Golda
by Elinor Burkett
May 2008, HarperCollins
The first female head of state in the Western world and one of the most influential women in modern history, Golda Meir was a member of the tiny coterie of founders of the State of Israel, the architect of its socialist infrastructure, and its most tenacious international defender. Her uncompromising devotion to shaping and defending a Jewish homeland against dogged enemies and skittish allies stunned political contemporaries skeptical about the stamina of an elderly leader, and transformed Middle Eastern politics for decades to follow.
A blend of Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King Jr. in the guise of a cookie-serving grandmother, Meir was a tough-as-nails politician who issued the first prescient warnings about the rise of international terrorism, out-maneuvered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger at their own game of realpolitik, and led Israel through a bloody war even as she eloquently pleaded for peace. A prodigious fundraiser and persuasive international voice, Golda carried the nation through its most perilous hours while she herself battled cancer.
In this masterful biography, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Elinor Burkett looks beyond Meir's well-known accomplishments to the complex motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments, of her charismatic public persona. Beginning with Meir's childhood in virulently anti-Semitic Russia and her family's subsequent relocation to the United States, Burkett places Meir within the framework of the American immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and the single-mindedness of a generation that carved a nation out of its own nightmares and dreams. She paints a vivid portrait of a legendary woman defined by contradictions: an iron resolve coupled with magnetic charm, an utter ordinariness of appearance matched to extraordinary achievements, a kindly demeanor that disguised a stunning hard-heartedness, and a complete dedication to her country that often overwhelmed her personal relationships.
To produce this definitive account of Meir's life, Burkett mined historical records never before examined by any researcher, and interviewed members of Meir's inner circle, many going on record for the first time. The result is an astounding portrait of one of the most commanding political presences of the twentieth century-a woman whose uncompromising commitment to the creation and preservation of a Jewish state fueled and framed the ideological conflicts that still define Middle Eastern relations today.
Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S MAY 2008 SELECTION
BLOOD MATTERS:
From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene
by Masha Gessen
April 2008, Harcourt
In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision-what to do with such knowledge-Gessen explored the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers. Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.
From Publishers Weekly: This energetic but unfocused account awkwardly merges several strands: the author's experience with the threat of breast cancer, discussions of genetic inheritance in Jewish families and a look at how the ability to test for genetic predispositions to various diseases is changing lives. With a family history of breast cancer, journalist Gessen (Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism) was not surprised to learn she had inherited a deleterious mutation in the BRCA1 gene, one of two genes known to be linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The BRCA1 mutation was first discovered in Jewish women, a compact population with a higher-than-average breast cancer rate. Gessen describes her narrow options, with nondirective counseling steering her toward prophylactic removal of her breasts and ovaries. Then she jumps the track to talk about Dr. Henry Lynch, who, in 1966, first suggested that predisposition to cancer might be hereditary. Gessen also covers Huntington's disease, maple syrup disease among Old Order Mennonites, eugenics and how a genetic testing program is affecting marital choices for some Orthodox Jews. Gessen covers a fair amount of ground, but in a haphazard fashion. The book's strongest parts are on genetics and heredity in the Jewish community. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S APRIL 2008 SELECTION
CERTAIN GIRLS
A NOVEL
BY JENNIFER WEINER
April 2008. Atria
From Publishers Weekly: "...Weiner turns in a hilarious sequel to her 2001 bestselling first novel, Good in Bed, revisiting the memorable and feisty Candace Cannie Shapiro. Flashing forward 13 years, the novel follows Cannie as she navigates the adolescent rebellion of her about-to-be bat mitzvahed daughter, Joy, and juggles her writing career; her relationship with her physician husband, Peter Krushelevansky; her ongoing weight struggles; and the occasional impasse with Joy's biological father, Bruce Guberman. Joy, whose premature birth resulted in her wearing hearing aids, has her own amusing take on her mother's overinvolvement in her life as the novel, with some contrivance, alternates perspectives. As her bat mitzvah approaches, Joy tries to make contact with her long absent maternal grandfather and seeks more time with Bruce. In addition, unbeknownst to Joy, Peter has expressed a desire to have a baby with Cannie, which means looking for a surrogate mother. Throughout, Weiner offers her signature snappy observations: (good looks function as a get-out-of-everything-free card) and spot-on insights into human nature, with a few twists thrown in for good measure. She expends some energy getting readers up to speed on Good, but readers already involved with Cannie will enjoy this, despite Joy's equally strong voice..."
OFRAH'S MARCH 2008 SELECTION
The Book of Dahlia
A Novel
by Elisa Albert
March 2008. Free Press
When Dahlia Finger-a 29-year-old, pot-smoking, chronically underachieving Jewish-American princess-learns that she has brain cancer, the results are hilarious and heartbreaking in Albert's superb first novel (following the story collection How This Night Is Different). Opening in the Venice, Calif., cottage to which Dahlia has retreated, at her father's expense, after unsuccessfully trying to forge a life in New York, chapter one begins with the omniscient narrator's scathingly Edith Wharton-worthy catalogue of Dahlia's symptoms and ends with her first grand mal seizure. As Dahlia endures blistering radiation, sits numbly through her support group, smokes medical marijuana (with her crisis-reunited divorced parents) and carries a condescending book called It's Up to You: Your Cancer To-Do List, Albert masterfully interweaves Dahlia's battle with flashbacks, most tellingly involving her complexly overbearing Israeli mother, Margalit ("who unceremoniously imploded the family decades earlier"), and contemptuous older brother, against whom Dahlia has never learned to defend herself. Throughout, Albert delivers Dahlia's laissez-faire attitude toward other people (men especially) and lack of ambition with such exactness as to strip them of cliché and make them grimly vivid. Her brilliant style makes the novel's central question-should we mourn a wasted life?-shockingly poignant as Dahlia hurtles toward death.
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Elisa's Tour
March 17, 2008 Powell's Books Portland, OR 7:30pm
March 19, 2008 Elliott Bay Books Seattle, WA 7:30pm
March 20, 2008 Book Passage San Francisco, CA 6pm
March 24, 2008 Dutton's Brentwood Los Angeles, CA 7pm
March 25, 2008 Skylight Books Los Angeles, CA 7:30pm
March 27, 2008 Books & Books Miami, FL 8pm
March 30, 2008 Newtonville Books Boston, MA 2pm
April 01, 2008 Brandeis University Pearlman Lounge 5 pm
April 03, 2008 Barnes and Noble Tribeca NYC 7pm
April 06, 2008 KGB Bar, East 4th St. NYC 7pm
NOW IN PAPERBACK!!
How This Night Is Different
Stories
by Elisa Albert
February 2008, Free Press
PW: Titled to reflect the customary question asked at Passover, these 10 stories by debut writer Albert explore traditional Jewish rituals with youthful, irreverent exuberance as her characters transition into marriage and child-rearing. In "Everything But," dutiful daughter Erin finds herself, after her mother's death, disturbed by the lovelessness of her marriage. In "So Long," Rachel has become "born again" as an Orthodox Jew and resolved to have her head shaved before her marriage, as per custom; the narrator, Rachel's maid of honor, struggles to suppress her sarcastic disbelief. "The Mother Is Always Upset" plays on the familial chaos of ritual circumcision (the bris): tearful mother Beth cowers in the bedroom, while exhausted new father Mark takes his cue from the sanguine mohel. And Albert, writing as nice Jewish girl Elisa Albert, becomes a cocksure writer determined to have the last word in the hilariously vulgar postmodern final story, "Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose"-an unabashed autobiographical fan letter to Philip Roth, "the father of us all."
Click the book cover for more reviews or to purchase the book
OFRAH'S FEBRUARY 2008 SELECTION
Please Excuse My Daughter
A Memoir
By Julie Klam
March 2008, Riverhead
A woman's hilarious, bittersweet account of growing up in a family of career-shunning, dependence-seeking women and her journey to a state of twenty-first-century self-reliance. Julie Klam was raised as the only daughter of a Jewish family in the exclusive WASP stronghold of Bedford, New York. Her mother was sharp, glamorous, and funny, but did not think that work was a woman's responsibility. Her father was fully supportive, not just of his wife's staying at home, but also of her extravagant lifestyle. Her mother's offbeat parenting style-taking Julie out of school to go to lunch at Bloomingdale's, for example-made her feel well-cared-for (and well-dressed) but left her unprepared for graduating and entering the real world. She had been brought up to look pretty and wait for a rich man to sweep her off her feet. But what happened if he never showed up? When Julie gets married to a hardworking but not wealthy man-one who expects her to be part of a modern couple and contribute financially to the marriage-she realizes how ambivalent and ill-equipped she is for life. Once she gives birth to a daughter, she knows she must grow up, get to work, and teach her child the self-reliance that she never learned. Delivered in an uproariously funny, sweet, self-effacing, and utterly memorable voice, Please Excuse My Daughter is a bighearted memoir from an irresistible new writer. Click the book cover for more reviews or to purchase the book
OFRAH'S JANUARY 2008 SELECTION
It gets dark so early. I am more cognizant of it this year. It is just good time to curl up with a book... or a bible...
People of the Book
A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks
January 2008. Viking
In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-she begins to unlock the book's mysteries. The reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book's journey from its salvation back to its creation. In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city's rising anti-Semitism. In inquisition-era Venice, a Catholic priest saves it from burning. In Barcelona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah's extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed. Hanna's investigation unexpectedly plunges her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. Her experiences will test her belief in herself and the man she has come to love. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is at once a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity, an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author. Click the book cover to read more.
