Yizkor, Book

It’s a telling textualization of Judaism that it’s not a sacrifice or magical act but the embalmed formality of Yizkor—“May God remember the soul of my father/mother, who has gone on to his/her reward”—that has become the primary communication between a living person and his or her deceased. Talmud tells us that the soul, though eternal, is subject to conditions that can be bettered—death cannot be worsened—through two responsibilities undertaken by a surviving heir: charity and righteous deeds. Yizkor enacts one—prayer as deed—while promising the other: “I shall give charity on my father’s/mother’s behalf.”

Zealous in our memory, we should be equally zealous with regard to our memorious technologies. By which I mean we mourners assembled to pronounce this rare prayer should be more charitable toward the fate of the book from which we read it (the word for that book is Mahzor, meaning “cycle”). The quasicyclical scroll was cut for the supersessionary codex, or book, whose materials have been sliced free, into omnimateriality, for screens (whose ancestor, the parochet or “veil,” screened the offerings of Judaism’s first worship). For modern Judaism, however, the codex—which began mass production in the late 1400s, the period of Europe’s most extensive Jewish expulsions—must be the terminant technology, unless electronic tablets, on which all information is egalitarianly accessible and divinely transitive, are to be raised above the congregation.

Keeping faith with the consolations of cycles, of recurrence (Mahzor’s root is chzr, meaning “return”), is the last ritual practice of a Judaism that has abandoned the Sabbath and dietary strictures, God and afterlife, etc. Such a belief, solely in the regulating merit of belief, is embodied not only in the Jewish books—read septennially, annually, monthly, weekly, daily—but also in books in general, if they are read not as commodities, rather as enduring resources (that timeless calendar, the canon).

Only last week, avoiding shul for Rosh Hashanah, I reread Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Buber’s letters, read the Internet. What did I find? The Death of Books! The End of Books! Today—if you read what is written today—all books seem to be “memory books” (“yizkor buch,” which is Yiddish, indicates a volume memorializing the dead of a particular shtetl or region ravaged by the Holocaust, e.g., the Sefer Marmarosh, which catalogs the names of my cousins in an area including Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, or the Sárospatak Book, which lists the names of closer relatives from Hungary).

Remembrance, at every instance, threatens an ultimate recursion: We remember so regularly until we’re only remembering we’re remembering. It’s not just the Internet. Recent print media seem to consist entirely of pieties about the death of print media and the inevitable ascension of the digital. Just as our prayerbooks seem to consist entirely of prayers that—though they’re said to be, should be, dedicated to saving our and our relations’ souls—spend the preponderance of their sentences and stanzas mortifying man and praising God. Unwilling to praise or mortify, incapable of salvation, following Rosh Hashanah I wrote the following Yizkor for bookery. Epigraphs as epitaphs, they comprise a page to print and slip between the relevant pages of your Mahzor—for when memory becomes too painful because too rote, or too remote from Yizkor’s words (just as all contemporary words have become too remote from their inscribing).

***

May there never come a future in which a secret can be hidden in a book.

May there never come a future when a child will have to search for what a book is on the computer. For what a book was.

Once books go and with them, covers, may we still find meaning in the words binding and bound.

May we still find comfort in the margin.

Consider the archaic English: boke. As in Chaucer, at the conclusion of Canterbury Tales, disavowing “the boke of Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of briddes.” It’s like book, only in past tense.

Blessed is the page, for it is more fraught than the screen. Reading a page, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other side.

Blessed are the bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum, my father’s/mother’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I scribbled the word bibliothanatos, (historical) Mao had bookmarks produced featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, cornhusks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks manufactured as advertisements for Heinz in the warty shapes of pickles. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) first popularized bookmarks. The term now characterizes a computer function that holds a webpage detailing the life of Elizabeth.

Consider Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Leave it to the goyim to end with Apocalypse. Moses and YHVH—our earliest professional writers of fiction—and even the deity’s amateur “son,” who only wrote once, one illegible word dug into sand (John 8)—would never have allowed it.

Reward with a girlfriend my friend H., a junior librarian from a fine family of Los Angeles. His recent email mentions his databasing nearly 30 books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.

Grant the justice/splendor of the smell of books, which is merely the smell of dust. This, like all sameness, instructs in mortality. After the book is composed, it decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.

Grant the meek/radiant feel of books (haptics is the current term): the texture, the heft in hand. Note for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran your fingers over a page you could tell which parts of that page were blank and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of recycling and digital printing (blot forever the 1990s).

Find repose among the taste of books. Find peace from, in a singularly impractical coinage, their “mannaism.” It’s said that monks poisoned the pagetips of forbidden books to punish their readers. It’s said that rabbis placed honey there at the tips to encourage students to lick and go forward. To lick and proceed. Consider however that when the lesson was finished and the book was shut, the honeyed pages would stick together. Consider however that such slavish adherence to factuality would be our own destruction. Woe to the generation that cannot tell stories. Woe to the generation that cannot be told stories.

The descriptions of the books were vague enough that I was left wondering what they were about. I knew Jewish literature was a loose term, applied to everything from Portnoy’s Complaint to Anne Frank’s diary. Did “Christian fiction” just mean novels about Christians? If so, isn’t that just most novels? Are they romance novels involving ladies who sometimes go to church? If so, was there sex? Is it the equivalent of As a Driven Leaf, but with pastors? I figured the best way to find out was to read one and see.

I emailed some friends, all Jewish, and invited them to join me in my spiritual fiction exploration, spinning the project as a fun-filled romp through foreign territory. After some research and a vote, we settled on Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers, which was billed as a retelling of the biblical book of Hosea set in the California gold rush. It features a prostitute, so I was hopeful that it might be raunchy.

Reading Redeeming Love turned out to be a lot like watching a Lifetime Television movie, in that it was both horrifying and enjoyable. The protagonist, a prostitute named Angel, lives in a dusty California town, a wretched place where she has a predictably wretched existence. In a scene that’s clearly meant to be romantic, a farmer named Michael Hosea buys Angel from her madam after Angel has been beaten to a pulp. I read the scene while lying in bed with my boyfriend and cringed when Hosea insists on marrying Angel before taking her from the brothel. Angel isn’t fully conscious, but, writes Rivers: “She would agree to wed Satan himself if it would get her out of the Palace. ‘Why not?’ she managed.” I audibly gasped while reading this, and when my boyfriend asked me what was wrong I had to admit both how deeply creepy the scene was and how much fun I was having reading it.

Hosea brings Angel to his farm and nurses her back to health, but she and her husband battle constantly. They also abstain from sex, because he suspects she’ll treat it like a job. She wants to return to prostitution so she can earn money and live independently. He wants her to become a Christian. Both of them are tempted by Satan and comforted by God. Rivers gives her theology a typographical treatment: Bold italic type means God is talking, simply bold type belongs to the devil. There is, as you might expect, a completely implausible happy ending.

When it was finally time for my newly founded book club to meet, eight of us gathered in my living room to discuss Redeeming Love. Sipping wine, we began picking apart the book, reading aloud the most bizarre and hilarious parts. We talked about the way that Christianity comes off as a last resort for people in pain and the way that independence is presented as a way of running away from love. But pretty quickly the conversation moved from Christianity—and the treacly way that Rivers wrote about it—to the way the ideas about God and religion in the book mapped onto our own, Jewish thoughts on the same subjects. Angel’s understandable resistance to becoming a frontier homemaker spoke to our own disinterest in becoming observant Jewish housewives. We wondered about the way that God speaks so directly to the characters in the book. Do the Christian women who read Redeeming Love feel that they, too, frequently hear from a bold italic God, who comforts and infantilizes them? As Jews, this sentiment was both foreign and somewhat attractive. We wondered aloud if a Jewish version of this book could be written, and how different it might be from the Christian text.

I had intended the book club to be a one-off thing, but we all had so much fun we decided to continue meeting, and so far we have read The Choice, by Suzanne Woods Fisher, which is part of a sub-genre of Christian fiction that focuses on the Amish, fetishizing the “plain” way of life, and The Pastor’s Woman, by Jacquelin Thomas, which is part of the “urban” sub-genre of Christian fiction, meaning it’s about African Americans. Next month we’re moving to Mormons with The Last Promise, by Richard Paul Evans.

Like Redeeming Love, the plots in these books creak forward unevenly, and the writing is at best mediocre. But in contrast to our first book, the heroines in The Choice and The Pastor’s Woman are presented as feisty women who never seem to encounter real conflict. The books set them on the road to marriage, and on the way, nothing much gets in their way. It is both boring and reminiscent of the countless conversations I’ve had with friends, both religious and secular, about tying the knot. In my experience, in the real world, people—even observant Jews—make a decision about whether or not to get married based on personal preference, not spiritual pangs. In Christian fiction, it seems, women who have doubts about their relationship just wait around until they feel themselves being pushed by God.

Wedlock, however, wasn’t the only aspect of the books we felt was at odds with our modern lives; modesty was another point of contention. All of the books we read dealt explicitly with issues of modesty, and we returned at every meeting to how our own perceptions of what’s modest and appropriate have been shaped by our Jewish backgrounds. In The Choice, the protagonist wears traditional Amish garb and shuns zippers, but kissing her boyfriend is apparently not a problem by community standards. In The Pastor’s Woman, the main character is berated for wearing a leather skirt to church (the pastor sends someone with a blanket to cover her legs), but later she runs a fashion show for teens because, she says, “I mainly wanted to give the teens some ideas on how to be fashionable without having to show all of their goodies.” Modesty is important to all of these women, and it’s presented as an important part of the Christian way of life, but even for an Amish woman, modesty doesn’t seem as restrictive a concept as it was at the Orthodox Jewish high school I attended.

Most curious, however, were the Jews, appearing in two of the three novels we’ve read as mini-savior figures. In Redeeming Love, Joseph Hochschild is a genial shopkeeper who offers Angel a place to stay when she runs away from her husband. “We can’t offer you grand accommodations,” the kindly Jew tells the destitute prostitute, “but we can give you a clean cot and blankets and kosher food.” Later, always a mensch, he reunites Angel with her husband. In The Choice, one Dr. Zimmerman takes care of the surprisingly high number of Amish people who end up in the hospital in the course of the 300-page book. He’s big on wise-cracking and great at saving Amish lives. We wondered why all these Jewish characters in Christian fiction, and then we looked at ourselves: Perhaps these authors were as titillated by writing about Jews as we Jews were by reading about Christians.

It makes sense: Nothing, it turned out, has made me feel quite as Jewish as reading and discussing Christian fiction. And these novels—as poorly written and developed as they all are—have helped me have fun with religion for the first time in ages. Book club functions as a low-stakes, no-grades, comparative religion class, pizza and wine included. It reminds me that faith doesn’t have to be serious, it can be playful, even silly. And you know who I can thank for this reminder? Jesus.

Tamar Fox is an associate editor at MyJewishLearning.com.

The mosque at the centre has gone except for the minaret, which stands forlornly alone, surrounded by ugly cement shopping malls and hotels that look like dormitories devoid of all charm. … The water in the lake is over-pumped to serve extensively heavy water-dependent farming that makes no sense in a country with limited water resources. A number of economically unsuccessful new towns have been established in the area, isolated from the natural continuation of the land to the south by the infamous semi-permeable wall, erected to separate them from the West bank, that prevents Palestinians from crossing over but allows Israelis living on both sides to go back and forth.

Shehadeh, a lawyer by profession, tours the Galilee to retrace the steps his uncle, Najib Nassar, took as he fled arrest at the hands of the Ottomans at the turn of the last century. Armed with Nassar’s diary and a 1933 map of Mandate Palestine, he searches for the villages, roads, mountains, and rivers his uncle visited while on the run across what became Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. But he finds that the last six decades have transformed the land nearly beyond recognition. Israeli historian Benny Morris estimates 400 Palestinian villages were abandoned in 1948 and were later demolished, forested, or converted into Jewish farming towns. Nearly all of the geographical features of the land were renamed from Arabic to Hebrew and subsumed in the urban sprawl typical of a Western country. The combination pushes Shehadeh to mentally excavate the visible landscape, searching for traces of Palestinian villages and people long gone.

Shehadeh is not the first to write a mournful account about the Palestine that was lost in 1948 nor to return to sites in their present-day guises. But by following his uncle’s path, Shehadeh shows how rural Palestinians lived and thought and how intimately they and their urban guest were connected to the land in the early 1900s. Quoted commentary from the celebrated British archaeologist and commander T.E. Lawrence suffuses the old landscape with vivid detail. Shehadeh adds another degree of familiarity by weaving himself into the narrative through frequent comparisons and snippets of his own political life. In his elegy for the peasant life long gone, Shehadeh challenges the view that Israel’s policies have been good for the land. On a broader level, he makes a case for rethinking the welter of borders that make his trip cumbersome and sometimes impossible.

“I have no memory of the way things were,” he said recently by phone from Ramallah. “In writing the book I explored how the land used to look. It made me sad, because it was once a mixed land with much more variety.” Is his book a call for an Ottoman revival? “I have no intent on calling for a return of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. “But I think the Ottoman Empire provides a precedent that is important to consider, when the region was unified.”

***

Raja Shehadeh at a book reading in Ramallah, October 16, 2010.
Daniella Cheslow

A Rift in Time opens with Shehadeh nervously facing arrest by Palestinian security officers in 1996, just after the Oslo Accords were signed. He was implicated in a client’s land deal gone wrong in Jericho. He escapes arrest through the intervention of well-connected friends, but the ordeal reminds him of his uncle, who enjoyed no such respite.

Najib Nassar, born in 1865 in southern Lebanon, moved with his family to Haifa, where he founded and edited the Al-Karmil newspaper. He was a short, outgoing, and generous man who staunchly believed in the Ottoman Empire but decried its decision to fight in World War I with the Axis powers. But the Ottomans feared Nassar had hidden loyalties to the British and put a bounty on his head. Nassar spent three years hiding in villages scattered across the region, often knocking on doors before dawn and with empty pockets. Whether or not his hosts knew him, they nearly always offered him food, a bed, a horse, and even gold coins to send him on his way. Because of this generosity, Nassar was able to evade the Ottomans until he turned himself in to spare his family.

According to Birzeit University sociologist Salim Tamari, the Palestinian memoir tradition goes back at least 100 years, to Jerusalemites who kept diaries. Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator, writer, and poet who lived from 1878 to 1953, called himself the “prince of idleness” but documented both his youthful escapades and his later work in America, his attempts to reform Palestinian education, and his exile. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who lived from 1897 to 1972, was a similar-minded bon vivant, poet, composer, and musician whose journals show Jerusalem over six decades. Both men’s diaries have been translated in whole or in part into English.

Yet after 1948, what Palestinians term the Nakba, or catastrophe, the intellectual leadership of Palestinian society dispersed, and political writing overtook the personal. The playwright and author Ghassan Kanafani, who worked for the PLO and was assassinated by the Mossad, wrote a 1962 play called Men in the Sun, about Palestinian refugees who suffocate while being smuggled to Kuwait. Mahmoud Darwish, the late Palestinian poet laureate, achieved renown with his highly political “Identity Card,” from 1964:

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

While there was always a trickle of memoirs, including one by Sakakini’s daughter Hala and another by the renowned Arab translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, the last 20 years have seen a major revival, Tamari said.

“If we can compare the two events, I think it’s similar to the Holocaust experience,” said Tamari, whose parents, like Shehadeh’s, fled Jaffa. “The people who experienced the Holocaust and survived did not speak about it until years later, in the 1960s and ’70s. They were ashamed and embarrassed. In the Palestinian case, they were ashamed they did not resist, that they allowed themselves to be taken like sheep from their homes. My parents did not talk about it until many years later.”

That changed after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Dozens of formerly exiled Palestinians were allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They had a very idealistic view of Palestine, and they found it not mundane, but a country lacking in sovereignty, and looking very much like a third-world formation,” Tamari said. “Since many came from urban, metropolitan centers like Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, and Damascus, they were shocked at how shabby the country looked.”

***

One of the landmarks of the evolving genre is Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, published in Arabic in 1997 and translated into English three years later. The book won Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. In it, Barghouti returns to his childhood home near Ramallah in 1996 after a 30-year exile and finds his village ringed with Jewish settlements. The Ramallah vegetable market is as dingy as it was when he was a child, and the Palestinian Authority has brought a class of officials who flaunt their income but do little to advance the common good. Yet Barghouti’s memoir mainly focuses on his own family’s experience. It does not have the same breadth as Shehadeh’s Rift, which encompasses the entire region.

Likewise, Edward Said’s 1999 memoir Out of Place details his childhood and adolescence in Cairo.

Unlike Said or Barghouti, Shehadeh remained in the Palestinian territories his entire life. As founder and former head of the Al-Haq legal aid organization, Shehadeh initially published technical works on Israeli law and human rights. He first tackled personal writing in 1982 with The Third Way, a collection of stories from Ramallah. The book was hailed in the Journal of Palestine Studies as “the first such book on life for the Palestinians under occupation.” Shehadeh’s full story emerged in Strangers in the House, a tour de force that encompassed his strained relationship with his father, exacerbated by Israeli rule that emasculated the head of the house.

In his last two books, Shehadeh departs from his family and daily life to give words to the Palestinian landscape. An avid hiker, he published Palestinian Walks in 2008, showing the growing difficulty of walking the West Bank without encountering Israeli settlements, soldiers, or roadblocks. It won him Britain’s Orwell Prize.

Palestinians protesting Israel’s security fence in the West Bank village of Bil’in, February 22, 2008.
David Silverman/Getty Images

Rift features those difficulties as a side story to the odyssey of Najib Nassar, whose trail markers are now deeply buried. In resurrecting the world of a century ago, Shehadeh shows what he sees as the price of Israel’s independence. Nassar hid in tents with Bedouin and spent his happiest days herding sheep while scratching the lice off himself. Farms were small and smelled of dung-fired ovens where today they are large and silent stretches of green plowed by tractors. For Shehadeh, despite the grinding poverty, exploitation, and constant water shortage, Palestinian peasant life was a state of grace.

“Gone is the mix of people that existed in Najib’s time,” he writes. “In their place a large variety of Jews from Arab countries, Eastern Europe and from the West, along with those Palestinian Arabs who have managed to stay, now share the land unequally. But gone are most of the Bedouin tribes, Palestinian Arabs and Arabs from various parts of North Africa, and the Marsh Arabs who lived in the Huleh region with their water buffaloes that are now extinct here.”

In one instance, Shehadeh is surprised to find expanses of wheat where he had expected to see a handful of the villages Nassar mentioned. Then he notices an almond tree in the middle of a field, which he notes only grows when cultivated. Almond trees are the ruins of the villages he is seeking, as he writes:

When I looked at the open green fields spread on both sides of my path I could see more almond trees that I had failed to notice before I recognized their significance. … There to the west Kufra must have stood and nearby to the south Bira, Dana and Tireh. With the possible location of the Arab villages, the old features of this cemetery of a land began to emerge, illuminated by the white blossoms of the almond trees, marked by the petals that slowly glided down to the ground around them in utter, hushed silence.

That same hallowed sense of loss is in Israeli work as well. As early as 1963, the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua wrote about a deserted Palestinian village hidden by Israeli-planted trees in his novella Facing the Forest. Former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti used 1946 maps to hunt for the disappeared Palestinian rural world in Sacred Landscape. “I would spread the relevant map on the ground, and suddenly the old landscape arose like an apparition,” he wrote. “And each plot and every prominent feature had its Arabic name marked on the map, so poetic and so apt that my heart ached.”

***

Palestinians, too, have mourned the lost villages, none so exhaustively as Walid Khalidi in his 700-page memoir, All That Remains. But Shehadeh combines the sadness of a Palestinian perspective with the poetry of a lost landscape and the escapades of his strong-willed uncle.

At times, Shehadeh’s lengthy rants can get tiresome, particularly because he pits Palestinian rural life against Israeli modernity. He notes that the goats and sheep that used to graze in the Galilee have given way to “lumbering grain-fed cows,” who pollute the air with their “fabled flatulence.” A look at the shopping malls and subdivisions in today’s Ramallah suggests that the same modernity may have beset the region even if the Palestinian villages had remained.

And while Shehadeh’s books have found an increasingly warm reception, his name is far better known outside the West Bank than it is at home, because his work is written in English, the language in which he was educated. Only two of his literary books have made it into Arabic, according to Omar Hamilton, creative producer of the four-year-old annual Palestine Festival of Literature.

The torrent of books on Palestinian life is hardly close to stopping. Tamari said that since the 1990s, students, researchers, and social clubs have been gathering oral histories of 1948 and its aftermath. Other Palestinians are exploring West Bank life under Jordan in the 1950s and ’60s. Humor is also gradually seeping through the lines, such as Ramallah-based Suad Amiry’s 2010 collection of women’s stories, Menopausal Palestine. For Shehadeh, it’s a welcome development.

“So many people feel so much weight that people try to tell the whole story from the beginning to end, and there is nothing worse for small books than trying to tell the whole story,” Shehadeh said. “Now people are feeling relieved of the whole story because 1948 has been dealt with.”

In the heady days at the end of 2008 and early 2009, the New York Times Magazine hired Kander, an accomplished editorial and fine art photographer, to produce “Obama’s People,” a portfolio of spare, flatly lit individual portraits of 52 members of the president-elect’s transition team. Kander and Times photo director Kathy Ryan called it an “athletic” challenge to corral Obama staffers into shoots in Washington and Chicago as they plowed into executive office at full throttle. All but the most seasoned Washington hands (Clinton, Pelosi, Biden) look rumpled, harried, and disheveled, which is partly Kander’s portraiture style and partly due to the palpable post-election giddiness. Rahm Emanuel, Kander recalls, burst onto the set, shook hands with everyone, said, “Well, this is like my bar mitzvah,” stood for a portrait that accentuates his raccoon-like eye sockets, then barreled out of the hotel conference-room lobby to things that at the time seemed vitally important. “He will be Obama’s chief of staff,” reads the caption to the image showing Emanuel with his suit jacket spread wide as if reaching for holstered six-shooters.

Kander’s images of China along the Yangtze are just as athletic, in their own way: 77 plates shot during five trips in three years from 2005 to 2007. He worked against the current, from the mouth near Shanghai—40 miles wide, the Pacific ocean’s largest pollutant, shuttling 10,000 ships a day—to its source in western Qinghai province, over the Three Gorges. By evidence of what’s on view, Kander slogged through tidal mud, rambled in construction sites, climbed abandoned buildings, trekked to remote frozen banks, and waited under invariably hazy skies for a scene to empty of locals or boats and repopulate in a compositionally sound manner. Despite the apparent difficulty in getting to these vantage points, the mood in the photos is, by Kander’s own admission, contemplative, as if the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu were back composing lyrics to the river and its power to make humans seem puny and vain. “Fluttering from place to place,” wrote Du Fu, “I resemble/ A gull between heaven and earth.”

In modern China, though, where man has worked for millennia to dominate nature, often razing just to rebuild a semblance of what was already there, the power of the 4,100-mile Yangtze to make our aspirations seem small is further heightened in these photographs by the scale of the state’s new infrastructural ambitions. Where Kander confined Obama’s people to a tiny space, the better to humanize their larger-than-life personas, in China, the photographer steps further and further away from the Chinese—leaving them lost and diminished in frames with unbroken horizon lines and towering half-finished constructions: bridges, sea walls, apartment blocks, the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, the flooded Wu Gorge, and the snowy deserts of Qinghai.

Kander left Israel as an infant, following his father, an El Al pilot who, having lost his left eye, found himself forced to reinvent a life in South Africa. There, Kander received a Pentax camera for his bar mitzvah. His required South African national service landed him in an Air Force darkroom, developing and printing aerial pictures for two years in the early 1980s, and many of his landscapes of the Yangtze (and, in previous work, of the Arctic Circle, Los Angeles highway overpasses, the Jordanian desert, the American West, and Chernobyl) still retain a sense of floating or weightlessness.

In these terrifying but aesthetic landscapes, where supertankers can seem like bath toys, Kander finds small scenes of Chinese domestic life, or at least evidence of it having been lived. A man fishes in an inner tube in the pond-like calm of the dammed river, which once would have been so turbulent that elaborate rope tows were the only way upstream. Families gather under huge highway pylons for riverside tea and cards on a hot, lazy Sunday in the megacity Chongqing, chairs and tables set out on what viewers realize is the rubble of demolished housing. Clotheslines, tattooed bathers, solitary construction workers, empty chairs, nappers, and other ghostly remnants of human presence give the vastness scale but provide little comfort.

Kander calls this “simple domesticity pitted against the hugeness of our ideas” an echo of early 19th-century painters Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, whom he cites as sources. The Romantic lesson fits China’s assault on nature, as it does, in a way, Kander’s native Israel, too. In Yangtze, Kander sees “a people scarring their country, and a country scarring its people,” and though nothing in Israel’s public works comes close to the scale of the 1.8 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam—save for the project of statehood itself—Israel retains a similar conundrum of being rooted in a land that seems always a work in progress. This is also, not coincidentally, how Kander, who lives in England, describes himself.

Kander likes to say that his photographs can never be taken again, and he is right. (Rahm Emanuel, for one, has moved on.) But capturing a moment is, after all, the work of photography. As much as time is every photographer’s subject, so must change be its corollary. What Kander is interested in is the agent of change and the self-deception and hubris that fools us into thinking we are masters of it. Anyone or anything—China, Israel, Kander’s boyhood South Africa, Obama—seeking to subdue the forces of man or nature with projects on a super-human scale would do well to first observe the hazy pall over the banks of the Long River. As Kander makes clear, it has seen change you wouldn’t believe.

