\”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.
\”The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust\” by Sir Martin Gilbert (Henry Holt and Company, $35).
On Jan. 19, 1942, Rabbi Jacob Schulmann of Grabow Synagogue wrote to his community in Lodz:
\”Alas, to our great grief, we now know all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything. They\’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they are all buried in the Rzuszow forest.\”
Reviewed: \”To Do Right and the Good: Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics,\” by Elliot N. Dorff (Jewish Publication Society, $34.95.)
\”Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics,\” by Elliot N. Dorff (Jewish Publication Society, $25).
\”Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics,\” by Elliot N. Dorff (Jewish Publication Society, $34.95).
\”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.
\”City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterstam and Early Manhattan,\” by Beverly Swerling. (Scribner paperback, $15.)
John Irving, whose novels have the rare distinction of being widely praised, read and filmed, has said that he always follows havoc with healing. Spanning the destruction-filled years of 1661 to 1798, Beverly Swerling\’s sprawling and successful novel about the origins of Manhattan purposely offers her readers no such solace.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has written more than 60 books on Jewish spirituality, but he is most famous for his translation and commentary of the Babylonian Talmud, which made the complicated text accessible to millions of otherwise ignorant Jews.
Recently, Steinsaltz turned his attention to the classic work of Chabad Chasidism — \”The Tanya,\” first published in 1797 by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad. In \”Opening the Tanya: Discovering the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classic Work of Kabbalah\” (Wiley, 2003) Steinsaltz translates and comments on the text and explicates the Tanya\’s philosophical and spiritual messages.
Last year, when Leonard Lawrence learned that the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Los Angeles (JCCGLA) had to cancel its annual book fair as a result of restructuring within the organization, he vowed to not let it happen again.
\”We saw it as a challenge that Mount Sinai could rise up to,\” said Lawrence, general manager of Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries.
This year, Lawrence\’s call to duty has placed the book festival back on the map with a bit of a twist. Unlike the traditional book fairs of previous years, this year\’s book festival, co-sponsored by Mount Sinai and JCCGLA, will cater to children.
Book publishers know that the marketplace is full of Jewish customers with a high level of secular education, a reasonable degree of Jewish awareness and strong aesthetic sensibilities. And now they\’re having children.
America\’s sense of self-definition has been on display more blatantly than ever, it seems. Led by our administration, we have embraced the \”cowboy\” ethic: seemingly down-home while at the same time unilaterally aggressive.
