August 24, 2010
Elie Wiesel’s The Sonderberg Case
Elie Wiesel’s new book, The Sonderberg Case, comes out today in hardcover.
In this latest work from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, Wiesel explores themes that will be familiar to many of his readers: memory and justice.
The book’s title refers to the prosecution of Werner Sonderberg, a young German who is accused of killing his uncle as the two hike through the Adirondack woods. A reporter sent to cover the murder trial, Yedidiyah Wasserman, tries to make sense of Sonderberg’s declaration early on that he is both guilty and innocent. Indeed, the trial itself seems like a jumping off point for chronicling Wasserman’s personal journey and psychological struggles.
None of the reviews I’ve read have called the book a hit. But, none are saying it’s a total flop either.
Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly said:
The novel is told mostly via Yedidyah’s personal reflections and each component of the story is so divorced from the next–there are no scenes, for instance, that show Yedidyah with more than one family member at a time–that it’s difficult to assemble a larger view of his life. The ambitious scope of the story, spanning generations, is compelling, but limited by the novel’s length.
Here’s an excerpt from the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“The Sonderberg Case” isn’t an exercise in sophistry; indeed, it’s often powerfully moving. But Wiesel fails to make the book cohere as a novel.
Faced with Yedidyah’s disjointed tale, I suspect many readers will wish they could have spent more time with the enigmatic but existentially intriguing Sonderberg.
Writing for the Associated Press, Summer Moore says Wiesel’s writing chops offset the unwieldy plot:
The story line of “Sonderberg” jumps around so much it can be difficult to follow. But in the end, Wiesel’s writing makes up for it. This is a book you will read aloud to your grandchildren.
August 22, 2010
Benyamin Cohen’s My Jesus Year
I have never gone to a church service in my life.
To be honest, I can’t even say I’ve been curious. If anything, I don’t even like the fact that I have to go into a church to vote on election day. The one where I used to go to vote had this big Jesus tapestry on the wall and I always felt like the first century rabbi was staring down at me.
What can I say? He makes me nervous.
I can’t say the same thing for my friend Benyamin Cohen. Not only was he curious about church services, he spent an entire year going to all sorts of Christian events and chronicled his adventures in the book, My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith.
First, a little background. I’ve known Benyamin for about 11 years now and I can tell you that he’s a frum-from-birth Orthodox Jew who’s father and brothers are all rabbis. (more…)
August 18, 2010
Rosh Hashanah books
Rosh Hashanah is about three weeks away so if you want to get inspired better start buying a few books to digest before the Days of Awe arrive.
Here are a few picks for Rosh Hashanah books:
Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur Survival Kit by Rabbi Shimon Apsidorf
This is a must-have for those people who don’t understand or dislike the high holidays. Apsidorf is engaging in his explanations and demonstrates the wisdom and joy of the high holiday to the uninitiated.
Rosh Hashanah Readings: Inspiration, Information And Contemplation by Dov Peretz Elkins
This 368-page tome from Jewish Lights Publishing comprises a variety of readings from throughout Jewish history. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin praised the book, saying it would “deepen the high holiday experience for every reader.”
This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew
Lew, who died last year at age 65, was known for bringing a sense of Zen spirituality to his Jewish teachings. In this book, he begins his discussion of the high holidays with Tisha B’Av and the month of Elul. He doesn’t actually reach Rosh Hashanah until the sixth chapter but that’s a good thing. Lew helps you appreciate the high holiday season, not just the days you need to take off from work.
Mahzor/Machzor Lev Shalem – New Gender Neutral Conservative High Holiday Prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
The new high holiday prayerbook from the Rabbinical Assembly contains a gender neutral translation and commentaries for explaining the prayers. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, more than 150,000 copies have been pre-sold.
The Complete Artscroll Machzor Rosh Hashanah (Artscroll Mesorah)
This is the quote-unquote official machzor of Jewish Literary Review because it’s the one that I use every year at my Conservative synagogue with a traditional bent. Although, I’ll be curious to see if we bought the new gender-neutral ones from the Rabbinical Assembly.
Looks like there will be a little intrigue at services this year.
Got more tips for great Rosh Hashanah books? Leave em in the comments below.
