Some Good (and Great) Books I Have Read
During the Past Year
With Brief Descriptions, Mostly Citing the Jacket Covers
Fiction and Non-Fiction
Jewish and Secular
Many of these books are now available in the Kol Rinah library.
I just ask that you let Nancy Greene know if you borrow one and that you bring it back within a reasonable time. Otherwise, ask me if you wish to borrow any of these books.
Rabbi Mark Fasman
2012-13
5773
Jewish Fiction
Ramona Ausubel, No One Is Here Except All of Us: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2012). “In 1939, the residents of the tiny Romanian village of Zalischik are counting on their isolation to protect them from the catastrophe sweeping Europe. When a mysterious stranger is washed up on the riverbank and the illusion of peace is shattered, the villagers are forced to acknowledge the precariousness of their situation. Their Jewish ancestors famously moved and escaped for thousands of years—across oceans, deserts, and mountains. Now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. But even with danger imminent in every direction, the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and the washed-up stranger, the villagers decide to start the world over. Through sheer will and imagination, they will reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known, and begin again from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator—the girl, grown into a young mother—must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. In rich, luxurious, surefooted prose, Ramona Ausubel has created a hugely ambitious story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history. Both the story of one girl’s coming of age and acceptance of her place within the world, and a parable about the power of belief, No One Is Here Except All of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and to shape our own truths.”
Barry Fantoni, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye (Doubleday, 2012). “Harry Lipkin is a tough-talking, soft-chewing, rough-around-the-edges, slow-around-the-corners private investigator who carries a .38 along with a spare set of dentures. Harry may specialize in the sort of cases that cops can’t be bothered with, but he knows where to find good chopped liver for a fair price. He’s not the best P.I. in Miami, but at eighty-seven, he’s certainly the oldest. His latest client, Mrs. Norma Weinberger, has a problem. Someone is stealing sentimental trinkets and the occasional priceless jewel from her, someone she employs, trusts, cares for, and treats like family. The suspect list reads like the cast of Clue—the chauffeur, butler, maid, chef, and gardener. Behind the domestic decorum, all the staff members seem to have motive, access, and a lot more moolah than they should. With the stakes fairly low and blood pressure a little too high, Harry Lipkin must figure out whodunit before the thief strikes again. Set in the sunny environs of South Florida, where octogenarian retirees sometimes intersect with the boxers, gamblers, and gang members of Miami’s dark underbelly, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye is as sharp, funny, and irresistible as our unlikely hero.”
Daniel Friedman, Don’t Ever Get Old: A Mystery (Minotaur Books, 2012). “When Buck Schatz, senior citizen and retired Memphis cop, learns that an old adversary may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. But a lot of people want a piece of the stolen treasure, and Buck’s investigation quickly attracts unfriendly attention from a very motley (and murderous) crew.” The lead character is 87 and Jewish. The action of the story takes place in Memphis and St. Louis. A fun read.
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2010). “Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer, and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never lost touch with each other, or with their former teacher Libor Sevcik. Dining together one night at the aged Sevcik’s apartment—two recently widowed Jews and the unmarried Gentile, Treslove—the men share a sweetly painful evening, reminiscing on a time before they had loved and lost, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. But as Treslove makes his way home, he is mugged outside a violin dealer’s window. Treslove becomes convinced that he was the victim of a misdirected act of anti-Semitism, and in its aftermath, his whole sense of self ineluctably changes in this funny and unflinching novel of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and the wisdom and humanity of maturity.” The New York Times comments: “Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon [Philip] Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences a surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book … Even in its darkest moments The Finkler Question offers many examples … the most pernicious and authentic strain of Jewish humor: the kind that’s so real it isn’t funny at all.”
Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (Vintage Canada, 1997). “Ebullient and perverse, thrice married, Barney Panofsky has always clung to two cherished beliefs: life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody else. But when his sworn enemy publicly states that Barney is a wife abuser, an intellectual fraud and probably a murderer, he is driven to write his own memoirs. Charged with comic energy and a wicked disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney’s Version is a brilliant portrait of a man whom Mordecai Richler has made uniquely memorable for all time. It is also an unforgettable love story, a story about family and the riches of friendship.” What a terrific read this is! The Globe and Mail’s reviewer raved, “[A] triumph … at once hilarious, poignant, satiric and elegiac …. Barney’s 30-year marriage to Miriam, their mutual love, and the two sons and one daughter they produce … are the novel’s heart and soul…. They are treated with the utter persuasiveness – the sympathy, the irony, the unique blend of comedy and tragedy – that is Richler’s great strength and that characterizes the book in its entirety. Barney’s Version has an embarrassment of riches, material enough to furnish lesser writers with several novels, yet woven here into a wantonly generous, seamless whole.”
