\”Gloomy Sunday\” is the English title for the more aptly named German-Hungarian film \”A Song of Love and Death,\” but under either label it is a movie of exceptional visual and dramatic beauty.\n\nOpening in the 1930s in Budapest, fabled in pre-war Europe for its handsome architecture and women, \”Gloomy Sunday\” starts as a good, old-fashioned love triangle, or rather a quadrangle.\n\n
\”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.
I am a Jew, a journalist and a professor, but I also am an anguished and proud father. Last month, my wife and I welcomed our daughter back to Los Angeles for her annual visit to observe the High Holidays with our family. She will not be coming home. Home for her is Israel, where she has lived for 23 years.
We hope to talk about things other than the subject, but who\’s kidding whom? After all, we are Jews. Inevitably, we will banter about politics, be it the wackiness of California\’s recall election or the tragedy of Israel\’s dead-end policy in the territories.
The Florida case of a woman on life support for 13 years has put issues of how we die and when and how doctors and others should intervene on the front page. Whatever the courts say about that case, however, will only apply to federal and Florida law.
What would Jewish law say about such a case? That question is important because the issues raised in that case confront Jews often as they care for their parents, spouse and other loved ones and as they contemplate their own dying process.
The basic Jewish principle about these matters is clear: We are, on the one hand, not allowed to hasten the dying process, but on the other, we are not supposed to prolong it either.
Okay, full disclosure about … full disclosure: I write emotionally revealing memoirs, but won\’t wear see-through blouses. Which is to say, I\’m not the type of person who posts naked pictures of herself on the Web. But when a women\’s magazine asked me to write about joining an \”erotic amateur photo site,\” I was intrigued. Let me repeat: they asked me, a petite Jewish woman who bears no resemblance to the cast of \”Friends,\” to publicly display my body.
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