August 9, 2010
Jonathan Papernick: A modern-day book peddler
I’ve never seen an author market their books with as much verve and passion as Jonathan Papernick. He’s really out there selling his work – literally.
According to The Milford Daily News, Papernick has begun hitting the streets and selling books from a green fluorescent pushcart. The author appeared at a Waltham, Mass., farmer’s market on Saturday accompanied by a clarinet player, Dimitri Zisl Slepovitch, who helped draw customers to the cart with some lively tunes.
Here’s a clip of what it was like on Saturday:
This is not the first time I’ve seen Papernick come up with a creative way to get his books into readers’ hands. Some of you may recall that a few years back he wrote an essay for Jbooks.com about his ‘1,001 Books Project.’ It was something of a cautionary tale for would-be authors, letting them know that writing a book is the easy part: getting it noticed takes real work.
As I’ve said before, you gotta give Jonathan Papernick credit. In an era when I see more and more authors relying on little more than social media to do their marketing, he has shown that going old school as Papernick the Book Peddler can also help attract attention from readers.
According to his website, Papernick will be visiting farmer’s markets throughout New England and New York from now until October 2 “to promote his short stories and reintroduce the age-old art of hand-selling books.” The tour will finish with a parade from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Papernick will have a reading.
I feel obliged to note that Papernick has more going for him than just a few marketing gimmicks.
He received critical acclaim for a 2002 short story collection called The Ascent of Eli Israel
His latest book, There Is No Other: Stories of Faith, Love and Heartache, is a short story collection that’s been called a pursuit of “the conflicted inner turmoil of Jews caught in a modern maelstrom.”
If you can’t make it to the farmer’s market, you can always pick up a copy on Papernick’s Amazon page
August 8, 2010
Terry Teachout on Elie Wiesel
Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic, had some harsh words for Elie Wiesel in wake of Wiesel’s threat to sue a playwright who had written a play about an imagined relationship between the Holocaust survivor and Bernie Madoff.
Wiesel’s issued the threat after the playwright, Deborah Margolin, sent Wiesel a draft of her work, hoping he would like it.
Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate sent Margolin a letter in April calling the play “obscene” and “defamatory,” according to The New York Times. He also said he might bring his lawyers into the matter if the play went forward the way it was written.
In the meantime, the production has moved from the Theater J at the Jewish Community Center in Washington to Stageworks/Hudson, a small theater company in Hudson, N.Y.
Also, Margonlin changed the script so that the Wiesel character goes by another name but bears an unmistakable resemblance to Wiesel.
Teachout, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, says no one likes to be publicly embarrassed — like Wiesel would have been in the original version of the play — but it’s not illegal. And that, Teachout writes, brings him to the heart of the matter:
Why on earth did Mr. Wiesel, of all people, threaten to drop the big one on Ms. Margolin and Theater J? Not only is he prominent and admired, but he is also a celebrated human-rights advocate who has famously declared that “indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” Yet he has proved himself utterly indifferent to the rights of a serious artist and a well-regarded theater company to make art as they see fit, merely because their art portrays him in a way he doesn’t like. I wouldn’t go so far as to call that hypocritical—not quite—but I have no doubt that it’s unworthy of a great man who ought to know better.
August 2, 2010
Rachel Shukert: ‘Everything is going to be great’
I’ve been a fan of Rachel Shukert ever since I read her piece on Salon.com about how Rock Band saved her marriage.
Like that piece, the title of her new book is also rather tongue-in-cheek. Everything is Going to be Great is a memoir about two years Shukert misspent in Europe in her early 20s. The book has received warm praise from places like Jewcy.com, where Jason Diamond says “Shukert’s stories are accessible, clever, and most of all, extremely memorable, and she has proven herself a master of the memoir.”
Indeed, as I’ve noted before, she’s a wry, witty writer who’s not afraid to be bawdy. She pokes fun at herself and everyone around her but she can also make a serious point when she has something important to say. (more…)
August 1, 2010
Summer reading: Jewish bestsellers on Amazon
Jewish bestsellers on Amazon are almost always surprising. I’m always amused by the books that end up in Amazon’s Jewish categories.
