Recent Reads: The J-Word, by Andrew Sanger

As a Jewish-American, I'm very interested in the experiences of Jews in other countries, past or present, factual or fictional. Andrew Sanger's debut novel, The J-Word, presents one such glimpse into 21st-century Jewish life--in England--by focusing on octogenarian Jack Silver and his family. (If Sanger's name is familiar, that may be because you've seen him guest-blog right here on My Machberet.)

What I found here--apart from certain figures of speech, a pronounced recurrence of teatime, and a greater focus on "football" (soccer) than we tend to find in American literature--were many similarities with threads of Jewish experience in the United States. To be sure, Jack's long-sustained quest to become truly "English" and fully assimilated is a situation quite familiar to readers of Jewish-American literature. The incorporation of prayer snippets and Yiddishims is another link (anyone needing refreshers or translations will find them in footnotes and a glossary). But the book also reflects newer aspects of Jewish contemporary experience that cannot fail to resonate in an American reader just as they might in an English one.

Take, for instance, these musings from Jack, shortly after he is attacked by a gang in what is clearly an anti-Semitic hate crime:

Maybe the answer is education. An intelligent, aware population. That, he realised, was an impossibility. Some of the best educated people hate Jews. So a liberal, tolerant society? He grimaced at the thought. In his mind he saw ranks of pale, thin-lipped English men and women saying 'we're not antisemitic,' the readers and writers of the Guardian and the Independent, sympathising with suicide attackers, calling for boycotts and spreading hatred of Israel. He laughed bitterly. 'Oh no, it's only Israel and its supporters we hate,' he said, 'not Jews.' The Guardian and the Independent and the BBC are leading us to the next Holocaust. Then they will be able to report on it with horrified condemnations. What about the Jews who take that side, too - Harold Pinter and the rest? Fools!

Now, I happen to be a reader who appreciates a good dose of politics in fiction, and I also happen to be someone who discerns with increasing frustration in some American media outlets much of the same content/opinion that Jack highlights here on the English side. In other words, I am sympathetic to Jack's particular political views. I admire Sanger's writing here very much. It takes bravery to write like this. It also takes skill. Whatever Sanger's personal views might be, these few lines convey at least as much power and conviction as might a full-fledged op-ed. But undoubtedly, some readers may not share my enthusiasm on these points.

I haven't done justice here to this novel, which merits a much more detailed examination, so I will send you to some other sources. Meantime, I'm quite glad that I've had the opportunity to read The J-Word, and (disclosure!) I'm grateful to the publisher for the review copy.

Further Resources:

• Andrew Sanger, "America Starts to Discover The J-Word"
• Joy Sable (for The Jewish Chronicle), Review of The J-Word
• OyVaGoy (Chas Newkey-Burden), Brief review and interview with Andrew Sanger
• Scribblers on the Roof, Interview with Andrew Sanger

Recent Reads: Grace Schulman's First Loves and Other Adventures

Now that I've joined Goodreads, I've been chronicling most of my "recent reads" over there. Hence, today's My Machberet post is actually a cross-posting of the write-up I gave earlier this month to Grace Schulman's First Loves and Other Adventures, a recent release from the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series.

Grace Schulman has to be one of the most generous writers out there. I had the privilege of meeting her for a profile I wrote not too long after I began working at The City University of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor at Baruch College. I left our first meeting with an armful of books, and when we met again a few months back, she asked if she might send me her latest: First Loves and Other Adventures.

I probably can't be completely unbiased, but having had the opportunity to get to know this author a bit, I find the opening and closing essays in this collection most striking. They are also, arguably, the most personal.

In the first, "Helen," Schulman describes family history, the experience of growing up Jewish in New York while the Holocaust unfolded across the ocean, and the connections she sensed from an early age with her father's sister, Helena ("my parents Anglicized it"), who died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. The closing piece, "An Uncommon Friend," recounts the relationship Schulman and her husband had with author Richard Yates. I was in the room at the 2008 conference in New York where Schulman presented this text on a panel honoring Yates's life and work; I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit it.

In the introduction to this volume, Schulman describes the essays within as being "of two kinds: first, about becoming a writer; second, about some of the books I love." The book encompasses reflections on May Swenson, Marianne Moore, Octavio Paz, and others. And anything Schulman writes is worth reading. Still, the first and last essays are the ones I'll remember the longest.