Maxie, my 5-year-old, is obsessed with K’tonton. You remember K’tonton, the “Jewish thumbling” who takes a ride on a chopping knife and wishes he hadn’t, who goes to synagogue and swings on a lulav, who takes a ride on a runaway dreidl? Even though the first K’tonton story was published in 1930, Maxie finds Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s tales about the Hebraic Tom Thumb to be as resonant and hilarious as this afternoon’s episode of Phineas and Ferb.

Maxie’s favorite bedtime reading is The Best of K’tonton, a compilation of 16 (not-so-) tall tales from three early K’tonton books: The Adventures of K’tonton, K’tonton in Israel, and K’tonton on an Island in the Sea. All are out of print, but there are lots of affordable used copies of the compilation (published in 1988) floating around the Internet.

For Maxie, K’tonton has just the right amount of scary. Our hero decides to ride the knife like a bucking bronco while his mother is chopping fish for Shabbat, then winds up falling off and having to dodge the flashing silver knife while throwing himself desperately around the bowl of raw fish bits. (Of course, his mother finally sees him, picks him up with two fingers and rinses him under the kitchen faucet. She doesn’t even get mad!) He gets accidentally folded inside a hamantashen, but he winds up cheering up a sad little boy on Purim. On Rosh Hashanah, he knocks over a cup of honey and lets a stray kitten take the blame, then he tells the truth on Yom Kippur. (The kitten forgives him.) He gets shipwrecked on a deserted island, but he befriends all the animals and eventually returns to civilization on a seaweed raft.

K’tonton is small and seemingly powerless—a stand-in for 5-year-olds everywhere—but the little guy has agency. He gets out of every scrape; he does mitzvot; he sees the world. He takes huge risks, like shinnying up a giant lulav and stowing away in a carry-on on a trip to Israel, but everything always comes out OK. What could be more enticing to a young reader?

Furthermore, K’tonton is the story of a desperately wanted child, an ancient and beautiful theme—think of the number of fairy tales that address this primal need, from Abraham and Sarah onward. The Best of K’tonton opens with a magical old woman granting K’tonton’s mother’s fondest wish: “Ah, that I might have a child! I shouldn’t mind if he were no bigger than a thumb.” What child wouldn’t like to imagine her own parents wanting her so much? Only the most cynical adult would point out that the magical old woman didn’t have to be so literal in her wish-granting. An etrog box becomes K’tonton’s cradle; his parents never for a moment wish he were bigger. All the descriptions of K’tonton’s wee shirts and suits and snacks are like crack to Maxie, given children’s love of tiny things. K’tonton is Polly Pocket in itsy-bitsy tzitzis. And I think the stories address children’s own, perhaps unexamined, ambivalence about getting big.

Of course, American-Jewish stories are often rife with another kind of ambivalence: the tension of being both Jewish and American. The K’tonton stories resolve that tension in a wholly happy way. “On the one hand, K’tonton is ritually observant, a good little Jewish boy,” pointed out Jonathan Krasner, assistant professor of the American Jewish Experience at Hebrew Union College. “But he’s also completely acculturated. In the 1930s American Jews were eager to present themselves as Americans and to minimize the differences between them and their compatriots. And in the illustrations, K’tonton looks American. He’s a fun-loving, spunky, energetic, curious kid who gets in trouble. He’s not a stereotype of a kid in cheder bent over his books. He reflects a more American ideal of what a kid is. Weilerstein managed to create a perfect synthesis.”

Krasner told Weilerstein’s fascinating personal history in “Sadie Rose Weilerstein through the Looking Glass: K’tonton and the American Jewish Zeitgeist,” an essay in The Women Who Reconstructed American Jewish Education, 1910-1965 (which was edited by one Carol K. Ingall, my mother, who introduced me to K’tonton in the 1970s). Weilerstein was born in 1894 in Rochester, New York, the daughter of intellectual Jewish émigrés from Lithuania. As a child, she and her sisters would act out scenes from Little Women while washing the dishes. The girls were encouraged to go to college, which wasn’t common in that era. Weilerstein became an early feminist, working for women’s suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony. She graduated from the University of Rochester in 1917, taught English for a few years at the Rochester School for the Deaf, then married a young Conservative rabbi and moved to Brooklyn.

At first she wrote stories only for her children. But her mother, behaving like the stereotype of a Jewish mother, marched a handful of her daughter’s stories over to the New York Public Library, demanding to know if they were any good. A Jewish librarian there directed her to Bloch, an educational Jewish publishing house that wound up putting out Weilerstein’s first book, What Danny Did, in 1928. Outlook, the National Women’s League of United Synagogue’s magazine, published the first K’tonton story in 1930.

Weilerstein’s work was immediately a hit. As a writer, she was conscious of how to make a story fun. She used lots of onomatopoeia and repetition and didn’t offer dry-as-dust moral lectures. Until she came along, there were very few Jewish children’s books, and those that existed were hectoring and syrupy.

“They were all about obedience and knowing your place and being patient and having self-control,” Krasner said. (The Jews were hardly alone in seeing children’s literature as an opportunity for paginated finger-wagging. Early British and American children’s books were also drearily didactic, as the childen’s book expert Leonard S. Marcus points out in his seminal history of children’s literature, Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature.)

Henrietta Szold, the pioneering Zionist and founder of Hadassah, praised Weilerstein’s work in a 1936 letter: “There is no writing down to what is erroneously in my opinion considered a child’s comprehension of language. The simplicity of the style is attractive to the grown-up as I am sure it must be to the child reader.”

K’tonton’s lightness and brightness was inspired by earlier, darker tales. Weilerstein didn’t draw just from Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, but also from S. Y. Agnon’s The Story of Rabbi Gadiel the Baby, about a miniature medieval rabbi who saves Jews from a blood libel. Weilerstein’s 5-year-old son overheard her and her husband discussing the story and asked what they were talking about. Weilerstein, preferring not to share the details of vampiric murder accusations and pogroms with her small child, wound up spinning the tale into K’tonton. (Weilerstein’s husband named the character—the name literally means “very little.”)

When Maxie and I cuddle and read The Best of K’tonton, Josie rolls her eyes. At 8, she finds the stories preachy and unsophisticated. But the stand-alone micro-chapters, the black-and-white morals, and the just-suspenseful-enough qualities of the tales keep Maxie on the edge of her seat. Eventually she’ll outgrow these tales too. Jonathan, my husband, tells me his grandmother used to read K’tonton to him. Isn’t it clear that values and culture aren’t transmitted only through ritual and religious practice, but also through stories? Could there be a more joyful means of transmission?

On Vox Tablet this week, host Sara Ivry presents Rakoff, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor, with three scenarios generally deemed to be good fun and asks him to present his more cautious take on them. (Sound designer Jonathan Mitchell helped her in the project.) Rakoff also discusses the origins of his pessimism and how he copes with a life-threatening illness—while writing the book, he learned he had cancer and is now undergoing chemotherapy—without the armor of positive thinking.

You see, I read the book. And it infuriated me. I loved the beginning passionately, then felt increasingly angry and hoodwinked as it went on. The Elizabeth Gilbert who went to Italy to rediscover food and sensory pleasures after the breakup of her marriage was hilarious and witty. I loved her description of the “gorgeous flower-chain of curses” tossed onto a soccer field by an old Italian man watching the game. I loved that she was an unabashed word nerd like me, telling us that the word for fan in Italian is “tifoso,” derived from the word for typhus—“in other words, one who is mightily fevered.” I loved that she lusted for her young Roman conversation partners but knew that acting on that lust was a mistake.

Oh, I knew Gilbert had done some stupid things in the past. But she owned them. I respected the way she was cryptic about what killed her marriage—she was protecting her husband. I liked the way she was rueful about her self-destructive passion for a younger actor/writer/poet/yogi. When Gilbert took off for Italy, leaving both ex-husband and lover behind, I rooted for her. I rejoiced as she began to eat again. I wanted to suck down plates of pasta with her and giggle over glasses of Barolo. She was my buddy.

But then she left Italy. She went to India to learn how to pray. And I started to turn on her. At first, I made excuses for her inability to write about faith and grace with the same charm she conjured up when she wrote about food. After all, Anne Lamott had the same trouble in Traveling Mercies; it’s hard to make something as internal as spirituality feel immediate. The writing-class rule is “show, don’t tell,” but how do you externalize belief? The book began to feel labored. When Liz wrote about her difficulty meditating and being silent, her self-deprecation started to come off as cutesy. The chattiness I’d loved in Italy was starting to feel glib.

And then one scene pulled the yoga mat out from under me completely.

It’s the scene in which—spoiler alert—Gilbert has a revelatory, out-of-body meeting with her husband’s spirit on an ashram rooftop. She and her husband’s spirit forgive each other, and it is beautiful. The divide between them is gone. Suddenly, his anger and hurt evaporate, because she and he have transcended their earthly selves and their souls have communed.

I was infuriated by Gilbert’s creation of a situation in which she’s been absolved, in which her husband’s soul has done something the man himself could not. It felt like the laziest sort of self-justifying hippie nonsense. I think you have to live with people not liking you. And it’s hard for people like Gilbert (and me), people who really want to be liked, but that is the real work, accepting that not everyone will like you. It’s harder than creating a transcendent moment in which the other person really does forgive you, even if he doesn’t know it consciously.

Of course, I can’t know that Gilbert’s ex’s spirit didn’t meet hers on the astral plane. But I think it’s much more challenging and meaningful to accept that you may never receive absolution. It is braver—and I think more Jewish—to do everything in your power to make right the wrong you’ve done and still acknowledge that forgiveness may not be granted. It’s miserable to live with loose ends. It’s prettier to conjure up resolutions. But it isn’t authentic.

I finished the book because I am a masochist, but I was seething. So much self-examination to so little end! Maybe I just can’t escape my earthly Jewish guilt and perpetual ambivalence about everything. I realize that Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t Jewish, and she’s more than entitled to her own freeform spirituality. But it made me start thinking about how Judaism is more about community than self-acceptance. Ours is not a full-on feel-good religion, like Gilbert’s version of Christi-Bu-ism. But neither is it self-aggrandizing pablum. I do believe the world would be a better place if we spent more time turned outward than inward.

I think back to when I lived in San Francisco and heard so many High Holiday sermons about self-forgiveness—so much talk about forgiving ourselves, so little emphasis on apologizing to others. I think the reason I’m more comfortable with the word “religion” than the word “spirituality” is that religion involves doing rather than just thinking and feeling. Meditation and silence aren’t enough. Healing the world—the actual, physical world—is a more lasting goal.

I don’t want to be too hard on Gilbert. I actually think she did heal the world—her book made people happy. (Not me. Other people.) That’s nothing to sneeze at. Helping readers forget their troubles for a while, letting them in on a life of world travel and adventure, is a mitzvah. I understand that the real Elizabeth Gilbert is a lovely and charitable person. I am glad that she—another spoiler alert—found love again, and I don’t begrudge her a kid-free footloose life, a gazillion dollars, or the privilege of being played by a toothy movie star with lots of hair. But I still think the Jewish takeaway is that Eat Pray Love’s spiritual vision may be a nice place to visit, but we shouldn’t want to live there.

Donner notes that a small number of Quranic passages speak of believers from among the People of the Book, i.e., Jews and/or Christians. Thus sura 3:199, one of the two examples given, says that “There are among the People of the Book those who believe in God and what he has sent down to you and was sent down to them.” Since the Quran as a whole is addressed to believers, this suggests to him that Muhammad’s followers did not form a separate confessional community, but rather included monotheists from any community who believed in God and the last day and were prepared to live piously. He also notes that Abraham is singled out as neither a Jew nor a Christian; that Jews are mentioned, in a document Muhammad drew up in Medina, as forming a community of or along with believers; and that every monotheist could agree to the first part of the Muslim profession of faith, “there is no God but God”: It is this phrase alone that appears on coins, papyri, and inscriptions down to about 685. Donner believes fear of imminent judgment drew the believers together, and by the end of Muhammad’s life they had turned militant in their desire to establish the kingdom of God on earth. Even so, the “violent conquest” model does not make sociological sense in Donner’s view, and there is little sign of destruction in the archaeological record. All monotheists will have found a place in the new community, without needing to convert, he suggests. It was not until the reign of Abd al-Malik (685-705) that Islam began to emerge as a separate confessional community of its own.

Donner’s book has already been hailed in a manner showing that its thesis appeals deeply to American liberals: Here they find the nice, tolerant, and open Islam that they hanker for. If the book attains a wide readership and succeeds in persuading the broad American public that Muslims are not the ogres they tend to imagine, it will have done a useful job. As a contribution to scholarship, however, it leaves something to be desired.

The main problem is that the only direct evidence for Donner’s central thesis is the Quranic verses on the believing People of the Book; all the rest is conjecture. The verses in question tell us nothing about events after the death of the Prophet, and it has to be said that the Medinese suras of which they form a part are not suggestive of ecumenicalism. They are full of bitterly hostile polemics against Jews and Christians, both of whom are charged with polytheism, deification of their own leaders, deification of themselves, and more besides. The Jews are faulted for rejecting Jesus, the Christians for deifying him. If there were believers among the People of the Book in Medina, an obvious explanation would be that they were Jewish Christians, a well-known hypothesis that Donner does not consider. The Jacobite, Nestorian, and Melkite Christians that the Muslims encountered in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq were unquestionably polytheists by Quranic standards, and with all due respect to Donner, the fact that they disagreed about Christology does not help, given that their disputes were premised on Christ’s divinity.

Donner is quite right that the first part of the Muslim confession of faith would have been acceptable to all monotheists. “It is not unreasonable to propose, then, that many Christians and Jews of Syria, Iraq, and other areas, as monotheists, could have found a place in the expanding community of Believers,” he writes. Maybe they could have, but did they? People do not usually get together merely because their slogans sound compatible. Was the Muslim confession of faith actually formulated to appeal to the Jews and Christians? Sebeos, writing not long after the 660s, did not think so. According to him, Mu’awiya sent a letter to the Byzantine ruler Constans (641-68) telling him to “abandon that vain cult which you learned from childhood. Deny that Jesus and turn to the great God whom I worship, the God of our father Abraham.” Sebeos was obviously not aware that Islam was an ecumenical movement: From what he had heard, the Muslims regarded worship of the one God as incompatible with belief in the Christian Jesus. Donner nonetheless holds that Sebeos, Isho’yahb (c. 647), and Bar Penkaye (c. 690) all offer evidence that “some Christians and Jews may have been fully integrated, as such, into the early community of Believers.” His evidence is that Sebeos identifies the first governor appointed by the Muslims to Jerusalem as a Jew, that Isho’yahb tells us that the Muslim conquerors of Iraq honored Christianity and gave gifts to monasteries and churches, and that Bar Penkaye says that there were not a few Christians among the Arab conquerors of Iraq. But evidence for warm attitudes and collaborators is not evidence for full integration without conversion.

The Christian secretaries that Donner also adduces are not evidence either, since they were a permanent feature of the medieval Muslim world, and besides the Muslims also used Zoroastrian secretaries, though they were well aware that Zoroastrians were not monotheists. Isho’yahb, moreover, says of the Christians of Oman that they only had to part with half their property in order to remain Christians, while Bar Penkaye says that “of each person they required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished.” In other words, both sources confirm the conventional view that non-Muslims had to pay taxes in order to retain their faith. Indeed, Donner himself later speaks of cities peacefully absorbed in exchange for a tax. If it was by incorporating monotheist communities as tributaries into their domains that the Believers worked toward their goal of establishing the hegemony of God’s law, Donner’s seemingly revisionist view is simply the conventional one. On the other hand, if he means that some Jews and Christians became full members of the community in the sense of not having to pay the taxes imposed on “protected people,” he has not produced any evidence.

How are we to envisage Christians and Jews “fully integrated, as such, into the early community of Believers”? The Believers, according to Donner, were all those who accepted belief in God and the last day, and who were prepared to live piously; and pious living meant following Quranic law: engaging in regular prayer, paying alms, fasting during the daytime hours of Ramadan, and going on pilgrimage to Mecca. But how could a community endowed with its own law and pilgrimage center be lacking in confessional identity? And how could Christians and Jews who followed Quranic law remain Jews and Christians? Donner has no answer to the first question and two contradictory answers, both implicit, to the second. The first implicit answer is that Jews and Christians who joined the movement did not actually have to follow Quranic law: The ecumenical quality of the Believers’ movement allowed it “to accommodate within itself, in addition to those Arabians who followed Qur’anic law, many Jews and especially (it seems) Christians who shared a commitment to righteous living.” One takes it that Arabians followed Quranic law while Jews and Christians practiced righteous living in other ways, presumably by following their own law. In line with this, Donner says that the terms “Muslim” and “Believer” eventually came to mean those who lived by Quranic law as opposed to Jews and Christians: Previously, one infers, the terms had included both those who practiced Quranic law and those who lived piously without doing so. But if Jews and Christians did not follow Quranic law, in what sense were they fully integrated as members of the community of Believers? Are we to imagine a community in which salvation was possible by three different laws (and indeed three different theologies)? The conception may not be impossible, but it is not exactly effortless either, least of all in a situation in which one party has established its supremacy over the other two by conquest.

The other implicit solution is that all the Believers did follow identical laws, just not Quranic ones, or this at least is what the Arabian Believers and the Christians did in connection with prayer. The early tradition describes a qibla musharriqa, an east-facing prayer-orientation, Donner says, suggesting that we may have here the memory of a stage when the Muslims faced eastward in prayer like the Christians. Indeed, he adds, the “vague” reports of how Muhammad himself changed the direction of prayer to Mecca should perhaps be seen as a retouched, vestigial memory of the later change whereby the Muslims began to differentiate themselves from their erstwhile Christian co-believers. This can hardly be right, given that it is the Jewish prayer-orientation to Jerusalem, not the Christian orientation to the east, that Muhammad is said to have abandoned in favor of Mecca. But even if we let that pass, what are we to do with the Jews who prayed in a different direction from the other two? And quite apart from that, if Muhammad did not himself institute the qibla to Mecca, how can the pilgrimage prescribed in the Quran have been to Mecca? Nothing quite seems to fit. If all Donner wants to say is that the Muslim conquerors were happy to extend favors to Jewish and Christian collaborators, he is perfectly right, but this is neither new nor connected with monotheism, since they were happy to collaborate with Zoroastrians too.

Is he really being revisionist or just perfectly conventional? One is never quite sure. The claim that the “violent conquest” model should be discarded is ultra-revisionist: It goes against the testimony of both contemporary sources (as Donner acknowledges) and the later tradition, about which he himself has written a well-known book. Now he speaks of the “conquerors” and “conquered” people in quotation marks. But at the same time he still grants that there were campaigns and battles; he even gives us a summary based on his 1981 book, The Early Islamic Conquests. He also admits that there was some pillaging and taking of captives, though (once more going against the contemporary sources) he does his best to belittle both activities. But if you occupy a country by means of battles, in what sense have you not engaged in “violent conquest”? The expression is surely a tautology. What Donner turns out to mean is simply the well-known fact that the Muslims did not engage in systematic destruction of towns, churches, and other religious buildings, and that they were not out to impose their religion by force. The “violent conquest” model is wrong, he tells us, because it is predicated on the mistaken notion that the “conquerors” (his quotation marks) came with the intention of imposing a new religion by force on local populations. How seriously is one meant to take this? No scholar believes that the Muslim conquerors were out to impose their religion by force; even going back a century or more I cannot think of any who has espoused this view. Yet all scholars apart from Donner and (in a different vein) Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren accept that the Muslims engaged in “violent conquest.” Laymen may still need to be reminded that the Muslims were not out to impose their beliefs by force, but to present lay misconceptions as the basis of a scholarly consensus is not playing it straight.

If all Donner means to affirm is that the Muslim conquests were relatively swift and surgical operations that left urban life, religious communities, and complex organization intact, then he is simply affirming the conventional view. But what has that got to do with ecumenicalism? The Muslims did not engage in systematic destruction of towns or religious buildings, regardless of whether they were monotheist, Zoroastrian, or (in Harran) pagan. Later he tones down the revisionist claim to the innocuous point that the sources’ emphasis on the military dimension of the expansion has obscured its nature as a monotheistic reform movement that many local communities “may have seen little reason to oppose.” At another point he seems implicitly to abandon his thesis, for he tells us that the early Kharijites “represented the survival in its purest form of the original pietistic impetus of the Believers’ movement.” Are we to see the Kharijites as the bearers of ecumenicalism, then? In the contemporary Middle East, militant fundamentalists are often dubbed “Kharijites,” with considerable justice. But it is hard to get one’s mind around Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as representatives of ecumenicalism.

Donner says so many strange things in this book that one wonders what is going on. In the preface he tells us that in his view Islam began as a religious movement, not as a social, economic, or “national” one, and affirms that all his predecessors from Hubert Grimme (1892) until today, including Montgomery Watt, myself, and my classicist colleague Glen Bowersock, have argued that the movement was “really” a kind of nationalist or nativist political adventure to which religion was secondary and, by implication, a mere pretext for the real objectives. This is bizarre. Is Donner really saying that a movement has to be either religious or political, economic or social? Does he really think that Osama bin Laden and his like are using Islam as a mere pretext, or alternatively that we are all mistaken in seeing their aim as political? Was religion mere eyewash when Moses used it to organize a revolt in Egypt? Was Vittorio Lanternari implying the same when he wrote his book on nativism in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia under the title The Religions of the Oppressed? Surely Donner has lived long enough to know that religion can articulate concerns of any kind and that the nature of the concern has no bearing on the sincerity of the conviction. Many people have sincerely believed in God and the last day without taking to arms in order to establish the kingdom of God on earth. The early Christians were among them. Muhammad’s followers in Arabia sincerely believed the same, yet set out to conquer. Why this difference? Presumably, it has something to do with Arabia. Yet Donner speaks of the historical accident that Islam arose in Arabia. He cannot possibly mean that there was nothing in Arabia that made the rise of Islam more likely there than in Siberia or India, or that if it had not arisen in Arabia, it would have done so somewhere else. Or can he? He seems to think of religion as individual convictions regarding matters spiritual and moral that are formed independently of external circumstances (“God-given,” as the believers themselves experience it) and that cannot articulate political aims without being a mere pretext. And yet at the same time he seems to think that religion can indeed cause sincere believers to form a state and take to arms against those who hold opposing convictions. It is hard to avoid the sense that he is arguing for incompatible positions.

Patricia Crone is a professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

It’s not easy to imagine someone even glancing at Joshua Cohen’s 817-page Modernist epic novel Witz and mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill Holocaust memoir or Eastern-European-genealogical romp, of the type that lands on the desks of staffers at Jewish magazines several times per week. But, as though to make absolutely certain that no one gets misled by the w-pronounced-as-a-v in the title, Cohen (at 29, an already-accomplished novelist and essayist) opens Witz with a sort of moat of difficulty. All seeking entry into its main narrative must cross.

For the first 20 pages or so, we find ourselves in a cubistically rendered mincha service in what seems to be an observant Jewish quarter somewhere in the contemporary United States. Then, we cross “from the world of the father to that of the mother,” in Cohen’s words, and land, still confused, at the Shabbos dinner of Hanna and Israel Israelian and their twelve semi-interchangeable daughters. At the end of the meal, Hanna will give birth, right there on the kitchen table, to a son, Benjamin, who happens to come out of the womb already a little old Jewish man. Benjamin will wind up being the last Jew on earth, and the novel’s protagonist. But we don’t know any of that yet.

The Shabbos dinner is divided obliquely into seven parts, one for each of the days of creation. In the first part, images of light are everywhere: The Israelians’ “table, like the sun, almost set”; Israel, finishing up work at his New York law firm before rushing home to New Jersey by sundown, has “the Sabbath to the left of him, Sabbath to the right, but there’s no Sabbath where he’s sitting—the sun stayed above him, just waiting.” In the next part, God creates water: Eldest daughter Rubina, making her bed before the guests (“the Dunkelspiels, the Kestenbaums, the Lembergs, the Friedmans”) arrive, imagines “her bed’s less a bed than an ocean.” Etcetera.

Cohen is not the only contemporary writer to arrange an ambitious novel according to kabbalistic stratagems, but he may be the most committed to the task—like Ulysses, Witz is a book that cries out for an annotated edition.

Cohen also has a Joycean yen for devising strange new compound words—“cleanscooks,” “pushpulling,” “tossturn,” “matzahballs,” “challahknife”—as well as for internal monologues that take place on toilet seats: One guest, Mr. Feigenbaum, spends most of the meal in the bathroom trying to defecate.

In the seventh section—which would be when God rested, for those of you who were asleep during that Hebrew School class—the guests gather up their coats, checking the pockets to make sure the Israelian girls haven’t helped themselves to their wallets. They go home. And then, as though it were the normal conclusion to a Shabbos dinner, the world’s last Jew is born, “His glasses’ lenses, smudgy with fluid, that and His, nu, you know, too, which is hairy as well, the beard down below and apparently, can it be, already circumcised … .”