That said, I take no responsibility for how Amazon categorizes these titles. That said, the lists always demonstrate some interesting reads. I got to catch up on my reading list.
Without further ado, here are the results of the Amazon category listings sorted according to ‘bestselling’:
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Jewish
1. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Nicholas de Lange (Paperback – Nov 1, 2005)
2. Wiesel’s Night (Cliffs Notes) by Maryam Riess (Paperback – Sep 5, 1996)
3. Cliff Notes on The Chosen by Stephen J. Greenstein (Paperback – Sep 15, 1999)
4. Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (The Americas) by Jacobo Timerman, Toby Talbot, Ilan Stavans, and Arthur Miller (Paperback – Aug 30, 2002)
5. The Blue Mountain: A Novel by Meir Shalev (Hardcover – Jun 1991)
6. A Journey to the End of the Millennium – A Novel of the Middle Ages by Abraham B. Yehoshua (Paperback – Jun 15, 2000)
7. Come Rack! Come Rope! by Robert Hugh Benson (Kindle Edition – Aug 17, 2009)
8. Shakespeare and the Jews by James S. Shapiro (Paperback – Apr 15, 1997)
9. A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin (Paperback – Mar 19, 1969)
10. Badenheim 1939 by Aron Appelfeld (Hardcover – Nov 1980)
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > United States > Jewish-American
1. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (Hardcover – Apr 5, 2004)
2. Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (Paperback – Sep 30, 2008)
3. Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska and Alice Kessler-Harris (Paperback – May 1999)
4. Rich Boy by Sharon Pomerantz (Hardcover – Aug 2, 2010)
5. Away: A Novel by Amy Bloom (Paperback – Jun 24, 2008)
6. Peep Show by Joshua Braff (Paperback – Jun 1, 2010)
7. Rashi’s Daughters, Book II: Miriam: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France by Maggie Anton (Paperback – Jul 31, 2007)
8. The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories by Joseph Epstein (Hardcover – Jun 14, 2010)
9. Sima’s Undergarments for Women (Wheeler Large Print Book Series) by Ilana Stanger-Ross (Hardcover – May 7, 2009)
10. Dawn by Elie Wiesel and Frances Frenaye (Paperback – Mar 21, 2006)
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Yiddish
1. Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (Library of Yiddish Classics) by Sholem Aleichem (Paperback – Oct 1, 1996)
2. The I. L. Peretz Reader by I. L. Peretz and Professor Ruth Wisse
(Paperback – Jun 1, 2002)
3. Ineffable Name Of God: Poems by Abraham Joshua Heschel and Morton M. Leifman (Hardcover – Dec 2004)
4. The Family Mashber: A Novel by “Der Nister”/”the Hidden One” by Nister and Leonard Wolf (Hardcover – Jun 1987)
5. The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky by S. Ansky, David G. Roskies, and Golda Werman (Paperback – Sep 1, 2002)
6. The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse by Ruth R. Wisse, Khone Shmeruk, and Irving Howe (Hardcover – Sep 23, 1987)
7. A Dybbuk and Other Tales of the Supernatural by Tony Kushner and Joachim Neugrochel (Paperback – Dec 1, 1997)
8. Great Works of Jewish Fantasy by Joachim Neugroschel (Hardcover – Feb 8, 1986)
9. I Keep Recalling: The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein by Jacob Glatstein and Barnett Zumoff (Hardcover – Oct 1993)
10. Treasury of Jewish Love: Poems, Quotations & Proverbs : In Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and English (Treasury of Love) by David C. Gross (Hardcover – Nov 1, 1994)
Top Ten under Religion and Spirituality > Judaism
1. Have a Little Faith: A True Story by Mitch Albom (Hardcover – Sep 29, 2009)
2. Introduction to the Old Testament by John Edgar McFadyen M.A. (Paperback – Sep 23, 2003)
3. When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner (Paperback – Dec 1, 1983)
4. Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money by Daniel Lapin (Paperback – Feb 8, 2005)
5. Who Wrote the Bible? : a Book for the People by Washington Gladden (Kindle Edition – Jun 18, 2010) – Kindle Book
6. Sacred (Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro Novels) by Dennis Lehane (Hardcover – May 1, 2001)
7. The New Jerusalem by G. K. Chesterton (Paperback – Apr 27, 2009)
8. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Paperback – Sep 13, 1993)
9. The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel (Paperback – Dec 2, 2008)
10. The Jewish Bible: Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures–The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text: Torah * Nevi’im * Kethuvim by The Jewish Publication Society (Paperback – Nov 1985)
Biographies & Memoirs › Ethnic & National › Jewish
1. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Hardcover – Sep 30, 1992)
2. Night by Elie Wiesel and Marion Wiesel (Library Binding – Apr 25, 2008)
3. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (Paperback – Aug 12, 1986)
4. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, John and Elizabeth Sherrill, and Nadia May (Audio CD – Mar 1, 2009)
5. The Diary of a Young Girl (Penguin Modern Classics) by Anne Frank, Otto Frank, Mirjam Pressler, and Susan Massotty (Paperback – Mar 30, 2000)
6. High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson (Hardcover – Jun 24, 2010)
7. Who Wrote the Bible? : a Book for the People by Washington Gladden (Kindle Edition – Jun 18, 2010) – Kindle Book
8. Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (Paperback – Jan 15, 1998)
9. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (Paperback – Sep 1, 1992)
10. Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Paperback – Aug 20, 2007)
As always, I welcome your comments.