The Torah
A Women's Commentary
by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi
December 2007. URJ Press
With More than 10,000 pre-ordered, The Torah: A Women's Commentary is on track to become the most popular Torah Commentary of 2008. This Highly anticipated work is finally here after 14 years of planning, research, and fundraising. At the 39th Women of Reform Judaism Assembly in San Francisco, Cantor Sarah Sager challenged Women of Reform Judaism delegates to "imagine women feeling permitted, for the first time, feeling able, feeling legitimate in their study of Torah." WRJ accepted that challenge. The Torah: A Women's Commentary debuts at the Union for Reform Judaism 69th Biennial Convention in San Diego in December 2007. WRJ has commissioned the work of the world's leading Jewish female Bible scholars, rabbis, historians, philosophers and archaeologists. Their collective efforts will result in the first comprehensive commentary, authored only by women, on the Five Books of Moses, including individual Torah portions as well as the Hebrew and English translation.
"The Torah: A Women's Commentary" presents five forms of commentary for each Torah portion. The Central Commentary contains the Hebrew text and a gender-accurate English translation, along with a verse-by-verse explanation of the biblical text, highlighting female characters and issues involving women. A shorter, "Another View" essay focuses on a specific element in the parsha in a way that complements, supplements or sometimes challenges the Central Commentary. The Post-Biblical Interpretations section gathers teachings from rabbinic writings and classical Jewish commentaries, showing how traditional Jewish sources responded to texts pertaining to women.
Take one brief example from Naomi Steinberg's Central Commentary in the parsha Vayigash. Steinberg observes that the story of the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers "presents a study in the human capacity for lasting change" and the importance of forgiveness. How can we explain the transformation we witness in Judah? Steinberg answers this question by speculating on the effect of Judah's earlier encounter with his daughter-in-law Tamar, who deceived Judah in order to become pregnant. Steinberg writes: "While not mentioned in this parashah, Tamar has been a pivotal figure in Judah's own growth. Their encounter in Genesis 38 best accounts for Judah's new capacity to sympathize with his father."
In another parsha, the five daughters of Zelophehad in the Book of Numbers approach Moses, the leaders of the people, and the entire community. They draw near because they see a problem that needs a solution: they have not been given an inheritance that they believe is due to them. They refuse to be left out and demand their rightful share. And so they dare speak to Moses, the priest Eleazar, all the other leaders, and the entire edah (congregation or formally constituted assembly). They say: 'Give us a holding among our father's kin. Give us a share of our heritage, why should we be left out?' They get what they want a share, a large share I should add. Moreover, as a result of their courage, a new Torah law is created, one that intends to benefit future generations long after them. Their story is the story of the WRJ's The Torah: A Women's Commentary. The Women of Reform Judaism said: 'Give us a share among our brothers. We are no longer willing to be left out.' Instead of land, WRJ asks for something even more enduring - 'Give us a share of our Torah.' The result is a Torah commentary that we trust will benefit all of us. With this commentary we will continue as sisters to empower the women - and men - who come after us for generations to come."
Click the book cover to read more.
See also:
OFRAH'S DECEMBER 2007 SELECTION
CASPIAN RAIN
A novel
by Gina B. Nahai
October 2007. MacAdam
From Publishers Weekly: In her stirring fourth novel, Nahai explores the struggles of an Iranian family in the tenuous decade before the Islamic revolution. Twelve-year-old Yaas narrates her family's story, beginning before her birth at her parents' unlikely meeting. Her mother, Bahar, lives in the Jewish slums with her less-than-respectable family-among them, a seamstress who can't sew, a cantor who can't sing, a Muslim convert and a ghost. Bahar's fortuitous encounter with Omid Arbab, the son of wealthy Iranian Jews, results in a marriage that quickly disintegrates, due to class pressures and Bahar's desire for a measure of independence. Yaas then embarks on what is, at times, an overly lyrical account of her difficult and lonely childhood. She senses that she is an unwelcome disappointment to her mother, whose behavior toward her daughter ranges from inattentive to cruel. When Omid becomes involved in a public affair with the wealthy and beautiful Niyaz and Yaas begins going deaf, the Arbab family spirals out of control. Despite a clunky subplot involving Bahar's ghost brother and a too-easy resolution, the novel is a poignant tale of a damaged family. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S NOVEMBER 2007 SELECTION
By now, you have read or heard about MAXIM MAGAZINE's readers poll on the ugliest women. And of their bottom five... probably 3 or 4 have Jewish conections. But seriously, what mindless idiots read MAXIM and other laddy mags (okay, Larry used to subscribe, but he would throw it out before even opening the package after realizing that the writing was 3rd grade level and the humor was third rate). Who did they diss? Sarah Jessica Parker (partly Jewish married to a partly Jewish guy), Amy Winehouse, Sandra Oh (plays a half Jewish physician on Grey's Anatomy); Madonna (took a Jewish name), oh and also Britney Spears (hmmm.. maybe her lawyer is Jewish). To me, they are all beautiful sisters. Speaking of a beautiful sister, here is a book filled with problems:
THE RABBI'S DAUGHTER
A MEMOIR
BY REVA MANN
November 2007. BantamAndDell.com Random House
Reva Mann is the daughter of a highly respected London rabbi rabbi and the granddaughter of the head of an Israeli Rabbbinic Council. She grew up on the fence between self-destruction and revelation and her teen years were filled with drugs and sex. After an epiphany, she enrolled in a yeshiva in Israel and she married a Torah scholar and had three children. But she struggled to find a life that suited her desires. This is her chronicle of a life of pleasure and piety, struggle, sensuality, spirit, and success. And yes.. for those who are wondering, page 162 discusses her sex life during pregnancy and the lack of multiple orgasms; and page Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S OCTOBER 2007 SELECTION
READ BOTH AND LET ME KNOW IF U CAN COMPARE AND CONTRAST THEM:
RASHI'S DAUGHTER
BOOK II: MIRIAM
A NOVEL OF LOVE AND THE TALMUD IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE
BY MAGGIE ANTON
September 2007. PLUME
Book 1 focused on Yocheved. In this second novel of the trilogy, we meet the second daughter. In is Troyes France in 1078. Shlomo ben Yitzhak (RaSHI) teaches his middle daughter the Talmud and she pushes the boundaries. She is mourning for her fiance. She wants to be a mohel as well as a midwife. When a new suitor arrives in Troyes, she must decide on her career path and family. See www.RashisDaughters.com .
Click the book cover to read more.
Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism
Resistance and Accommodation
by Tova Hartman
September 2007. Brandeis
University professor and social activist Tova Hartman, discouraged by failed attempts to make her modern Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem more inclusive of women, together with other worshippers, set about creating their own own, Shira Hadasha ("a new song"). Since it opened in 2002, this new synagogue's mission--to develop a religious community that embraces halakhah (Jewish law), tefillah (prayer), and feminism--has drawn thousands to services. The courageous act of creating the synagogue--against amazing odds--is testimony to Hartman's own deeply felt commitment to both feminism and modern Orthodox Judaism. The story of the creation and ongoing development of similar "partnership minyans" in Jerusalem and elsewhere anchors and ties together this book's five essays, each of which explores a vital contact point between contemporary feminist thought and aspects of Jewish tradition. Hartman discusses three feminist analyses of Freudian psychology for reading Jewish texts; modesty and the religious male gaze; the backlash against feminism by traditional rabbis; the male imagery in liturgy; and Orthodox women and purity rituals. Throughout, Hartman emphasizes the importance of reinterpretation, asking her readers to view as "creative tensions" what seem like obvious and insurmountable contradictions between traditional and modern beliefs. Such tensions can offer unexpected connections as well as painful compromises. The conclusion revisits the construction of the synagogue as well as discusses its impediments and actualizing these types of social and religious changes. Hartman's book will speak directly to scholars and students of gender, religion, and psychology, as well as anyone interested in the negotiation of feminism and tradition. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S SEPTEMBER 2007 SELECTION
I am drowning in books. It is a pleasure but sort of a burden. But my favorite pleasure so far has been:
The Zookeeper's Wife
A War Story
by Diane Ackerman
September 2007. WW Norton
Do you remember how in THE TIN DRUM, the main character stopped growing during the Nazi period? In this book, Antonina Zabinski, the zookeeper's courageous wife, contemplates whether the Nazi occupation of Poland is a hibernation of the Polish and human spirit. Unfortunately, after the war, the hibernation continued with the Communist takeover of Poland. Mrs. Zabinski died in 1971, before Poland was reborn, but through her diaries and her actions, we learn about a modern day NOAH.. who saved Jews in her ark.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. She introduces us to such varied figures as Lutz Heck, the duplicitous head of the Berlin zoo; Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, spiritual head of the ghetto; and the leaders of Zegota, the Polish organization that rescued Jews. Ackerman reveals other rescuers, like Dr. Mada Walter, who helped many Jews pass, giving lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice. Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: ...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart. This suspenseful beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership.
Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S AUGUST 2007 SELECTION
When We Were Bad
A novel
by Charlotte Mendelson
August 2007. Houghton Mifflin
See www dot charlottemendelson dot com
She might have titled this book, "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Mother."