Translated Poetry by Avrom Sutzkever in Hayden's Ferry Review

The current issue of Hayden's Ferry Review, a literary journal from Arizona State University, features poetry by Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), introduced and translated by Miri Koral. And luckily for us, this material is available online.

As Koral writes:

"The Yiddish poet and writer Avrom Sutzkever is considered to be the greatest Yiddish poet of modern times, and the greatest post-War Jewish poet. He was born in the town of Smorgon, Lithuania in 1913, near the city of Vilnius (Vilna). Vilna, the venerable center of a great flowering of Jewish cultural and intellectual life, became his enduring spiritual and creative home. Already prior to WW II, he enjoyed a well-established reputation as a member of the literary group Yung Vilna (Young Vilna).

The body of work that he then produced under hellish circumstances in the Vilna Ghetto is both rigorous lyrical poetry as well as a magnificent artistic witnessing of the systematic destruction of Jewish Vilna. During this period, at risk of death, he was instrumental in rescuing many rare Jewish books and manuscripts that were otherwise destined for nefarious ends by the Nazis. In 1943 he escaped to the partisans and then to Moscow, subsequently serving as a witness at the Nuremberg trials.

In 1947, he emigrated to Israel, where he continued his efforts to safeguard what remained of Yiddish language and culture. He founded the literary group of Yiddish writers, Yung Yisroel (Young Israel), as well as Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), the leading Yiddish literary journal, which he edited from 1949 to 1995. Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize in 1985, the only Yiddish poet to have received this honor. His good friend Marc Chagall was also an illustrator of Sutzkever’s poetry.

In addition to undertaking to memorialize through his oeuvre both the glories and devastations of Jewish Vilna, his many published works address a wide array of themes, including life in Israel, metaphysical and artistic inquiries, and lyrical celebrations of the natural world.

Sutzkever’s poetry in general is a challenge to translate well because of its often extraordinary musicality (sounds and cadences) and multifaceted concepts dealing with spirituality, creativity, and the ephemerality of human experience. He also is known for enriching the language of his poems with words that he coined and with those no longer in use from Old Yiddish. In other words, much of this uniqueness inherent in the original cannot help but be lost in translation. In spite of these translating challenges, English translations of Sutzkever’s poetry can be found in numerous anthologies, collected works, and in The New Yorker.

The two Sutzkever poems translated here were written in the Vilna Ghetto and have the challenge less of complex language than of keeping some of the rhythm and rhyme of the original while adhering as much as possible to the poems’ exact wording and compact power in depicting acts of spiritual resistance in inhumane situations."

To read the two poems, "A Little Flower" and "Scorched Pearls," please click here.

Next JBC Twitter Book Club: April 27

The Jewish Book Council has announced its next lunchtime book discussion title: Dara Horn's All Other Nights. The author will participate in the chat, which will take place on Tuesday, April 27, beginning at 1 p.m. (If you're not yet on Twitter, be sure to sign up soon to give your account time to activate fully.) Details here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Very Exciting

First, the good news:

The Jewish Book Council's first Twitter Book Club meeting took place yesterday. Check out the discussion of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You here. Many thanks to the author for stopping by and answering questions.

Now, the bad news:

I was totally unable to post anything! I do not know what I was doing wrong. But none of my "tweets" showed up (and yes, I did include the hashtag). I kept trying to ask what seemed a perfectly simple question: Given how funny the book is (despite some basically sad subject matter), what advice would the author give writers who want/need to hone their humor-writing skills?

And moving on the the very exciting news:

The Jewish Book Council has also announced the latest slate of winners of the National Jewish Book Awards. Congratulations to all!

From My Bookshelf: German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons

Last week, the fall issue of Jewish Book World arrived in my mailbox, and I was delighted to see that it included my first review for that publication. Jewish Book World packs in a LOT of reviews each quarter, so most of the pieces are relatively short. Here's my take, in its entirety, on Norah Labiner's German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons (Coffee House Press, 2009):

In ninety-five brief chapters, this novel acquaints us with an extended family and its secrets, past and present. In 2005, a letter from a woman claiming to be their great-aunt prompts Jewish-American cousins Eliza Berlin and Louisa 'Lemon' Leopold to travel to Germany. There, at the beginning of the previous centruy, their great-grandfather, Dr. Jozef Apfel, was a prominent psychoanalyst. The novel reveals secrets and traumas within the lives of the cousins as well as the truth behind their great-grandfather's most mysterious case, that of 'Elsa Z.' At various times, the reader will notice what seems to be the sparest of expository prose (the body of one chapter consists of a single twelve-word sentence); occasionally, there is a page-length paragraph; some sections particularly impress with their use of dialogue or detail. Although some readers may initially find it difficult to track all the characters, overall, the novel is extremely engaging, shifting in time and place with artful connections and literary grace. Chronology [included].

