For those of a certain age, the name Bennett Cerf brings up fading memories of an owlish, avuncular man you’d see on reruns of “What’s My Line.” For many, that was all he was: funny, sophisticated and one of television’s first celebrities. In retrospect, he seems like an early incarnation of someone who was famous for being famous.

He was much more than that: As the publisher and co-founder of Random House, he was one of the most important figures in 20th-century culture and literature, publishing books by Robert Penn Warren, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Philip Roth, Ted Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), William Faulkner and Ayn Rand, to name but a few. More importantly, Cerf and Random House took the U.S. Government to court over its classification of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” as obscene; their victory is considered a landmark First Amendment case.

In “Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built,” Gayle Feldman aims to present a complete portrait of Cerf; as she writes in the prologue, Cerf was “a paradox … the famous, fun loving, ultimately fleeting TV personality and the driven, dead-serious publisher-for-the ages.” She wants to give a full picture of “the only U.S. publisher ever to be a truly public man.”

And “Nothing Random” is a hefty biography; including acknowledgements, endnotes and an index, the book weighs in at a Robert Caro-linian 1,032 pages. But Cerf is such a fascinating character, and Feldman such a graceful writer, that your interest never flags.

Cerf was indefatigable, endlessly curious and the possessor of a massive Rolodex. He was a figure that spanned high and low culture; he published Pulitzer Prize-winning books while writing a series of joke books — 21, if we’re being precise. Cerf was an inveterate punster — the more they made you groan the better. You could call him the father of dad jokes.

He was not the kind of publisher that got involved in the granular work of a book; although he was a deep and sensitive reader, he was not someone who took a book apart, line by line. He loved authors and saw his job as having their backs and marketing their books as effectively as possible. The idea that literary quality could lead to “smash hits” was not universally held, but Feldman writes that Cerf “was speaking from instincts that made others liken him to a theater impresario or studio boss. Appreciating quality and popularity, he put great effort into popularizing.”

And he lived something of a charmed life. The most important thing, Feldman writes, “was never to be bored.” Cerf had an active social life outside of Random House.He was married, briefly, to actress Sylvia Sidney; his second wife, Phyllis (nicknamed “Thrup”) was the niece of Ginger Rogers. “Thrup” was the perfect partner, both at home and at work; she worked closely with Dr. Seuss and was the first publisher of Random’s children’s imprint, Beginner Books. To give you an idea of how well connected Cerf was, “Nothing Random” includes cameo appearances by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, an “interesting young producer” for daytime talk show host Mike Douglas, and future Fox News founder Roger Ailes. His social circle included members of the Algonquin Round Table, playwright Moss Hart and his wife, Kitty Carlisle, and the Marx Brothers. Edna Ferber said that the Cerfs gave “the nicest dinner parties in New York City.”

The book is filled with wonderful literary gossip and stories: A pugnacious John O’Hara trying to butter up a courtly but sozzled William Faulkner; the work behind the publication of “Atlas Shrugged” and Cerf’s unlikely friendship with the book’s author, Ayn Rand; and the time a newly signed author was invited to one of the Cerfs’ dinners. “The guest seemed perhaps 12 years old: short, terribly slim, with enormous eyes and a very high voice. [The butler] mounted the stairs in search of his mistress. ‘Mrs. Cerf, are you expecting a child for dinner?,’ he discretely enquired. [She] was puzzled, but Bennett overheard and responded, ‘Oh, that’s Truman Capote.’” And at a private lunch Cerf set up between Gertrude Stein and leading critic Alexander Woollcott Stein disagreed with the critic several times. “People don’t dispute Woollcott,” he informed her. “I’m not people,” came the reply. “I’m Gertrude Stein.”

There are also wonderful anecdotes about the famous in the Cerfs’ social circle, including the time when Cerf and George Gershwin sailed to Nassau, the Bahamas. At the hotel, Gershwin “banged out ‘Rhapsody in Blue’” at 7 a.m. to impress a girl he’d met and became “indignant” when the manager asked him to stop.

The other story Feldman wants to tell is how Cerf and other Jewish publishers including Alfred A. Knopf, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, Henry Guinzburg of Viking Press and Horace Liveright started to have their books on bookshelves beside the WASPy Duttons, Doubledays and Little, Browns. But that didn’t protect them from antisemitism – they still couldn’t belong to the Publisher’s Lunch Club, so they started the rival Book Table (much like Los Angeles’ Jewish bankers, merchants and studio moguls started the Hillcrest Country Club). Publishing was the kind of industry where a Jewish editor was advised to take a job at Harper and Row because “it’s a good time for Harper to have a Jewish editor.”