It is time for American Jews to meet their British Jewish cousins, and I am not just talking about "dress British and think Yiddish." To write this book, Mendelson interviewed four female rabbis, read Jewish cookbooks, studied the JOYS IF YIDDISH, and immersed herself in the world of synagogue newsletters. In England, clever is an insult and quiet is a virtue. Yet Jews are usually clever and not quiet. The opposite of British goals. But this novel explores Jewish sexiness, the hidden lives, the self deprecating jokes and sex and food, the fears of violence, and the peach hand towels. The reader will be introduced to British Jewish uniqueness, just as they learn about West Indians in the pages of Zedie Smith or the Bangledeshis when reading Monica Ali.
A rising British star makes her American debut with an excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart. Everything is in order in the house of Rubin. This marvelous, dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off their perfect eldest son, Leo. History, community, even gastronomy all unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom--one minute before exchanging vows--bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family start to take on darker overtones. Mendelson's satiric eye, which in her two earlier novels has won her comparisons to the writing of Evelyn Waugh, is on full display here. But in these pages, she is also describing a world rarely explored in British society: the complicated, singular world of English Jews who often wear their Jewishness uneasily amidst an Anglican culture. It is a story of how birth order defines lives, and how people secretly loves people they are not supposed to love. Families harbor myths about their members and set roles for people based on these myths. Some people spend their lives trying to escape or conform to these expectations and myths.
The Rubin family is doomed to happiness. Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, flamboyantly sexy famous celebrity rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son's glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel . . . His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the center together but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo's has been. Meanwhile, Claudia's husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide - a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about . . . A warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and - ultimately - in luck. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S JULY 2007 SELECTION
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
by Lucette Lagnado
June 2007. HarperCollins
Read her piece in the WSJ on Yom Kippur:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110009017
A Memoir. Vassar graduate, Lucette Matalon Lagnado, the author of "Children of the Flames: Dr. Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz" recreates the glamour of growing up in Cairo between the World Wars, and life as a Jewish family. Her father, Leon, a textile broker, was a businessman who conducted business from the posh Nile Hilton. But when King Farouk was deposed by Nasser and the young Egyptian officers, and businesses were nationalized, Leon and his family lost their economic base. The streets were renamed, neighborhoods of their fellow Jews disbanded, and the city purged of all foreign influence. The Lagnados, too, planned their escape. With all of their belongings packed into 26 suitcases, their jewels and gold coins hidden in sealed tins of marmalade, Leon and his family depart for any land that will take them. The fled to Paris and then to New York, and moved from opulence to poverty, from ease to hardship. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind. A vivid and graceful story. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S JUNE 2007 SELECTION
Not a Happy Camper
A Memoir
by Mindy Schneider
JUNE 2007. Grove Press
Remember those long sultry summer days at camp, the sun setting over the lake as you sang Kumbaya? Well, Mindy Schneider remembers her summer at Camp Kin-A-Hurra in 1974 just a wee bit differently. Not a Happy Camper chronicles a young girl's adventures at a camp where the sun never shines, the breakfast cereal dates back to the summer of 1922, and many of the counselors speak no English. For eight eye-opening and unforgettable weeks, Mindy and her eccentric band of friends - including Autumn Evening Schwartz, the daughter of hippies who communicates with the dead, and the sleep-dancing, bibliophile Betty Gilbert - keep busy feuding in color wars, failing at sports, and uncovering the camp's hidden past. As she focuses on landing the perfect boyfriend and longs for her first kiss, Mindy unexpectedly stumbles across something infinitely grander: herself. Hilarious, charming, and glowing with nostalgia, Mindy Schneider's memoir is a must-read for anyone who's ever been to summer camp, or wishes they had. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S MAY 2007 SELECTION
If You Awaken Love
by Emuna Elon. Translated by David Hazony.
May 2007. Toby Press
From Publishers Weekly: A Tel Aviv interior designer specializing in closed rooms and clients' privacy, 40-year-old Shlomtzion Drore closed herself off emotionally after her childhood sweetheart, Yair, broke off their engagement when his rabbi refused them his blessing. A rebound marriage, pregnancy and divorce quickly followed, as did an abandonment of the religious nationalism at the center of her relationship with Yair. Now it's the eve of Rabin's assassination in 1995, and Shlomtzion is a secular leftist who supports the Oslo peace accords and the dismantling of the controversial West Bank settlements. But when her daughter, Maya, undergoes a religious awakening and becomes engaged to Yair's son, Shlomtzion is forced to confront her old flame at his West Bank settlement home, and her pentup venom threatens to poison their children's happiness. West Bank resident Elon limns a vivid and dignified portrait of the Israeli religious minority, although at times her characters spout political rhetoric and Shlomtzion's overwritten obsession with Yair and their children's coincidental romance fails to suspend disbelief.
*Kirkus Starred Review* - Beautifully lyrical, with philosophical reflections on love and fate, family and politics, culture and history. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S APRIL 2007 SELECTION
DORK WHORE
My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin
by Iris Bahr
March 2007. Bloomsbury
Take David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell and David Rackoff, roll them together, give them divorced parents and an American and Israeli childhood, send them to the Israeli Army, and then ship them off to Asia with a journal. Now you almost have Iris Bahr. Iris (pronounced Eeeee-ris) was fresh out of the Israeli Army, age 21, and ready to follow the footsteps of many other Israeli 20-somethings and trek and backpack through Asia. The stories that ensue are very funny, slightly insightful, totally soul-baring, and sort of like "travels through Asia in a bad and horny mood"
There are many who say that men think with their crotch and brain. Iris is the same. She is desperate to officially lose her virginity. It sort of almost happened as she ended her tour of Army duty near Tel Aviv, but it doesn't really count. And because Iris' crotch is in control, and because she is chock full of Jewish and other neuroses, she is not the most pleasant travel companion.
Many of you may have seen the author in her one woman show, Dai (enough), or in her appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David (as the Orthodox woman in the chair lift with Larry).
As the book cover says, "Poignant, hilarious, and always original, Dork Whore is a remarkable mix of bawdy humor and heartbreaking moments, witty intelligence and touching personal discoveries."
Although I would never recommend traveling with her, I can heartily recommend reading this book or any of her journals. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S MARCH 2007 SELECTION
PAST PERFECT
A NOVEL
BY SUSAN ISAACS
February 2007, Scribner.
Isaacs's 11th novel has fewer sparks flying than nets dragging, but most fans won't mind a bit, given the amount of outside-the-bedroom adventure. Despite reinventing herself as the author of the novel Spy Guys and the creator of the resultant TV show, Katie Schottland remains wounded by her still-unexplained firing from the CIA, where she wrote intelligence briefs as the Cold War ended, 13 years earlier. When she gets a distress call from an old co-worker, Lisa Golding, who subsequently disappears, Katie plunges back into the notes she smuggled out of the office. She seeks help from an old flame and another ex-agent (now a log-cabin recluse) who helps her trace three of Lisa's former charges at the CIA, East German asylum seekers transported to America and given new names. When two of them turn up dead within weeks of each other, Katie decides to give chase to locate the third before the woman becomes the next casualty. And she still hopes she'll coerce her ex-employer to give up the truth about her termination. The operations stuff is well-done throughout. Katie's relationship with her sweet vet husband adds little, but TV show-based scenes are diverting, and her fixation on her last job is sharply funny and true-to-life
Click to read more
OFRAH'S FEBRUARY 2007 SELECTION
Off the King's Road
Lost and Found in London
by Phyllis Raphael
January 2007. Other Press
From Booklist: In this immensely appealing memoir, Raphael shares an engaging story of self-discovery in 1960s London. After leaving Los Angeles to join her film producer husband in England, Raphael is shocked to find her 12-year marriage over. Confounded by her spouse's revelation of an affair with an 18-year-old actress, Raphael navigates the world as an expatriated single mother of three, finding solace in London's dazzling mazelike streets and libertine society. An "island of friends" (painters, writers, and lyricists) and distinctive menagerie of characters, including her "anti-psychiatry psychiatrist," encourage her to strip away the sacrosanct: "Experience will save you. Break out. The nuclear family is over. Try something new." Heeding their call, Raphael, the dutiful Jewish daughter (whose family owned a Brooklyn-based spice business), former off-Broadway actress, and self-described "person of small ambitions," finds herself swinging, developing her writing talents, and coming into her own. Ms. Raphael is a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award winner, a Pushcart Prize nominee and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S JANUARY 2007 SELECTION
In honor of her receipt of the Hadassah RIBALOW PRIZE in December 2006, kudos to the following paperback:
The Genizah At The House Of Shepher
by Tamar Yellin
2005. Toby Press
This is one of those books that winds the reader in gauzy layers of ancient and recent history, woven into confusing patterns but somehow not losing sight of each other. The protagonist, an independent and single biblical scholar named Shula, is deeply connected to her family's history but not especially interested in either her own present or future. Tracing her genealogy through four generations to her great-grandfather Shepher, she learns of his purported journey to unknown lands to seek the lost tribes of Israel. More than 100 years later, a codex--a very early copy of the five books of Moses--is found in the Shepher family home outside Jerusalem shortly before the building is slated for demolition. Shula returns to the house, site of family vacations throughout her childhood, to find the remaining family in tumult, unsure of what to do with this archaeological treasure. When a strange man arrives to beg Shula to give him the codex, she is torn between her disconnection from her living family and her desire to honor its ancient past, however improbable it might sound. Although Shula's personal life and inner struggles do not truly resolve themselves, the story of the codex and the Shepher family history are more than enough to pull this novel through with beauty, deep love, and a timelessness that will likely make it a classic. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S DECEMBER 2006 SELECTION
I was drawn to this book not only for its story and the letters, but how the author came to write the story of her mother's life.
