Stories and symbols intersect in unexpected places in Pearl Abraham\’s intricate and complex third novel, \”The Seventh Beggar,\” a vivid meditation on the nature of creation.
Can you imagine an Orthodox bar mitzvah celebrated in the Arizona desert soon after the Civil War — with a guest list that includes Apache warriors, gun-slinging outlaws and a minyan imported from Tombstone?
Recently, I found myself spellbound while watching \”Girl With a Pearl Earring.\” This film, based on the excellent Tracy Chevalier novel, is a fictional account of the history behind Vermeer\’s famous painting of the same name. The novel revolves around a servant girl, Grete, who became a secret assistant to the painter in his studio. In one scene, Vermeer accidentally glimpses Grete with her hair uncovered. The moment is electric. Grete, like all women of her social station, covered her hair at all times. It was as if Vermeer had caught her unclothed.
\”The Final Solution: A Story of Detection\” by Michael Chabon (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, $16.95).
Depending on their authors\’ predilections, so-called \”literary\” novels are often unsettling, disturbing, enlightening or tragicomic. They are not, in the main, much fun. Fun is left to hacks, those genre writers who churn out the chick-lit blockbusters, weepy romances, thrillers, sci-fi fantasies and blood-and-guts horrors that dominate the best-seller lists.
\”I see Christmas as a cultural and family holiday,\” Joe Roth said, while the movie itself carries two main messages. It\’s first about the sense of family and community that supercedes any particular holiday. Secondly, it\’s a satire on the over-commercialization of Christmas.\”
Since 1968, when his novel \”My Michael\” — exquisitely narrated by a despairing young wife in Jerusalem — mesmerized thousands of readers, Amos Oz has been recognized as one of Israel\’s most gifted and prolific authors. He has produced 22 books — 11 novels, three collections of stories and novellas, one children\’s book, and seven books of articles and essays — that have been translated into 35 languages. His work is his autobiography, and until now Oz had been reticent about his own life.
The memory of the Holocaust has haunted the Jewish imagination for three generations. It represents the rupture in our communal history, its shadow falling on everything else. And yet, we have amassed new memories since. Three books by local authors use the legacy of the Holocaust in their attempts to grapple with many facets of the Cold War.
A brother announces to his sister that another sister has vanished, as \”The First Desire\” (Pantheon) opens. Nancy Reisman\’s highly-praised novel is unusual in many ways, from its premise to the quality of writing to its setting. She follows the lives of the Cohen family, from the Depression to the years following World War II, not on the Lower East Side or in Brooklyn, but in a stately neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y.
Sentence by sentence, this is an exquisite story of family. Reisman writes with assuredness and tenderness, as the story unfolds serially from five perspectives: three of the four Cohen sisters, the brother and their father\’s mistress.
Confession: It\’s not Virginia Woolf I\’m afraid of — it\’s Cynthia Ozick. Even though she blurbed my last book (disclosure, disclosure) and once recommended me for a fellowship I didn\’t get (thanks for the memories, Mr. Guggenheim), still I\’m afraid of her. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.
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