• For former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, being stuck in Jerusalem is a disruption to his schedule of campaigning for his successor Gordon Brown. [AFP]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak took the national holiday as an occasion for frankness, saying that Israelis “shouldn’t delude ourselves”: “The growing alienation between us and the United States is not good for the state of Israel…The world isn’t willing to accept—and we won’t change that in 2010—the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more.” [AP]

• On Saturday night, the first Jewish book fair in Italy opened in Ferrara, the city that will host the future Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah. [JTA]

• A nuclear conference in Iran concluded with a statement demanding that “the Zionist regime” join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [AP]

What should we do when faced with a literary work that makes us want to scream like a mandrake in a Harry Potter novel (No. 1 on the American Library Association’s list of the most frequently banned books of the last decade, by the way)?

First, read the book. Screaming about the content and dangers of something you haven’t read is lunacy. My reaction to The Shepherd’s Granddaughter: The story is so broad and the characters so simplistic and nuance-free, it’s more like a Balinese puppet play than a fully realized novel. It’s also written in a sonorous, self-important tone that would have annoyed me as a 7th grader. I liked books with strong characterization, ethical shading, and humor—qualities this book lacks completely. As an adult, I found this book infuriating and distressing, but it’s worth considering that a kid unfamiliar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may simply be bored and irked.

OK, you say, but what if my kid does read it? Take a deep breath. When we get shrill and hyperbolic and demonize any book—just as when we go all Reefer Madness about drug education or insist that every act of premarital sex leads to AIDS, pregnancy, warts, and demon babies with gills—we’re missing an opportunity for education. If the kid reads a book like The Shepherd’s Granddaughter and doesn’t become a suicide bomber, we’ve proven ourselves to be clueless and untrustworthy as authority figures. We’ve closed the door to open, honest discussion.

And remember, we parents do have influence over our kids. If Josie, my 8-year-old, brought The Shepherd’s Granddaughter home from the library, I’d have a conversation with her about its bias. It’s part of my job as a parent. How do novels differ from history? Does fiction have an obligation to tell everyone’s story? Josie and I had a tough talk about Little House on the Prairie, which features some mighty racist words about Indians. We had it about Dr. Dolittle, which treats Africans like buffoons. Great swaths of classic children’s literature come from a place of bias or privilege. It doesn’t mean we don’t read those books. It means we talk about them.

I hear you saying, “Stupid naïve mother! Your child is 8! Get back to me when she’s a teenager!” I do know we can’t police all the culture—music, movies, books—our children will ever consume. But by the time they’re in junior high or high school, they should know our values on controversial subjects. That too is part of the parental job assignment. If our kids don’t know what we believe, that’s our fault. No book can trump years of parenting.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course, is a particularly complicated subject for any parent to tackle. So, I asked a dozen or so Jewish librarians for their recommendations of middle-grade and young adult books that offer perspective without inducing narcolepsy. Here goes:

Samir and Yonatan, by Daniella Carmi. This book is perfectly appropriate for 7th and 8th graders. It’s told from the perspective of a Palestinian boy who befriends an Israeli boy while both are in the hospital. The writing is lyrical but also readable, with a lot of engaging dialogue.

Running on Eggs, by Anna Levine. This book, unfortunately out of print but available at many libraries and from used booksellers, is also fine for middle-schoolers. An Israeli and an Arab girl in Galilee become friends thanks to their shared love of running. As an American, I’m not sure how realistic the book is, so I asked my Israeli editor. He said, “The portrayal of an Israel with a track team of Arabs and Jews sounds like West Side Story’s version of New York City gang life: It’s technically possible that some thugs move in perfect choreography and resolve their differences in song and finger-snapping, but the reality is likely darker.” Duly noted.

Real Time, by Pnina Moed Kass. This frenetic, lightning-paced, scary, cinematic story made me feel like an old person. In other words, teenagers will love it. Several characters with different backgrounds, on different emotional journeys, board a bus that is subsequently bombed by a terrorist. Each entry has a time-stamp, like on 24. The narrative shifts rapidly among the German teenager descended from Nazis, the young kibbutznik, the Holocaust survivor, the Palestinian suicide bomber, the kind Palestinian doctor. (Just like The Breakfast Club, but with explosives!) In 2004, Real Time won the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Sydney Taylor Award for the best Jewish book for older readers.

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, by Valerie Zenatti. I adored this epistolary novel, which won a Sydney Taylor Honor in the older readers category as well as a host of other awards from secular librarians and booksellers. It’s my favorite title on this list. A Jewish girl asks her brother, a soldier, to throw a bottle with a letter in it into the Gaza sea. She’s hoping for a Palestinian girl pen-pal, but winds up with a sarcastic, angry Palestinian boy. The story consists of emails and instant messages between the two beautifully drawn characters. There’s humor, sadness, fear. The two characters have wildly different voices and views of the world. I think the book does justice to a complex conflict while completely holding its own from a literary perspective. “With strong, likable characters, a quick pace, suspense where there are bombings, and a good sense of place, this book is an excellent way for teens to learn about the challenges of living in Israel and Gaza, as well as the cultures,” Kathe Pinchuk, chair of the Sydney Taylor Committee the year the book won the award, said. “The hopefulness, the anger, and the fear and curiosity of the unknown are developed well.” The book’s author, Valerie Zenatti, is a French Jew whose family made aliya when she was a teenager.

If your middle-school- or high-school-aged child is drawn to lyrical writing, he or she will enjoy Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat, a memoir by a Palestinian woman who grew up during the Six Day War. The chapters are short and easy to read. The book focuses on Ibtisam’s daily life, not just politics or war. Kids will be fascinated by her stories of her father killing her beloved goat and of her brothers’ circumcisions. Israelis aren’t demonized—the perspective is that of a real child. It just feels immediate, and it’s gorgeously written.

The Flag of Childhood: Poems From the Middle East, compiled by Naomi Shihab Nye (first published as Space Between Our Footsteps, which garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal) offers 60 poems for kids written by adult poets from throughout the Middle East. Here’s one I’d share with kids of all backgrounds:

“I Do Not Blame You”
By Samih al-Qasim

Your wings are small for this storm –
I do not blame you.
You’re good, and frightened, and
I am the hurricane. I used to be a wing
Struggling in the storm
But then I became the storm,
Lacking light, shade, or a wise language.
And now I confess
To be a lost planet circling a lost world
And I do not blame you:
What has tender mint to do with the storm?

Translated by Sharif S. Elmusa and Naomi Shihab Nye

There’s also an Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary called Promises, in which seven Israeli and Palestinian kids aged 9 to 12 get to know each other. The version aimed at schools, libraries, and other institutions comes with a study guide created by educators and the filmmakers—it has classroom activities, worksheets, poems, readings, lesson plans, and recommendations for further reading. Sadly, that one is expensive. The version intended for home use is only $29 but doesn’t come with the extras.

In an amusing bit of irony, the American Library Association just published its list of the 100 most frequently banned or challenged books of the last decade. The list includes two Jewish classics: Summer of My German Soldier (No. 55 on the ALA list), challenged or banned for profanity, offensive racial stereotypes, and “subject matter that sets bad examples and gives students negative views of life,” and the Newbery Honor book The Upstairs Room (No. 79), challenged or banned on the basis of profanity. (I guess when the German Army’s advancing and you have to go hide in an attic, you’re supposed to say “darn” instead of the s-word.)

Jews can’t preach censorship without expecting our own books to get swept up in the tide. Shouldn’t that teach us that book-banning is a bad idea? We’re the people of the book, for crying out loud. Do we want to become China, trying to shut down all access to any media we disapprove of? The answer to hateful speech is more speech. It isn’t silence, or the slamming of doors.

It all sounds so sylvan and merry. But this year, in the Red Maple category—the recommended reading list for 7th and 8th graders—one of the 10 nominated books is The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter. And its inclusion is making a lot of Canadian Jews very unhappy. The book tells the story of Amani, a Palestinian girl in the West Bank who wants to be a shepherd like her grandfather. But the land that has been in her family for generations is now under Israeli occupation. Israeli soldiers prevent the family from harvesting their olives, grazing the sheep, or driving on the highways near their home. Israeli settlers poison the sheep’s water, bulldoze Amani’s house, and shoot and kill her dog. Amani’s father and uncle are beaten and thrown in jail; her father seeks justice and peace through negotiation, but her uncle believes in violent resistance. There is one sympathetic Jewish character, a teenage settler who realizes that the Jews are wrong and decides to leave the country. In a heavy-handed metaphor, the Israelis are repeatedly compared to wolves stalking the sheep. A Jewish rabbi and a lawyer who help Palestinians make brief appearances, but the book gives no indication that there is a serious Israeli peace movement.

The book was published in 2008 to mostly good reviews and little controversy. But when it was nominated to the 2010 Forest of Reading list, the uproar began. Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded that the book be “made unavailable” to students. “The Simon Wiesenthal Center does not promote censorship,” said president Avi Benlolo, “but the issue is that this book is so skewed and so overtly against the State of Israel. … Any school child who reads the book will grow to hate the State of Israel and possibly the Jewish people.” The Jewish Tribune, a publication of B’nai Brith Canada, ran a story with the provocative headline: “Could this book turn your child against Israel?” The story’s opening sentence: “Reading this book made me want to go to Palestine and kill Israelis.” The quote was attributed to a girl named Madelaine on the book review site Goodreads.com. Quoting her was Toronto parent and Jewish Tribune contributor Brian Henry, who also wrote an open letter to Ontario’s education minister demanding the book’s withdrawal from the reading list. “Unfortunately, that’s a perfectly natural reaction to this book,” Henry wrote. And in the same issue of the Tribune, Sheila Ward, a trustee of the Toronto District School Board, said, “I will move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off the school library shelves.”

Ward, it was clear, hadn’t read the book. “This book,” she wrote, “on the basis of what Mr. Henry has sent to me, is so blatantly biased that it is intolerable. I suspect I’ll be accused of censorship. If it means I will not support hate-provoking literature with no redeeming qualities, I am delighted to be called a censor.”

Anita Bromberg, national director of legal affairs at B’nai Brith Canada, told me in an interview that calling the book into question had nothing to do with its literary merit. “The book isn’t badly written,” she says. “I’ve read most of it. What we are questioning is the educational value. Anyone without a lot of background or experience who was reading it would accept that everything in there gives context to what goes on in the Middle East, but it is one-sided, biased, and more based on propaganda than truth. I think this book is inappropriate to be on the list or in the school setting.”

The Canadian mainstream press has picked up on the story. For now, Toronto school officials say the book will remain in school libraries, but Henry is filing a formal complaint. Concern over the book’s one-sidedness is understandable. But there’s a larger question here: How do we determine which books children should be allowed to read? Who should get to decide whether books are carried in school libraries or added to curricula?

Angela Maycock, assistant director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, believes that any demand for restriction is risky. “It quickly becomes a slippery slope,” she says. “Most of the time, people are motivated by genuine concern, fearing that harm will come to young people from being exposed to a book. That’s a laudable goal, wanting to keep young people safe. But where we get into trouble is when one group wants the power to restrict the access of everyone. In a library, everyone gets to choose for themselves. No one is required to read The Shepherd’s Granddaughter.”

Anyone offended by a book, says Joan E. Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, has recourse. “You don’t have to be quiet if you don’t like something,” Bertin says. “Anybody can file a complaint. There’s generally a review process. But it’s not about whether someone likes the message but whether teachers and librarians think the book has pedagogical value or promotes reading. The problem with saying ‘this offends me, and therefore it shouldn’t exist’ is that when drawn to its larger conclusion, nothing should exist because everything offends someone. That would shut down all but the banal and bland, and it shuts down the ability to have a conversation about all kinds of matters of public interest.”

So, how should Jewish communal organizations react to literature and art they perceive as anti-Israel? “B’nai Brith could ask to have a panel discussion at schools about the book’s representations of Israel and why they find them upsetting, though that would mean they’d have to listen to others who don’t agree with them,” Bertin suggests. “In my dream world, we’d be having discussions about why people react the way they do, and maybe by doing that, we’d also get people to respect and understand other people’s sensibilities.” The question of balance—whether parents and educators should require a book or a library to strive toward even-handedness—is a trickier one. “If you have 10 books on evolution, do you need 10 books on creationism?” Bertin asks. “If you have 10 books on the Holocaust, do you need 10 books by Holocaust deniers? Balance is an impossible proposition. We strive for a diversity of viewpoints and a wide range of thoughts and opinions so individuals can choose.”

B’nai Brith and the Friends of the Wiesenthal Center are of course not alone in advocating censorship (whether or not they choose to call it that) of potentially upsetting books. In recent years parents have challenged Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of its use of the N word; Texas School Board members have rewritten children’s textbooks to reflect their beliefs that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation; the Spertus Museum in Chicago closed a 2008 exhibition of historical maps of the Middle East and contemporary art because some Jews felt the maps reflected an anti-Israeli point of view. In 2006, Brandeis University took down an exhibition of art by teenagers from Palestinian refugee camps, curated by an Israeli student.

But might young people have better critical faculties than we give them credit for? Remember Madelaine, the teenaged girl who supposedly wants to kill Israelis after reading The Shepherd’s Granddaughter? If you actually read her Goodreads review, you’ll see that she goes on to say the following: “Please allow me to explain that this feeling, luckily, did not last. Once I finished the book and spent a few minutes sitting quietly in a corner, I calmed down. I promise, I no longer want to kill anyone. But I have never, ever read a book that made me so incredibly angry … because of the endless, frustrating parade of injustices that happen to the protagonist and her family. That’s why it gets three stars, by the way—the story really wasn’t that great, but I felt it deserved credit for stirring such powerful emotions in me. … So, I’m asking my more politically-savvy Goodreads friends to please explain the other side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This clusterfuck cannot be nearly as simple as The Shepherd’s Granddaughter makes it seem.”

Does that sound like it was written by someone who seriously wants to kill Jews? Or someone without critical faculties? No. This young reader (she’s 21, as her profile says—it’s unclear where the Jewish Tribune got the idea she was a teenager) is actually asking to be educated. But Brian Henry didn’t quote that part of her review. And being disingenuous and hyperbolically alarmist about the threats posed by novels—as opposed to the threats caused by shutting down all discussion—means we don’t get the chance to elucidate and debate. If The Shepherd’s Granddaughter can teach us anything, it’s that even educated people with a glorious literary tradition sometimes feel justified in banning books. And we’re all poorer for it.

I was seated at a table in the back, and had been for some time, getting nowhere on the whatever-the-hell it was I was struggling uselessly to write for some goddamn reason. I watched over the top of my laptop as one of the people from the group, a young woman who looked in her early 20s with close-cropped yellow hair and the practiced sincerity of a funeral director or a liberal arts post-grad, was shaking hands and exchanging warm smiles with each woman in turn. She carried a small black-and-red paperback in her hand—I tried to catch a glimpse of the title, but she clutched it, Holy Bible-style, to her chest. Then I noticed, with a shiver of horror, that the others were all holding their own copies of the same black-and-red volume.

Oh Dear God, I thought. It’s a fucking book club.

Every member, whether or not she had a shoulder bag, chose to carry her paperback tucked under her arm or clutched to her chest, like dead animals strapped to the roof of a brave hunter’s car.

With their free hands, they carried their coffees and took their seats around the table. Because I’m a glutton for self-punishment, I hit the mute button on my computer. The waiter took their dinner order—the No. 11 with chicken was a popular choice—and the young woman with the cropped yellow hair leaned forward and welcomed them.

“Some of you I know,” she said, which the women somehow found hilarious, “and some of you we’re just meeting.”

Yellow Hair went on to explain that if she seemed tired (she didn’t), it was because she had been up all night for three nights reading this wonderful book, which she adored. She really felt she had really like, you know, connected to the main character. It was such a complex, intricate story that she felt it would be a good idea to go around the table and have everyone say the one word they thought perfectly summarized it. She started the ball rolling by sitting back in her seat, folding her arms across her chest, and asserting, “Heartbreaking.”

Everyone nodded solemnly. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

I should admit that this was a particularly bad time for me to run into a book trial such as this, having recently been the strung-up victim of one myself. The group that tried and condemned my writing, though, wasn’t made up of strangers. They were friends. I had had the temerity to write about a close friend of ours who was dying. Within the piece I examined the death of my beloved grandfather, the wasting away of my Alzheimer’s-ridden grandmother, the tragic death of a brother I never met, and anticipated my own rage that would surely follow my friend’s death. Our mutual friends declared it “opportunistic” of me to write about her. It was, they said, “in poor taste” and “wrong.” Perhaps I would have fared better with a jury of strangers.

“Gabby?” asked Yellow Hair to the woman sitting beside her.

“Moving,” said Gabby.

Everyone nodded. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

“Very,” said Yellow Hair. “Sandra?”

“Touching,” said Sandra.

They all nodded solemnly. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

“Danielle?” said Yellow Hair.

“Important,” said Danielle.

They all nodded solemnly.

“Important’s good,” said Yellow Hair. “Mara?”

“Funny,” said Mara.

A heavy silence fell over the court. The F word.

“Funny?” asked Yellow Hair. “I didn’t see it as funny.”

“Not funny,” explained Mara. “Comical. Comedic.”

People are funny, too, and by “funny,” I mean horrifying and detestable. Go visit our relatives at the zoo; there’s always that one monkey sitting calmly by himself, picking his feet, or gazing peacefully into the sky. Then the other monkeys come over, and everyone goes, well, apeshit.

“What are these?” my son asks, pointing up at the crazed monkeys.

“Your grandparents,” I say.

Yellow Hair shrugged and looked to the others. The others shrugged.

“But moving,” added Mara quickly. “Funny in a moving way.”

“Definitely moving,” said Yellow Hair. “I thought it was very moving.”

“Me, too,” said Mara. “Very.” Still feeling she hadn’t fully clawed her way back into respectability, she added: “Much more moving than the film.”

“Oh, definitely,” said Yellow Hair.

The ship of unanimity sailed on. Joyce went with “engaging,” Cheryl declared the book “brave,” and Nora proclaimed it “refreshing and absorbing,” which is actually three words, but since they were words everyone agreed with, her violation of the rules was overlooked.

I began to wonder just what this heartbreaking, moving, touching, important, funny in a moving way, refreshing, absorbing book was, when Yellow Hair called on Sally, a heavy, older woman at the far end of the table.

“Trite,” said Sally.

Uh-oh.

“Really,” she continued. “Just a big cliche.”

Sally didn’t like the book’s heavy female protagonist. She’d seen it before, heard it before; Sally wanted to know why all heavy protagonists are so pure and good, and if they are, why did it matter that they are heavy.

“I just saw it coming,” said Sally. “A mile away.”

“I can see that,” said Sandra.

Yellow Hair turned to look at her.

“You said it was touching,” Yellow Hair said.

“It was,” said Sandra. “But it wasn’t surprising.”

“No,” said Mara. “It definitely wasn’t surprising. That’s why I said funny.”

Only moments before, the black-and-red paperback looked like it was going to survive; now, the tide began to turn. Some of the group took Sally’s point of view, some took Yellow Hair’s; some tried to bring the group back into agreement by reminding everyone at the table how much better the book was than the movie, but those who disliked the book seemed to prefer the movie, and a woman at the far end of the table admitted she hadn’t even read the book, and had only seen the movie. Yellow Hair wasn’t giving up.

“I guess,” she said, “different people react to different things differently.” But this book, she insisted, was something special, particularly the heavy main character, who was so real and human that it was hard for Yellow Hair to not feel what she felt, to see the world through her eyes, and to internalize all the complex—

“No. 11 with chicken?” called the waiter.

He had returned with a large tray loaded with plates, cups, and bowls.

“Over here,” said Yellow Hair.

“I had a No.11 with chicken, too,” said Sandra.

“We all did,” said Danielle. Everyone laughed.

I was at a literary festival recently, and members of the audience were interested in writing. I told them to read Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” first. Franz probably meant it to be about family, or existence in general, but it’s a pretty dead-on description of the writing life: You sit in a cage, starve to death, and nobody cares because they’re all off watching Avatar.

If you’re looking for love, don’t write. Odds are you’ll be hated. The best odds are that you’ll simply be ignored.

“Everything good here?” the waiter asked.

I noticed that the black-and-red paperbacks had been put away.

“Great,” said Yellow Hair.

Everyone nodded enthusiastically. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

If you’re looking for love, don’t be a writer. Be a No. 11 with chicken.

His mind gnawed by a neurological disease, he was motionless, blank, absent. When he died last week at the age of 82, the obits dryly listed his laurels: author, artist, political activist, bohemian. As is customary in such cases, most of the press reports kept the precise nature of his affliction—Alzheimer’s disease—deliberately vague. He died, they stated sotto voce, of a grave illness.

Amos Kenan, one suspects, would’ve scoffed at such euphemisms. Had he been around to comment on Amos Kenan’s death—the nation’s most unsparing columnist, it’s hard to recall a significant event he hadn’t addressed in print—he might have cherished the irony of Israel’s greatest rememberer ending his life in a fog of forgetfulness.

It was memory, after all, that made Kenan who he was. He was born Amos Levin in Tel Aviv in 1927, the morning after May Day, to an avidly socialist father. He belonged to Ha’Shomer Ha’Tzair, a socialist youth movement, but then he forgot all about its communitarian ideals and joined the Lehi, the most radical underground militia operating against the British mandate in Palestine and a hotbed for many of the nation’s future right-wing luminaries. He fought in the War of Independence, was wounded, and became a writer. He met Yonatan Ratosh, a charismatic poet, and joined Ratosh’s movement, the Canaanites.

Largely forgotten today, the Canaanites committed their considerable talents—the movement attracted a radiant lineup of artists, poets and journalists—to a radical reorganization of history. Forget the Bible, they preached, and its talk of a holy nation in God’s good grace. Forget the Jews. Remember only the Canaanites, the ancient Hebrews, who lived off their land and hunted and fought hard and spoke in the hardened tongue of battles and wounds and stood proud and invincible. They preached a collective cultural amnesia, one that would do away with Zionism and erect instead a neo-primordial society, inviting of all the land’s inhabitants and free of the vagaries of religion, nationality, and ideology.

The Canaanites’ influence soon faded away, silenced by the thundering of Israel’s independence. But Kenan emerged from the movement inspired. His would be a homeland unencumbered by heaven and its imperial demands, he swore. In June of 1952, when a bomb was thrown into the home of David Tzvi Pinkas—Israel’s minister of transportation and a religious Jew who tried to ban driving on the Sabbath as a means to save gasoline—Kenan was arrested on the scene. He denied all guilt and was eventually acquitted. (Recently unearthed testimonies, however, suggest he was behind the attack.) Still, he was too much for polite society to take, and immediately after his case was dismissed he was fired by Haaretz, for whom he’d been writing a popular column.

Twenty-five years old and persona non grata, he exiled himself to Paris, where he made a living writing a column for a radical Israeli magazine which he defiantly titled “The Wandering Knife.” He lived with the author Christiane Rochefort, hung out with Jean-Paul Sartre, and soaked up the French literature of the absurd that would later come to influence his writing greatly.

But for all the wonders of the City of Lights, he felt the greatest spiritual affinity to the craggy hills of Israel, and he returned to Tel Aviv in the early 1960s, taking on a position as a columnist in Yediot Aharonot that he would hold for more than 30 years. He dealt with his journalistic subjects the same way he had with his political enemies, with wit and without mercy. True to his Canaanite rules, he savaged Judaism and celebrated the land of Israel. Earth, not faith, was his haven.

And yet, after the war of 1967, Kenan became one of the first intellectuals to object to Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, supported negotiations with the Palestinians, and, in 1970, was one of the founders of the Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a deeply radical organization at a time when even the most open-minded of the nation’s intelligentsia considered such actions verboten.

Such political and cultural isolation took its toll. Increasingly, Kenan’s writing became more dystopic, more desperate, less empathic. In 1974, he published what is arguably his most famous novel, The Road to Ein Harod, a terrifying tale of Israel in the throes of a Jewish fascist takeover.

“Don’t you see?,” asks a nefarious general, one of the book’s antagonists. “Whoever wants to stop what is happening today from happening today has to find a way to stop what happened yesterday from happening yesterday and what happened the day before from happening the day before. Only he who can stop today what happened the day before yesterday can also stop what will happen tomorrow because of what’s happening today, if you see what I mean.” Kenan was turning the perceived wisdom about history on its head: only those who can forget the past would avoid repeating it. A year later, Kenan struck the same theme more forcefully, naming yet another novel about post-apocalyptic Israel Shoah 2.

But Kenan was as ravenous in his earthly passions as he was in his politics, and for every lashing article he published he penned lyrics to popular tunes, comedy skits, satirical plays. Even in his lighter works, however, he was never without his violent wit: he signed his long-running restaurant review column as Loculus, an ancient architectural term referring to a burial place just big enough to hold a human corpse. He pursued pleasure, but saw in each delightful bite a small step bringing him closer to the grave.

It was his turn as bon vivant that brought him into friendship with some unlikely characters: despite his political activism, he was a close friend of Ariel Sharon, a fellow gourmand. When Sharon decided to leave the Likud and form his own party in 1977, he named the new enterprise Shlomzion, after Kenan’s daughter.

Everywhere you looked in Israeli culture, Amos Kenan was there. And his ubiquity might have been his downfall. He was so much a part of the fabric, most Israelis couldn’t see him anymore. They needed their artists to be solitary, singular, remote. Kenan was none of these things. He was the landscape. He was—to paraphrase Bob Dylan, whom he admired—so easy to look at and so hard to define.

For years now, Israelis have forgotten about Amos Kenan. But he had the last laugh: he had forgotten about them first.