Sala's Gift
My Mother's Holocaust Story
by Ann Kirschner, PhD (Dean, CUNY)
November 2006, Free Press
See also: http://letterstosala.org/
"In rare moments of retrospection, my mother would tell us about her arrival in the United States.... But even as a child, I was unconvinced. My mother was substituting a happy ending for an untold story."
For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: she had spent five years in seven Nazi work camps. It was not until 1991 that she showed her daughter a priceless collection of more than 350 gripping and poignant letters and a diary that revealed the astonishing story of her survival in Hitler's Germany. After volunteering to take her delicate, older sister's (Raizel) place for what she thought was a six week stay in one of the first Nazi work camps in 1940, Ann Kirschner's mother left her parents and a large extended family of siblings, nieces, nephews, and in-laws, to take a train away from the Polish city of Sosnowiec (the same town in which the book MAUS by Art Spiegelman took place) that had been her entire world. Little did she know that the six weeks would stretch into five years of slavery. She survived thanks to extraordinary luck, and help, and by the war's end only she and two sisters remained alive. Sala Kirschner's odyssey, documented in precious letters, photographs, and keepsakes, lay hidden in a cardboard box as she built a new life in America. Only when faced with heart bypass surgery at the age of 67 did she make a gift to her daughter: of letters, of memories, and of an identity whose rediscovery has challenged and deepened their relationship in surprising ways. There are letters to and from more than 80 people that were preserved. Sala was actually saved from emotional collapse by Ala Gertner, another young woman, who was later killed in the final days of the war at Auschwitz for organizing an armed uprising there. One of the last great survivor narratives, Sala's Gift is as moving and unforgettable as The Diary of Anne Frank. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S NOVEMBER 2006 SELECTION
Fall has descended on us, the leave are ablaze with muted and bright colors. But a stillness has also descended on the store, since our inspiration, the mother of our founder, passed away suddenly on 29 Tishrei. We wish the family well and extend our condolences.
EMMA LAZARUS
by Esther Schor
FALL 2006. A Schocken Nextbooks Jewish Encounters title
Booklist writes: From Booklist
Writing with great enthusiasm, Schor confirms that the author of "The New Colossus," the sonnet ensconced in the base of the Statue of Liberty, was no one-hit wonder. Until the 1930s, "The Banner of the Jew," a rallying song for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was her best-known composition. Lazarus (1849-87) was also controversially famous for the prose "Epistle to the Hebrews," expounding her ideas about Jewish identity as well as Palestine. Spurred by the crisis of the pogroms following Czar Alexander II's 1881 assassination, Lazarus set aside the gentility of her wealthy upbringing to advocate for the thousands of Jews whose flight for life left them destitute in New York. Her encounters with shtetl refugees and her trust in American freedom confirmed her belief that Judaism should be secular and universal, committed to justice, freedom, and revolution. She anticipated Zionism and, as a radical who didn't embrace socialism, much of non-Marxist Jewish politics. Moreover, Schor argues with engrossing persuasiveness, she "invented the role of the American Jewish writer." Click the book cover to read more.
Last Days in Babylon
The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation
by Marina Benjamin
October 2006. Free Press
From Publishers Weekly: "Through the events of her late maternal grandmother's life, British journalist Benjamin tells the saga of the Iraqi Jews, who arrived during the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles from Judea in the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. and were once Iraq's largest and wealthiest ethnic minority. Born in 1905 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Regina Sehayek is a compelling character who lived in tumultuous times, witnessing as a child the British takeover of Baghdad and, as an adult, Arab nationalism and revolution. A moneychanger's bright and opinionated daughter, Regina was married off (and deflowered semipublicly as tradition dictated) to a virtual stranger, a prosperous merchant 30 years her senior whose ancestor was the Persian Jewish doctor for an 18th-century shah. Although indifferent to Zionism, Regina and her kin were victims of the rabid anti-Semitism that began to pervade Iraq in the 1930s. By 1950, the Jews' desperate situation forced a widowed Regina to thwart police and petty bureaucrats and flee, eventually settling her children in London. Benjamin (Rocket Dreams) honors her family by vivifying a once-thriving community that has dispersed worldwide, leaving only 12 souls struggling for survival in present-day war-torn Baghdad".
Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family's exotic Middle Eastern ways. She refused to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home. She rejected the peculiar food they ate in favor of hamburgers and beer. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realized that she was losing her link to the past. ... In Last Days in Babylon, Benjamin delves into the story of her family's life among the Jews of Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. Click the book cover to read more or to read an excerpt.
OFRAH'S OCTOBER 2006 SELECTION
Hello from Washington DC. The words of Kohelet ring true in my ears this month. All is vanity. We don't know the future. There is a time for so many things, and life and health are precarious. For those of you who missed the book reading for the book below at the DCJCC, I invite you to read this fascinating book:
Behind Enemy Lines
The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany
by Marthe Cohn with Wendy Holden
2006. Three Rivers Press paperback edition. Originally published in 2002
Marthe Cohn was a beautiful young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe's sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. The rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army. As a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army, Marthe fought valiantly to retrieve needed inside information about Nazi troop movements by slipping behind enemy lines, utilizing her perfect German accent and blond hair to pose as a young German nurse who was desperately trying to obtain word of a fictional fiancé. By traveling throughout the countryside and approaching troops sympathetic to her plight, risking death every time she did so, she learned where they were going next and was able to alert Allied commanders. After the war, she held a high levfel intelligence position, so high, that the US Army spied on her. Later she returned to France to raise a family. She never told her husband or children of her heroic life. When, at the age of eighty, Marthe Cohn was awarded France's highest military honor, the Médaille Militaire, not even her children knew to what extent this modest woman had faced death daily while helping defeat the Nazi empire. When her brother became ill, she approached the Spieldberg Archives for help in writing her memoirs. They did not help. But when her neighbor recommended that she speak with a relative who made docs for pbs, a bond was formed and the book was written. At its heart, this remarkable memoir is the tale of an ordinary human being who, under extraordinary circumstances, became the hero her country needed her to be.
OFRAH'S SEPTEMBER 2006 SELECTION
By now, many of you know that the Uri Grossman, a Staff Sergeant, the son of author and novelist David Grossman, was killed battling Hezbullah in Southern Lebanon by an anti-tank missile. The death occurred three days David Grossman appealed to the Israeli PM to end the war.
Elul is here. The Holidays are approaching. And a story by Elicia Brown resonates with me. She wrote of Unetanah Tokef prayer,... "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?", ... and the recovery of a young Manhattan rabbi (Rabbi Yael Ridberg) from cancer, who wrote, "Our job is to live our lives connected to each other - doing teshuva, making amends toward each other. And to improve our connection between ourselves and God... We cannot know the day of our death... We can only think about how in anticipation of that day we will live and love and learn how to make a difference in the lives of people we care about..."
And on that note, may I wish you and your loved ones a happy and fruitful and abundant and healthy new year, new return, new change
As for a book for September, I suggest:
I Feel Bad About My Neck
And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
by Nora Ephron
AUGUST 2006. KNOPF
With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself. The woman who brought us When Harry Met Sally . . . , Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and Bewitched, and the author of best sellers Heartburn, Scribble Scribble, and Crazy Salad, discusses everything-from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can't stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there's no quick fix for that. Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years ("I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at") and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton-from a distance, of course. But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age. Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.
There's a lot of interesting advice in a chapter called "What I Wish I'd Known." She tells us that "the last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money," but she doesn't say how you know when the last four years begin. I like "If the shoe doesn't fit in the shoe store, it's never going to fit": So many things could be substituted for shoes in exactly the same sense. She tells us that "The plane is not going to crash," but later she notes "Overinsure everything." The essay's last words: "There are no secrets." "The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less" is a marvelous compilation of high and low points and moments of great clarity and learning. Under "What my mother said," there is "Everything is copy." This is a lesson the daughter learned well, as her ex-husbands would agree. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S AUGUST 2006 SELECTION
As the war in the Middle East continues, I have busied myself with reading The Times and Haaretz online and in print. I even read the WSJ's "red State Jews" piece by Thane Rosenbaum, and the Foreign Policy Research Institutes's pieces by H. Sicherman.
I have also sent $$ to the UJA, New Israel Fund, and Hadassah, and I suggest you do the same. Although I see many groups are taking full page ads in Jewish papers to solicit funds, I have flown to quality and am sticking with the three trusted charity funds that I am most familiar with.
As for a book for August, I suggest:
A Woman in Jerusalem
by A. B. Yehoshua, with Hillel Halkin (Translator)
AUGUST 2006. Harcourt.
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape-she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful-he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today. Click the book cover to read more. You can read an excerpt by clicking the book cover above.
OFRAH'S JULY 2006 SELECTION
Hopefully, MyJewishBooks.com will air condition its office, or I will lilt like old lettuce when I come for work. Speaking of lilting, did I tell you that we all went to hear Rami Kleinstein in June, and sat next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Sadly, the man behind us decided to whistle to each song. So we decided to drop some cool cash on a full concert a week later in NYC. Once again though, the woman sitting in front of us decided to not only sing each song (and her voice was definitely not lovely), but she got us and danced to each song. So we moved back a few rows. Unfortunately, an usher came up to her, and informed her that she was in the wrong row.. Yes, Yes.. her new seat was now in front of our new seats. Hehe.. We know you will have better luck with my July book pick. At least better luck than Larry had. He chatted up some woman at the concert, who recommended several Hebrew CD's to him. He ended up buying about seven or eight. Did he get her number? Ummm.. no. her bf showed up after 20 minutes.