From My Bookshelf: The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (translated by Dalya Bilu)

From the back cover of Gail Hareven's new novel (translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu), The Confessions of Noa Weber: "This award-winning novel of one woman's quest to understand her obsessive love for a mysterious man is by turns funny, self-mocking, and brutally honest."

Well, this reader couldn't resist that description, especially when it was complemented by this enthusiastic NPR review and book excerpt (but shame, again, on NPR for not crediting the translator, to whom I also owe my first encounters with such excellent Israeli writers as Aharon Appelfeld and Orly Castel-Bloom). Bonus: I have a recurrent weakness for novels and stories about writers. Noa Weber, the eponymous protagonist, is a writer (and a successful one!).

It happens, as we all know, that book jacket descriptions don't always deliver on their promises. This one does--sort of.

That is to say, the book is, indeed "by turns funny, self-mocking, and brutally honest." But I can't say I think that the first-person narrator--that self-same Noa Weber--is all that interested in understanding her obsessive love for the itinerant, Soviet-born Alek, the father of her child, a man for whom, despite a nominal marriage, Noa is, in truth, more of a mistress than a wife. Talking about it with the reader (note, not with a psychotherapist), yes. Understanding it, I'm not so convinced.

Because, despite the occasional (rhetorical) question, Noa seems remarkably self-aware. She seems to understand and accept the situation.

Further, as a writer, she knows what is an interesting story, and what is not:

"For the record I'll simply mention here that I was favored by the luck of the draw. I grew up well fed and protected, and that's another reason why where and how I 'came into the world' is not a matter of public interest. People who've survived a holocaust, who were born into a world that no longer exists, they can begin their biographies with 'I was born,' my heroic father can begin his story with 'I am born.' Not me. My early history is too boring, it fails to provide any explanation for what happened to me in later years, and I have never felt the urge to examine it or whine about it. Nor do I now.

In any case, it's no great loss, and if the right to say 'I was born' has to be paid for in dire catastrophes, stepfathers, orphanages, and picking pockets in the marketplace, I say , 'No thanks,' and choose to enter this story at the age of seventeen, where the real me begins:

Me and my love for Alek--which against my better judgment I experience as transcendence.

In this case, I'm not sure the lack of an explicit, sustained quest for understanding (if I'm right) is such a flaw. The book works so very well without it.

Especially for this American reader, who considers herself woefully under-read in Israeli literature, who appreciated the book's Israeli setting and context, who is grateful to be able to read the work of a writer who has won the prestigious Sapir Prize, and who, quite simply, looked forward to reading the next chapters for all the recent evenings the book has rested on her bedside table.


Further resources:

--Gail Hareven's profile on the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature Web site.

--An interview with Gail Hareven in The Forward.

--The Complete Review's review of The Confessions of Noa Weber. Much more articulate than anything I've attempted to write here. Really captures the book.

(cross-posted on Practicing Writing)

Sana Krasikov Wins Sami Rohr Prize

I've mentioned Sana Krasikov and her debut story collection, One More Year, on this blog a couple of times, but boy, do I regret not writing up something more substantive after I read the book a few months back! And that's because Krasikov has been racking up honors and awards since then, most recently yesterday, when she was named the winner of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Congratulations to Sana Krasikov. I am really looking forward to the awards ceremony!

In the meantime, here are a few links to help you can learn more about Krasikov and her work.

--"Maia in Yonkers," one of the stories included in One More Year.
--Just one of many reviews of the collection.
--Jewish Book Council Q&A with the author.

From My Bookshelf: American Jewish Fiction, by Josh Lambert

You've seen me mention Josh Lambert on this blog before. I'm delighted to tell you that Josh's new book, American Jewish Fiction, is now available. Go and get a copy!