Cerf was not a religious man, but he was concerned about the safety of his Jewish authors in Europe, helping some of them emigrate to the U.S. A trip to mandatory Palestine in 1934 awakened his Jewish pride. While waiting to get a haircut at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, he watched the barber who spoke German when a German was in his chair, French when a Frenchman took his place. When Cerf sat down, the barber spoke perfect English. When Cerf asked the barber’s nationality, he told him “I am a Jew.” Cerf “never forgot his joy ‘at the man saying [it] so proudly.’” Two years later, working with Time magazine, Cerf published “Jews in America,” a book he hoped would “squelch … a lot of the loose talk about ‘the Jewish problem.’”

Cerf’s Judaism only intersected with his business twice. In 1946, Random House was readying an anthology of modern poetry for publication, when he objected to “printing a single line” of the rabid antisemite Ezra Pound “in any new volume that bore [our] imprint,” a position that caused no small controversary. He also refused to publish Rand’s “The Fascist New Frontier,” a typically shrill tract that compared John F. Kennedy to Hitler.

Cerf was also an innovator in business. Random was one of the first publishers to take an active interest in selling the paperback reprint rights as well as film and TV rights. In 1959, it became one of the first publishers to become a publicly traded company, which gave the company a cash infusion to grow, including acquiring Knopf (the chapter on Alfred Knopf and his wife and parter Blanche is fascinating) and other imprints. It also led to Cerf selling Random House to RCA in 1965, a decision that he came to regret. He was forced out of the company he started in 1970, and died a year later

If “Nothing Random” flags as Cerf ages, the book’s epilogue turns elegiac. Feldman recounts Random House’s sale from one conglomerate to the next, until it is merged with Penguin to form Penguin Random House. She’s nostalgic for the time when publishing was a gentleman’s business and deals could be made on a handshake. Most damning, the chapter does not reference a single author, something Cerf would find unfathomable.

“Nothing Random” should appeal to readers interested in the publishing world and mid-century American culture, and a fitting memorial to its larger-than-life subject.

Hannah Senesh occupies a unique place in Israeli history and memory. Only 19 years old on the eve of World War II, she left her hometown of Budapest to build the land of Israel with her young Zionist peers. At 23, she made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe. The mission ultimately failed in its stated purpose and resulted in Senesh’s execution. But it left the fledgling Jewish State with a national hero, whose poetry and diary entries still reverberate today. Senesh wasn’t alone, she was one among a small group of Jewish members of the yishuv who donned British army uniforms in an implausible bid to try to save Jewish lives from the German killing machine, often their own families included. A few of these figures, such as Enzo Sereni and Haviva Reik, also entered the national consciousness, with streets and settlements named in their honor. Others are less well-known. For a story that is this iconic, one would imagine that its details would be more or less widely understood. Yet as Matti Friedman demonstrates in his riveting new book “Out of the Sky,” one of Israel’s greatest legends is also riddled with mysteries and open questions.

The heroic operation was the result of a collaboration between the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah and British intelligence. The idea, at least as the British understood it, was for a group of Jewish men and women, almost all of them recent refugees from Europe, to join the British army and leverage their skill in their native languages in order to assist British POWs and local resistance fighters behind enemy lines. On the Jewish end, motivations were more multifaceted. The Jewish conscripts sought British military training, which would help them when the time came for their own inevitable war of independence. Even more so, they desperately wanted to try to help the Jewish communities of Europe in some way. A total of 250 men and women were recruited to take part in this unusual mission, but only 37 of them completed the training. Of this number, 12 were captured and seven did not make it home.

Friedman lays out the extent to which this improbable mission, rooted in the loftiest ideals, never really had a chance of succeeding. Firstly, by the time it took place in 1944, most Jews in Europe had already been murdered. No allied powers, including the British commanders overseeing this secret mission, seemed to prioritize saving their lives. Even the safety of the Jewish volunteers was not viewed as urgent. Enzo Sereni, the brilliant Italian Labor Zionist and polymath, who Ben-Gurion tried to prevent from jumping because “there wasn’t another man like him,” was carelessly dropped atop a German army installation in Northern Italy.  As Friedman notes in an interesting aside, the Mossad unit operating out of Istanbul at the time had been infiltrated by German double agents, who likely knew about the parachutists’ missions before they even landed.

A visitor could walk through the entire Hannah Senesh House in Sdot Yam — a beautifully renovated museum in the kibbutz where she lived for two years before setting out on her perilous mission — without seeing any mention of a seemingly important fact: that her mission was doomed from the start. Yet Friedman’s aim is not to diminish Senesh’s extraordinary bravery, or that of her fellow operatives. Rather, he seeks to understand their courage in a new light.

