Sheila Solomon Klass and Dr. in Perri Klass — mother and daughter co-authors — don\’t finish each other\’s sentences, but they do elaborate on them
In 1979, comedian Al Franken wrote a skit for \”Saturday Night Live\” called \”What if: Überman,\” featuring Dan Aykroyd as Klaus Kent, a clerk in Hitler\’s Ministry of Propaganda. Klaus dashes into phone booths to become Überman, uses his X-ray vision to detect bombs and to reveal Jews by looking through their pants, and ultimately leads his country to victory.
While there are no statistics to prove it, the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Typing \”Jewish romance novel\” into Google calls up dozens of bodice rippers featuring Jewish themes or characters, and not all published by small presses.
Narrated in the first person, present tense (always risky), \”Love With Noodles\” follows Gelder\’s canoodling with a string of women who enter his life just as he emerges from mourning his late beshert, Ellen. Gelder lives alone. His grown son, Eric, faces financial ruin. What\’s worse, Eric is planning to marry a non-Jew.
In late fall of 1999, I wrote a short story, \”Summertime,\” which I eventually included in my collection, \”Assumption and Other Stories\” (Bilingual Press, 2003). When the book reviews started coming in, most noted that particular story\’s unsettling premise.
What books must every Jew read? What books are critical to informing your understanding of your faith, your culture, your people? With this issue, The Jewish Journal introduces a new weekly column: My Jewish Library.
If Jacob Green sounds like every teenager who\’s hated mandatory Shabbat dinners, he\’s also the protagonist of Joshua Braff\’s viciously witty and poignant new novel.
In this collection of linked stories, the three figures at the center are a mother, father and son who leave Riga, Latvia, for Toronto, Canada. The stories are told from the point of view of the son, Mark Berman, who observes everything and helps interpret the New World for his parents.
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.
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