Why? It's not merely a matter of what Josh knows about his subject (which is, frankly, quite a lot). It's also a matter of his excellent, engaging writing style. Epitomized in this e-mail he sent about the book's release:

"First let me tell you a little about the book. It's a handbook to American Jewish fiction: think Uris, Roth, Malamud, Bellow, Bashevis Singer, Potok, Ozick, Paley, Foer, and Friday, the Rabbi Slept Late, plus a whole lot of truly excellent writers you've never heard of. It's sort of like a Zagat guide, except that there are no quantitative scores and I had to come up with all the snappy remarks myself. The book contains short reviews of 125 novels and short story collections published from 1867 to 2007, including lots of classics and many lost treasures, plus there's an introduction that gives a broad overview of the development and contours of the field, and some useful appendices. The book aims to give you a good sense for the range and depth of what I believe is one of the stronger literary traditions of the 20th century. The best part is that you don't even need to read the whole thing to tell me how much you like it. You can just flip through and see what catches your eye. And if you happen to have a deeper interest in American Jewish fiction--either as an enthusiastic reader, or as a student of American literature or Jewish Studies--I hope you'll ifnd that my book leads you to some interesting discoveries (or, at least, that it allows you to pretend convincingly that you've read books when you've only read my summaries of them)."

Intrigued by this (perfectly accurate, in my view) description? How about this? The Jewish Publication Society is offering a 40 percent discount through February 28. Go order your copy now!

And Mazel Tov to Josh for writing a guide that's a "coffee table book" in the best sense--one I am leaving within ready reaching distance so I can pick it up (more often than not) whenever I settle on my sofa.

Mining Moment Magazine

The November-December issue Moment magazine ("The Book Issue") arrived last week, and it contains some terrific content. Here's a quick guide to some highlights:

1) A profile of comedian Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz)

2) Reading recommendations (classic and contemporary Jewish books) from nine Nobel laureates. Plus: more suggestions from rabbis.

3) The top three stories submitted to the most recent Moment-Karma Short Fiction Award competition.

4) A poem by Myra Sklarew

5) And an online bonus: a book club guide to Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus and Other Stories.

From My Bookshelf: The Day My Mother Changed Her Name and Other Stories, by William D. Kaufman

Recently I had the great pleasure of reading a new release from Syracuse University Press's "Library of Modern Jewish Literature" series: The Day My Mother Changed Her Name and Other Stories, by William D. Kaufman. As a bonus, one of the book's two forewords is by Max Apple, whose work I've also discussed on this blog.

The second foreword to this unusual collection comes from Carol Montparker, to whom the book owes much. It was Montparker's discovery of Kaufman and his stories--Kaufman attracted her attention when reading from his work to audiences at the assisted living residence where both he and Montparker's mother were residing--that led to this publication. "I got it into my head that I must find a publisher for Bill Kaufman," Montparker writes. And after making copies of Kaufman's stories, researching publishers, and contacting editors on Kaufman's behalf, Montparker struck gold with Syracuse. And in his tenth decade of life, William Kaufman published his first story collection.

Montparker believes that Kaufman's writing is "not unlike I.B. Singer's in its folkloric aspects, with a dash of S.J. Perelman's ironic humor thrown in but even more charming and witty and altogether engaging." I probably shouldn't admit that I've read relatively little Singer or Perelman, but if they're anything like Kaufman, I'll have to remedy that soon!

Because these stories--most very brief and seemingly rooted in the author's early twentieth-century childhood (the jacket also characterizes them as "semi-autobiographical works" and informs us that Kaufman is "the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and the Ukraine")--are simply a pleasure to read. If you're yearning to immerse yourself for a little while in a Yiddish-inflected America, to a world of observant Jews who send their children to cheder in the American Northeast, then you'll find your place in these stories. And there's a bonus: a glossary to help those of us who may have become too assimilated here in the United States to recognize every Hebrew or Yiddish word.

Most serious reviewers try to avoid words like "heartwarming," but I can't deny that these stories warmed my heart. They may well do the same for yours.

From My Bookshelf: What Happened to Anna K.? by Irina Reyn

Last week I finished reading What Happened to Anna K.?, the first novel by Irina Reyn, who immigrated to the United States as a child and whose book adds to the growing collection of excellent fiction being penned by Jewish transplants from Russia to the United States. It's a retelling of Anna Karenina, through a distinctly Russian-Jewish immigrant lens. Highly recommended!