A Woman of Uncertain Character
The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie
(Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom)
by Her Bastard Son
by Clancy Sigal
APRIL 2006. Carroll and Graf.
What took Sigal, age 70, so many years to publish this memoir? Maybe because he has a 10 year old son and is thinking about what sort of parenting style he will follow. This memoir is about Clancy Sigal's intense attachment to his fast-talking, redhaired, sexy, unwed mother Jennie, a firebrand union organizer, and his roaring Oedipal rivalry with his mostly absent father Leo who carries a gun to social occasions. She led her first union demonstration by age 13. She hung out with Emma Goldman. During the Depresssion in Chicago (Lawndale, the Greater VEST Side), where the mob and gangs were powerful, Jennie even hung out with Clarence Darrow. Jennie, in her Cuban heels, red hair and flaming lipstick, was a single mother at age 31, living on welfare trying to raise a wild rebellious son in a twilight world between law and lawlessness. She is defiant, vulnerable, sexually alive, high stepping, man-loving, woman-friendly, wisecracking - fearlessly facing down hostile scabs armed with shotguns and clubs. Along with the portrait of Jennie, this book tells a rollicking, profane, and gritty tale of bottom-feeding street life, race riots, riding the rails, and what happens when a gang boy is mistakenly sent to an all-girls' high school.
Click to read more.
OFRAH'S JUNE 2006 SELECTION
Is it summer already? Oy. So many books, so little time. In honor of the retirement of the first American female graduate of an American rabbinical school (Rabbi Sally J. Preisand on Tinton Falls, NJ), I am selecting for my June book:
HONEST ANSWERS TO YOUR CHILD'S JEWISH QUESTIONS
By Rabbi Sharon Forman
April 2006. Union of Reform Judaism Press.
What do you say when your five-year-old asks, "What does God look like?" or "Why am I Jewish?" By middle school, the questions are tougher: "Is the Torah true?" "Why do I have to learn Hebrew?" This helpful new book suggests successful response to these questions and many more, summarizing liberal Jewish thought in an accessible, easy-to-use format. The author, a rabbi and a mother, covers a broad array of topics, including God, holidays, ethics, history, Israel, prayer, Jewish diversity, practices, and identity. This is a must-have for Jewish educators and parents. Rabbi Sharon Forman is the religious school principal at Temple Shaaray Tefila The Rabbi Harvey M. Tattelbaum School of Judaism, New York, New York.
Click to read more.
Also...
THE LEMON TREE
An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
by Mr. Sandy Tolan
May 2006. Bloomsbury USA.
In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in. This act of faith in the face of many years of animosity is the starting point for a true story of a remarkable relationship between two families, one Arab, one Jewish, amid the fraught modern history of the region. In his childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard, Bashir sees dispossession and occupation; Dalia, who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. As both are swept up in the fates of their people, and Bashir is jailed for his alleged part in a supermarket bombing, the friends do not speak for years. They finally reconcile and convert the house in Ramle into a day-care center for Arab children of Israel, and a center for dialogue between Arabs and Jews. The lemon tree died in 1998. Bashir was jailed again. The Lemon Tree grew out of a forty-three minute radio documentary that Sandy Tolan produced for NPR's Fresh Air. The Lemon Tree is a reminder of all that is at stake, and of all that is still possible. Click to read more.
OFRAH'S MAY 2006 SELECTION
Only in America. Only in America can a 22 year old Jewish guy from Texas, the son of a Bush fundraiser, graduate from Texas Christian University, where he was President of the student body, and be named, upon graduation, as Bush's White House Liaison to the U.S. Jewish Community, Bush's fifth since 2001. Sounds like a nice gig for a Republican. Mazel Tov to Jay Zeidman. Jay. Do you like older Jewish women?
Speaking of gigs...
Take note: In 2005, the top 10 fiction books sold 11.1 million copies. This is down from 17.9 million in 2004, and 19.4 million in 2003. In 2005, the top 10 non-fiction books sold 13.8 million copies. This is down from 21 million in 2004, and 25.3 million in 2003. Children's hard and softcovers however, are up about 20%. Ouch, that hurts my biological time clock.
Jane Austen in Scarsdale
Or Love, Death, and the SATs
by Paula Marantz Cohen
MAY 2006, St Martins Press.
From Booklist: Following her send-up of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen in Boca (2002), Cohen tackles Austen's final novel, Persuasion, about first love getting a second chance. At age 21, Anne Ehr-lich was persuaded by her family to break up with her poverty-stricken boyfriend, Ben Cutler. Thirteen years later, Anne is working as a guidance counselor at a competitive high school when Ben, now the well-known founder of a travel guide series, walks back into her life.
His nephew, Jonathan, is transferring to the school Anne works at, and Ben is determined to get him into Columbia, the university Anne herself attended. Anne finds her feelings about Ben haven't changed one bit, but Ben is engaged to another and doesn't seem inclined to forgive Anne for caving in to her family's wishes all those years ago. Cohen's novel is part witty satire on the college application process and part love story, guaranteeing Austenites and lovers of romantic comedy in general will cotton to this charming modernization of one of Austen's best novels. Click to read more.
OFRAH'S APRIL 2006 SELECTION
Is Spring here yet? It must be, since I just blew $300 on Pesach and Seder groceries. But I also wisely spent $100 on a new CD and a ticket to the Idan Raichel concert at NYC's Apollo Theater. Truly a tour de force. I so wanted to jump on stage with the band. But since I was in the balcony, I decided the jump would not be wise. Speaking of jumping, Larry told me the story about Dreamworks SKG (soon to be Paramount). When you work at Dreamworks, you get a free breakfast and lunch. Their chef wanted to make a Passover dish, and decided on blintzes. BLINTZES? Hello. That is not normally Kosher for Passover. When Larry heard about this, he sent Dreamworks a free copy of the New York Times Passover Cookbook. Did they kvell? Yes. Larry tells me he already got two emails from their chef thanking MyJewishBooks.com, and asking for additional advice. He needs to make 2,000 matzoh balls. I (oFrah) recommended he place a call to honorary LA Jew, Wolfgang Puck, who can make 1,000 for his seder. But, The Dreamworks chef wrote to say that he invented a new matzoh ball... you boil it, and then you bake it. A baked matzoh ball? It is brown but tasty. Actually he tested 12 types, some with seltzer, some without. I wish him a B'tay Avon. And speaking of Dreamworks Spielberg (Katzenberg and Geffen), Spielberg will have a reality show this Fall in which aspiring directors make films and get voted off the show each week. Perhaps I will apply, but I digress. On the book front, I want to recommend:
Intuition
A novel
by Allegra Goodman
Dial, February 2006
In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman, a struggling Boston cancer lab becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. Click to read more reviews.
OFRAH'S MARCH 2006 SELECTION
The bout of cold weather is making me feel academic...
THE RABBI'S WIFE
THE REBBITZIN IN AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE
By SHULY RuBIN SCHWARTZ (List College JTS, Dean)
January 2006, NYU PRESS
In 1973, Professor Schwartz, the daughter of a rabbi and rebbitzin, married a rabbi. It was the cusp of Jewish feminism. Marrying a rabbi, prior to the ordination of women, gave many women a congregation to teach and counsel and lead. Schwartz gives a much needed history of the role of these women in American Jewish culture and history, with special light on their roles in the period of The Great Depression. Being a rebbitzin "... gave them status, a respectable career, a place of authority in the Jewish community." Many pre-war rebbetzin were helpmates, supporting their husbands, entertaining, hostessing. "Several worked as a team with their husbands, strengthening American Jewish life all over the country,"
The book focuses on three powerful women prior and during the Great U.S. Depression. Long the object of curiosity, admiration, and gossip, rabbis' wives have rarely been viewed seriously as American Jewish religious and communal leaders. We know a great deal about the important role played by rabbis in building American Jewish life in this country, but not much about the role that their wives played. The Rabbi's Wife redresses that imbalance by highlighting the unique contributions of rebbetzins to the development of American Jewry. Tracing the careers of rebbetzins from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present, Shuly Rubin Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the role from a few individual rabbis' wives who emerged as leaders to a cohort who worked together on behalf of American Judaism. The Rabbi's Wife reveals the ways these women succeeded in both building crucial leadership roles for themselves and becoming and important force in shaping Jewish life in America. Click the book cover above to read more.
THE WOMEN'S MINYAN
A novel
BY NAOMI RAGEN
March 2006, Toby Press.
Her many fans will welcome the publication of Naomi Ragen's first play, which premiered in July 2002 at Habima National Theater in Tel Aviv. It is based on a true story: a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman, wife of a rabbi, mother of 12, leaves her home and stays with a friend. The community's "modesty squad" tries in vain to force her to go back. Her friend is physically attacked, her arm and leg broken. The rabbi's wife is punished: she is cut off from her children, against her will. Novelist Ragen learned of this tragic story several years ago from a newspaper article. "We've been together ever since then," she says. "They simply crushed this wonderful woman who never committed any crime. It's not a melodrama. It's a story of social truth, like Ibsen's A Doll's House. "I tried to write a play about the status of the Jewish woman in the strictly Orthodox world," continues Ragen. "The religious woman does not have any public place in which she can express her opinions in a natural fashion. Conversely, every man can say whatever he wants from the platform of the synagogue, on any subject, including current events; religious women have never had access to it. In synagogue, we pray upstairs in the women's section, while the men get up and say what they want to the entire congregation. Why shouldn't the woman have the same right? Is she less intelligent? Does she have fewer interesting things to say?" .... Click to read more.