German Jewish Leader Backs Publication of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ [Haaretz]

According to Regnery’s press release, Allen plans to write from his personal experience as a college football and rugby player at the University of Virginia—probably a smart move, since relying on the lessons he learned from his father, legendary Redskins coach George Allen Sr., would open up questions about when he planned to pen a companion volume on lessons he learned from his mother, who spent her adult life concealing her religious background for the sake of her husband’s and son’s careers.

George Allen’s Road Back? [Politico]
Related: Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight On Senator’s (Jewish?) Roots [Forward]

What’s Fine Literature Doing in the Knesset? [Ynet, in Hebrew]

Out magazine’s blog puts it best: “A group of grown-ups want to rally around a burning trash can, remove an elected public official from office, and pocket $30,000 public dollars a piece because they were ‘exposed’ to a decade-old story the American Library Association called ‘[A] gift to young people who have known since they could remember that they too wanted—and deserved—love’ as if it were asbestos.”

Christian Group Sues for Right to Burn Gay Teen Novel [Guardian]
Francesca Lia Block Under Fire [Out]

Bill would freeze new-book prices for two years [JPost]

But while Bellow went on to great success, Rosenfeld slipped behind. His writing life, marked by struggle, doubt, and carnal distractions, was cut short in 1956, when he died of a heart attack. He was 38 years old.

How to make sense of the success, and failure, of this writer is the focus of Steven Zipperstein’s new biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, out now from Yale University Press. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, talks to Nextbook about the complicated life and work of this all but forgotten literary figure.

The answer, of course, is that these mysterious people were Sephardim—descendants of the Spanish Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. But as Aviva Ben-Ur shows in Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History, it was remarkably difficult for the vast majority of American Jews, whose roots lay in Eastern Europe, to know how to think about their Sephardic neighbors. As the description above makes clear, for Ashkenazi Jews, Jewishness was signaled by a few basic markers—above all, physical appearance (including skin color) and knowledge of Yiddish. Could a Jew who spoke Ladino, which bears roughly the same relationship to medieval Spanish as Yiddish does to medieval German, really be considered a Jew at all?

That was the question one Ashkenazi woman posed in a letter to the editor of La Bos del Pueblo (“The Voice of the People”), one of the Ladino newspapers that briefly flourished in New York City in the first half of the 20th century. Clara wrote to ask about Jack, a Sephardic man with whom she had fallen in love. “At first glance, I thought him Italian,” she explained. “The way he spoke, his countenance and his gestures were like those of the Italians. But later, when we began seeing each other, he swore to me that he is a Spanish speaking-Jew.” The problem was that Clara’s parents refused to believe it, and so they would not consent to the match. “Now, I beg you,” Clara implored the editor, “to tell me through your esteemed newspaper if it is possible that a Jew who doesn’t speak Jewish, and doesn’t look Jewish, can nevertheless have a Jewish soul.”

The answer was just what Clara wanted to hear, and one hopes her parents read it: “Yes, Clara, the boy speaking Spanish, having Italian gestures, who can read our newspaper, is Jewish . . . There are many examples of Sephardim living with Ashkenazim in the greatest harmony.” But as Ben-Ur goes on to point out, things were not quite as rosy as La Bos del Pueblo made them seem. In fact, she writes, “marital liaisons between Ashkenazim and Eastern Sephardim were exceedingly rare during the first immigrant generation.” So strong was Ashkenazi skepticism that, in Seattle, where there was a sizable Sephardic community, a Sephardic Jew was four times more likely to marry a Christian than an Ashkenazi Jew.

The story Ben-Ur has to tell, then, is largely one of miscommunication. But failures to communicate can be as revealing, in their way, as successes, and the ways Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews thought about one another, in the early 20th century, offers some surprising insights into the construction of modern American Jewish identity. That is why Sephardic Jews in America offers so much food for thought, even though, as Ben-Ur readily acknowledges, Sephardic Jews were never more than a tiny fraction of the Jewish population—“a minority within a minority,” to use her term.

A vast wave of Jewish immigrants arrived in the U.S. from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924, when restrictive immigration laws took effect. But the Ottoman Empire did not allow emigration until 1908, and during the First World War it was very difficult to leave Turkey, especially after the U.S. entered the war on the Entente side. That meant Sephardic Jews had a much smaller window of opportunity to come to America: in 1920, out of roughly 1.5 million Jews in New York City, there were at most 25,000 Sephardim. (Hard and fast numbers, Ben-Ur writes, are impossible to come by.) Even today, only around 4 percent of the American Jewish population is non-Ashkenazi, and that includes later waves of immigrants from Iran and Arab countries.

Ben-Ur’s focus is specifically on Ladino-speaking Jews, who traced their ancestry back to Spain—in Hebrew, Sepharad, from which the word Sephardic derives. Yet one of her themes is the difficulty Sephardim found in claiming a name for themselves. For just as America’s older German Jews often tried to keep the new Polish and Russian arrivals at arm’s length, so America’s few well-established Sephardic families wanted to distinguish their own pedigrees—which led back to the colonial period—from those of the new Ottoman immigrants.

The very first Jews in North America had been “Western Sephardim”—Jews whose ancestors left Spain for Portugal, the Netherlands, and England, and who came to the New World in the wake of those countries’ colonial expansion. New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel was established in the 17th century to serve these Jews, who spoke Spanish or Portuguese, not Ladino; and some of the most prominent Jews in American life, such as Benjamin Cardozo and Emma Lazarus, traced their roots back to these pioneers.

With the arrival of new, Ladino-speaking Jews, Ben-Ur shows, these established families sometimes tried to keep the name Sephardic for themselves, preferring to call the newcomers Oriental or Levantine Jews. In 1911, for instance, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society established a Sephardic Bureau to help Ladino-speaking immigrants, who often fell through the cracks at Ellis Island because there was no one available to translate for them. But Shearith Israel pressured HIAS, successfully, to change the name to Oriental Bureau.

The same thing happened when the Federation of Sephardic Societies, a mutual-aid group, was compelled to rename itself the Federation of Oriental Jews. As Ben-Ur notes, in a period when immigration from “the Orient”—that is, East Asia—was completely banned, being labeled Oriental was not necessarily a good thing for these new Jewish arrivals. “Does there exist in New York some Federation of Occidental Jews that we should call ourselves by an opposite name?” demanded one irate letter-writer in the Ladino newspaper El Progreso.

Ironically, even as the relationship between Sephardim and Ashkenazim showed strain, the myths and stereotypes associated with Sephardic Jews were largely positive ones. Ben-Ur devotes a chapter to the way that Ashkenazi schools and synagogues came to use to the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, influenced by the prestige of Palestinian Hebrew speakers. And many German and Eastern European Jews—like many American Jews today, one might add—cherished a highly idealized picture of Golden Age Spain as a time of Jewish flourishing, and particularly of successful Jewish assimilation.

Sephardic Jews could draw on this legacy for communal pride, as in a 1911 article from La America that Ben-Ur quotes: “the blood of Maimonides, Judah HaLevi, and the Abravanels still courses through our veins.” Yet this sort of myth could also prove to be a double-edged sword, when Ashkenazim observed that 20th-century Sephardic immigrants were not all Abravanels. Indeed, Ben-Ur notes, some Ashkenazi critics of Sephardim attributed to them the very vices—for instance, an excessive interest in bargaining—that Europeans attributed to Ashkenazim themselves. It isn’t easy to be a minority group, but as Ben-Ur shows, being a minority within a minority is harder still.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931, and while he has been part of the Palestinian literary scene for most of his life, he did not publish his first book of poems until 1983. Over the last few years, however, he has won a growing international readership for his humane, melancholy, sometimes comic poetry, thanks in large part to the efforts of Hoffman, a film critic and author of the essay collection House of Windows, and her husband, the poet and translator Peter Cole. Hoffman and Cole, American-born Jews who live in Jerusalem, are two of the founders of Ibis Editions, a remarkable small press that publishes Hebrew and Arabic literature in translation. It was Ibis that brought out the first English edition of Muhammad Ali’s work, Never Mind, in September 2000—“in the same month,” Hoffman notes, “that the al-Aqsa intifada broke out.”

That kind of grim calendaring can be found in every chapter of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. “In 1946 Taha read his first modern book,” Hoffman writes—just around the time the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel. He produced most of the poems for his first book in 1982 and 1983, during the months when the IDF was invading Lebanon, leading to the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The most important date of all in Muhammad Ali’s story, however, is July 15, 1948. It was on that night that the Galilean village of Saffuriyya, where Muhammad Ali was born and raised, was captured by the army of the newborn Jewish state.

Along with most of the village’s population, the teenage Muhammad Ali and his family fled on foot, ending up in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where his 12-year-old sister, Ghazaleh, died of meningitis. (Six other siblings had died in infancy, Hoffman writes, and the poet was actually the fourth boy to bear the name Taha.) They were able to sneak back into Israel the following year, and eventually even to gain Israeli residence cards, but they were never to return to their ancestral village; Saffuriyya had been leveled and turned into Tzippori, a moshav. Instead, the future poet settled in Nazareth, where he opened a small grocery store. Eventually this grew into a prosperous souvenir shop catering to Christian tourists, which Muhammad Ali still owns today. (The book includes several photos of this eccentric-looking establishment, which is decorated with a sign bearing a quotation from Keats: A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”)

Even this dry summary of Muhammad Ali’s story shows why it is such a painful one for a Jewish reader to encounter, and why Hoffman writes it with such missionary fervor. Here is a man whose life was grievously damaged by the Jewish state—who was expelled from his land, separated from his family, and subjected to discrimination and violence. Hoffman makes clear that Muhammad Ali has never wanted to be a “committed,” political poet—neither his innovative free-verse style nor his ironic humor are suitable for the kind of platform oratory that move large crowds. Yet inevitably, in speaking in his own voice of his own experience, Muhammad Ali is voicing the suffering of his Palestinian generation.

In his poem “The Fourth Qasida,” Muhammad Ali addresses Amira, the girl to whom he was betrothed in childhood, but whom he didn’t get to marry because she wound up on the wrong side of the Lebanese-Israeli border. In the process, he turns Amira into what Hoffman calls an archetypically literary stand-in for all of Saffuriyya and indeed for all that is ever lost to time, to death, and to separation”:

When our loved ones leave,
Amira,
as you left,
an endless migration in us begins
and a certain sense takes hold in us
that all of what is finest
in and around us,
except for the sadness,
is going away—
departing, not to return.

The fact that Taha Muhammad Ali is a gifted poet and a very appealing personality—Hoffman writes of his ability to charm Arab, Jewish, and American audiences alike—makes him easy for the reader to care about. But it does not make his fate inherently more significant than those of hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who suffered the same injuries. Here, in fact, lies the main trouble with Hoffman’s book: she is writing about one man, but she is really interested in what she calls, with polemical exaggeration, “the Palestinian century.”

Thus she devotes much of the first half of the book to recounting the Jewish-Arab clashes of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in Israel’s War of Independence. By focusing on Saffuriyya and its people, Hoffman makes the human costs of this conflict come to life, and she clearly means to confront American and Jewish readers with the facts of Palestinian suffering. But this Saffuriya-centric approach also allows Hoffman to neglect the larger history of the war and the period, and to portray Israel as the aggressor in what was in fact a war in defense of its very existence. Her retrospective indignation is not the best lens through which to view this complex history.

The more original and valuable parts of My Happiness deal with Palestinian literary culture. Hoffman shows how Palestinian writers dealt with obstacles from every side—they were cut off from foreign books and magazines by the Arab boycott, and subjected to censorship by the Israeli government—and how they evolved new institutions and forms in response. The poetry festivals of the 1950s and 1960s brought poets face to face with their audiences, thus making “poetry the most important means of political expression for the hemmed-in, cut-off Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The publications of the Israeli Communist Party, the only one to welcome Jews and Arabs equally, were another important venue for Palestinian writers. Hoffman shows how, despite these meager resources, poetry became central to Palestinian culture in a way that poets in America can hardly imagine.

It is a problem for Hoffman’s book, however, that Taha Muhammad Ali played little role in this story. An autodidact with just a few years of formal schooling, he spent many years teaching himself to write classical Arabic and exposing himself to modern literature from around the world. While his shop in Nazareth became known as a kind of open-door salon, and he befriended many Palestinian writers, he seems to have been shy about writing or publishing until he was in late middle age. When he read his work at a London festival of Arabic literature, in the late 1980s, another writer exclaimed, “How is it that we didn’t even know you existed?”

And while Hoffman knows the poet well—she refers to him as “Taha” throughout—and has conducted years of interviews with him and his acquaintances, he remains a rather abstract and guarded presence throughout My Happiness. Hoffman warns the reader of the poet’s tendency to embellish his stories—his formidable storytelling gifts tend to involve fanciful improvisation on more-or-less true themes”—but she is constrained by the political barriers and cultural differences between them from challenging Muhammad Ali’s self-presentation.

Indeed, she is clearly uncomfortable speaking critically about any aspect of Palestinian life. She writes sentimentally about the relationship between Taha and Amira, for instance, when it would make more sense for her, as a secular liberal, to question the sexist archaism of promising a girl to a husband at birth. But then Hoffman is not trying to be impartial, and she is not really writing a biography. She is, rather, confronting the almost unbearably difficult history that binds and divides Jews and Arabs in Israel; and she does this with a courage that the reader can only hope to emulate.

Brague’s work has been devoted to showing how profound and subtle the thought of the Middle Ages really was. “Against the legend of the dark ages,” he writes, “it will be shown that people never stopped thinking, that in fact medieval people did a lot of thinking, and that many highly refined concepts were shaped during those years”—roughly, the thousand years between the fall of Rome in the fifth century CE and the Renaissance. In earlier books like The Law of God and The Wisdom of the World—translated and published, like this new one, by University of Chicago Press—Brague explored those “highly refined concepts,” introducing the modern reader to the complex ways ancient and medieval people thought about the universe, its Creator, and its laws.

In this new collection of essays, Brague supplements those major works of synthesis with smaller, more targeted studies. Drawing on a wide range of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish texts, Brague sets out to explode some of the clichés and misunderstandings that, he laments, still shape our picture of the medieval world (though much less, arguably, than they once did, thanks to the success of revisionist historians like him). Take, for instance, our habitual pride in the achievements of modern science. In the 16th century, the textbooks tell us, human beings began to wake up to their profound ignorance of the natural world. Instead of relying on the ancient errors of Aristotle in physics and Galen in medicine, they began to ask questions for themselves, to do experiments—in short, to practice science.

There is, of course, a good deal of truth in this story. But Brague offers a different perspective in his essay “Is Physics Interesting?”, whose unusual title announces its novel approach to the subject. For modern people, Brague suggests, physics—broadly speaking, the study of the natural world and its laws—can be intellectually engaging and aesthetically pleasing. But it is not “interesting” in the way it was to medieval thinkers, because we have lost the ability to see the natural world as a reflection of God and of ourselves. Physics is something we use and master, but not something that is interesting in the precise sense Brague means: “What is interesting is what is found between us and ourselves. . . so that we must pass through it in order to get at ourselves.”

But that is the kind of interest that medieval Jewish thinkers found in physics. To Maimonides, nature was the royal road to understanding God: “There is, moreover, no way to apprehend Him except it be through the things He has made; for they are indicative of His existence and of what ought to be believed about Him…It is therefore indispensable to consider all beings as they really are.” Gersonides, the 14th-century French Jewish thinker, went even further, writing that “Human happiness is achieved when a man knows reality as much as he can.” As Brague observes, “This is an idea that admittedly has a modern ring to it.”

As Brague’s citation of these Jewish philosophers shows, the Middle Ages were also a time when thinkers of all three monotheistic faiths were engaged with the same problems and shared the same conceptual vocabulary. In his essay “The Interpreter,” Brague writes that “the history of medieval philosophy—and even modern philosophy—would not have been what it was without a vast movement to transfer knowledge from one language and one culture to another.”

Famously, the Arab world preserved the heritage of Greek philosophy which the West abandoned after the fall of Rome. Averroes—as the West called the great Ibn Rushd, who lived in Spain in the 12th century—“commented on all the available works of Aristotle at least once, and on occasion three times.” “For him,” Brague writes, “Aristotle was the absolute summit of humanity—with the exception, of course, of the prophets.” Even those who believed in different prophets shared Averroes’ views: “his commentator and Jewish disciple Moses of Narbonne went even further, saying that if Aristotle has said something, there is no reason to seek elsewhere.” When a Christian philosopher like Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle, he did so through the lenses of the Muslim Averroes and the Jewish Maimonides.

Brague points out that Jewish translators played a central role in transmitting texts from Arabic to Latin. This was an ironic side effect of the mass emigration of Jews from Spain’s Muslim South to its Christian North, in the 12th century CE, after they were expelled by the conquering Almohad dynasty. These Jews were perfectly equipped to mediate between cultures that regarded one another with distrust—much as the Marranos would do, centuries later, when the Jews were expelled in turn from Christian Spain. One family of exiles, named Ibn Tibbon, produced three generations of translators: Samuel translated Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, while his son Moses translated Aristotle and Averroes.

The Ibn Tibbons are a reminder that, when we speak of the “Islamic world” in the Middle Ages, we are not necessarily talking about either Muslims or Arabs, but rather about a variety of peoples who lived in Arabic-speaking lands, including many Christians and Jews. Indeed, Brague writes that while Muslim thinkers produced an extraordinarily rich philosophical literature, it was Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews who deserve credit for passing that heritage on to Latin-speaking Europe, since the role of Muslims in the work of translation was “nil. They did not actively transmit anything.” The reasons for this are explored in Brague’s essay “Inclusion and Digestion,” where he examines the different ways Muslims and Christians adapted ancient Greek and Latin works to their own purposes.

When Muslim philosophers wrote about Aristotle, Brague shows, they tended to do so by paraphrasing his works, creating new originals: “the text is completely rewritten, the demonstration proceeds more systematically, the exposition is clearer, and examples that are out-of-date or have become hard to understand are replaced by others that are more current and easier to grasp.” The effect is to “digest” the original, divesting it of its foreignness and making it an integral part of Arabic thought.

Because Muslims believed that Arabic was a sacred language, the tongue in which God dictated the Koran, this kind of translation represented a promotion; once a text was available in Arabic, it was no longer necessary to read it in the original Greek. Brague quotes a 15th-century Tunisian writer to this effect: “[The Muslims] took them over into their own language from the non-Arab languages and surpassed the achievements of [the non-Arabs] in them. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic language were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered . . .  . Thus students of the sciences . . . could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them.”

Europeans, on the other hand, tended to write commentaries on Greek authors, in which the original text was preserved and explicated line by line. The result was that Aristotle could be approached in his foreignness—he remained an “other” for medieval Europeans, and for that very reason could challenge their assumptions. For Brague, indeed, the noblest definition of Europe is that it is a culture which has always looked outside itself for guidance and inspiration: “The relationship with the exterior is internal to it.” He traces this tendency back to the origins of Christianity, which had just such a relationship with Judaism: “Using the technical term of Jewish exegesis, the New Testament is like a pesher of the Old, which is to say an interpretation that applied the text to the present situation and interprets it.” In this and many other ways, Brague shows, the subtle, often acrimonious interplay between Judaism, Christianity and Islam helped to create the advanced thought of the Middle Ages—a phrase that, after reading Brague’s book, no longer sounds like an oxymoron.

With his second novel due out in the United States this May, Freedland spoke to Nextbook’s Hugh Levinson about the origins of his pen name, looters in Mesopotamia, and a postwar assassination plot you want to know more about.

Two years ago, Judi Dench was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as a menacing English schoolmarm turned stalker in Notes on a Scandal. The movie was based on a novel by Zoë Heller, who has made her mark creating unkind protagonists. In her new novel, The Believers, she’s done it again.

The Believers follows the Litvinoffs, a family of New York Jewish radicals whose patriarch, Joel, falls into a coma. Left to settle his affairs is Audrey, his angry British-born wife, and their three children—Rosa, Karla, and Lenny.

As the Litvinoffs variously cling to and thwart one another, Heller probes the belief systems—political, religious, and familial—her characters rely upon to understand themselves and the world around them.

Zoë Heller photo: Sigrid Estrada.

In your introduction, you write that this book “shares the revolutionary spirit of Mao’s Little Red Book.” In what way is this book revolutionary?

I like to think of it as a little manifesta. It’s revolutionary in the sense that the whole project has spread by word of mouth and through a grassroots network of women. And it’s about ending a stifling silence and replacing it with a proud dialogue. The other aspect of the project is to benefit women’s health organizations. The proceeds are going to organizations. The more stories I heard, the more I realized [menstruation] wasn’t just a cultural taboo. There are tangible limitations that periods pose. One girl from Kenya told me there girls miss school because they don’t have pads. They would be homebound. When I learned about that, I decided every time I ask a woman a story I will tell her that. And from an Indian contributor I learned about untouchability and serious restrictions women go through—they can’t eat off the same silverware. So I found a charity that helps women in India.

One of the essays in your book is by Gloria Steinem; it’s an update of her famous 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.” Had you read that essay as a child?

I read the essay right after I started collecting these stories. I immediately connected with it. My own first period was a travesty, and I had a skewed, dramatic view of what a first period was. So her essay showed me you could write about it with humor and still get your point across. And even though it was written in 1978, and I read it in 2003, every word was relevant, which is kind of disturbing. But the original version had some pop-cultural references that were dated, and she updated it. She had Muhammad Ali Rope-a-Dope tampons, and Joe Namath pads. She changed the TV shows: Happy Days became Law & Order.

I don’t think I will ever forget the story of the woman who got her period on a train while in flight from the Nazis. What were the most unforgettable stories for you?

It’s hard to pick just one. I categorize them by the feelings they give me. In my Happy and Inspiring category, I love Nina Bentley’s story—she gets a stain on her skirt, and instead of freaking out, she draws and turns it into a flower. But the sad ones hit me the most. The most important story in the book is Joyce Maynard’s, which talks about shame, and how being shameless isn’t so bad after all. I love her work. One other essay I really like is by Sandra Guy, and it’s about a girl who gets her period shortly after her sister dies, and how she really wishes she could stop time, because when you have a death in your family you don’t want anything to change, but her body keeps moving forward. Her period is the final straw—she has to grow up.

Throughout the book, women write about feeling ashamed of the onset of menses. Only one woman, as far as I could tell, wrote about believing that her menses was private—a more positive word. What would you say to someone who said that menses, like other bodily functions, isn’t bad, but it ought to be private?

That’s totally fine. Jacquelyn Mitchard has a good line that getting your period is like getting a sports bra: an essential but annoying part of womanhood. You should be able to deal with your period however you want to deal with it. Previously privacy and keeping quiet were the only options. You should have the choice. And celebration can be going out for a fancy dinner and getting a red cake and a rose—or it can be telling your mom. There’s a whole spectrum in each situation.

You went to Choate. Do boarding school girls have a unique experience of their periods?

I really don’t think so. Girls are getting their period younger and younger. Most girls get their periods before they get to Choate. But because it’s a diverse group of people—the girl in my book from Kenya I knew from Choate—they offer very different stories. There is one story in the book that explores what I think you’re trying to get at. She got her period in an orphanage during the Great Depression. Who do you tell? She had to tell the headmistress.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

I was talking about this with my mom today and saying I don’t think I could be in any office. I am really interested in food. I am working at Zinc [in New Haven]. I love writing. I am really interested in sustainability, and in women’s health. I don’t know, man. I could see myself working at a cool magazine. But I don’t know. I don’t know!

It was, but as Leora Tanenbaum outlines in her spirited new book, Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, women in any number of religions have been waiting much longer than that. The book announces its seriousness with an austere white cover and gothic lettering, contrasting with the defiantly girly designs of her two earlier books, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation and Catfight: Rivalries Among Women—from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room (now mainstays of Women’s Studies bookshelves). Having become recognized as an authority on these thorny feminist issues, Tanenbaum has moved on to a subject that’s even more personally rooted.

Tanenbaum considers herself an observant Jew (Modern Orthodox, to be precise), an identity she divulges right off the bat, in a preface that feels equal parts honest and defensive. Her exploration of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions is guided by a rigorous respect for each of them, but it’s a respect built on the belief that being faithful means challenging your religion when it veers off track. A non-religious person could have written this book persuasively, too, but Tanenbaum’s faith enriches it in some unexpected ways, raising questions about what it means to view any of these religions as an outsider, and what (if any) potential for unity exists among religious women from different backgrounds.

The book is a catalog of familiar, if astoundingly retro, attitudes—the Catholic Church’s hysterical refusal to ordain women in the face of a dire priest shortage, shoddy conditions in the women’s sections of mosques, the Artscroll Women’s Siddur‘s approving commentary that “even a silent recitation [of the Kaddish] by a woman is frowned upon”—threaded with “We Can Do It”-style affirmations. “We do not have to abandon our faith communities,” Tanenbaum writes. “We can stay and make them stronger. And for this to happen, we cannot be polite.” Ultimately, “the issue is not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’” Her case for equality is pretty basic—after all, the idea at the heart of this and similar struggles is heartbreakingly straightforward—even if the path to achieving it is a predictable minefield.

It’s worthwhile to read about restrictions in different religions side by side, as Tanenbaum positions them here; while there have been books about individual faiths dealing with gender issues (many directed at their respective lay populations), revealing parallels come through when they’re examined in relation to one another. Though Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women all bump up against their own unique obstacles, they experience many of the same limitations: women are second-class citizens, barred or actively discouraged from taking part in significant rituals, and physically separated from men in various ways. All are reckoning with texts that suggest—or say outright—that they’re unworthy.