Late last month, Sandee Brawarsky introduced Reyn and her book, as well as another Russian-born fictionist, Sania Krasikov, whose story collection is titled One More Year. Both Reyn and Krasikov are among the "Five Under 35" whom the National Book Foundation will honor this year "as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting and is among the best of a new generation of writers."

From My Bookshelf: ASK FOR A CONVERTIBLE, by Danit Brown

Over the past week or so I've had the pleasure of reading Danit Brown's new book of connected short stories, Ask for a Convertible. This is a new twist on Jewish-American writing, with most of the stories focused on a Jewish girl--born in Israel to an American father and an Israeli mother--who moves to Michigan in the early 1980s with her parents. (The character is then 12 years old, which makes her my more-or-less contemporary, and heightens my appreciation for the now quasi-historical details appearing through the work.)

At some moments the book made me laugh out loud: "In the city phone book--what luck--the other Marvin Greenberg had no problem with listing his full name: Marvin Alvin Greenberg, as if Marvin and Greenberg together didn't already invoke massive amounts of nostril hair, golf pants, and game after game of shuffleboard." At others, especially with some of the depictions of Israel (though it's important to remember that when the Israeli-born protagonist returns to her birthplace in her twenties it's not exactly a happy homecoming; the unappealing way the setting comes across is surely colored by the unhappy consciousness through which it is filtered), I found myself--what's the right word--disillusioned? See, for instance, this paragraph:

"In Tel Aviv, where Osnat lived, there was a McDonald's on every other block, and a Dunkin' Donuts near Rabin Square, and still everything felt to Osnat as if had been shifted a little--a smaller, dirtier, almost-America--as if someone had gone through her house and rearranged the furniture and all the closets so that she couldn't find her shoes....When guys excused themselves and didn't close the bathroom door behind them, Osnat gave them the benefit of the doubt: maybe it was a cultural difference. When they walked down the street, she tried not to stare if they stopped to urinate against trees and parked cars. One time, she saw a man peeing against the wall of a gas station, ten meters away from a restroom. Now, everywhere she went with Jeannie, the two of them stumbled onto naked men, sunbathers who decided to flip over right as they walked by, boys skinny-dipping at the beach. The bus stops reeked of urine."

The book pulled me in immediately, and the crackling liveliness of the early stories kept me going even when I began to wonder how one or another story was going to end up "connected" with the others and, yes, began to wonder if the collection might have been stronger if two or three of the pieces had been left out. But that minor kvetching aside, I found this book an impressive achievement, one that makes me look forward, very much, to seeing what its author will do next.

You can preview Ask for a Convertible by reading two of its stories, "Hands Across America" (yes, THAT Hands Across America) and "The Dangers of Salmonella," on Nextbook.org.

From My Bookshelf: The Temple Bombing, by Melissa Fay Greene

Last year I spent a few days in Atlanta, and at one point I passed the beautiful Temple on Peachtree Street. I hadn't yet read Melissa Fay Greene's 1996 book, The Temple Bombing, but I'd heard about it (it was a National Book Award Finalist), and I knew the basic story it told: the Temple, Atlanta's oldest synagogue, was bombed in 1958. Thankfully, no one had been hurt.

Now I'm reading Greene's book, and while I haven't yet finished it, I'm very glad that I've finally gotten to it. The book not only chronicles the bombing, but offers a rich history of Atlanta Jewry; a detailed portrait of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the Temple's leader in 1958; and a reminder of just how difficult the struggles for integration and civil rights in the South really were.

At about 500 pages (with footnotes), it's a challenging read. But very much worth the effort.

From My Bookshelf: The Gift of Grief

If you want to read a thoughtful, compassionate, highly intelligent, and Jewishly-spiced book to help you manage the tough times, consider picking up The Gift of Grief, just released from Celestial Arts/Ten Speed Books. Subtitled "Finding Peace, Transformation, and Renewed Life After Great Sorrow," the book has been written by Rabbi Matthew D. Gewirtz, whom I am proud to say is currently Senior Rabbi at my home congregation. Congratulations to "Rabbi Matt" and his family on this wonderful accomplishment!

Rachel Shukert's Nextbook Essay

An essay bearing a subtitle that reads "A Childhood Obsession with the Holocaust" doesn't exactly promise loads of laughs. But laugh I did, at given moments, as I read this piece by Rachel Shukert on Nextbook today.

Here's an excerpt:

“We need to talk,” said my mother. The ballet car pool had just dropped me at home.