Howard Schwarz, Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales (Oxford University Press, 2009). “Just as Schwartz’s award-winning book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism collected the essential myths of Jewish tradition, Leaves from the Garden of Eden collects one hundred essential Jewish tales. As imaginative as the Arabian Nights, these stories invoke enchanted worlds, demonic realms, and mystical experiences. The four most popular types of Jewish tales are gathered here—fairy tales, folktales, supernatural tales, and mystical tales—taking readers on heavenly journeys, lifelong quests, and descents to the underworld. King David is still alive in the City of Luz, which the Angel of Death cannot enter, and somewhere deep in the forest a mysterious cottage contains the candle of your soul. In these stories, a bride who is not careful may end up marrying a demon, while the charm sewn into a dress may drive a pious woman to lascivious behavior. There is a dybbuk lurking in a well, a book that comes to life, and a world where Lilith, the Queen of Demons, seduces the unsuspecting. Here, too, are Jewish versions of many of the best-known tales, including “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Rapunzel.” Schwartz’s retelling of one of these stories, “The Finger,” inspired Tim Burton’s film Corpse Bride.” Mr. Schwartz was Kol Rinah’s Scholar-in-Residence for Selichot and will be presenting two additional talks in November.
Daniel Silva, The Fallen Angel (HarperCollins, 2012). “After narrowly surviving his last operation, Gabriel Allon, the wayward son of Israeli intelligence, has taken refuge behind the walls of the Vatican, where he is restoring one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces. But early one morning he is summoned to St. Peter’s Basilica by Monsignor Luigi Donati, the all-powerful private secretary to his Holiness Pope Paul VII. The body of a beautiful woman lies broken beneath Michelangelo’s magnificent dome. The Vatican police suspect suicide, though Gabriel believes otherwise. So, it seems, does Donati, who calls upon Gabriel to quietly pursue the truth—with one caveat. ‘Rule number one at the Vatican,’ Donati said. ‘Don’t ask too many questions.’ Gabriel soon learns that the dead woman had uncovered a dangerous secret that threatens a global criminal enterprise involved in looting timeless treasures of antiquity. But there is more to this dark network than just greed. And unless Gabriel can prevent a mysterious operative from committing a devastating act of sabotage, the world will be plunged into a conflict of apocalyptic proportions….” This novel is written a dozen years after The Kill Artist [see below] and is much more pro-Israel than the earlier book. Some wonderful descriptions of both the Vatican and the Temple Mount.
Daniel Silva, The Kill Artist (Penguin, 2000). “Immersed in the quiet, meticulous life of an art restorer, former Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon keeps his past well behind him. But now he is being called back into the game—and teamed with an agent who hides behind her own mask…as a beautiful fashion model. Their target: a cunning terrorist on one last killing spree, a Palestinian zealot who played a dark part in Gabriel’s past. And what begins as a manhunt turns into a globe-spanning duel fueled by both political intrigue and deep personal passions….” One of Silva’s characters presents the Palestinian case against Israel in fairly stark language, but I do not believe that the author is really anti-Israel.
Milton Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf (originally published in 1939; reprinted in 1996, with a Foreword by Chaim Potok). “The magnificent work of modern fiction that brings the age of the Talmud alive, and explores the times of Elisha ben Abuyah, whose struggle to live in two worlds destroyed his chances of living in either.” This is a wonderful historical novel incorporating material from the Talmud and Greek literature. I re-read it this year and enjoyed it even more than when I read it before entering rabbinical school. This book explores the world that produced Rabbinic Judaism (the basis of all forms of Judaism today) and deals with struggles remarkably similar to those experienced by contemporary American Conservative Jews. Milton Steinberg was a Conservative rabbi and a strong supporter of Reconstructionist Judaism (a part of the Conservative Movement), as developed by Mordecai Kaplan.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: Retold With Commentary by Adin Steinsaltz (Maggid Books, 1979). “Rabbi Nachman’s stories are considered the peak of his creative life for their form, content, and profound, underlying ideas. Transcribed by Rabbi Natan (Sternharz) of Bratslav, Rabbi Nachman’s chief disciple, they are a mixture of intellectual and poetic imagination, fairy tales rooted in Kabbalistic symbolism and Biblical and Talmudic sources. The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav features select pieces from the original work together with Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s elucidating commentary to help the reader discover layer upon layer of meaning in this classic work.” I found that Rabbi Steinsaltz’s commentary helped me to understand the kabbalistic symbolism in these otherwise curious tales. I suppose I could have listed this book under “Jewish Non-Fiction” – but it is the stories themselves that are the primary focus of the book.
Herman Wouk, The Lawgiver (Simon & Schuster, 2012). “For more than fifty years, legendary author Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses. Finally, at age ninety-seven, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale in The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, Skype transcripts, and text messages. At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a move about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie when the Australian billionaire insists on Wouk’s stamp of approval. As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, and the force of tradition, rebellion, and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.” I found this a fun read, though there is very little about Moses himself (i.e., we don’t get to read the screenplay). But there is a lot of Jewish content.