So why should women continue to practice religions that seem intent on keeping them down? Women in some of the faiths Tanenbaum explores (namely, Judaism and Protestantism) have the option of moving between denominations if one is wildly out of step with their lives. Others don’t have that flexibility. Still others don’t want it: despite being profoundly angered and wounded by institutionalized sexism, many remain committed to traditional sects, which they see as the most authentic version of their religion. Tanenbaum, generally a fan of the Hebrew-heavy Orthodox service, counts herself among them, and explains, “It would be easier to withdraw from observant Judaism by aligning with a liberal denomination, but these women love their Orthodox tradition too much.” In order to stay within their religion, women like Tanenbaum choose to believe that patriarchal ideas about women’s roles are not what their traditions are really about; they come from a time and place that is outdated, and human fallibility (and willful misinterpretation) is responsible, not God.

Fair enough, but things get sticky when she and other religious activists urge women to work to transform sexist attitudes within their religions, while also assuring them (and anyone who might be listening in) that once this happens, those religions will be able to stay essentially the same. It’s a pragmatic line of reasoning, but doesn’t hold up. Tanenbaum maintains that sexism is not in fact integral to Jewish tradition, but other members of her devout community would say that by pushing for inclusivity, she’s asking for the kinds of reforms that would effectively transform Orthodoxy into a different (and by implication lesser) denomination. Even if we accept that these religions have no real basis for the restrictions they place on women, the leadership (and male members of the community, who “stand in the center of their world” while women “are told to move to the periphery”) have self-interested reasons to resist equality. If they don’t budge, religious women are basically left with two unappealing options: seek refuge in a community that aims for gender equality but offers less rigorous observance, or stay in one that’s spiritually fulfilling but stifling.

Tanenbaum quotes one Catholic woman explaining, “I don’t want another church. I just want to get this one right.” It’s sort of a semantic game: wouldn’t that in some ways mean making it another church? Despite the many bold efforts described in these pages, religious women are caught in a cycle of contradictions and multiple allegiances that are hard to resolve in any satisfying way. If you refuse to have blind faith when it comes to gender, for example, why should you have it about anything else? If your chosen religion silences and invalidates you in ways you can’t condone, what’s the point of following it?

The underlying impression is that religion is so worthwhile and enriching that damaging views about women—no matter how extreme—are less persuasive than the community and tradition it offers. On a gut level, these priorities feel appalling: if a fundamental denial of women as complete people isn’t compelling enough, what is the bottom line? On the other hand, as Tanenbaum poignantly quotes a middle-aged Catholic woman saying, “If I leave the church, I will crumble.” So much of her community and identity are bound up with it that she can’t conceive of cutting herself off.

For all its force and intelligence, it’s not always clear who Tanenbaum has written this book for: some explanations seem aimed at the unlikely readers who’ve never even heard of the concept of religious equality. At the same time, she’s uninterested in tempering her outrage. She airs some dirty laundry that people outside specific religious communities might otherwise never know about, and includes some distressing anecdotes: one Modern Orthodox woman’s rabbi forbade her from taking part in her son’s bar mitzvah, and when she objected, barred her from teaching at the synagogue school; a national organization of Presbyterian college women was intimidated by a hardline Christian publication for daring to discuss sexuality. Irshad Manji‘s calls for reform within Islam have been met with death threats. Some of Tanenbaum’s findings and observations are expressed with sarcastic disbelief, butting up—at times awkwardly, at others elegantly—against her attempts to justify her own adherence to particular traditions.

As so many recent books on and against religion have shown, it may be impossible to be truly balanced when it comes to writing about something so inherently personal. Either way, Tanenbaum will stay focused on this area for some time—her website notes that for her next book she’s looking into the discrimination faced by devout gay people. In Taking Back God, her optimism buoys what is in many ways a depressing survey, but it’s hard not to wonder if it can survive this next inquiry.

Eryn Loeb is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine.

Pledging modest cash awards to the authors of the six best essays on the theme “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America,” YIVO asked entrants to fill at least 25 “notebook pages” and to be “detailed,” “precise,” and “sincere.” Excellent advice for most writers, this was particularly apt counsel for novices, which nearly all the entrants were expected to be (and turned out to be).

For YIVO, the contest was an expression of a mission undertaken in 1925 in Vilnius (Vilna, to Jews) in what was then Polish-occupied Lithuania. That mission was to study, esteem, and strengthen the common (in both senses) Jews of Eastern Europe and their secular culture, often referred to as Yiddishkeit for the common (both senses again) language that ruled the arguments, lovemaking, postcards, soccer matches, business deals, ribaldry, newspapers, and restive dreams of some 11 million Jews over a territorial swath that extended from western Russia north to the Baltic, south to the Balkans, and then east across empire and satrapy to the Oder River.

By 1925, that great sea was at ebb, reduced by war, revolution, poverty, anti-Semitism, secularism, socialism, Zionism, and America—to name some principal drains on population and spirit. Among other recovery efforts, YIVO dispatched zammlers (collectors) to record story, song, argot, and custom in the shtetls and urban ghettos, and sponsored three autobiography competitions for young Jews in an attempt to secure them as citizens of Yiddishkeit. Those contests were popular successes, the last of them concluding just months before Germany devoured Poland in September 1939.

In 1940, having nimbly reestablished world headquarters in Manhattan and out of what would become murderous German reach, YIVO picked up where it had left off, administering an autobiography contest for young American Jews. But this call from a Yiddishist preservationist organization failed to prick ears that were hearkening to such matters as work, college, the Dodgers’ chances against the Reds, and Frank Sinatra keening “I’ll Never Smile Again.” (In 1946, YIVO would issue an equally tone-deaf and unsuccessful call for what-I-saw-in-the-war memoirs from Jewish veterans.) And so in the spring of 1942, YIVO in America turned to its tried-and-true constituency, Jews native to Eastern Europe.

In all, YIVO received 223 essays (some 25,000 “notebook pages”) before the “Why I left Europe” contest closed in March 1943. About 200 were in Yiddish and the rest in Hebrew or English. Only 47 were by women. The awards were presented at a public ceremony in September 1943, and the contest “secretary,” a distinguished YIVO scholar named Moses Kligsberg, wrote soon afterward, “Now YIVO is confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.”

That “great task,” if ever undertaken, is nowhere manifest. After he got done responding to the entrants who believed they’d been jobbed by the judges, Kligsberg himself wrote a few uninspired essays on the contest material. Much later, Irving Howe tapped some of the English-language entries for World of Our Fathers, his 1976 best-seller that still reigns as the heavyweight champion of Third Migration cultural history. But it was not until the late 1990s that the Fordham historian Daniel Soyer and the YIVO researcher Jocelyn Cohen, supported by a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, cracked “American-Jewish Biographies, Record Group 102” wide open and began the dusty, demanding work (all those handwritings; all those variant spellings and localisms; all those amateurs) that led to publication—in cloth in 2005 and in paperback this past year—of English translations of nine of the autobiographies under the title My Future is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Immigrants.

A fine piece of scholarly and humane business, the book is supported by an informative introduction and comprehensive, lucid notes. The translations themselves move along nicely in Yiddish-flavored English that never goes vaudeville on us and that respects writer as well as reader. When Shmuel Krone—of Denver and Verkhovichi, Belarus—a man rather given to what the law calls excited utterances, says of his oldest son, “He is now a public accountant!,” Soyer and Cohen know that this is an exclamation point to preserve on behalf of the sweet and luckless Krone. And when the pedantic Chaim Kusnetz—from Brooklyn and Duboy, Belarus—repeatedly interpolates “Vayehi hayoym”—“and it came the day”—into his narrative, they know to leave the Hebrew phrase stand in the text for what it conveys about Mr. Kusnetz’s literary and personal vanity. (Kusnetz ends his autobiography with this gem: “And the thorn of loneliness in the desert of my life burns eternal.”) And if, some literary heavy breathing aside, the memoirs generally present as facts mustered in chronological order, the brisk artlessness of the narratives is itself often affecting.

So with Rose Silverman—New York City and Berdichev, Ukraine—who sums up her years of compelled labor as a child-seamstress with the sentence, “The hardship never let up and accompanied me always”; and with Ben Reisman—Pittsburgh and Kalush, Galicia—who writes of the consequences of a slum fire in America, “My oldest boy caught cold and was sick for several months, until he died. Our grief cannot be described.” And so, too, with the ambitious, vivacious, and pretty Rose Schoenfeld—New York City and Drohobycz, Galicia—who recalls her arranged (by her desperately poor parents) marriage in the old country to a visiting American businessman this way: “With an embittered heart, I went to the wedding canopy.” Isaac Babel, a near-contemporary of Ms. Schoenfeld’s and master of the hammer-blow sentence, might well have put it just that way (though he probably would have told us whether the imported bridegroom smelled of onions or a sweet American cologne or a broth of both on the wedding night.)**pagebreak next=”The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor.”**

The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor. We learn, for example, that the salary structure for melameds—village religious teachers who instructed children, usually in the local synagogue—was tied not to length of tenure or ability but rose with the ages of the students taught; and that starving Jews filled themselves with cakes made of ground sunflower shells during the Ukrainian civil war; and that the Jewish trade in metal-smithing made its practitioners bearded, skull-capped repairers of church cupolas across the Russian and Ukrainian summer sky.

We also pick up piquant colloquialisms (“Even a broom can shoot if God helps”), rabbinical nicknames (“the Kaidoner prodigy” and “Reb Leybele the Sharp”), and telling exchanges of conversation, as in this one between the then-melamed Shmuel Krone and a fellow greenhorn slightly more versed in America:

Greenhorn: “You are too talented for teaching.”
Krone: “What should I do?”
Greenhorn: “Open a dry goods store like mine.”

It’s a fine harvest altogether, though I, for one, would have liked to have heard more from the editors about their decision to thumb the scales hard for gender (five of the nine contributors are women), for landfall (1892 through 1929), and for place of origin (Ukraine, Galicia, Poland, and Belarus are all represented), rather than simply publish the strongest essays they could find. And they could also have done a better job of placing YIVO within its initial American context, exploring the misapprehensions suffered by the organization’s leaders in the face of a Yiddishkeit on these shores unlike any previously known or imagined, and how their failure to attend to America with some humility undermined YIVO’s early work in this country.

But the most important question this book raises is not for the editors or for the contributors (all of the latter as safely entombed in history now as King Tut), but for the volume itself. And it takes this form:

Following the recovery, beginning in the 1960s, of Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan (to name a very few); and following the publication of A Walker in the City (1951), The Downtown Jews (1969) and World of Our Fathers (to name a very few); and following the inflorescence of Jewish historiography under the post-war ministrations of Moses Rischin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Oscar Handlin, and more recently David Roskies, Hasia Diner, and Jonathan Sarna (to name a very very few)—after all that has been delved, recorded, filmed, monographed, and presented at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies ever since the YIVO autobiographies were locked down in 1943—after all this, was the retrieval of these words of nine of our fathers and mothers necessary or even helpful?

From the perspective of what the founders of YIVO thought of as “science” (YIVO has since removed Wissenschaft—or science—from its name and is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), the answer must be no. The sophisticated scholarly and imaginative work that has emerged over the past 65 years roars like Niagara beside these trickly odysseys. And unmediated personal declarations, while held in scholarly esteem in 1942, are no longer considered important in ordering history. Scholars, to paraphrase the late Moses Kligsberg, are no longer confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.

* * *

But if scholars aren’t confronted, maybe others are—or should be. Here I mean we common (in any sense you like) American Jews who have come to view the territories these nine men and women inhabited—the shtetl and the Lower East Side—as cohorts of Mamre’s plains, the brickyards of Egypt, Jerusalem, Sepharad, and (very lately) Masada: stars in that runic cosmos that Jews have been studying for millennia, looking for a “usable past,” by which historians mean the tales that make a tribe’s progress through time explicable.

In the case of the shtetl, how else could we have accommodated the ground that swallowed millions of our brothers and sisters except to declare it holy, and ourselves therefore enjoined from treading upon it in shod feet? And so Abraham Joshua Heschel, speaking on “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” at YIVO in New York City on January 7, 1945, 20 days before Soviet soldiers reached Auschwitz, pronounced an elegy that, in accordance with ancient panegyric tradition, cast what had happened as a theological calamity, as a blow against klal Yisroel, the one covenantal Israel. “Even those who have abandoned tradition . . . have not separated themselves,” Heschel said, reading mundane and also sacral truth in the crematoria ash. And then, after comparing the European destruction with the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem, Heschel concluded by placing the Shoah out of human reach: “If other eras [in Jewish history] were holy, this one was the holy of holies.” The audience, it’s reported, as though one covenantal Israel, stood and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.

And a powerful and incontrovertible umen has sounded ever since, in the stories and memoirs of Singer, Agnon, Wiesel, and lesser lights; in Chagall’s pie-eyed fiddlers, loopy lovers, and crucified rabbis; in the Hasidic and Haredi communities’ faithful replication of the habits, dress, and quarrels of lost study halls and rabbinic courts; in the popularity of Buber’s romanticized Tales of the Hasidim, and of the slushy Life Is With People; in the hundreds of Yizkor books that memorialize the saintly butchers, the uncomplaining widows, the kindly melameds, and the generous mill- and tavern-owners in one shtetl after another and never recollect a card cheat, a child beater, a philanderer murdered by the Germans; and of course in unabashed confections such as “Mein Shtetele Belz” and Fidder on the Roof.

In the case of the Lower East Side, there’s no better explanation for what we have made of the place—in novel, in “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” in movie, in lox, in bagel, in the Tenement Museum, and on Big Onion tours of Delancey Street—than that offered by Irving Howe for why World of Our Fathers became an astonishing (and to him somewhat embarrassing) success. The book, Howe wrote, “enabled [readers] to cast an affectionate backward glance at the world of their fathers before turning their backs upon it forever and moving on, as they had to, to a world their fathers would neither have accepted nor understood. My book was not a beginning, it was still another step to the end.”

For Jews, some failures—an inability to samba, for example—feel stunningly inconsequential, while others, such as the failure to keep faith with fathers and mothers, with that pesky klal Yisroel, feel stunningly unforgivable. And so sitting beneath our vines in Beverly Hills, on West 72nd, or in Cambridge 02138, we trouble our hearts with yearnings for our lost Eden of Jewish authenticity: that land of virile pickle-makers; the communion of three-times-a-day prayer; peddlers and pressers who not only spent a predawn hour over the Torah but remained faithful to the Internationale and saved money for their children’s education; and tenement windows that glowed with Sabbath candles beneath which children studied hard.**pagebreak next=”Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over.”**

Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over. (The ghettos, the shootings, and the sometime gassing by engine exhaust in the closed compartments of trucks were known by 1943, but the six million was an abyss undreamed.) Nor had they any reason to feel guilt about taking off for Brownsville, the Bronx, or Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill and leaving the Lower East Side to wither away, because they wanted the Lower East Side and all it represented to wither away.

And so, a truth escapes like a reflexive sigh from these nine witnesses, which is that the shtetl and the Lower East Side were for common Jews not places of authenticity, pride, and vitality, but vulnerability, contingency, and impotence; and a main product of such a life, for Jews as for other people, is anger, which seeps inward as self-scorn and depression, or spews outward as cruelty directed at the nearest targets, which are usually one’s children, parents, spouse, brothers, sisters, neighbors.

Here is Minnie Goldstein—Providence, Rhode Island and Warsaw—come to tell us that her mother was one of 12 children of whom 11 died young; that her mother was left a widow with two children at 19; that relatives cheated the woman out of her meager inheritance; that her second husband—Minnie’s father—was himself ruined financially when in-laws—his business partners in a shoe store—took to stealing stock during the night; that Minnie herself was loathed by her mother, who called her “treyf,”—unkosher. She writes, “I cannot remember a single day during my childhood when I was taken care of as a child should be, or when I had enough to eat.” Later, a grown woman in Providence, and married to a hapless, cheerless husband, she bears a son who develops polio, and she considers murder and suicide: “Would it not be better to take the child into bed with me, turn on the gas, and go to sleep forever with the child?” She notes, in a sentiment that is repeated in a number of these memoirs, and inferred in more of them, “Those who have been here in America for a long time will never be able to grasp that we who have experienced so much could still be full human beings.”

And here is Aaron Domnitz—Baltimore and Romanovo, Belarus—a sweet man of lively intelligence whose early love of Talmud and then of secular literature led him nowhere but to America and the fate he most wanted to avoid—a six-day-a-week shift at a sewing machine in a rundown factory on the Lower East Side. Domnitz tells us of an impromptu party celebrated by his coworkers in the apartment of a colleague whose daughter had just become engaged. They drank. They sang “Russian revolutionary songs.” And one worker, who was a cantor, sang a High Holy Day prayer. And then the bride arrived. “Instead of greeting us, she twisted her nose and hurled a reproach at her father in English, why did he bring drunks into the house?” Her father “smiled stupidly and helplessly . . . completely foreign among his grown children.”

Leaving the daughter and father behind, the men fled to a nearby park where they “leaned against the fence and looked at the East River. The water, like the sky was dreary, autumnal. . . . Through the mist we saw the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. Behind her, the ocean spread out far and wide, and across the ocean somewhere were the shores of the Old Country. We were silent.”

Of course, our notions of Belz or “The Historic Lower East Side Bargain District” are no more likely to be altered by the testimony of Minnie Goldstein and Aaron Domnitz, than a bonfire of dreidels is likely to be inspired by evidence that Hashmonean priests and Taliban mullahs had many bloody habits in common—which by my reading of purity zealots through the ages seems highly likely. In the development of prophetic or apologetic history, whether by Jew, Frenchman, Serb, or Abkhazian (who knew?), the truth is whatever shores up the bottom line of need.

Today, the “shtetl” and “the Lower East Side” appear at the very least to be remarkable self-healings of grave wounds, and at the very best creations as brilliant as Hashmonean Jerusalem. Given, however, the amount of evil that has entered the world as a consequence of supra-history, we probably want to try and keep track of what really happened. In aid of this anchoring, we have those books and conferences and peer-reviewed articles, which tell us such things as the percentage of Eastern Europe’s Jews who depended on relief at the turn of the twentieth century (35) and the childhood mortality rate on the Jewish Lower East Side (40 percent). And now we have these words of our fathers and mothers; reedy in places, affecting in places, but surely usable if we ever find ourselves in need.

Ben Birnbaum is the editor of Boston College Magazine and an award-winning essayist. He is the editor of Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (Crossroad, 2007).

Stained glass at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem

Much has changed since Darby died in 1882. Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State, the Balfour Declaration was signed, and, in what seemed to Darby’s followers a validation of his ideas, Israel was created. Today, there are as many as 75 million evangelicals in America. Most of them support Israel. And yet, only about five million of them are premillennial dispensationalists—most Christian Zionists don’t actually base their support for Israel on a catastrophic end-times scenario. In his book Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Stephen Spector, a freewheeling professor of English at Stony Brook University and author of Operation Solomon: the Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews, makes the case for a more nuanced understanding of Christian Zionists. Based on a range of evangelical and academic literature as well as dozens of interviews with evangelical leaders and American and Israeli officials, Spector argues that we’ve misunderstood a large, rich, and diverse religious group—at both their expense and our own.

Jews tend to see evangelical support for Israel as self-serving, and worry that evangelicals champion Jews’ return to the Holy Land only so they’ll die or convert to Christianity at the end of days. But you say that’s not the whole story.

The reason that’s most often cited is Genesis 12:3—God will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who don’t. Generally, the Jews are God’s people. God is on the Jews’ side, so evangelicals want to be on the Jews’ side as well. There’s also a commandment to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and it’s said that those who do will prosper. Among evangelicals, I’ve noticed a genuine fear of what would happen if the United States stopped supporting Israel. Christian Zionists believe that the only reason we are a blessed nation is because we’ve blessed Israel.

If evangelicals care about Jews—not just Israel—then why didn’t Genesis 12:3 receive as much attention before Israel was created?

Critics of Christian Zionism say that the emphasis on Genesis 12:3 is a recent development, perhaps with the suggestion that it is a cover for real—eschatological—motives. In fact, the 1909 Scofield Study Bible—which helped popularize John Darby’s ideas in America—cites this verse. I can’t look into people’s hearts, but I can say that this biblical promise and threat seem to be genuinely central factors for every evangelical I spoke with. Ted Haggard told me that he doesn’t regard Israel as the fulfillment of prophecy. He supports it because it is the home of millions of Jews, triggering the blessing in Genesis 12:3.

You write that it was actually the Israelis who first reached out to Christian Zionists.

Back in the ’50s, Israel was encouraging evangelical pastors to start tourism in Israel. By 1967, the country had a well-developed Christian Affairs Department. Yona Malachy, an advisor there, wrote an important book sorting out which American Protestant denominations were supportive of Israel. But it was Menachem Begin who developed the relationship. He was quite friendly with people like Jerry Falwell.

If they are not so extreme theologically, are Christian Zionists also less politically extreme when it comes to issues like a two-state solution?

Exterior of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church

Evangelicals do hold extreme political positions, and many oppose a two-state solution, but the press has portrayed them as much more rigid then they are. If you read the leaders’ writings and talk to them—Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Jerry Falwell while he was alive—they all say it’s national suicide for Israel to give back an inch of land. But 52 percent of evangelical leaders support a two-state solution, which some justify by saying the Jews will not control all of the land as long as they are secular. Evangelicals have not used their political power to intimidate Bush on the issue of land. Even the most fervent Christian Zionists have a streak of pragmatism.

Even on social issues?

Christian Zionists are highly individual in their beliefs. Abortion is the most unifying domestic issue among American evangelicals, and many Christian Zionists compare it to the Holocaust. Pat Robertson opposes abortion, of course, but he implicitly accepted it when he spoke in favor of China’s policy of one child per family. He also endorsed Giuliani during the Republican primaries, despite the fact that he is pro-choice. These were pragmatic decisions, and evangelicals are often more pragmatic than we expect.

John Hagee has become the face of the Christian right, and he’s been subject to a lot of criticism.

Hagee believes that Israel should be uncompromising on the land, and has a lobbying organization [Christians United for Israel, or CUFI] that deploys four or five thousand people to Congress every summer. He sees Iran as a terrible threat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Hitler. But at the CUFI conference in Washington this past summer, the official position was not to promote an attack on Iran; it was to promote negotiations. He’s not cheering for the end. Like Pat Robertson and the others, he’s trying to alert people to a danger, much as Churchill tried to alert the world to a danger in the 1930s.

Bush, too, has been made out as a religious extremist. But you say he’s not a Christian Zionist at all.

He’s even been accused of being a premillennialist and of wanting to bring us to Armageddon. Bush wanted to create the impression that he was a born-again Christian, but the Christian Zionists have been writing for the last five years that Bush is not one of them. Some are showing deep contempt for him. Some Christian Zionists say Bush believes in replacement theology; those who know him say he doesn’t know replacement theology at all. I wasn’t given access to Bush, so I couldn’t ask him what he really believes.

Some of the harshest criticism of Christian Zionism comes from other evangelicals. How can people who read the Bible literally disagree so strongly about textual issues?

Like mainline Protestants, liberal evangelicals tend to read the Bible more figuratively. They note that in the New Testament, God focuses on caring for the poor and the oppressed. One of the most interesting things I learned from writing this book is that empathy seems to work in only one direction. The empathy the liberal evangelicals feel for suffering Palestinians short-circuits any empathy they might feel for Israelis.

You quote an African-American pastor named Glenn Plummer saying that evangelicals love Israel like a man loves his wife—the love is inexplicable. Are black evangelicals as supportive of Israel as whites?

There’s been tension between blacks and Jews for years, so Glenn’s project is to bring blacks to support Israel. Glenn grew up in Brooklyn, had no particular interest in Jews, was listening to religious radio, decided that there was something to it, and gradually came to love Israel. He said to me—he said it when he spoke before the Knesset, as well—”Get in the faces of black people, tell them: we were there for you in the civil rights movement, we died for you, we marched for you, now you owe us.”

Do you expect Christian Zionist attitudes to change?

Ted Haggard pointed out that dispensational thinking is declining among evangelicals, and wondered whether they would love and support Israel less as a result. Some evangelicals might feel put off if their love for Israel and the Jews seems unrequited. My best guess, though, is that people who read the Bible literally will always take very seriously God’s promises of blessing those who bless Israel, and cursing those who curse the Jews.

“A well dressed woman nowadays is as fluffy as a downy bird fresh from the nest.” So read a line in a magazine nearly 100 years ago, when ostrich feathers represented the height of chic (and fashion copy had a long way to go). For decades, women from Berlin to San Francisco wore hats and boas festooned with long, lush plumes harvested and exported from many regions of Africa—its southern tip, its Atlantic coast, and its northernmost reaches. The United States alone imported five million dollars’ worth of ostrich feathers in 1912, the height of the market.

Two years later everything changed. In 1914, the industry that had boomed went bust, leaving everyone, from the immigrant girls who processed the feathers to the importers who bought them in bulk, jobless. Many of those people were Jews.

As Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues in her book Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, Jews were key players in this industry at every level. She speaks with Nextbook about how and why they came to dominate this business, the economic and political factors that led to its irreversible decline, and the difficulties in making generalizations about Jews in commerce.