I wriggled impatiently, anxious to fix some microwave popcorn and return to my copy of Nuremberg Diary. “Um, not now, okay?”

“I got a call today from Mrs. Finkel.”

“Mrs. Finkel?”

“The librarian. You know, at the Jewish Community Center. She’s friends with Grandma—”

“I know who she is. How did she get this number?” I demanded.

“What do you mean, how did she get this number? Probably she got it out of the Hadassah directory, the same way I would get her number.”

Nearly every Jewish woman and girl in the country belongs to Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. The local chapter directory is a veritable who’s who of area Jewish females. Earlier that week, I had casually mentioned to my mother that we might consider terminating our association with the organization and withdrawing our names from its records, as when They came for us, the Hadassah directory would likely be the first place They’d look.

“Mrs. Finkel told me that you tried to check out all four tapes of Shoah this afternoon.”

“So? You’re allowed to check out all four tapes! They come as a set! It’s like checking out one tape!”

She was still making that damn face. I hated that face. “She told me it was the seventh time you’ve tried to check it out in the past three weeks.”

“So what? She kept saying it was reserved.”

“It’s on the thirteen-and-over list, honey.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have to be thirteen or over to check it out. That’s the rule.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of any such rule.”

“Sweetie, that’s the rule.”

“IT’S A BULLSHIT RULE!”

My mother’s shrill temper flared at last. “And when were you planning to watch all NINE AND A HALF HOURS OF SHOAH, HUH? Were you going to take a night off from whatever weird fucking shit you’re doing to the walls of your room when the normal people are asleep?”

Never content to let a long period of insomnia pass unproductively, I had kept myself busy in the restless wee hours cutting out pictures of famous Jews from magazines and sticking them on the walls of my bedroom with bits of chewed gum, where they acted as talismans warding off the unspeakable evil that lay in wait. The resemblance to Anne Frank’s famous bedroom wall in the Secret Annex, touchingly adorned with colorful postcards and newspaper ads picturing film stars and babies, was not lost on me; however, I reasoned, if poor Anne had only been a bit more judicious, a little more ethnocentric in her selections, things might have turned out differently. The Gestapo wasn’t going to get me, not with that giant picture of Henry Kissinger on the wall.

I have to confess that there are aspects of this essay that really resonate for me. To some extent, the Holocaust "obsessed" me, a grandchild of refugees from Nazi Germany, during childhood, too. And it took me years (and, frankly, some therapy) to work through this obsession. I'm also convinced that writing fiction that might be labeled "post-Holocaust" fiction helped as well.

In any case, now that I've read Shukert's essay, I'm looking forward to her book. Should be a good companion to this one on my bookshelf.

From My Bookshelf: The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, by Lucette Lagnado

(cross-posted earlier this week on Practicing Writing)

Last month I mentioned how eager I was to read Lucette Lagnado's Sami Rohr prize-winning family memoir,The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. This weekend, I finished reading the book. And it's excellent.

Given what often seems an unending stream of memoir-related scandals, not to mention the primacy of what I'll charitably call the dysfunction narrative (and of course the interrelationship between the two), reading The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is a gift. Not only does the author focus on a story that's truly fresh (in this case, the story of a Jewish family's history in Syria and Egypt and the massive dislocation it experienced in 1962 when emigrating from Egypt, first to France and then to the United States). Not only does she include authentic "evidence," including photographs, documents, and file citations from the social service agencies that worked with her immigrant family in Paris and New York. But she also presents rounded portraits of multiple "characters," especially her parents (her father, Leon, is the eponymous man in the white sharkskin suit) and grandparents (especially her two grandmothers). An exercise in navel-gazing, this is surely not. It's not until late in the book that the author's own life-threatening medical problems--which another writer, especially in this Age of the Misery Memoir, might have chosen to make the subject of an entire book, and which are artfully presaged in earlier chapters--take center stage. Even then, it's the effect of her illness on those around her rather than her own suffering that seems to matter more.

What will you get from reading this book? You'll get a sense of the culture of a Levantine Jewish community, one that I, for one, previously knew only superficially (mostly through stories about the in-laws of one of my mother's close friends). You'll get some history, of World War II and the Suez crisis. You'll get stories of Jewish immigrants in France and Israel and the United States. You'll get the texture of Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s. You'll get the almost unimaginably shocking story of what happened to one of Lagnado's maternal uncles at the hands of Lagnado's own grandfather. You'll get the triumphs and the tragedies of her family, and you'll get, in particular, a sense of the deep bond between Lagnado and that extraordinary man in the white sharkskin suit. Don't miss it.