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July 29, 2010
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
There are very few poets — if any — who have attained the level of success of Joseph Brodsky.
He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. He received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1981. He won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism in 1986 for his collection of essays, Less Than One.
One more thing: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.
Brodsky, a Russian-Jewish poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1977, often wrote about the power of literature on its audience. He seemed somewhat ambivalent about his Judaism although he included Jewish subjects in his writings. In the end, he was buried in the Episcopalian section of a Venice cemetary.
Now, we may gain more insight into Brodsky’s thinking and his feelings toward Judaism. A newly-translated book, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, is set to be published for the first time in English and it may shed more light on the poet’s writing and life.
From what I’ve read, the book has already received much acclaim in Russia. It was originally written by Lev Loseff, a professor of Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College who has already published eight collections of verse and fiction in Russian as well as numerous works of criticism.
At this point, we’ll have to sit back and wait for the book. Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life will be published in early 2011.
July 28, 2010
I win a beautiful blogger award
I am proud to announce that I’ve received a Beautiful Blogger Award from the Jewish Publication Society.
In order to collect my award, I need to reveal seven little-known things about Jewish Literary Review and then pass the award on to seven other blogs.
Here are a few things you might not know:
1. I’ve posted 188 articles over the last three years.
2. I’ve only received three angry emails from authors.
3. I love mixing Judaism with environmental awareness.
4. I belong to a Conservative shul where we daven with ArtScroll siddurs.
5. I’ll give every book 100 pages before I give up.
6. Favorite Jewish author: Philip Roth
7. Favorite Jewish book critic: Alfred Kazin
OK. Now for my seven choices to receive a Beautiful Blogger Award:
1. Jewlicious – 100 percent Kosher!
2. JewWishes – Book reviews on Jewish-related books and films, news and more.
3. The ‘My Jesus Year’ blog – Author Benyamin Cohen expands on his year-long romp through churches in the Bible Belt.
4. BeWilderblog – Author Laurel Snyder blog about children’s books, life and more.
5. The Arty Semite – The Forward’s arts and culture blog
6. The Fundermentalist – JTA blog about world of Jewish philanthropy.
7. On The Other Hand – Baltimore Jewish Times Editor (and my former boss) Neil Rubin explores the world of modern Jewry.
July 22, 2010
‘Imagining Madoff’ moves forward without Elie Wiesel
A play imagining the relationship between Elie Wiesel and Bernie Maddoff began performances this week with one important change – the character that was supposed to be Elie Wiesel was no longer referred to as “Elie Wiesel.” Instead, the character has been re-named “Solomon Galkin.”
According to The New York Times, Wielsel threatened to take legal action if the play, “Imagining Madoff,” went forward the way it was written. In the original version, the play portrays a fictionalized version of Wiesel and Madoff’s relationship, including a ‘central scene’ in which the Holocaust survivor pleads with Madoff to invest his money. There also was a scene depicting a sexually-tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp, the Times wrote. (more…)