And in case you’re wondering, the answer to the question that stumps Stein in the podcast is: “Between 30 and 70 years.”

Photo: Mrs. Harry K. Thaw, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

This election, I’ve been thinking a lot about an unlikely political superstar. He belongs to a historically oppressed minority group, and faced down intense prejudice from a political establishment who never believed a man like him could rise to the top. He skyrocketed to the leadership of his party, bringing down a much more established party leader on the way, and prompting questions about whether he was ready for the highest office. He is a writer who bared his soul in print in a way no ordinary, cautious politician would dare, then used his writerly imagination to capture the imagination of a country.

He is Benjamin Disraeli.

Of course, he is also Barack Obama. Indeed, the similarity between Obama and Disraeli, whose biography I recently wrote for Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, is striking. Disraeli was the first Jewish prime minister of England, and Obama, it now appears, is likely to become the first African American president of the United States. Like Disraeli, Obama belongs to an ethnic minority that has traditionally been abused by the majority he seeks to lead. If he does win next week, it will represent a triumph of democratic openness and equality, just as Disraeli’s career did in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Indeed, as one French statesman joked, the greatest triumph of English liberalism was that a Jew could rise to lead England’s Conservative party.

But the most significant thing Obama and Disraeli have in common, despite all the differences in their characters and politics, is that they were both writers before they became politicians. Disraeli published his first novel when he was just 21, more than a decade before he entered Parliament, and his early fiction was heavily autobiographical—a laboratory in which he could experiment with his persona and ambition. Likewise, Obama published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father, years before he entered politics; and his book, like Disraeli’s, is surprising coming from a politician, both for its high literary skill and its honest wrestling with issues of identity and belonging.

Both men turned first to writing to explore the question that would eventually define their public lives: is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you? In his autobiographical novel Contarini Fleming, Disraeli made his alter ego an Italian living in Scandinavia, rather than a Jew living in England, but the parallel is clear. Contarini complains that he does not look like other boys, and he dreams of returning to Venice, his mother’s homeland, and restoring it to its ancient glory. In his next book, Alroy,

Disraeli would create an explicitly Jewish fantasy, imagining a medieval hero-king, David Alroy, who conquers the Middle East and restores the Jewish state in Palestine. Dreams from My Father is far less romantic and fantastic, but it, too, is a workshop for its author’s identity, as he struggles with the legacy of his idealistic white mother and his absent African father. In his book, Obama writes about traveling to Kenya to confront and reclaim his African heritage, just as Disraeli made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in 1831, to come face to face with the Jewish past.

When Disraeli entered English politics in earnest, he abandoned his youthful dreams of becoming a Jewish national leader. But he never stopped making his Jewishness central to his public and political identity. In the novels he wrote in the 1840s, as he was rising to the top of the Conservative Party, and in his speeches during the debates over whether to allow Jews into Parliament, Disraeli advanced very provocative ideas about Jewish power, Jewish racial identity, and the spiritual debt Christians owed to Judaism. These ideas were actively detrimental to his career—members of his own party thought them bizarre or blasphemous—yet Disraeli never tried to mute them, to become simply a mainstream Tory politician. Knowing that he would always stand out from his surroundings, he decided to stand out vividly and memorably—even his clothes were extravagant.

Still, it’s risky to press the comparison too far. For there is a deep and treacherous gulf between 19th-century British politics and 21st-century American politics. Disraeli’s Conservatives, who like him believed in tradition, social hierarchy, and class deference, have nothing in common with conservative Republicans, whose belief in small government and free markets hews closely to the platform of the nineteenth century’s Liberals. By another irony, liberal Democrats, like Obama, would find much to admire in Disraeli’s program of social welfare legislation. As prime minister, his environmental, labor, and education policies led one British labor leader to say that the Conservatives had done more for the working man in the five years of Disraeli’s government than the Liberals had in the previous fifty. Yet the policy that was perhaps most important of all to Disraeli—maintaining the glory of his country’s empire—finds no resonance at all in American politics, where even the most hawkish politicians discuss war as a dire necessity rather than a glorious adventure.

Even more important, when it comes to comparing Obama and Disraeli, is the very different status of Jews in England and blacks in America. When Disraeli was born, in 1804, there were about 15,000 Jews in the whole of Britain, out of a population of some twelve million. Jews may have loomed large in the English imagination, thanks to Jewish villains imagined by Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and to the role of the Jews, for good and evil, in English Christian thought. But in real life, there were too few Jews to make much impression on English politics or society, and there was certainly no such thing as a Jewish voting bloc for Disraeli to appeal to. (In fact, the few Jewish voters generally supported the Liberals.) There is no comparison to the absolutely central role of African Americans in the history of this country, from before its founding down to the present. Historically, politically, demographically, and culturally, African Americans are at the heart of American life, in a way that Jews never were in England. Above all, the legacy of slavery and racism is infinitely more poisonous in America than anti-Semitism ever was in England.

But there is another, more significant difference between the two men. As he gets closer to the presidency, Obama is becoming less and less like Disraeli—that is, less vivid, less imaginative, less original as a thinker and speaker. To put it in one word, Obama is deliberately making himself less of a writer.

Since his great speech on race and racism in March, delivered in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama has tried earnestly and with surprising success to downplay the significance of his race in the election. He prefers, when possible, to shrug off the whole question, as when he remarks that he doesn’t look like the presidents on our currency, or alludes to his “funny name.” The reason for this, of course, is that Obama recognizes better than anyone just how momentous his election would be as a milestone in American history. The issue of race is so terribly freighted that he does not need to add another ounce to it. In this sense, contrasting Obama’s reticence with Disraeli’s loquacity shows how much more serious American racism is than English anti-Semitism.

The less he dwells on race in his campaign, Obama has apparently calculated, the more likely he is to win. In other words, the less he challenges voters to make the election about racial progress, the more likely he is to strike a terrific blow for racial progress. Disraeli grew up in a Romantic age—Lord Byron was his idol—and what he wanted more than power was to impress himself on the world, to become known on his own terms—which were inevitably Jewish terms. Obama, a more pragmatic man, is willing to efface some of the self we can glimpse in his writing, if that is what it takes to rise to the top of the greasy pole. This calculus seems to be working; but ironically, it may end up making Obama, whose achievement promises to be greater than Disraeli’s, a less memorable historical figure.

An unforgettable scene in Fellini’s film Roma depicts the discovery of an ancient catacomb filled with breathtaking murals. But when the murals are exposed to the spotlights of the researchers and camera crew, they fade and quickly vanish.

Explaining the process of inspiration, for me, is like trying to explain what occurs in a dream. In both cases we must resort to using words to describe an experience that by nature resists definition. In both cases we can rationally analyze the events and consider, for example, the themes and characters that may have influenced the dreamer and the needs that led him to conjure up these particular influences rather than others in his dream. But we will always feel that the essence of the dream, its secret, the unique glimmer of contact between the dreamer and the dream, remains an impenetrable riddle.

I remember what I experienced when I felt I was under the rays of a vast and inspiring literary power—when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, or Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. I have no doubt that some part of me, perhaps my innermost core, seemed to be in the realm of a dream. There was a similar intrinsic logic, and a direct dialogue conducted with the deepest and most veiled contents of my soul, almost without the mediation of consciousness.

When I talk, then, of this or the other author and how he or she touched my life and influenced my writing, I know that it is merely the story I tell myself today, in a waking state, under the spotlights, filtered through the natural sifting process of memory.

When I was eight years old, my father suggested that I read Sholem Aleichem’s Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son. Father himself had been a child in the Galician shtetl of Dynow, just a few miles from Lemberg, otherwise known as Lvov. Like Mottel, he had lost his father at a young age and lived with his brothers and sisters and hardworking widowed mother.

Father, who immigrated to Palestine in 1936, did not talk much about his childhood. Only rarely was the curtain drawn to reveal a strange, enchanting, intangible world, almost like a shadow theater. Then I could see my father as a little boy, sitting in the cheder opposite a stern teacher who used to fix broken china during class, binding the pieces together with wire. I could see Father at the age of four, walking home from the cheder in the dark, lighting his way with a candle stuck inside half a radish—nature’s candlestick. I could see the doctor bringing a precious remedy for my grandfather’s ailment as he lay on his deathbed: a paper-thin slice of watermelon. And I could see my father looking out the window.

Father handed me Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (in Y.D. Berkowitz’s Hebrew translation), and I read the title of the first chapter while he held the book in his hands—“Today’s a Holiday—Weeping Is Forbidden!”—and then the following words: “I bet no one was so delighted with the warm sunny days following Passover as I, Mottel, the son of Peissi the Cantor, and as the neighbor’s calf, ‘Menie’ (as I, Mottel, have named him).”

I did not understand a word of what I read, and yet there was something there. I took the book from my father’s hands and climbed up onto the windowsill, my favorite reading place. Outside was Beit Mazmil, where the residents were trying to accustom themselves to the neighborhood’s newly ordained Hebrew name, Kiryat Yovel. It was a cluster of apartment buildings whose occupants had made their way from seventy exiles and who argued in seventy languages. The dwellers of the tin-shack neighborhood, whom we called asbestonim, looked on enviously at those who were lucky enough to get a tiny apartment in one of the buildings. There were young couples who confronted life with determined optimism, and Holocaust survivors who walked the streets like shadows and whom we children feared.

“Together we basked in the first warm sunrays of the first mild after-Passover days; together we breathed in the fragrance of the first tender blades of grass that burst through the newly bared earth; and together we crept out of dark narrow prisons to greet the first sunny spring morning. I, son of Peissi the Cantor, emerged from a cold damp cellar which always smells of sour dough and medicines. And Menie, the neighbor’s calf, was released from an even worse odor—a small filthy stall, dark and muddy, with crooked battered walls which let in snow in winter and rain in summer.”

“Do you like it?” my father asked. “Read, read, it’s just how things were with us.” And perhaps because of the expression on his face at that moment, I had a sudden illumination: I realized that for the first time, he was inviting me over there, giving me the keys to the tunnel that would lead from my childhood to his.

It was a peculiar tunnel. One end was in Jerusalem, in the young State of Israel, which believed that its strength depended partly on its ability to forget so that it could cobble together a new identity for itself. And the other end was in the land of Over There.

From the moment I stepped into that land I could not leave. I was eight, and within a few months I had devoured all of Sholem Aleichem’s writings that existed in Hebrew at the time—the children’s stories, the writings for adults, and the plays. When I reread the works before writing this piece, I was amazed to discover how little I could have understood as a child, and how powerfully the things beyond the visible text must have worked on me. Because what could an eight- or nine-year-old have understood about Rachel’s tormented love for Stempenyu? Or the political views that Sholem Aleichem gave to a detached and wayward Jewish character like Menachem Mendel, or to his complete opposite, Tevye the Milkman? What did I know about the life of yeshiva students who ate at the table of a different homeowner each day of the week? About the hostility between the “landlord” class and the workers, or about the conflict between the Zionists and the Bundists?

I did not know, I did not understand, but something inside me would not allow me to let go of the inscrutable stories, written in a Hebrew I had never encountered before. I read like someone entering a completely foreign world that was, at the same time, a promised land. In some sense, I felt that I was coming home. And it all worked its magic on me in a muddled way: the words with the biblical ring, the characters, the customs, the ways of life, and the fact that the page numbers were marked with letters rather than numbers, as in Bialik and Rawnitzky’s Book of Legends. Even the smell of the pages was dense and so different from the scent of the other books I read—translations of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, The Paul Street Boys and Kajtus´ the Wizard, the works of Erich Kestner and Jules Verne, and Israeli books like Shraga Gafni’s adventure stories, Eliezer Smoli’s Frontiersmen of Israel, the adventures of the secret agent named Oz Yaoz, books by Nachum Gutman, and anything else I could get my hands on.

Parenthetically I will add that I belong to a generation that was accustomed to reading texts in which they did not understand every single word. In the early 1960s we read books in archaic and poetic Hebrew; we read translations from the 1920s and ’30s that did not employ our daily language at all. The incomprehensibility imposed on us was certainly a barrier to fluid reading, but in hindsight I think that part of my reading experience in that period came from this very same incomprehensibility: the mystery and the exoticism of words with an odd ring, and the pleasure of inferring one thing from another. I note this because most children’s books today (and children’s magazines even more so) are written at the readers’ eye level and ear level, if not lower, usually preferring the simplest—and sometimes the most simplistic—words possible, often favoring slang. Of course this has many advantages and perhaps results in a broader readership, yet I miss the reading experience of my own childhood, when in the course of reading, the child would fill in linguistic gaps and unwittingly acquire a large and rich vocabulary, learning to view language as an entity with a life of its own.

**pagebreak next=”I met moneylenders and usurers, and robbers who attack you in the woods at night.”**Inside the six volumes of Sholem Aleichem—a collection of small red books published by Dvir—I discovered the most imaginative world I had ever found in any book. It was a world that was neither heroic nor grand, ostensibly containing nothing that could draw the heart of a child. But it spoke to me, and must have given voice to a longing, a real hunger, that I had not even imagined before. I read about cunning matchmakers, tailors, and water-drawers; about tutors (melamdim) and pupils (dardakim) in the cheder; about priests and laundresses and snuff-takers and smugglers. I read about sheepskin mantles and peasant overcoats. I met moneylenders and usurers, and robbers who attack you in the woods at night. There were places called Kasrilevke and Yehupitz, and people called Hersh Leib, Shneyer, Menachem Mendel, Ivan Pichkur, and Father Alexei. Strangest of all was that Jews lived together with goyim. What did this mean? Why did they want to live with these dangerous goyim? Why did Tevye’s daughter Chavaleh marry a goy? And why did the goyim throw Tevye out of his home, and how was it possible so simply, with the wave of an arm, to uproot a man from his home and his life and tell him, “Go”?

Incidentally, I did not fully comprehend the meaning of the word goy, and the term “Christian” was also a little vague. I am fairly certain that until the age of nine I was positive—perhaps like many children—that “Christian” (in Hebrew, notzri) was a type of Egyptian (in Hebrew, mitzri). Either way, they were both “the enemy.”

Everything in the stories amazed and daunted and attracted me: the sense of a tenuous existence; the suffering embedded in the everyday; the constant fear of pogroms or “hunts”; the fluent dialogue with God, almost like small talk; and the absolute authority of dreams and their meanings. There was also the constant presence of the dead, a series of “patriarchs” and “matriarchs” with whom people conversed on a daily basis even if they had been dead for years. And the experience of total dependence on despots, the fatalism, the physical weakness, the compassion—even toward those who hate you—and the irony, and again and again the peculiar intimacy with calamity, the calamity that always hovered over everyone’s head so that its imminence was never in doubt.

It is worth noting that I did not know any other children who read Sholem Aleichem. When I excitedly told my best friend in the neighborhood about my new experience, he gave me a sideways look and his lips began to curl into a smirk. I quickly changed the subject, but the incident forced me to make increased efforts in such pursuits as suicidal leaps from trees and climbing up tall cranes, all to clear my briefly sullied name. Very quickly, with a child’s instinct—a survivor’s instinct—I realized that the shtetl must remain my secret world, to be shared with no one.

Between the ages of eight and ten I was a double agent from “here” to Over There and back again. I conducted an intensive life in both realities, experiencing with great enthusiasm all that life in Israel of the early 1960s had to offer—a spirited existence that was both miserable and miraculous. Like most children in the neighborhood, I worked tirelessly to expose Arab spies (half the country was busy with that) and spent days in physical training so that I could either make it onto the Israeli team that would defeat the evil Germans or get into the paratroopers. But whenever possible I dived back into my Jewish shtetl, which was becoming more and more tangible, comprehensible, and relevant to me, animating within me some Jewish note—that was at the same time very diasporic—giving it a voice and sensations, and a clear existence in my world.

The odd thing was that all that time I was convinced that the world of Sholem Aleichem—the world of the Eastern European shtetl—continued to exist alongside my own. Not that I dwelled much on the question of its existence or lack thereof in reality: its literary form was so bold and vital that it never even occurred to me to ponder its subsistence outside the pages of the six volumes. But in the recesses of my mind it was clear to me that this world did indeed live on somewhere out there, with its various laws and institutions, its special language, and its mystery. It was a world always accompanied by a sad yet smiling melody, a lamentation resigned to the loss—but the loss of what? That I did not know.

And then when I was about nine and a half, in the midst of a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, one of those clumsy, hackneyed, repetitive rituals that are so helpless in the face of the thing itself, in the face of that unfathomable number, six million . . .

It struck me all at once. Suddenly. The six million, the murdered, the victims, the “Holocaust martyrs,” all those terms were in fact my people. They were Mottel and Tevye and Shimele Soroker and Chavaleh and Stempenyu and Lily and Shimek. On the burning asphalt of the Beit Hakerem school, the shtetl was suddenly taken from me.

It was the first time I truly understood the meaning of the Holocaust. And it is no exaggeration to say that this comprehension shook my entire world. I remember my distress during the following days, a distress characteristic of the children of real survivors, because I imagined that I now bore some responsibility to remember all those people; it was a responsibility I did not want.

Every child has his first experience of death. The characters in Sholem Aleichem’s stories were the first people to die in my life. I could not read about them any longer, yet I could not stop reading. For a while I read in a way I never had: with care and gravity, I read all six volumes again, for the last time (I was very careful not to laugh in the places that always made me laugh), and the reading was both my contact with the intolerable pain and my only way to heal it. Each encounter with the text brought home to me again the enormity of the loss, but somehow also made it a little more tolerable. Today I know that at ten I discovered that books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can coexist.

The first part of See Under: Love tells of a boy named Momik who tries to understand the Diaspora in Israeli terms. Large parts of the book are an attempt to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom. But it also attempts the opposite: to describe Israel in a “diasporic” language. That is the book’s internal music, its counterpoint.

See Under: Love is a novel about a story that was lost, torn to shreds. There are several such lost stories in the book, which have to be told again and again because that is the only way to assemble the traces of identity and fuse the fragments of a crumbled world. Many characters in the book are looking for a story they have lost, usually a childhood tale, and they need it very badly so that they can retell it, as adults, and be reborn through it. It is not innocence that drives their desire to tell children’s stories, for they have virtually no innocence left. Rather, this is their way to preserve their humanity, and perhaps a modicum of nobility—to believe in the possibility of childhood in this world, and to hold it up against the sheer cynicism. To tell the whole story again through the eyes of a child.

**pagebreak next=”The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books.”**The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books. In See Under: Love it was Nazism; in The Smile of the Lamb and The Yellow Wind it was a military occupation that views itself as enlightened, while its victims are subjected to the tyranny of a power they perceive as supreme; in The Book of Intimate Grammar I tried to describe the way one’s soul—that multifarious glimmer of life—is forced to adapt to the impersonal dimensions of matter, to the unequivocal quality of flesh.

From one book to the next I found that if I could be more precise in describing the relationship between the individual soul and this external arbitrariness, if I struggled a little harder with the depth of descriptions, the subtlety of sensations, the nuances of “being there,” I could conquer another millimeter of the void between myself and what had always seemed unalterable. Not that I found a better way to live in peace with the contradictions between body and mind; not that I truly understood how a man can erase himself to such a degree that he becomes part of a destructive machine; and not that if I were to describe the injustices of the Occupation it would be over. But my inner stance vis-à-vis the unalterable shifted slightly: I could give my own private names and definitions to states that had seemed frozen, eternal, monolithic, decreed from above or from below. I was no longer a victim of the things that had theretofore paralyzed me with fear and despair.

This feeling brings me to another precious source of inspiration and awe—the writing of Bruno Schulz. I first heard about The Street of Crocodiles (originally titled Cinnamon Shops) from a stranger who phoned me one day after reading The Smile of the Lamb to tell me, warmly but firmly, that I was of course deeply influenced by Bruno Schulz. As I said, I did not know Schulz’s work at the time, and I was happy to learn how much he had influenced me. In fact, I have frequently been informed by my erudite critics about certain writers who have influenced me, and after reading them for the first time, I have discovered that the critics were correct.

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer who lived in the town of Drohobycz, also in Galicia, was a modest art teacher who turned his small domestic life into a tremendous mythology, and today he is considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Bruno Schulz believed and hoped that our daily life was but a series of legendary episodes, fragments of ancient carved images, crumbs of shattered mythologies. He likened human language to a primeval snake that was long ago cut into a thousand pieces—these pieces are the words that have ostensibly lost their primeval vitality and now function solely as a means of communication, yet still, always, they continue “to search for one another in the dark.”

On every page written by Bruno Schulz one can feel this restless search, the longing for a different, primordial wholeness. His stories are full of the moments of first contact, when words suddenly “find one another in the dark.” That is when an electric spark of sorts occurs in the reader’s consciousness, awakening the sense that a word he or she has heard and read a thousand times can now momentarily reveal its private name.

Only two collections of Schulz’s short stories have been published, as well as a few other shorter works. He wrote a novel titled The Messiah, which was lost, and no one knows for certain what it contained. I once met a man who told me that Schulz had shown him the first few lines of the novel: Morning rises above a town. A certain light. Towers. That was all he saw.

Although Schulz did not write much, life bursts forth from every page he did produce, overflowing, becoming worthy of its name, a colossal effort that occurs simultaneously on all levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, illusion and nostalgia and nightmare. I read the book over the course of one day and night in a total frenzy of the senses, and my feeling—which now slightly embarrasses me—will be familiar to anyone who has been in love: it was the knowledge that this other person or thing was meant only for me.

I read the entire book (Cinnamon Shops & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, published in Hebrew by Schocken) without knowing a thing about Bruno Schulz, and when I reached the end, I read Yoram Bronowski’s afterword, where I learned the story of Schulz’s death. In the Drohobycz ghetto, Schulz had a protector and employer in the form of an S.S. officer named Landau, who had Schulz paint murals in his home and stable. The officer had a rival, another S.S. officer named Günter, who lost a card game to Landau. Günter met Bruno Schulz on a street corner and shot him dead to hurt his employer. When the two officers later met, the murderer said: “I killed your Jew.” To which the other responded: “Very well. Now I will kill your Jew.”

After reading this account, I felt that I did not wish to live in a world in which such monstrosities of language could be uttered. But this time, unlike my paralysis at age ten—after realizing the connection between the horrors of the Holocaust and the characters of Sholem Aleichem—I had a way to express what I felt. I wanted to write a book that would tell readers about Bruno Schulz. It would be a book that would tremble on the shelf. The vitality it contained would be tantamount to the blink of an eye in one person’s life—not “life” in quotation marks, life that is nothing more than a languishing moment in time, but the sort of life Schulz gives us in his writing. A life of the living.

I know that many readers of See Under: Love found it difficult to get through the chapter on Bruno Schulz. But for me, that is the core of the book, the reason I wrote it, the reason I write. When people tell me they were unable to read it, I am regretful over the missed encounter, which is why the meetings I have had with those who were willing to delve into that chapter with me are so precious. The book has since been translated into several languages, and nothing makes me happier than the fact that in each language in which the book has appeared, new editions of Bruno Schulz’s writings have soon followed, and more and more people have become acquainted with this wonderful writer.

When I was invited to write about my sources of inspiration, I was asked which books I would like to discuss and what should be included in the bibliography for students. I began to think about which books and writers have influenced me and shaped my writing, and there have been so many: the stories of A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz’s Hill of Evil Counsel, Kafka’s works, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Heinrich Böll, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Of course I was tempted to lecture about Joyce and Camus, of whom I am particularly fond, and to frustrate some of the distinguished scholars with quotations from a Greenlandic epic they have never heard of.

But when Bialik wrote his poem “My Song,” he did not speak of his literary sources of inspiration. That was not the poem in which he described the bookshelves he stood facing as a boy, and later left behind. “Do you know whence I derived my song?” he asks. And he replies by recalling the dry, empty voice of a cricket that lived in his father’s house, and his mother’s deep sigh when she was widowed.

A cricket, a sigh.

And so I will not speak of authors or books that inspired me, but of an almost physical sensation that may not be a source of inspiration in the traditional sense, yet I feel it is a distinct root of my need to write. I find it difficult to reduce this sensation to a verbal definition. Bruno Schulz talks of suffocation within “the fortressed walls of tedium that close in on us”; perhaps it is that suffocation. Perhaps it is a type of claustrophobia that arises within the words of others. To understand it, I wrote a whole book, The Book of Intimate Grammar, which is the story of a young man who cannot accept the burden of all the conventions and routines that surround him, or the verbal clichés, or even the restrictive, unequivocal, physical dictates of his own body.

**pagebreak next=”Aron Kleinfeld lives in what is essentially a society of refugees.”**The book takes place in 1960s Jerusalem. Aron Kleinfeld lives in what is essentially a society of refugees, filled with people who have recently escaped a catastrophe and are trying with their last remaining strength to create a new life, a new language. With sometimes grotesque fervor, they grasp onto objects, food, anything with tangible volume. They create a solid, corporeal, unequivocal world, and it is naturally a world that is extremely belligerent and arbitrary, recklessly invading the privacy of its individuals.

To me, it is a book about the birth of an artist from within those “fortressed walls of tedium.” Aron, who is twelve when the story begins, a bright and imaginative child with abundant happiness, feels this invasion increasingly stifling him. It is all around him, shoving rude fingers into his mind and body. Even the physiological process of maturation that he faces seems to be a part of it. (Incidentally, the Hebrew words for “muscle”—shrir—and “arbitrariness”—shrirut—come from the same root.)