From My Bookshelf: The Pale of Settlement, by Margot Singer

Every once in awhile I read a book that, as the cliché goes, "speaks" to me. It's a book I am grateful to have discovered and purchased, a book I will reread for years to come. It's a book whose nearly every note--historical, emotional, stylistic--strikes some chord within me. It's a book that, as a writer, I wish I could call mine.

Last week I read one such book: Margot Singer's prizewinning collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement.

You can learn more about Singer and her extraordinary work at Nextbook, among other places.

But here's a single paragraph, from the third of the book's nine stories (titled "Lila's Story") to give you a sense of why I'm so enraptured.

So you could say that they survived, but they were not survivors, not exactly, not in the new sense of the word. They were never in the camps. They never had to hide out in a gentile's barn or forage in the forest with the partisans. They were not displaced persons—not officially, anyway—even though they were among the refugees, the dispossessed. They were immigrants, among the lucky ones. Lila had packed their belongings in trunks and crates—a wooden angel that had hung over her boys' crib for luck, an oil painting of the Weinerwald, her dolls, her gilt-edged dinner service for sixteen, a Gallé table lamp, their goose-down quilts, the bedroom set her parents gave them when they were married, several reels of sixteen-millimeter film containing footage of ski trips to Kitzbühel and Zürs, her jewelry, a gold watch, her silverware engraved with her initials, a box of photographs, thirty-two Moser crystal goblets—and they set sail for Haifa, as if they were going on a holiday. They were Europeans, not exactly Zionists, but there was no escaping being Jews. Now they were yekkes, German-speaking Jews, with their poor Hebrew and assimilated Prussian ways. They were always punctual, drank Kaffee mit Schlag in the merkaz cafés, kept their jackets on even in the stifling summer heat. The old Russian socialists, who had been in Palestine for generations, made fun of the yekkes, of their stiffness and bewilderment and fear. Everyone was talking about the new Jews, the pioneers, which all their children would doubtless be. The posters showed blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed kibbutzniks grinning in the sun. The yekkes had never seen Jews like these before. These boys and girls had sun-bronzed skin and calloused hands. They worked the land. They would fight back. They would show the world.

From My Bookshelf: Story Collections by Max Apple and Ellen Litman

A few weeks back I wrote that Max Apple's The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories had caught my attention. Since then I've had a chance to read it. And it's definitely a recommended read.

I'm particularly intrigued by the way Apple handles some potentially dicey cross-cultural issues (black-Jewish relations, in particular). Incidentally, despite the book's title and coverage in the Jewish press, the opening story, "Yao's Chick," is not overtly "Jewish" in terms of its characters or content. Apple is apparently not intimidated to write about characters from different ethnic backgrounds. I think that's a good and admirable thing, but I can't help wondering if that's worked against him in some readers' eyes.

Another recent read I'd encourage others to pick up is Ellen Litman's debut collection, The Last Chicken in America. I had the opportunity to hear Litman talk about her experiences shaping this story collection at the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in New York City, so reading the book shortly after that was particularly meaningful.

Litman's primary subject--running through the linked stories--is life within the Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Different from Apple's work, to be sure; reading them sequentially and considering them together I'm reminded of something that's too often lost in discussions of "Jewish-American literature"--how truly varied it can be.

From My Bookshelf: Triangle, by Katharine Weber

I've been meaning to read Katharine Weber's novel, Triangle, pretty much ever since it was published. Another writer's reminder got me moving and I've just finished reading it. It's an excellent work of historical fiction, the root event of which is the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in lower Manhattan in 1911.

The book appeals to me on so many levels: as an historical novel; as one that's evidently inspired by some family history as well (Weber's paternal grandmother worked in the factory in 1909); as a work that portrays immigrant Jewish life in the era; and as one that is at least as concerned with how histories (and novels) are constructed as it is with their actual content. And in a way, this is also a "September 11" novel as well, a sub-genre of sorts in which I'm also very interested. The book is replete with interviews, transcripts, and other "devices" that keep things lively (and very interesting, to this academically-trained historian!).

For one of the best online discussions of this novel that I've found, read the January 2007 feature over at The Jewish Reader. And if you've read Triangle, I'd love to hear your thoughts.