In recent years, Friedman has become one of the most compelling English-language chroniclers of Israeli history and society. What distinguishes his work — whether he is examining the brilliant letters of a young Israeli soldier on a Lebanese outpost or recounting Leonard Cohen’s sojourn in Israel after the Yom Kippur War — is his tendency to frame Israel’s turbulent history through a literary lens. While the canon of modern Hebrew wartime literature remains relatively sparse — perhaps because most writers keep their distance from the battlefield — Israel has never lacked for fighters with poetic souls in the state’s early years or today.

Throughout the book, Friedman explores the intellectual worlds of his unusually thoughtful protagonists, suggesting that “if they showed up at a military recruiting office now, they’d probably be turned away.” Senesh, the daughter of a well-known Hungarian-Jewish playwright, dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps and wrote poems of startling quality as early as age 15. Sereni held a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rome. Friedman recounts how, in addition to having already written a novel and novella, he dreamed of writing a great Italian novel which would depict the conflicts and controversies of his time through the lens of his own Jewish family.

In this sense both Senesh and Sereni follow in the path of other great Zionist leaders, like Herzl and Jabotinsky, who began their careers as journalists and writers of fiction, eventually putting aside their universalistic literary ambitions for the more particularistic cause of Jewish sovereignty. Friedman makes the terrific observation that this is no coincidence: “To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”

Part of the book’s premise is that the exquisite literary sensibilities of these proto-Israeli heroes helps explain why they made the jump. Friedman writes: “The parachutists aren’t commandos. They’re storytellers. They’ve been sent to write, with their lives, a Zionist story about the war – a story that will lead others not to despair but to action.” Senesh’s military achievements may have been miniscule – hardly any time passed from the beginning of her mission until her execution in a Hungarian prison, only three months before liberation.

Yet we remember Senesh because of her literary achievements: among them the diary she wrote vividly portraying her transition from a precocious, assimilated 13-year-old girl into a fervent Zionist activist. At every major juncture in her short life Senesh seemed to find the time to quickly craft a phenomenal poem. She handed her fellow fighter “blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame” right before entering occupied Hungary. Shortly before her execution she managed to pen a short lyric poem: “I gambled on what mattered most/The dice were cast. I lost.” While Senesh failed in saving other Jews, and even herself, she succeeded in her larger objective. As Friedman summarizes it: “The mission isn’t military, it’s literary, and she’s the best writer.”

In writing “Out of the Sky” — a book equally about a remarkable episode in history as it is the act of crafting and telling stories — Friedman certainly crafts his own. While many fascinating and heretofore little-known stories about Senesh and her fellow parachuters make it into the book, others do not. Friedman leans toward a portrait of Senesh as a clever, cosmopolitan European. He reminds us of her youth and her theatrical family. In her precocious diary entries, Zionism feels like a role she has chosen to play. He clearly admires her heroism but does not exaggerate it. Yet alternative accounts remain.

In his introduction to the first edition of Senesh’s collected writings, Abba Eban wrote, “all the definitions of giant courage come together in Senesh’s life.” Joel Palgi, another parachutist who followed a similar path to Senesh but inexplicably managed to survive, wrote about her in his memoirs as a force of nature, the undisputed leader of their group, fiercely admired by fellow resistance comrades as she transformed from a poet into a fighter. Even the Gestapo, in Palgi’s telling, were in awe of Senesh. He describes the sadistic prison warden who used to visit Senesh’s cell every day to argue about politics. Senesh’s mother Katherine, in her own memoir, describes the mesmerizing power Senesh held over guards and fellow prisoners alike. Children gravitated toward her, fellow prisoners drew strength from Senesh’s whispered encouragement, her Zionist education campaign, and her ingenious secret broadcasts from the window of her cell. One SS guard told Senesh, “I’ve never known a woman as brave as you.”

“Out of the Sky” does not contradict these remarkable testimonies, which contain a whiff of hagiography, though surely have some grounding in truth. It’s not really a book about superheroes, unusual people with uniquely phenomenal qualities who changed the course of history. Rather, it’s a book about regular people, highly intelligent and talented to be sure, who met the challenges of their age with bravery and foresight.  What distinguished them as heroes was that they understood, both in their lives and their deaths, they could contribute to the writing of a story much larger than themselves.