Alienation and, ultimately, hostility emerge between Aron and his own flesh and body—between himself and the part of his being that has an external, objective, yet extremely internal existence. Aron sees his friends begin to mature and change, as if collectively obeying an invisible order, and he is incapable of joining them. There is something in the unity of the process, in its inevitability, that deters him because he finds it lacking in freedom, almost humiliating.

Aron’s case is of course an extreme one, but I imagine we all remember the feelings of our adolescence, when we entered a tunnel that would stretch out for a number of years without knowing what fate had in store for us, how we would emerge at the other end, woven into which body, woven into which soul. As the years go by, we come to know the thing that Aron feared most, unknowingly of course, and which probably made him refuse to accept this constitution of the flesh: the knowledge of how easy it is for the mind to surrender to the corporeal dimension and gradually become a mechanism much like that of the body—with clogged arteries, cramped muscles, rigid joints, and automatic reflexes.

Faced with the bureaucracy of the body imposed on him, Aron feels that the primary means through which he can express his freedom, his uniqueness, and even his sexuality is language. And since language is also a kind of body, with a dual existence, both inside and out, Aron is tormented every time there is a grating contact between that “inside” and that “outside”: when people around him use language like old saws, when they belittle something that in Aron’s soul has a different, purer, more loyal existence. From that particular moment he realizes instinctively that he can no longer use words as others do—indiscriminately, indifferently, inarticulately.

It is also relevant to note that the story occurs shortly before the Six-Day War, when everyone Aron meets talks in the same blunt, military style, born of fear and arrogance. They all prophesize in the same tone, and this depresses Aron to no end, both because of the crudeness that characterizes the uniform, slogan-ridden discourse and because of his sense that they all belong to a secret, hermetic system of symbols from which he himself is removed, and that he will never have the requisite crudeness or obtuseness to become a part of it.

Deep within himself, beneath his heart, Aron establishes a hospital for sick words, where he employs complex rituals to heal and purify the words he gathers from the day-to-day. Only when the purification process is complete does he feel entitled to use the words. They have passed through his body and soul. They are his. Of course this process condemns Aron to utter solitude, trapped in his inner world, in his own private language, creating his beloved and his best friend inside himself, unable to maintain normal relationships with them in what is termed “reality.” The book ends when Aron shuts himself up inside an old refrigerator and hopes that with the help of the childlike, artistic spark he used to have, he will be able to pull off his most difficult Houdini trick and break out of the refrigerator into the world. But will he in fact be able to?

I have my own answer to this question, but before I reach it I would like to shift from the private, personal language to the more general kind, which served as a sort of “inspiration in reverse” for three of my books: the novel The Smile of the Lamb and two works of nonfiction, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire. Each of these books, in its own way, tries to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom.

To our great misfortune, we in Israel have been living for almost a century in a state of violent conflict, which has an enormous influence on all realms of life, including, of course, on language. When a country or a society finds itself—no matter for what reasons—in a prolonged state of incongruity between its founding values and its political circumstances, a rift can emerge between the society and its identity, between the society and its “inner voice.” The more complex and contradictory the situation becomes and the more the society has to compromise in order to contain all its disparities, the more it creates a different system for itself, an ad hoc system of norms, of “emergency values,” keeping double books of its identity.

I am not saying anything new here. Those who live in such a reality, as we do in Israel, will find it easy to understand how fears consolidate ideals around themselves, how needs become values, and how a subjective world-view and a self-image that is wholly unsuited to reality can materialize. A special kind of language then begins to emerge, one that is usually a manipulation on the part of those who wish to prolong the distorted situation. It is a language of words intended not to describe reality but to obfuscate it, to allay it. It depicts a reality that does not exist, an imaginary state constructed by wishful thinking, while large and complex elements of the actual reality remain wordless, in the hope that they will somehow fade away and vanish. In such conditions one of our most dubious talents arises: the talent for passivity, for self-erasure, for reducing the inner surface of our soul lest it get hurt. In other words, the talent for being a victim.

Let us go back eleven years, to the spring of 1987.

For two decades, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel has controlled more than two million Palestinians. By all opinions this is a grave state of affairs, yet it turns out that most Israelis, as well as most Palestinians, have taught themselves how to live in these warped circumstances and that many of them believe the situation will never change. As time goes by, there is an increasing perception of a “status quo,” along with more and more arguments that justify and even sanctify this very status quo. The press provides scarcely any news of what is going on in the Territories, only brief reports of violent incidents phrased in fixed formulas that are little more than slogans and do not catch one’s eye for very long.

At this time I was working as a newscaster on the Kol Israel radio news. I was given dozens, if not hundreds, of items to read that sounded something like this: “A local youth was killed during disturbances in the Territories.” Notice the shrewdness of the sentence: “disturbances”—as if there were some order or normative state in the Territories that was briefly disturbed; “in the Territories”—we would never expressly say “the Occupied Territories”; “youth”—this youth might have been a three-year-old boy, and of course he never had a name; “local”—so as not to say “Palestinian,” which would imply someone with a clear national identity; and above all, note the verb “was killed”—no one killed him. It would have been almost intolerable to admit that our hands spilled this blood, and so he “was killed.” (Sometimes the passive voice is the last refuge of the patriot.)

Because we lost the capacity to use the right words to describe reality, we woke up one day, in December 1987, to a reality that is difficult to describe. Israel had deceived itself so efficiently that the Israel Defense Forces did not even have contingency plans to deal with the mass protests. At the beginning of the intifada the security apparatus dispatched urgent envoys to the world’s most dubious markets to purchase rubber bullets, gravel-spraying vehicles, and other necessities. Yet any country that occupies and oppresses another people must be prepared for such large-scale demonstrations. Israel was not prepared, because it did not know it was an occupier, it did not think it was an oppressor, and it did not tell itself that there was a people out there.

Nine months before the intifada broke out, I wrote The Yellow Wind. The book presented nothing new in the way of facts, which had been exposed ad nauseam. But in order to truly understand what I was seeing and feeling, I had to articulate the facts with new words. And from the moment I started writing, from the day I went to the Dheisheh refugee camp and encountered a reality that until that time I had lacked the words to describe, I felt something I had not felt for years, certainly not in the political context: that consciousness, in any situation, is always free to choose to face reality in a different, new way. That writing about reality is the simplest way to not be a victim.

In this sense, writing the nonfiction books made me feel that I was reclaiming parts of myself that the prolonged conflict had expropriated or turned into “closed military zones.” Furthermore, I came to grasp the high price we were paying for willingly giving up on parts of our soul—a price no less painful than giving up land. I knew that we were not killing only the Palestinians, and I asked why we were continuing to accept not just the murder, but the suicide too.

The name of the novel Be My Knife is a paraphrase of a line Franz Kafka wrote to Milena: “Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself.” The Book of Intimate Grammar could not have been written without See Under: Love, which preceded it; Be My Knife could not have been written without The Book of Intimate Grammar; and Be My Knife, in turn, was probably the basis for the book that followed it. It is clear to me now that this is a very long path, which must be followed slowly, and that I must recognize that an entire lifetime will not suffice to map out even the first bend in the path.

In The Book of Intimate Grammar, I articulated several complicated ideas that I needed to understand, in sentences that today cover the pages in front of me like a verdict. But they are precisely what enabled me to find the strength to step out of Aron Kleinfeld’s loneliness, to escape from the refrigerator at the end of that book and start walking—this time in a different literary situation, with a different, more mature literary character—toward a different person. This would no longer be the imaginary creation of my protagonist, but a man who lives in reality and a woman of flesh and blood. I had to believe that it is possible for a different person to occur within myself, to believe without fear that a person can dwell inside the body and soul and language of another. And to discover that one can find a partner to share the deepest and most silent anxieties, and keys to unlock the most despicable self-laid traps.

Be My Knife is also the story of a journey to find the right language. A journey in which the woman is a tour guide of sorts who leads the man to his real language, which she carves out of him in a difficult battle until, near the end of the book, they create their own language. The book tries to be the only place where there can be a meaning for this private language—the language of their love.

Excerpted from Writing in the Dark by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen), published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright© 2008 by David Grossman. Translation copyright © 2008 by Jessica Cohen. All rights reserved.

There’s a fairly well-established canon of Israeli writers in the United States. There’s Amos Oz, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld. Their work is not light. It grapples with the shadow of the Holocaust, Jewish-Arab relations, history, and morality. But in recent years the work of younger Israelis—among them Etgar Keret, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Yael Hedaya—has begun to appear in translation. Like that of her peers, Hedaya’s fiction does not carry the weight of the world, or a nation, on its shoulders. It’s more about day to day intimacies and anxieties, about loneliness, about desire.

Nextbook visited with Yael Hedaya in her home on a moshav just outside of Jerusalem. She spoke about making her novels political in their own small way, raising three children and still finding time to work, and writing for the hit television series Betipul, which inspired the HBO series In Treatment.

Photo: Efrat Eshel.

A few weeks ago, finalists were announced for this year’s Man Booker Prize, which honors the best novel by a British Commonwealth or Irish writer. The thirteen authors on the longlist include Salman Rushdie, art critic John Berger, and Joseph O’Neil, whose novel Netherland has received a lot of attention in the United States. Also on the list is an author who is not as well known here, but who should be: Linda Grant.

Grant’s new novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, tells the story of Vivien, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants who hide their Jewishness—and other details of their past—from her and the rest of the world. As an adult, Vivien forges a friendship with an estranged, criminal uncle in order to gain access to the secrets her parents have kept from her.

The Guardian calls the book “fluid and addictive.” Our London-based reporter Hugh Levinson was equally enthralled. In an interview with Levinson from her home in north London, Grant talks about why suffering does not make one noble, keeping family secrets rarely works, and shopping is a worthy pastime.

Photos: Judah Passow.

In “The Thorny Path,” the first story I ever read by Dvora Baron, a paralyzed woman lies propped up in bed before the display window of her husband’s photography studio in their Eastern European village. I read the story in 1981, two years after I moved to Israel. My Hebrew was weak, and I struggled with the early-twentieth-century prose of novelists like Micha Yosef Berdischevsky, Uri Nisan Gnessin, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. At the time, none of them left a particular impression, except Baron, who conjured a protagonist, trapped in bed, looking out on a world she cannot join. It made for a haunting image.

Mousha’s paralysis has doomed her to experience the circle—as she calls the small radius of her sight—as if it were one of Nahum’s photos. The story takes place during the summer:

The doors in the houses of the “circle” have been opened, and the daily activities . . . have been moved out to the doorsteps. In the tavern across the street, the proprietress, Lipsha, chopped sorrel leaves on the kitchen steps . . . and Heniah Levin, dark and delicate, peeked from time to time at the fabric store, where her handsome husband, the city boy, worked.

A quarter of a century ago, I did not know that Mousha’s creator observed the world in much the same way. The only woman to be accepted into the canon of early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature and a central figure in the modern Hebrew literary renaissance and the literary life of Tel Aviv, Baron spent her last thirty-three years as a recluse. Until her death in 1956, she observed life from the window of her tiny apartment on Oliphant Street, around the corner from then-fading (now café-lined) Shenkin Street.

Like many other Hebrew prose writers of her generation, Baron primarily wrote short stories, though she also published two novellas, For the Time Being (1943) and Since Yesterday, and a highly regarded Hebrew translation of Madame Bovary. Toward the end of her life she collected the stories that she felt best represented her legacy in Parshiyot (Tales), relegating all her other, earlier work—about fifty stories—to oblivion.

These works were anthologized by Avner Noltzman and Nurit Govrin in 1988, more than thirty years after Baron’s death. But by that time, the stories that Baron believed represented her literary legacy—not just the ones she had discarded—were no longer read by a broad public. Baron’s Hebrew of the early twentieth century feels stilted and overly formal in comparison with the colloquial language of today.

In recent years, however, the tide has turned. In 1991, psychologist Amia Lieblich published Conversations with Dvora, an “experimental biography” of Baron, which tells the story of Baron’s life through a series of imaginary conversations in the writer’s apartment, set in the months before her death. Six years later, the book was translated into English, and garnered strong reviews. And in 2001, a new English translation of a selection of Baron’s works appeared, under the title The First Day and Other Stories.

Four years ago, I had an opportunity to reacquaint myself with Baron. Sheila Jelen, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland and the author of Intimations of Difference, an excellent study of Baron, asked me to translate into English some essays for Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction. Once again, I was astonished by “The Thorny Path.”

When the story begins, Mousha is three years old. Her life resembles a fairy tale, with both an evil stepmother and a Prince Charming, her neighbor Nahum. Mousha and Nahum grow up and marry, Nahum sets up his studio, and the couple has a child. But childbirth paralyzes Mousha and she lacks sufficient milk. The baby dies. Mousha then has another child, Muni (short for Benjamin). A bris is arranged but the townspeople boycott it, since Mousha, immobilized, could not have immersed herself in the mikveh to purge herself of menstrual impurity. The newborn is the product of forbidden relations.

Mousha again cannot breastfeed and her stepmother offers to save the child by taking him away to a wet nurse on the condition that the couple agrees never to contact him. Years pass, and a friend of Nahum’s facilitates a meeting with Muni before Nahum dies. The young man returns home, takes over the shop, and photographs his mother. “He revealed and discerned all that was hidden, drew out all that was in her, and showed her truthfully to herself.”

Baron seems to suggest that truths about people are revealed not through direct observation, but through a mediating device—a window, a mirror, a photograph—which produces a truer portrait.

Baron was born in 1887 in Ouzda, just outside Minsk, where her father, the town rabbi, quickly came to appreciate her precocity and intelligence. He encouraged her—alone among her three sisters—to study traditional texts, letting her sit in on his classes for the community’s men and boys. Her older brother, Benjamin, with whom she was very close, schooled her in the modern Hebrew literature of the Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment. The combined influences of her father and brother provided her with precisely the knowledge she needed to enter the modern Hebrew literary world.

She published her first stories in Hebrew in 1902, when she was just fifteen, in the Eastern European Hebrew-language daily newspaper HaMelitz. Like many writers of the Hebrew literary revival, which got underway in 1886 with the launch of HaMelitz and other similar periodicals, Baron also wrote a bit in Yiddish early in her career. In 1903, she left home to seek admission into a Russian high school. Discriminatory quotas made it very difficult for young Jews to gain admission to such schools. They had to cram for and excel at a grueling series of entrance examinations, an experience Baron later portrayed in some of her stories. She managed to get over these hurdles and gain admittance to a Russian high school for girls in Lithuania, where she pursued her secular studies and earned a teaching certificate. Moving from one major Jewish population center in the Pale of Settlement to another—during these years she lived, among other places, in Kovno, Mariompol, Minsk, and Vilna—she continued to write and participate in Hebrew literary life.

In 1910, at twenty-three, she immigrated on her own to Palestine. Her reputation preceded her. She was immediately offered the post of literary editor of the important labor Zionist newspaper HaPoel HaTzair. The following year she married the newspaper’s editor in chief, Yosef Aharonovitch, a Ukrainian immigrant ten years her senior.

Her life soon took a tragic turn. Their only child, Tzipora, born in 1914, developed epilepsy. Five years later, Baron’s brother died in a typhus epidemic in Russia. Then, in 1923, she and her husband resigned from HaPoel HaTzair, after a public controversy over whether he was still the right man to run the newspaper. Aharonovitch carried on in public life—he was appointed head of Bank Hapoalim, the labor movement’s major financial institution. But from then on, Baron stayed home, not venturing out even to attend his funeral in 1937. While there has been much speculation about the reason for this behavior—depression, anorexia, a need for isolation in order to write—Baron herself offered no clues.

It was during Baron’s long seclusion that she wrote most of her mature work, and though she did not leave home, she did receive visitors, including editors and literary figures who continued to publish and promote her. Her stories appeared in journals and newspapers associated with the labor movement, and were published in book form by Am Oved, an arm of the Histadrut labor federation.

At the turn of the century, when Baron began writing, the young stars of the small, vibrant literary movement were men—Agnon, Brenner, and Chaim Nachman Bialik—who rebelled against religion and against the Eastern European yeshivot where they had studied as teenagers. While these men were not believers, they knew and valued Judaism’s sacred literature. And they argued that a legitimate modern Hebrew style could not be a hollow imitation of the literatures of other cultures, but must be firmly based in the literary heritage of the Jewish people. Their fiction constantly alluded to and borrowed vocabulary, syntax, and subject matter from the Bible, the Talmud, and the midrashim.

Baron’s female contemporaries—Nechama Puchechevsky, Sarah Feige Meinkin Foner, and Hemda Ben Yehuda—lacked this knowledge of traditional sources, and while like them Baron wrote of domestic matters, her religious education allowed her to set up allusions and ironies that only readers with traditional Jewish erudition could appreciate. In “Burying the Books,” for example, (first published in 1908 and again in a considerably revised version in 1922), the female narrator sits in synagogue, listening to a sermon about Balaam, the gentile prophet hired by the king of Moab to curse the children of Israel. As the narrator recounts the congregation’s ceremonial burial of sacred books, Baron weaves in themes from the Biblical story, along with a subplot that hearkens back to a midrash about a woman who brings a handful of flour to the Temple in Jerusalem as a sacrificial offering, only to be scorned by the priest.

As Jelen points out in Intimations of Difference, by delving into the minds of women, Baron risked utterly losing the interest of the male gatekeepers to the literary establishment—her fellow writers and editors.

Her stories offered sophisticated critiques of women’s status in both traditional and modern Jewish society. But the male critics didn’t always respond. Prominent literary figures in the early years of Israeli statehood, such as Dan Meron and Gershon Shaked, regarded Baron as a talented, but limited chronicler of the domestic side of the lost world of Eastern Europe. To be sure, most of her fiction is set in and around three Lithuanian towns, Khmilovka, Tochnovka, and Zhozhikovka. After her move to Palestine, Baron was criticized for continuing to write about the Diaspora, rather than the seemingly more worthy subject of the new Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel. Her choice solidified her reputation as a genre writer, valuable as an archivist of a vanished world, but with little to say to the modern Israeli. Still, she won several major literary awards in her lifetime, including the prestigious Bialik Prize in 1934 for her short story collection Kitanot (Trifles) and, in 1951, the Brenner Hebrew literary prize for Parshiyot (Tales).

Most of her early readers assumed Baron’s work was autobiographical. She did nothing to discourage this assumption, repeatedly making her protagonists the daughters of rabbis and calling characters in her stories Benjamin and Hannah—the names of her brother and one of her sisters. And then, of course, there’s “The Thorny Path,” a story about a woman confined to a few rooms, written by a woman who confined herself to a few rooms. In reality, her fiction was not a mirror of her life. Despite the sufferings of her protagonists—which arguably reflected her own—her stories typically have happy endings, which often involve the birth of a baby boy or, as in “The Thorny Path,” the return of a lost son. Yet these happy endings are like the happy ending in the book of Job. Job suffers—his children are killed and his home and wealth destroyed by a God who gives a free hand to a malevolent demiurge. In compensation, God makes him rich again, provides him with another house, and grants him more children. Baron’s heroines, like Job, wonder if consolation can ever compensate their initial loss.

Toward the end of Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, his friend and fellow fantasist Neil Gaiman attempts to sum up Ellison, who has, over the course of his seventy-four years, written millions of words, won dozens of awards for his short stories and teleplays, married five times, had sex with “over seven hundred women” (or so Ellison says), marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, and traveled with the Rolling Stones.

“You have to accept that you have somebody who is partly one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . and, at the same time, a cranky old Jew,” says Gaiman, who’s also a Jew, though a very genial one. “. . . Like some people live in castles, he lives in cranky old Jew world.”

It’s a nice denouement to the film, which is both a hagiography of Ellison—a talented writer, but not one for the ages—and a character study of a certain kind of Jewish boy, belonging to a certain generation, whose life has been a running battle between his talents and his demons.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Ellison became known to the world (or at least to a certain geeky segment of it) as a writer of short science fiction and as a kind of science fictional version of Norman Mailer—a pugilistic, charismatic literary personality whose own exploits were often as much a part of the story as his stories. He published well-regarded collections like Ellison Wonderland, Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled, and Deathbird Stories. He wrote the teleplay for the classic Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” And he made a scene, and often a fool of himself, at every opportunity.

The Ellison story begins more quietly, however. He was born in Cleveland, in 1934, and soon moved with his family to the small town of Painesville, Ohio. The miseries he endured there were both communal and familial.

Painesville, writes Ellison in his memoiristic essay “Everything I Know About My Father,” was “famed for its anti-Semitism.” In addition to the typical indignities he suffered for being one of the few Jews in town, Ellison got bonus lessons. One summer, while he was away at camp and while his parents were in Cleveland for the day, a neighbor called the pound on his dog, who was taken away and gassed.

“I hate her as much today, forty years after the fact, as I did the day I came back from camp and my father took me in his arms and explained that Puddles was dead,” writes Ellison in the introduction to his revenge fantasy “In the Fourth Year of the War.” “The old woman is no doubt long gone, but the hate lives on.” (Ellison’s grudges are lifelong, and he seems to savor them.)

He was regularly roughed up at school (for being Jewish, scrawny, and a smartass), and was once beaten so badly he lost consciousness. That beating became a kind a primal scene for Ellison, one he would later describe, in various ways, in stories, essays, and interviews. In the story “Final Schtick,” for instance, he writes:

At recess time they get you out on the ball diamond, and one of them picks a fight with you. Usually it’s Jack Wheeldon, whose head is square and whose hair is cut in a butch, and whose father is a something or other at the Diamond alkali plant. . . . You stand there while Jack Wheeldon calls you a dirty kike, and your mother is a dirty kike and you pee your pants because all kikes do that, don’t they, you frigging little kike? And when you swing, and hit him on the side of the head, the circle of kids magically grows about you, and while you’re locked in an adolescent grapple with Jack Wheeldon (who is all the things in this life that you despise because they are bigger than you and slower-witted and frightening), someone kicks you from behind. Hard. At the base of your spine. With a Thom McAn shoe. And then you can’t help it and you start to cry.

His home wasn’t much of a refuge. His parents, Louis and Serita, were decent but unhappy people. In “The Death of My Mother, Serita R. Ellison,” which ran in Ellison’s column for the St. Louis Literary Supplement, Ellison writes of her family, the Rosenthals, that they had “a capacity for unhappiness that was awesome to behold, and Mom was a Rosenthal to her shoetops.”

Louis “Doc” Ellison had been a dentist before hard times, and apparently some shenanigans, forced him to close his practice. For a while, he smuggled bootleg liquor down from Canada, and then, after a stint in jail, managed the jewelry store of his brothers-in-law. After many years building up the business of the store, which he’d been led to believe he was also building a stake in, the Rosenthal boys cut him loose. “[W]hen the crunch came down, my old man was out on his ass,” writes Ellison in “Everything I Know About My Father,” “But it had been my mother’s brothers, you see, and so there wasn’t much he could do about it. Jewish families hang tight that way. So at close to the age of fifty, my father had to open his own store.”

Louis died not long after of a massive heart attack, which Harlan, then fifteen, happened to be in the room to witness. Even before his father’s death, Ellison had been bent on getting the hell out of Painesville. At thirteen, he ran away for three months with a touring circus, returning home only after he was tracked down by a private detective hired by his parents.

After his father’s death, the family re-located to Cleveland. It was there that Ellison found both his community—science fiction fandom, with its clubs and conventions and fan zines—and a vessel, in the genre of science fiction, for his fantasies of escape, fame, wealth, and payback. After high school and an interlude at Ohio State (which ended when he told a creative writing professor to go fuck himself), Ellison moved to New York. He threw himself into the science fiction community there, selling his first story toward the end of 1955 and firming up his friendships with other young science fiction writers, like Robert Silverberg, whom he’d known until then through correspondence and meetings at the occasional science fiction convention.

The New York science fiction scene, in the 1950s and ’60s, was a heavily Jewish milieu. In part it was just New York, where anything literary had a Jewish vibe. In part it was that many of the pioneering editors and publishers of science fiction—men like Hugo Gernsback, whose magazine Amazing Stories launched the genre—happened to be Jewish. And it was because science fiction, from the moment it coalesced as a subculture in the 1920s, had proven irresistible to nerdy Jewish kids who dreamt of worlds in which intellect was the pathway to power and glory (as well as acrobatic, zero-gravity sex with women of futuristic morals).

All this Jewishness, however, tended to disguise itself, or disappear entirely, by the time it got to the page. “I didn’t write on Jewish themes,” writes Isaac Asimov, in his introduction to 1974’s Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. “I didn’t think of Jews, particularly, in connection with robots, wrecked spaceships, strange worlds with six suns, and Galactic empires. The subject didn’t come up in my mind.”

In Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character—published four months before his suicide, at twenty-three, in 1903—a brilliant mind comes unmoored. Based on a grotesque premise, the book reasoned shoddily to monstrous conclusions. It distinguished itself as notably anti-Semitic in fin-de-siècle Vienna, a setting in which the distinction wasn’t easy to earn; and it is perhaps the most misogynistic book written in any language in the history of the world. It embraced the Wagnerian opposition of the heroic Aryan to the materialistic Jew; enthusiastically cited Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the theorist of racial degeneration read so avidly by Hitler; and ended by endorsing the voluntary self-extinction of the human race.