OFRAH'S FEBRUARY 2006 SELECTION
Well, Oprah chose a universal Jewish book by Elie Wiesel. Is she trying to hog into my territory? Hey. Stay in Chicagoland, honey. My selectionf for February is below. Enjoy.
The World to Come
A novel
by Dara Horn
January 2006, WW Norton
In 2005, a million-dollar painting, a sketch for "Over Vitebsk" by Marc Chagall, is stolen from a museum - during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child-prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows, and who believes the painting belongs to his family. Ben tries to evade the police while he seeks out the truth of how the painting got to the museum - whether the "original" is really a forgery - and whether his twin sister, an artist, can create a successful forgery to take its place. As the story unfolds - with the delicacy and complexity of origami - we are brought back to the 1920s in Soviet Russia, where Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There, Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," the Hidden One. And there the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One, but also the story of the Ziskind family - from Russia to New Jersey and Vietnam. Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future - revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning. Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S DECEMBER 2005 SELECTION
Stars of David
Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish
by Abigail Pogrebin
broadway, OCTOBER 2005
Sixty-one of the most accomplished Jews in America speak intimately-most for the first time-about how they feel about being Jewish, the influence of their heritage, the weight and pride of their history, the burdens and pleasures of observance, the moments they've felt most Jewish (or not). In unusually candid interviews conducted by former 60 Minutes producer Abigail Pogrebin over the course of eighteen months, celebrities ranging from Sarah Jessica Parker to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from Larry King to Mike Nichols, reveal how being Jewish fits into their public and most private lives. This book of vivid, personal portraits reveals how the experience of being Jewish is amplified by fame and also how the author's evolving Jewish identity was changed by what she heard. Dustin Hoffman, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers, and Leonard Nimoy talk about their most startling encounters with anti-Semitism. The challenges of intermarriage are explored by Kenneth Cole, Steven Spielberg, Eliot Spitzer, and Ronald Perelman.
Attitudes toward Israel range from unquestioned loyalty to complicated ambivalence in the musings of Mike Wallace, Richard Dreyfuss, Natalie Portman, and Ruth Reichl. William Kristol scoffs at the notion that Jewish values are incompatible with Conservative politics. Alan Dershowitz talks about why, despite his Orthodox upbringing, he gave up morning prayer. Shawn Green, baseball's Jewish star, describes the burden of that label. Tony Kushner finds parallels in being Jewish and being gay. Leon Wieseltier throws down the gauntlet to Jews who haven't taken the trouble to study Judaism. These are just a few snapshots from many poignant, often hilarious conversations -- with public figures whom many of us felt we already knew. Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S NOVEMBER 2005 SELECTION
Sure.. I was going to select Mrs. Freud, but, you know me, I want to be risque
Bodies and Souls
The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women
Forced into Prostitution in the Americas
by Isabel Vincent
William Morrow. November 2005
The acclaimed journalist and author of Hitler's Silent Partners reveals for the first time one of the most shameful and secret chapters in history -- the forced slavery and prostitution of thousands of young Jewish women from the 1860s to the beginning of World War II. Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman, Rebecca Freedman. Young and poor, these Jewish women and thousands of others like them were sold or duped into slavery, forced to become prostitutes by the Zwi Migdal, a notorious criminal gang comprised entirely of Jewish mobsters. From the late 1860s until the beginning of World War II in 1939, the women left behind the grinding poverty and anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe's teeming urban ghettos and rural shtetls to find themselves working in brothels in South America, Latin America, South Africa, India, and New York. Though these women were forced into this terrible life, the Jewish community deemed them unclean and refused to accept them. Barred from synagogues and shunned by their coreligionists, they were also forbidden from partaking in the sacred Jewish burial ritual. Eventually they formed The Society of Truth, a religious order of love, honor to God, and faith in one another that established women-only synagogues, kosher kitchens, and cemeteries. Culled from archival documents, academic studies, and interviews, Bodies and Souls illuminates the tragic plight of these long-forgotten women and elevates them to their rightful place in history.
From Publishers Weekly: One of the saddest and most shameful stories in Jewish history has been suppressed for generations: between 1860 and 1939, thousands of poor young women from Eastern European shtetls were sold into sexual slavery by the Jewish-run Zwi Migdal crime syndicate, which controlled brothels on several continents. Focusing on three women, Vincent reconstructs the miserable lives of many of these women. One, sent to New York, saw 273 men in a two-week period. Many, unable to find support in the Jewish community-which ostracized them-committed suicide. And one, Sally Knopf, whose own uncle was a trafficker, escaped by disguising herself as a man. There is some triumph here: the Jewish prostitutes of Rio de Janeiro purchased their own cemetery in 1916 and ran their own burial society. By the time they bought their own synagogue in 1942, they had seen the demise of the Zwi Migdal gang. Unanswered questions, many raised by Vincent herself, abound. Clearly, poverty and lack of opportunity in Europe drove women into the trade, but why did they stay? Canadian journalist Vincent (Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold and the Pursuit of Justice) demonstrates her strength as a writer and storyteller, which enables her to at least partially retrieve this all-but-lost world. Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S OCTOBER 2005 SELECTION
Oy. What is up in Israel? First, friends tell me about the Friday night gatherings at Ahava v'Ahva shul in Bat Yam. It is next to the Abarbanel asylum. Who are the crazies? It is a wild midnight service known for it miracles (or hookups?) for new age young Israelis. Then there is news of the BACHELOR show, a take off on the BACHELORETTE SHOW in ISRAEL. In Israel it is called TAKE ME SHARON. Do you want to see the Israeli men, all Jewish, who were vying for a relationship with SHARON? Take a look at the URL below:
http://www.keshet-tv.com/sharon_cand.asp?ItemID=22392&ProgID=1199
Hmmph
Sure, Mister Gonzalez (Jewish) isn't bad, but I will stick with webmaster, Larry here in the States.
As for the BACHELOR show... ARI GOLDMAN, an Israeli American in NYC, who resides on Manhattan's Upper East Side and works at a hedge fund, is the star of FROM ALL THE GIRLS IN THE WORLD (Mikol Habanot B'Olam). He will choose from Gali, Galit, Orit, Etty, Neta, Ofira.... BUT NOT OFRAH.. mind you. Which is okay with me. He is definitely not my type, and as for the Great Neck based in-laws... ahh... I don't think so. Hagai Lapid created the show with Elad Kuperman in their Ramat Hehayal offices for Israel Channel 3. (they also did TAKE ME SHARON, and THE AMBASSADOR) The budget is around $2 million. The Yeshiva educated Goldman does not speak Hebrew, so why they picked him for an Israeli tv show... I have NO IDEA. Maybe it is some Zionist concept of enticing New yorkers to Israel for the sex. Oh, by the way. I heard he has a gf in NYC already. I bet that is the surprise ending. He will ignore the 17 other contestants at the end and choose his current gf. Oh that would be grand. Israel gets rejected for the diaspora girl.
Goodnight Nobody
A Novel (Hardcover)
by Jennifer Weiner
Atria (September 20, 2005)
From the book jacket: For Kate Klein, a semi-accidental mother of three, suburbia's been full of unpleasant surprises. Her once-loving husband is hardly ever home. The supermommies on the playground routinely snub her. Her days are spent carpooling and enduring endless games of Candy Land, and at night, most of her orgasms are of the do-it-yourself variety. When a fellow mother is murdered, Kate finds that the unsolved mystery is one of the most interesting things to happen in Upchurch since her neighbors broke ground for a guesthouse and cracked their septic tank. Even though Kate's husband and the police chief warn her that crime-fighting's a job best left to professionals, she can't let it go. So Kate launches an unofficial investigation -- from 8:45 to 11:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when her kids are in nursery school -- with the help of her hilarious best friend, carpet heiress Janie Segal, and Evan McKenna, a former flame she thought she'd left behind in New York City. As the search for the killer progresses, Kate is drawn deeper into the murdered woman's double life. She discovers the secrets and lies behind Upchurch's placid picket-fence facade -- and the choices and compromises all modern women make as they navigate between independence and obligation, small towns and big cities, being a mother and having a life of one's own. Engrossing, suspenseful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Goodnight Nobody is another unputdownable, timely tale; an insightful mystery with a great heart and a narrator you'll never forget.
OFRAH'S SEPTEMBER 2005 SELECTION
The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt
by Ruth Andrew Ellenson
Dutton Adult (August 18, 2005)
A hilarious and provocative collection of original essays by some of today's top Jewish women writers-including Aimee Bender, Daphne Merkin, and Rebecca Walker-exploring all the things that their rabbis warned them never to discuss in public.
Have you ever heard a grandmother's biological clock tick?
Are you certain that a piano is about to fall on your head, simply because too many good things have happened to you lately?
Would your own mother out you as a lesbian at her Yiddish club?
Do you substitute davening with sessions with a shrink?
Did your great grandparents suvive pogroms so that you can eat a bacon cheeseburger and shrimp cocktail?
How does cultural heritage shape who we are?