Sarah Rindner is a writer and educator who lives in Israel. For more of her work, follow her on Substack: bookofbooks.substack.com

Allegra Goodman’s new book, “This Is Not About Us,” introduces us to three generations of the Rubenstein family, whose members deal with life’s problems and opportunities each in their own ways: divorce and midlife dating; parenting anxious or seemingly directionless children; adult sibling rivalries, surviving shared Jewish holidays; and feuding matriarchs.

The book is not a single narrative but a novel of interconnected stories, each laced with irony, poignancy and hilarity. In the opening story, “Apple Cake,” elderly sisters Helen and Sylvia dutifully visit their dying youngest sister, 74-year-old Jeanne, on home hospice in Boston. The nurses expect Jeanne to pass away within a few days, but she hangs on tenaciously and awkwardly, offering acerbic observations.

When Sylvia points out her latest beautiful floral arrangements, “Jeanne made a face. The flowers depressed her, especially those already wilting. When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn’t dying fast enough.” When her sons ask about her final wishes, she tells one of them, “Stop pacing.”

As the family waits for Jeanne to make her final departure, Helen and Sylvia argue over cremation versus burial (Jeanne has given mixed signals), with Helen foisting an unwelcome visit from a rabbi to speak to Jeanne. But an even more ferocious duel erupts between the sisters: which of them bakes the better apple cake? Eighty-year-old Helen and 78-year-old Sylvia engage in a battle of flour, sugar and mixing bowls, each relentlessly baking at night and bringing sweets for the family the next day. Helen’s pecan bars can crack teeth and her brownies are quietly fobbed off on the help. Sylvia is the star baker, and her apple cake is devoured with gusto. The rivalry gets so out of hand that both sisters are made to promise not to bring homemade apple cake to the shiva house under any circumstances. They both agree. One breaks her promise. They stop speaking for years.

Many stories focus on timeless issues, such as relationships between and among parents and children, siblings, and marriage partners. Others focus on current issues, such as having to pivot professionally in midlife. In the story “$,” Steve is laid off after 25 years as a textbook editor and interviews with a tattooed, 20-something headhunter who specializes in “creatives.” Steve says, “I’m not sure I like being an adjective being turned into a noun.”

Several stories show how a contemporary Jewish family engages with Jewish ritual and practice. In the story “Redemption Song,” Jeanne’s sons Dan and Steve and their wives host Passover seders on consecutive evenings. Neither son enjoys the holiday because their father had been a survivor, “and he’d ruined the holiday because it meant so much to him.” Dan’s response has been to become a “control freak” about kashruth during Passover, though he is not kosher the rest of the year. Nor can he stand the progressive politics at Steve’s egalitarian seder, run by his wife, Andrea: “He hated off-road Judaism. The unscripted seder. The personal connection. Although he felt oppressed by the old rituals, he preferred them, which was why he brought his own Haggadah.”

Ironically, it is Dan and his wife, Melanie, who defer to their vegan daughter, Phoebe, and serve a plant-based moussaka for the seder meal, leaving everyone still hungry afterward. Phoebe also frets openly about cultural appropriation while others sing “Go down, Moses …” at her uncle and aunt’s house. This story is a tour de force, capturing the Jewish yearning to connect with tradition while also insisting on putting a modern political stamp on the Haggadah. It also touches on how children of survivors interpret and express their inherited trauma.    

Another favorite story was “Nutcracker,” where Debra worries about the unforgiving standards at the dance academy where her two daughters, ages 12 and 16, are rehearsing for the annual “Nutcracker” performance. The academy is run by the aptly named Nastia, a tiny, fierce Russian cracking the whip and making the girls cry over the slightest error in form. Debra desperately wants to protect her girls from Nastia’s “abuse” (Nastia publicly yells at her older daughter, “No bread! Salad salad salad!”), yet her girls adamantly insist on staying at the academy and in the show. They find Nastia “thrilling — scary but awesome,” recognizing that they are being pushed toward excellence and willing to withstand even humiliation to shine on stage.

As a feminist, Debra thinks, “Mothering. Caregiving. It sucked resistance out of you. You woke up with a start and realized your daughters wanted to be princesses onstage — and you were financing gauze skirts and rhinestone crowns, even though you used to read them ‘Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.’”

Goodman’s previous novels include “The Family Moscowitz,” which also focused on a multigenerational Jewish family, as well as
“Isola: A Novel”, “Sam” and “Kaaterskill Falls,” which explored life in a Jewish bungalow community in upstate New York during the 1970s. “This Is Not About Us” is a delightful, splendidly drawn book written in equal measure with profound insights about the human condition and the modern Jewish experience. It is a book I will be eager to read again.

Judy Gruen is the author of the memoir “Bylines and Blessings” and several other books, as well as a writing coach and editor, see more at judygruen.com