Without realizing his ideas would culminate in a book, Ed Feinstein began writing down his thoughts more than six years ago. He collected the most common questions children asked him — most having to do with why bad things happen to good people.
\”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.
\”A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair\” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. (Knopf, 2002). $25
After provoking a furious debate over the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust with his book, \”Hitler\’s Willing Executioners\” (Vintage, 1995) Daniel Goldhagen tackles an even more explosive subject, the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, in his new book, \”A Moral Reckoning.\” The power of the book is neither in the answers it gives nor the evidence it marshals, but in the questions it poses. None is more central than the one that frames the book: \”What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of a hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?\” Goldhagen approaches the question in three parts: Clarifying the Conduct, Judging the Culpability and Repairing the Harm.
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.
\”Girl Meets God: On the Path to Spiritual Life\” by Lauren Winner (Algonquin Books, $23.95).
Lauren Winner\’s spiritual memoir, \”Girl Meets God,\” is a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths.
Winner, the child of a Reform Jewish father and a \”lapsed Southern Baptist\” mother, was raised as a Jew in the South. Told she was not really Jewish, since Jewish law dictates that Judaism passes through the blood of the mother, she chose to convert to Orthodox Judaism at the end of high school, following her parents\’ divorce. By the end of her senior year at college, she decided that while in graduate school in England she would convert again, this time to evangelical Christianity.
The UPS man brought an envelope containing a beautiful ray of hope, an exceptional picture book by Jane Breskin Zalben titled \”Let There Be Light: Poems and Prayers for Repairing the World\” (Dutton Books, $15.99).
One of the most depressing of the many depressing aspects of the second year of the new millennium has been the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the importation into Islam of anti-Semitic motifs that were abandoned and discredited in the post-Holocaust Christian world.
Fertility therapy, Jewish identity, pressure to marry, single parenting. All are themes that flow through both the personal life and creative work of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony in 1998 for \”The Heidi Chronicles.\”
In a rare peek behind the curtains on Broadway, Wasserstein will share some scenes out of her own theater experience at the Newport Beach Public Library on Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. The $36 cost per person includes a complimentary copy of Wasserstein\’s latest book, \”Shiksa Goddess (Or How I Spent My Forties),\” essays chronicling challenges facing contemporary women in America.
Fans of Sara Paretsky\’s V.I. Warshawski detective novels are used to following the hard-edged but soft-hearted Chicago private investigator unravel interlocking stories of white-collar crime and corruption.
While there\’s plenty of crime and corruption in \”Total Recall\” (Dell, $7.99) the V.I. Warshawski novel recently released in paperback, there\’s also something new: the story of Lotty Herschel\’s flight from Austria on the eve of the war. Lotty was a young Jewish child living in Vienna when Hitler rose to power. At 9, she fled to London through the Kindertransport — the British rescue mission that saved thousands of Jewish children just before war broke out. She is now haunted by memories of her family that died, and does her best to suppress them.
This is a book for those who are or who some day may be ill, which is another way of saying for everyone. It contains wisdom culled out of ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary Jewish literature that is intended for the patient, the caregiver and the physician.