Is dating non Jewish men better than dating members of the tribe
How could you divorce the perfect Jewish man, and not produce enough children and become a baby factory for the Jewish people
The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt is a laugh-out-loud funny pull-no-punches collection of original essays on topics that aren't usually talked about-much like the recent bestselling anthology The Bitch in the House. Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl and daughter of Erica Jong, writes about displeasing her therapist in "Tell Me About Your Mother." In "Great, My Daughter Is Marrying a Nazi," editor and author Jenna Kalinsky takes readers inside her experience of falling in love with a German, marrying him and moving to Germany, only to feel like an exotic among the locals. Ayelet Waldman's "Land of My Father" tells of the author's return to her Israeli homeland after living for years in the United States. But then she realizes.. is she doing this for her father, or for herself. Whose dream is she living? Tova Mirvis, author of the bestselling novel The Ladies Auxiliary, writes about the pressure to be perfect in "What Will They Think?" In "Mercy" by novelist and USC professor Gina Nahai, we enter a powerful story of the author's childhood in Iran. Lori Gottlieb, author of the bestselling memoir Stick Figure, writes about trying to outwit her mother using caller ID in "Conversations with My Mother." There is a funny trip in one story to meeting Jewish men via JDate.com. There is the story the contains the game: Spot the Jew. Also includes pieces by: Jennifer Bleyer Pearl Gluck Rebecca Goldstein Lauren Grodstein Dara Horn Rachel Kadish Cynthia Kaplan Binnie Kirschenbaum Ellen Miller Katie Rophie Laurie Gwen Shapiro Susan Shapiro Ayelet Waldman, and many more. Click the book cover above to read more.
Bernadette Murphy, writing in the LA TIMES stated: ..."covers and titles can be deceptive. Rather than being just about "girls" and "guilt," the book is really a collection of strong and moving stories about what it means - culturally, spiritually and emotionally - to be a Jewish woman in today's world."
OFRAH'S late AUGUST 2005 SELECTION
Off-White
A Memoir
by Laurie Gunst (Harvard, Phd)
Soho Press (August 15, 2005)
Laurie Gunst is the youngest child of a well-to-do southern family of German-Jewish descent. Her primary source of care and love is Rhoda, a woman who had been her grandmother's maid. Summoned from New York City to Richmond, Virginia, childless Rhoda had taken charge of the new baby and raised her. The intimate relationship between caregiver and child is strong. So is Laurie's shame at aspects of her family's racially intolerant past: An ancestor fought for the South in the Civil War and another cooperated with the Ku Klux Klan in fomenting a race riot. As a vulnerable child, she witnesses firsthand the unfairness of segregation that consigns the woman who cares for her to a lesser status. Laurie's outrage at racial discrimination sets her apart from other white southerners, even her father. Love for Rhoda marks Laurie indelibly. Their relationship enables her to see the person and not just the color of her skin. Ultimately, she acknowledges Rhoda as a spiritual mother who shaped her life as much as her biological mother.
Laurie who got her PhD at Harvard is the author of Born Fi' Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. She now teaches a course Race Relations at The New School in New York City. If you are at UW in August 2005, check out her seminar on Tuesday, August 30, "The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing a Memoir about Race in America." Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S early AUGUST 2005 SELECTION
RAYMOND AND HANNAH
A NOvEL
By STEPHEN MARCHE
Harvest/Harcourt, 2005
This is a short postmodern novel of short sentences and fragments, but larger ideas.
Raymond is..... not a Jew.
Toronto is a city of multiculturalism, and Jerusalem is a city of... well.... Let's see
Marta Segal writing in Booklist: "A week before leaving for an intense course of study in Israel [at an egalitarian Orthodox institute,] the Jewish Hannah picks up the Gentile Raymond [at a party in Toronto.] What is meant to be a one-night stand turns into an intense, weeklong affair. The assimilated Hannah is going to Israel to try to discover her roots and herself. Raymond is trying to avoid writing his dissertation on Robert Burton [on the topic of melancholy and depression.] They decide to continue the affair via e-mail and phone calls. This lyrical first novel is written in brief passages, each with its own subtitle. At first this might seem like an Internet-age or postmodern writing gimmick, but the technique suits the subject matter well. The intellectual journeys of both protagonists are perhaps a little overexplained, since what is compelling here is their relationship with each other. The characters are likable and believable, and their romantic dilemma will resonate with many readers."
... As Hannah get deeper and deeper in her study of Judaism in Jerusalem, and the enclaves of Jerusalem and their unique entitlements, her relationship with Raymond becomes more and more threatened. And their love affair becomes more and more about what they think than about what they actually physically do. Is it any wonder that they retreat to Jerusalem, a city of differences? Hehe. Click the bookcover to read more
OFRAH'S JULY 2005 SELECTION
It is already July, and I am so far behind on reading. I have at least 40 books that I must plow through, but at the same time, try to enjoy. I am especially enjoying my rereading of Tova Mirvis' novel (now in paperback), THE OUTSIDE WORLD. She makes writing seem so effortless. And tell me please, why do kosher pizza restaurants all feel the need to sell kosher sushi? (or is that Jew-shi). Speaking of Chai Maintenance, below is quite an interesting find:
THE jGirl's Guide
A Young Jewish Woman's Handbook for Coming of Age
By Penina Adelman, Ali Feldman, and Shula Reinharz
June 2005, Jewish Lights
What does it mean to become a Jewish woman? Did you ever think that Judaism had any advice on how to deal with pressure from your friends? Arguing with your parents? Feeling stressed out? Well, this book shows you that Judaism can help you deal with all these things-and a whole lot more. The JGirl's Guide is a first-of-its-kind book of practical, real-world advice using Judaism as a compass for the journey through adolescence. A fun survival guide for coming of age, it explores the wisdom and experiences of rabbis, athletes, writers, scholars, musicians, and great Jewish thinkers, as well as lots of girls just like you-girls who share your worries and concerns, and your joys. Here's a place to turn to for honest, helpful discussion about the things that really matter to you: Friendship / Eating / Health / Sexuality / Getting involved / Dealing with authority / Coping with stress / Self-esteem / Communication / Jewish Identity. Now's the time when you are thinking: Who am I? What do I believe in? Who will I become? The JGirl's Guide provides Jewish writings, traditions, and advice that can help. Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S JUNE 2005 SELECTION
I must tell you... I was at the Book Expo America in June 2005, when someone told me about Oyprah, the Jewish talk show host.. OYYYYYY!!!! I hope she doesn't have an Oyprah's Jewish Book Club, or Oyprah's Book Club selection. Gee, don't you like the sound of that? Oyprah's Book Club, or Oy Magazine, for short. Oh well.. something to ponder for the Summer, but I better stick with my own name, Ofrah.
It is so hot.. I need some cool reading.. some light reading.. so for June, I select
Who We Are
On Being (and Not Being)
a Jewish American Writer
Edited by DEREK RUBIN
Schocken, May 2005
Professor Rubin taught Jewish American Lit at SUNY and now teaches at Utrecht in the Netherlands. In his book, 29 major Jewish writers are evaluated. The question of identity is examined, from E. I. Doctorow, who wrote against the idea of the Jewish American writer, to Allegra Goodman, who embraces this notion. Thane Rosenbaum writes that as a child of Holocaust survivors, his writing imagines new outcomes. Dara Horn writes for a more creative way to tell the Jewish story, one that doesn't focus on anti-Semitism. Rubin also looks at the early years of famous writers, including the late Saul Bellow, the late Chaim Potok, and my fave, the poet Grace Paley. Picking up this book is a pleasure, and it includes references to Art Spiegelman, Erica Jong, Tova Mirvis, Jonathan Rosen, Cynthia Ozick, Pearl Abraham, Alan Lelchuk, Nessa Rapoport, Rebecca Goldstein, Lev Raphael, M. J. Bukiet, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rachel Kadish, Yael Goldstein, Steve Stern, Jonathan Wilson, and others. Spanning three generations of Jewish writing in America, these essays--by turns nostalgic, comic, poignant, and provocative--give fascinating insights into the thinking and the work of some of America's most important contemporary writers. Click on the cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S MAY 2005 SELECTION
First, I want to congratulate MTV News, Alexandra Zapruder, and Lauren Lazin on a great job commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII with their MTV broadcasted film, I'M STILL HERE, based on the writing of teens who perished in the Shoah. For more information, see:
Narrators include Zach Braff, Elijah Wood, Ryan Gosling, Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, Brittany Murphy, Amber Tamblyn, and Joaquin Phoenix. Music is by Moby. Let's home this film does not just preach to the converted but exposes a wider audience to the idea of genocide.
THE HISTORY OF LOVE
A NOVEL
by NICOLE KRAUSS
May 2005, Norton
The hottest book of May and June; a PW starred review
The story of a long-lost book that mysteriously reappears and connects an 80 year old Polish Jewish locksmith, Leo Gursky, searching for his son with a girl (Alma Singer) seeking a cure for her mother's loneliness (Charlotte Singer). Leo is invisible, no one notices this old Jewish man in New York. He has a novel that he wrote and is now lost (little does he know that another man published it in Chile under another author's name); he has a lost son who doesn't know Leo is his father, and he has a lost love. Alma was named for the heroine in Leo's lost novel. When Alma is hired to translate the "lost" novel from Chilean Spanish into English, bedlam occurs.
Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S APRIL 2005 SELECTION
April 2005... twenty years since Amy Eilberg was the first woman ordained by JTS. In the past 20 years, over 150 women have graduated from the rabbinical program at JTS. Happy anniversary to all passionate and vibrant rabbis, whether they are men or women.
