaspora: Exiles at Home\” (HarperCollins). The product of 25 years of work, the book contains photographs of Jews living very different kinds of lives in 45 different countries. The images are powerful, as are the accompanying analyses by some of the great thinkers and writers of our time.
Scratch away at any Jew and you\’ll find a storyteller. The people of the book dream of spinning out personal memories and Old Country stories to a rapt circle of children. That\’s why the first-ever Jewish Children\’s Literature Conference, held in the fall at Sinai Temple through the auspices of Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries and the Association of Jewish Libraries, attracted 125 eager attendees. Many were there specifically to grapple with the question: So you want to be a writer of children\’s books?
Karen Levine never had plans to write a book.
Then in 2001, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio producer came across an article in the Canadian Jewish News about a young Japanese woman, urged on by Tokyo schoolchildren studying the Holocaust, who traveled halfway round the world to find the owner of a child\’s battered suitcase. That child, Hana Brady, had died in Auschwitz at age 13, but the determined young woman tracked down Hana\’s brother George, who had survived Auschwitz and found a new life in Toronto.
Levine made a radio documentary chronicling the meeting between Fumiko Ishioka and George Brady, and that led her to write a children\’s book, \”Hana\’s Suitcase,\” a gripping detective story and an inspirational saga.
Today, \”Brundibar\” is experiencing a revival of sorts. It is the title and story of a new children\’s book written by Tony Kushner, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak (Hyperion Books for Children), and this weekend, the Jewish Community Foundation and the Dwight Stuart Youth Foundation sponsored Youth Opera Camp of Santa Monica College Conservatory will be performing the opera at the Miles Memorial Playhouse and Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Fagin, who recruits a gang of young thieves in \”Oliver Twist,\” is arguably the most villainous caricature of a Jew in English literature — not excepting Shakespeare\’s Shylock — but his creator, Charles Dickens, was no dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite.\n\nIndeed, in \”Our Mutual Friend,\” his last completed novel, Dickens took a 180-degree turn in his portrayal of the Jew Riah, who is as saintly as Fagin is evil. For good measure, Dickens added a Jewish factory owner and his wife, who treated all their employees with kindness and generosity.\n\nThe appraisal of Dickens comes from Harry Stone, one of the foremost collectors and authorities on the great 19th-century English novelist.\n\nStone, who taught English literature at Cal State Northridge for 32 years, recently donated to the university the thousands of items in his private Dickens collection, including first editions of all the novelist\’s works, the monthly newspaper installments in which they first appeared, personal letters, corrected proof sheets, translations, photographs, and even dolls and figurines inspired by his characters.
\”The Rabbi and the Hit Man,\” by Arthur J. Magida (HarperCollins, $24.95).
If not for the legion of pederast priests unmasked like some gruesome ecclesiastical episode of \”Scooby Doo,\” Rabbi Fred Neulander might have been a shoo-in for \”most infamous religious figure of the past decade.\”
Now, it\’s a toss-up. So be it.
Yet after tearing through Arthur J. Magida\’s \”The Rabbi and the Hit Man,\” the painstakingly detailed account of the rise and fall of Neulander, a philandering New Jersey rabbi who paid an assassin to bludgeon his wife to death in 1994, one can only lapse into a well-worn cliché. Truth is stranger than fiction.
\”An Hour in Paradise: Stories\” by Joan Leegant (Norton, $23.95).
People imagine that, as a book critic, I read so much that there must be dozens of books I enjoy each year. But the truth is, books about which I am totally enthusiastic appear only every few years. Joan Leegant\’s terrific first book of stories, \”An Hour in Paradise,\” is one of those books.