Speaking of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my choice this month is a book that was most likely written within a few blocks of JTS.
Who She Was
My Search for My Mother's Life
by Samuel G. Freedman
Simon & Schuster (April 4, 2005)
When Samuel G. Freedman was nearing fifty, the same age at which his mother died of breast cancer, he realized that he did not know who she was. Of course, he knew that Eleanor had been his mother, a mother he kept at an emotional distance both in life and after death. He had never thought about the entire life she lived before him, a life of her own dreams and disappointments. And now, that ignorance haunted him. So Freedman set out to discover the past, and Who She Was is the story of what he found. It is the story of a young woman's ambitions and yearnings, of the struggles of her impoverished immigrant parents, and of the ravages of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.
It is also the story of a middle-aged son wracked with regret over the disregard he had shown as a teenage boy for a terminally ill mother, and as an adult incapable for decades of visiting her grave. It is the story of how he healed that wound by asking all the questions he had not asked when his mother was alive. Whom did she love? Who broke her heart? What lifted her spirits? What crushed her hopes? What did she long to become? And did she get to become that woman in her brief time on earth? Who She Was brings a compassionate yet unflinching eye to the American Jewish experience. It recaptures the working-class borough of the Bronx with its tenements and pushcarts, its union halls and storefront synagogues and rooftop-tar beaches. It remembers a time when husbands searched hundreds of miles for steady work and wives sent packages and prayers to their European relatives in the desperate hope they might survive the Nazis. In such a world, Eleanor Hatkin came of age, striving for education, for love, for a way out. Researched as a history, written like a novel, Who She Was stands in the tradition of such classics as Call It Sleep and The Assistant. In bringing to life his mother, Samuel G. Freedman has given all readers a memorable heroine. Click on the cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S March 2005 SELECTION
March is here, and soon it will be Spring and Purim, and then can Passover be far behind. Maybe, please maybe, I can drop some pounds by Passover. The book below combines eroticism and Rabbi Nahman. It reminded me of The Mad Dancers by Yehuda Hyman. It is my recommendation for March. Enjoy.
THE SEVENTH BEGGAR
PEARL ABRAHAM
Feb 2005, Riverhead
Set in the Chasidic world of Monsey, New York, a brilliantly original, provocative novel about storytelling and the limits of creation. The Seventh Beggar begins with a contemporary young man's obsession with the legendary nineteenth-century Chasidic master, Nachman of Bratslav-kabbalist, storyteller, and charismatic whose cult following persists to this day. The legends and life of Nachman inform the novel, in particular Nachman's famously unfinished "Tales of the Seven Beggars," which serves as the inspiration for Pearl Abraham's own bold and probing story about the glories and pitfalls of originality. A translation of Nachman's tales from the original Yiddish is included in full in the novel itself. Abraham staked her literary claim in the groundbreaking novel The Romance Reader, which took readers for the first time into the Chasidic world through the eyes of a woman. Now she returns to that world, with an even more ambitious work that upends the conventions of storytelling, thwarts expectations, and yet all the while compels us with its lovable characters, its narrative momentum, and its creation of a familiar yet dreamlike landscape, in which imagination simultaneously triumphs and destroys.
Click the book cover above to read more.
Judaism For Two
Partnering As A Spiritual Journey
by Rabbi Nancy H. Wiener, and Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer
Jewish Lights, March 2005
Rabbi Wiener (HUC-JIR) and Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer (RRC) are respected teachers, leaders, and authors. Rabbi Wiener is one of America's top teachers of pastoral counseling. Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer is a leader at RRC and also a Director for the Jewish Family Service in Philly. In this book, the collaboratively assert that Jewish teachings can strengthen relationships, both gay and straight. Click the book cover above to read more.
OFRAH'S February 2005 SELECTION
February already? So the calendar says. Hi from Park City UTAH, where I came with Larry for Sundance and Slamdance and SchmoozeDance. We ran into a few celebs, like Keanu (rhymes with Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu), and Leonard Maltin and his nice daughter, and even Roger Ebert. Another hottie was Danny K from The Apprentice, that Donald Trump hagio-broadcast on NBC. Since Danny K(astner) (jew or not a jew?, I know but I am not telling) is a friend of Larry's, we hung out with him as part of his entourage and ate a few meals with him. What a fun and creative guy. Too bad he got fired off that show, but he is much too creative for the Trump Organization. Speaking of brilliantly original... let me segue into my book selection for this short month:
HISTORY ON TRIAL
My Day in Court with David Irving
by Deborah E. Lipstadt (Emory University)
February 2005, Ecco
In 1993, Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish Studies at Emory University, published the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust denial movement. In this critically acclaimed account, Lipstadt called David Irving -- a prolific, respected, and well-known writer on World War II who had, over the years, made controversial statements about Hitler and the Jews -- one of the most dangerous spokespersons of the denial movement.
A year later, when Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for libel in a London courtroom, the media spotlight fell on Deborah Lipstadt and, by extension, on the historiography of the Holocaust. Five years later, when David Irving lost his case after an intense ten-week trial, Lipstadt's resounding victory was proclaimed on front pages of newspapers worldwide. The implications of the trial, however, were far from over.
History on Trial is Deborah Lipstadt's personal, riveting chronicle of the legal battle with Irving, in which she went from a relatively quiet existence as a professor at an American university to being a defendant in a sensational libel case. This blow-by-blow account reveals how Lipstadt fund-raised $1.5 million for her defense, which included a first-rate team of solicitors, historians, and experts, among them Anthony Julius, a literary scholar who is better known as the late Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. Lipstadt describes how in forced silence she endured Irving's relentless provocations, including his claims that more people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, that survivors tattooed numbers on their arms to make money, and that nonwhite people are a different "species." She also reveals how her lawyers gained access to Irving's personal papers, which exposed his association with neo-Nazi extremists in Germany, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and the National Alliance, which wants to transform America into an "Aryan society." In the course of the trial, Lipstadt's legal team stripped away Irving's mask of respectability through exposing the prejudice, extremism, and distortion of history that defined his work, even his once highly regarded account of the Dresden bombing.
OFRAH'S January 2005 SELECTION
Did you have a nice Hanukkah and New Year's Eve? For Erev Xmas, I made my way to NYC's Cutting Room night spot for a show by Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Wow. What talent and beauty. What kvetching. And that was just the line to get in. I even saw Michael Musto there, and what seemed to be his older, huskier, Jewish brother or doppelganger. It was a night of comedy, music, hoola hoops, a Jewish camp songstress (Michelle Citrin, who looked a little like the kid from Bookdocks; but sounded better
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Golda ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0151013624.jpg)
BLOOD MATTERS:![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743294254.jpg)
CERTAIN GIRLS![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743291298.jpg)
The Book of Dahlia![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/074329128x.jpg)
How This Night Is Different![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1594489807.jpg)
Please Excuse My Daughter![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/067001821X.jpg)
People of the Book![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0807410810.jpg)
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The Torah![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0060666846.jpg)
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CASPIAN RAIN ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0385341423.jpg)
THE RABBI'S DAUGHTER![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0452288630.jpg)
RASHI'S DAUGHTER![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1584656581.jpg)
Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0393061728.jpg)
The Zookeeper's Wife![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0618883436.jpg)
When We Were Bad ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0618883436a.jpg)
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The Rubin family is doomed to happiness. Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, flamboyantly sexy famous celebrity rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son's glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel . . . His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the center together but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo's has been. Meanwhile, Claudia's husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide - a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about . . . A warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and - ultimately - in luck. Click the book cover to read more. ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0060822120.jpg)
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0802118488.jpg)
Not a Happy Camper![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1592641458.jpg)
If You Awaken Love ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1596912340.jpg)
DORK WHORE![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743242165.jpg)
PAST PERFECT![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1590512596.jpg)
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Off the King's Road![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1592640850.jpg)
The Genizah At The House Of Shepher ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743289382.jpg)
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Sala's Gift![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805242163.jpg)
EMMA LAZARUS![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743258436.jpg)
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Last Days in Babylon![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307335909.jpg)
Behind Enemy Lines![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1841957429.jpg)
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I Feel Bad About My Neck![[HADASSAH]](http://www.sefersafari.com/donatehadassah1.jpg)
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A Woman in Jerusalem ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0738537152.jpg)
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A Woman of Uncertain Character ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0807409448.jpg)
HONEST ANSWERS TO YOUR CHILD'S JEWISH QUESTIONS![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1582343438.jpg)
THE LEMON TREE ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0312325029.jpg)
Jane Austen in Scarsdale ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0312324987.jpg)
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Intuition ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0814740162.jpg)
THE RABBI'S WIFE![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1592641563.jpg)
THE WOMEN'S MINYAN![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0393051072.jpg)
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The World to Come ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0767916123.jpg)
Stars of David ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0060090235.jpg)
Bodies and Souls ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743470117.jpg)
Goodnight Nobody ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0525948848.jpg)
The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1569474001.jpg)
Off-White ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0156032570.jpg)
RAYMOND AND HANNAH![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1580232159.jpg)
THE jGirl's Guide![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805242392.jpg)
Who We Are ![[mtv I'm still here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/imstillhere.jpg)
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THE HISTORY OF LOVE![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0743227352.jpg)
Who She Was ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1573222852a.jpg)
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THE SEVENTH BEGGAR![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/158023254X.jpg)
Judaism For Two![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0060593768.jpg)
HISTORY ON TRIAL ![[njggb]](http://www.sefersafari.com/njggb.jpg)