A book like this survives, to the extent that it does (a new English translation—the first since 1906—by Ladislaus Lob was issued by Indiana University Press in 2005, with a preface declaring it “The Book That Won’t Go Away”), principally as a reminder of the perverted thinking that was midwife to an age of atrocity. Fin-de-siècle Vienna, the place where, as the historian Norman Stone puts it, “most of the twentieth-century intellectual world was invented,” gave us psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy, atonal music, and architectural modernism, among other attainments, but it also bequeathed a darker legacy. While it was nurturing Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of a family of wealthy and accomplished secular Jews, in one part of the city, a vastly less fortunate and gifted young man, squirreled away in a men’s rooming house—Adolf Hitler—was failing in his bid to earn admission to the academy of art, and schooling himself in the doctrines of race war and Aryan superiority flourishing in the intellectual undergrowth of that city (and, alas, not only there, and not only in that city).

But Weininger’s strange book, the only one he published in his short life, survives not just as a primary source in the history of political and psychosexual pathology, but also in the history of thought and art. It straddled the young Hitler’s Vienna and the Vienna of Wittgenstein, Freud, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, and Clemens Krauss in an utterly eccentric way that casts an oblique light on both of the city’s legacies.

For one thing, Wittgenstein himself credited Weininger as one of the ten thinkers who decisively influenced him—exactly how remains a matter of scholarly speculation and dispute. (In a letter to G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein remarked that “he was fantastic, but he was great and fantastic,” going on to assert that “roughly speaking, if you just add a ‘~’ to the whole book it says an important truth.”) Wittgenstein was far from alone in his admiration. Many of the canonical figures of the heroic period of early Modernism—Karl Kraus, August Strindberg, Hermann Broch, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka—read and discussed him and, in ways both apparent and obscure (few of them uncritically embraced his assertions about women or Jews), were influenced by him. There was something remarkable about the book that some of the best minds of his generation were content to call genius. His writing, Elias Canetti recorded in his diary of Vienna in the 1920s, “cropped up in every discussion.” Ford Madox Ford described the “immense international vogue” the book experienced after Weininger’s death thusly: “One began to hear singular mutterings amongst men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.”

The new gospel purported to resolve for the first time—and for all time—the “Woman Question,” by means of an investigation into the deep structure of femininity and masculinity—it was an inquiry into not women but Woman. It is a sprawling, unstable admixture of scientific and pseudoscientific theorizing, cultural polemic, and philosophical argument that imposes a paranoid coherence on its breathtakingly disparate elements. Even while heaping rhetorical abuse upon women and Jews, Weininger argues explicitly against any infringement of their rights. To understand the weird fascination the book exerted on its readers, one must appreciate it for all that it was: an impassioned defense of the autonomous self against the forces that would turn it into a thing to be manipulated, an impossibly idealistic assertion of neo-Kantian ethics, a glimpse into one tortured young man’s psychosexual panic, and a sounding board for an inflamed epoch’s sexual and racial obsessions. Though Weininger’s view of women is practically incomprehensible to those of us raised in the postfeminist present, it merely advanced with fanatical rigidity a view that permeated his age, expressed in the violent misogyny appearing in the paintings of Alfred Kubin, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka, among others, which is vividly summoned up by the title of Kokoschka’s avant-garde play Murder, Hope of Woman.

Sex and Character begins with an argument about method, assailing the experimental psychology of the day—which had famously declared, in the words of its leading exponent, Ernst Mach, that the “self was beyond salvage.” The autonomous and unified subject of liberal political philosophy had come under assault; following the philosophical skepticism of David Hume, the experimental psychologists saw the mind as a mere bundle of sensations. They eschewed introspection as a valid form of investigation, and restricted research to what could be measured in a laboratory. Psychology, then, as Weininger puts it, “completely fails to reach those problems normally described as eminently psychological, the analysis of murder, of friendship, of loneliness, etc.” In place of this impoverished account of the self, Weininger argued, we needed a new “characterology,” which would inquire into the stable and unique source of individuality, into that “something that reveals itself in every thought and every feeling.”

Weininger rooted his concept of the self in Kant’s transcendental, suprasensible “intelligible” subject, whose existence could never be demonstrated empirically, but only deduced. This self makes our perception of empirical reality possible. For how could we conceive of time if we were merely caught up in the flux of sensation from isolated moment to isolated moment? Some part of us must partake of eternity in order for us to know eternity, and it was, Weininger said, this suprasensory self that was responsible for all of the highest expressions of the human spirit. “The desire for value expresses itself in the general striving to emancipate things from time,” he wrote. The genius is the person who remembers everything because he is capable of endowing every moment of his life with meaning.

It is this intelligible self in each of us that gives humanity its special moral significance. Kant’s “categorical imperative” enjoins us to treat all others as ends in themselves rather than means to other ends. The categorical imperative defined for Weininger the curious vision of utopia articulated in his book: a world in which people engage in mutually respectful relationships that inspire individual genius and spiritual perfection. It also defined the negative utopia that Weininger saw emerging all around him:

Although in a later chapter Weininger concedes that women are not “animals or plants,” but in fact “human beings,” they qualify for this distinction only in the most rudimentary, basely biological way.

a modern world in which people were becoming mere cogs in a gigantic machine, using each other for their own basely material ends, and negating the very existence of a higher world. Our materialistic, mechanistic science was but one of the many faces this creeping degeneration wore. Our glorification of sex was another.

Throughout Weininger’s account of the intelligible self and of genius, he continues to denigrate women in a way that feels compulsive and almost beside the point, noting that if men are capable of conscious thought, women are capable only of calculating immediate material advantage, and that if men are capable of spiritual aspiration, women are capable of mimicking—expertly—whatever men present to them as the proper values to emulate. Thus far, we remain within the context of the misogyny of the age—the misogyny of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and a thousand after-dinner boors.

It is when Weininger turns fully to the subject of Woman that the book begins its long slide into extremism. He proclaims Woman to be nullity itself: incapable of reason, creativity, or spiritual aspiration; sexually insatiable (“under the spell of the phallus”); psychologically incoherent, desiring nothing more than her own subordination to man—“a hollow vessel covered for a while in makeup and whitewash.” Although in a later chapter Weininger concedes that women are not “animals or plants,” but in fact “human beings,” they qualify for this distinction only in the most rudimentary, basely biological way. In a passage devoted to acknowledging the “meanness and inanity” that may appear in individual men, he nonetheless concludes that “the most superior woman is still infinitely inferior to the most inferior men.”

Weininger’s misogyny is eccentric. His extremism leads him, at times, to sound rather like a radical feminist. He will have nothing to do with the sentimental veneration that imprisons women while pretending they are more virtuous than men. He wants to debunk what he sees as the great lie written into the traditional narratives structuring relationships between men and women. Love itself is a form of imprisonment. And “all eroticism, even the most sublime, remains a threefold immorality: selfish intolerance for the real empirical women, who is merely used as a means to an end . . . and who is therefore denied an independent life of her own.”

Weininger closes his long inquiry into the “Nature of Woman and Her Purpose in the Universe” by laying the responsibility for the moral condition of women on men: “Man must redeem himself from sexuality in order to redeem Woman.” Weininger acknowledges that this will mean the extinction of the human race. It is a small price to pay for the emancipation of woman, and the perfection of humanity.

Tacked onto this exhaustive inquiry, the weird fascination of which is impossible to convey in any quotation or series of quotations, Weininger wrote a single chapter that would help to define the category in which he is, along with “crazed misogynist,” best remembered—that of the self-hating Jew. For Weininger was the son of a solidly middle-class Jewish goldsmith much admired for his knowledge of his craft. Secular in orientation, anti-Semitic in his opinions, Leopold Weininger nonetheless, according to his daughter, Rosa, “thought as a Jew and was angry when Otto wrote against Judaism.” Like other sons of the newly emergent Jewish middle class, Weininger went to a private high school, where he learned multiple languages and attended to self-cultivation with an intensity that is scarcely conceivable today. There, he came upon a dawning conviction that has afflicted hormonal adolescent men throughout history: that he was a genius. This subject would absorb much of his attention in Sex and Character, in which he defines “genius” as a capacity for universal empathy with other men and with the universe as a whole. The genius becomes the “microcosm” able to absorb and reflect everything he encounters.

Weininger was a tortured soul who “lived in complete isolation” with his books, according to his father, and held himself aloof from the pursuit of sex and drinking that characterized the social lives of his classmates at the University of Vienna. His letters refer to his inability to experience pleasure or love, and an overpowering sense of his own moral corruption. There is no evidence that he ever had sex with a woman, and no conclusive proof that he was either sexually abused as a child, as David Abrahamsen speculated in his 1946 book The Mind and Death of a Genius, or homosexual, as others have speculated. Chandak Sengoopta’s excellent 2000 monograph Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna includes a letter from Weininger to his closest friend in which he reports success in administering male hormones for the purpose of converting a homosexual “patient” who was, in fact, “already preparing for his first coitus!” Sengoopta asserted that it was “strongly likely” that the “patient” was Weininger himself.

In 1902, Weininger wrote a dissertation on sexual characteristics that his professors admired, but not without misgivings. Weininger’s assertions on women “could not be described as anything other than fantastical,” one of his advisors wrote. (The same professor would later call the latter half of Sex and Character “shocking and repulsive.”)

Weininger openly acknowledged that he was himself “of Jewish ancestry,” and then went on to argue that Jews, like women, are “soulless people” who lack intelligible selves.

The dissertation would eventually become Sex and Character, but not before failing to earn the endorsement of Sigmund Freud, who nonetheless described Weininger as a striking personality “with a touch of genius.”

Soon after completing his dissertation, Weininger converted to Protestantism—doing himself no worldly favors in that Roman Catholic capital, but instead announcing his commitment to the austere creed of Northern Germany, and the religion of his hero, Immanuel Kant. But in a footnote to his infamous chapter on Judaism, Weininger openly acknowledged that he was himself “of Jewish ancestry,” and then went on to argue that Jews, like women, are “soulless people” who lack intelligible selves. But he does this in a characteristically eccentric way that has nothing to do with the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazis, and everything to do with his own anguished wrestling with his own identity.

“From now on,” Weininger wrote, “when I speak of the Jew I mean neither a specific individual nor a collective, but every human being as such, insofar as he participates in the Platonic idea of Judaism.” The Jew is “relatively amoral, never very good and never very bad,” and the “opposite pole of the aristocrat,” for whom “the strictest observation of the boundaries between human beings” is the guiding principle of conduct. Yet the Jew is also “the born communist and always wants community.” At the same time, the Jew is the spirit of irony and debunking, wishing to denude the world of mystery, and strip away the spirit from the material world. Never truly revolutionary, but always subversive, “he is an absolute ironist, like—and here I can only name a Jew—like Heinrich Heine.” Capable of adapting himself to all situations, he never really possesses an inner being.

Weininger goes on:

It is like a condition before being, an eternal wandering back and forth before the gate of reality. There is nothing with which the Jew can truly identify, no cause for which he can risk his life unreservedly. What the Jew lacks is not the zealot but the zeal, because anything undivided, anything whole, is alien to him. It is the simplicity of belief that he lacks and it is because he lacks this simplicity and stands for nothing positive that he seems to be more intelligent than the Aryan and is supple enough to wriggle out of any oppression. Inner ambiguity, I repeat, is absolutely Jewish, simplicity is absolutely un-Jewish.

Jewishness is thus, for Weininger, as it was for many others, a spiritual condition more or less identical with modernity itself. (And certainly not, as it was for the most virulent anti-Semites, either a malevolent or a uniquely powerful force ruling the world from the shadows.) It is also roughly analogous to the diagnosis of the Jewish condition advanced by the pioneering Zionists, who dreamed of a Jew restored to psychic health and vigorous manhood by a renewed relationship to the land. Weininger rejects Zionism as the solution to the Jewish question, but curiously he retains it as an unreachable ideal. “The Jews would have to overcome Judaism before they could be ripe for Zionism.” This cannot be done collectively, Weininger argues: “Every single Jew must seek to answer it for his own person.” But by posing the greatest obstacle, Judaism also occasions the highest possibilities. Thus, “Christ was the greatest human being because he overcame the greatest adversity,” as “the only Jew who has ever succeeded in defeating Judaism.”

This struggle against the Jew in each of us was, for Weininger, clearly a battle the culture at large was losing:

Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most effeminate of all ages . . . an age of the most credulous anarchism, an age without any appreciation of the state and law . . . an age of the shallowest of all imaginable interpretations of history (historical materialism), an age of capitalism and Marxism, an age for which history, life, science, everything, has become nothing but economics and technology; an age that has declared genius to be a form of madness, but which no longer has one great artist or one great philosopher; an age that is most devoid of originality, but which chase most frantically after originality; an age that has replaced the idea of virginity with the cult of the demivierge. This age also has the distinction of being the first to have not only affirmed and worshipped sexual intercourse, but to have practically made it a duty, not as a way of achieving oblivion, as the Romans and Greeks did in their bacchanals, but in order to find itself and to give its own dreariness a meaning.

One recognizes in this peevish rant the intransigence of youth. In differing forms Weininger’s concerns were the concerns of anti-modernists of every persuasion, including some of our most admired writers. But they come together in Weininger with a rigidity and literalism, an absence of humor or detachment that marks his work as that of a callow, sheltered, and disturbed personality. Weininger might conceivably have worked through his issues over time, had he taken Freud’s advice and spent another ten years gathering data for his wild assertions, perhaps abandoning them in the process. Weininger’s propositions tell us nothing useful or true; instead they enact for us a drama that is of continuing significance to a world in which bright young men—traumatized by sex, infatuated with piety, and obsessed with Jews—continue to try to live in opposition to the age by dreaming of apocalypse.

The fin-de-siècle anti-modernists feared a world from which all nobility and heroism would be banished, and in which the individual would be swallowed up by a technological mass society. Their fears were not without basis. The more reckless among them, who substituted crude symbols, like the Woman or the Jew, for concrete analysis of large social processes, made more than an intellectual error. They helped to make the earth, for a time, into hell. Weininger became the microcosm of his age, but not in the way he intended.

Earlier this year, as Israel celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, the country’s journalists, pundits, and bloggers amused themselves by nominating individuals for the title of the quintessential sabra. Ariel Sharon, ur-warrior, was in the running, of course, as were Yitzhak Rabin, prince of peace and the nation’s first Israeli-born Prime Minister, and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space. No fewer than five leading cultural critics named a fictional character as Israel’s most representative son: Ari Ben Canaan, the protagonist of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, immortalized on screen by a young, virile, and shirtless Paul Newman. The adoration of Ben Canaan culminated in a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Exodus, held in June at Jerusalem’s prestigious Cinematheque.

That a fictional person—even one based on a real man, Yossi Harel, commander of the actual Exodus, the ship that carried 4,500 survivors of Nazi death camps toward Palestine in 1947—should exercise such a strong grasp on the collective imagination of a country never short on real heroes may seem strange. Ari, however, is just too good to resist: handsome and daring, defying the British and defeating the Arabs, romancing a beautiful American blonde even as he helps guide a ship full of illegal immigrants to shore and a country full of war-weary Jews into existence. A few years before inventing Ben Canaan, Uris, then making a living as a Hollywood screenwriter, wrote Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, depicting Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with a mixture of myth and melodrama. Take away the Stetson, and it’s not hard to see Ari as a rugged Western hero transplanted to the Middle East.

But was Israel ready for such a character? Could a nation still busy being born sustain the tremendous impact of a larger-than-life, ready-made hero? And could that hero age gracefully alongside the country he’s come to personify? As Ari turns fifty, these questions are hard to avoid.

For the uninitiated, the story of Exodus is one best told with numbers. After reportedly reading three hundred books about Jewish and Israeli history and traveling more than twelve thousand miles within Israel and the Middle East, Uris (who was born in Baltimore in 1924) wrote a 626-page novel about the birth of Israel, from the struggles to overcome the British mandate’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine to the battles that followed the creation of the Jewish state. It was published by Doubleday in 1958, and spent nineteen weeks at the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list. The paperback quickly sold well over twenty million copies. In the annals of American publishing, this puts Uris just ahead of Margaret Mitchell: Exodus unseated Gone with the Wind as the fastest-selling American novel of all time, and held the record until the publication of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in 1966.

By 1960, when Otto Preminger adapted the novel into a three-and-a-half-hour film and cast Newman as Ben Canaan, the book’s status as one of Zionism’s most sacred texts was secure, with some scholars arguing that Uris had written nothing less than Israel’s founding myth. George Washington University professor Melani McAlister, the author of Epic Encounters, a 2001 history of America’s cultural perceptions of the Middle East, claimed that when Exodus was published “most Americans still knew little about Zionism or Israel,” making Uris’s story “a foreshadowing of what Israel was to come to mean to Americans.”

But with all the attention paid to Exodus in America, little has been written about the impact Exodus has had on the society whose birth it sought to depict.

Israel has not, until recently, kept official book sales records. But growing up in Israel in the 1980s and ’90s, I was always aware of the book’s ubiquity. It was in my high school’s library, where works by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were frowned upon for representing the wrong kind of Jew—the neurotic and vulnerable American. It was in my local scouts’ den, where as teenagers we would often spend rainy afternoons spellbound by Ari’s heroics. And it was on the shelves in the houses of all my friends, a staple of Israeli domesticity.

But it was television that solidified its standing. In Israel’s first five decades, with a single, state-run television station serving as the tribal campfire, the small screen was hailed as the most sacred of Israel’s cultural altars. Any program shown on Friday evenings was watched with a sense of duty, and any program shown on a national holiday was exalted.

Such was the status of Exodus. For years, the film’s oversaturated colors and expansive frames appeared on television sets across Israel each Passover. By regularly screening Exodus on the eve of Judaism’s celebration of freedom, the stewards of Israeli television sent a clear message to viewers: Ari is not just about Israel’s history; he’s about Jewish history. He’s a hero, and should be revered accordingly.

And revere him we did. Ari’s name—not Moshe Dayan’s, or Sharon’s, or Rabin’s—became an idiom for everything we Israelis admired about ourselves. His concluding plea for peace between Arabs and Jews, we imagined, was our very own; in fact, when Yitzhak Rabin addressed the U.S. Congress in 1994 with a similar speech, commentators in Israel dubbed it an “Ari Ben Canaan moment.” They were not being ironic. We saw Ari’s face in each of the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces, which, we boasted, was the most ethical army in the world.

Around that time we began seeing another kind of Israeli soldier. The kind that allowed the slaughter of civilians at Sabra and Shatila. The kind that fired rubber bullets—and sometimes, live ammunition—at Palestinian protestors during the first and second Intifadas.

And so Ari himself was trotted out to protest what many Israelis, especially on the left, considered a decline in the nation’s morality. I remember one afternoon, a decade or so ago, at Tzavta, a dank basement-turned-performance-space considered the Mecca of Tel Aviv’s intelligentsia. A well-known intellectual was holding court. His topic, as usual, was the immorality of Israel’s soldiers, and the destruction of Israeli society as a result of their behavior. As he spoke, an image quivered behind him on a makeshift screen: Newman, smirking, bathed by moonlight, a large Star of David dangling on his chest. Ari, he kept repeating, wouldn’t have recognized the Israeli soldiers of today.

Many Israeli historians disagree. Ari, they claim, is not so much a paragon of purity as a symbol of senseless sacrifice, an atavistic vessel designed to drain history of its contexts and complexities and recast it instead as a single-minded story of Jewish exceptionalism.

Evidence for this is everywhere in Exodus, both book and film. In a scene in the movie, Ari loses his temper at a Cypriot businessman who is involved in the efforts to smuggle Jews into British-controlled Palestine. A fellow member of the Jewish resistance asks Ari to apologize to the man, and Ari, of course, refuses. “All over the world, they work for us and tell us how terrible it was that six million Jews went into the ovens,” Ari says. “But when the showdown comes, we always stand alone. . . . We have no friends, except ourselves. Remember that!”

In reality, the Exodus had all the friends it needed. After its 4,500 passengers were refused entry to Palestine by British authorities, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann persuaded his friend, former French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to shelter the refugees in France for as long as was necessary. But David Ben Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, refused to endorse the deal: At the time, the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine was holding discussions on the future of the contested land, and Ben Gurion realized that few things would attract more international sympathy for the Jewish cause than a boatload of Holocaust survivors caught in a watery limbo. Ben Gurion torpedoed Weizmann’s efforts, thereby stranding the men, women, and children aboard the Exodus for more than seven months.

Most Israelis, however, never got to hear the true story. The one Uris wrote—haunted Holocaust survivors hunted by the British authorities as an apathetic world looks on, with no one to defend them but Ben Canaan—was simply too good to disrupt with facts.

Inconvenient, too, was the actual behavior of Harel, the ship’s real commander and a man every bit as sensitive and mild-mannered as Ari was brash and bold. When the British attacked the Exodus upon its arrival in the port of Haifa, Harel ordered his men to offer no resistance. He was severely criticized at the time by Jewish leaders, but there is little doubt that his decision to surrender saved thousands of lives.

Ari, of course, would never tolerate such level-headedness; his was the worldview of the martyr. In the novel, David Ben Ami, Ari’s brother-in-law, delivers a speech that captures this worldview precisely: “At Masada,” he says, “we held out against the Romans for four years and when they entered the fort they found us all dead. . . . We have not had much opportunity to fight as a nation for two thousand years. When we had that opportunity at the Warsaw ghetto we did honor to our tradition. I say if we leave this boat and willingly return to barbed-wire prisons then we will have broken faith with God.” At Ari’s command, the children aboard the Exodus begin a hunger strike, collapsing one after another on the ship’s deck, arranged in ghastly, lifeless piles. When this fails to move the British authorities, Ari threatens mass suicides.

Needless to say, any talk of suicide as politics strikes an uneasy chord with contemporary Israelis. And yet martyrdom remains an irresistible political elixir. Above the blackboard in my elementary school classroom hung a bright blue sign on which a teacher had written in green letters the alleged last words of Yosef Trumpeldor, a legendary Zionist hero who died in 1920 while defending a northern Jewish settlement from Arab combatants. “Never mind,” he reportedly said. “It is good to die for our country.” My classmates and I, like generations of Israeli children before and since, spent our days staring at this slogan. It’s only natural that many of us came to take its message of self-sacrifice at face value.

Such thinking still plagues Israel. In her 2005 book Death and the Nation, a stunning and irreverent study of Israel’s obsession with martyrdom, the historian Idith Zertal argues that this fixation has come to define the way Israelis understand themselves and their country. “Ancient graves,” she writes, “produce fresh graves.” As Israelis seek to move away from the deeply rooted complexes of a small nation surrounded by sworn enemies, we look in the mirror and, too often, still see Ben Canaan. Too many of us are still proudly convinced that the Jewish people should never trust anyone, that Israel’s only hope lies in its strength, and that certain death is a noble thing. And this dissonance may just be driving Israelis insane.

The late Baruch Kimmerling, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, mused about this idea in a 2005 article in The Nation, devoted to, among other things, the Exodus myth and its omnipresence in Israel’s collective consciousness. “The obsessive commemoration of the Holocaust and of Jewish victimhood,” he wrote, “has blinded much of the Jewish community to Israel’s real position in the world and to the humanity of the Palestinian people. . . . To be sure, there are periods in the history of a nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary, and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in Israel today is whether this heroic period has come to an end or whether the prevailing ideology of the 1948 war will last another hundred years.” To adopt the former worldview, he states, is “to grant priority to the lives of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab. To adopt the latter is to remain a community of victims, joined in a mythical communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile gentile world.”

By continuing to revere Ari, we Israelis concern ourselves less with reality as it unfolds around us and more as it unfolded for Uris half a century ago.

In 1993, when Dan White set out to hike the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, he brought along his girlfriend, a $385 backpack, and zero long-distance hiking experience. A self-proclaimed “product of the low self-esteem movement,” White, who hailed from a posh seaside town in Southern California, quit his job as a reporter and decided to hike the scenic trail as a sort of “replacement bar mitzvah.” At twenty-six, White was looking to be transformed from “man-boy to man.”

Now, at the age of forty, he’s published an account of his experience. On the surface, Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind—and Almost Found Myself—On the Pacific Crest Trail is pure farce: White’s misadventures include a salamander attack on his state-of-the-art water filter, an encounter with a six-hundred-pound black bear (and some equally frightening gun-toting locals), and, in the scene referenced by the book’s title, taking a regrettable bite out of a cactus. But underneath the funny veneer, White’s ruminations about God, reflections on his ancestry, and repeated use of biblical metaphors infuse the tale with more gravitas than your average comedy of errors. His account also raises questions central to both the literal and the metaphorical act of writing (or rewriting) one’s life story. Just how much of our pasts come to the fore during trials and moments of vulnerability? And, to paraphrase White, can the act of creating one’s own Exodus really lead to a personal Eden?

There’s a trend now of people challenging themselves to bizarre feats just to get a book out of it.

I have no problem with that, but this book would have been very different if I’d done it that way. There would have been something self-conscious about the writing. In truth, I was a bumbling greenhorn in the wilderness, with no game plan about my literary career.

I did try to write about the trail immediately afterward; I ran home and banged it all out on my computer. But time is what you really need to write about yourself. It’s like trying to make sense of the Colossus of Rhodes from right up close: All you can see is the big toe of the statue. There’s no perspective.

You write, “Every step toward Canada was a step toward manhood. I feared that the trail, if I never finished it, would leave me stranded in a permanent kindergarten.” Where did the motivation for this sort of test come from?

I set out on the trail because I wanted to change who I was, mold myself into a different person. I felt soft in many ways—marshmallowy. I actually thought I might begin the book with the line, “I had a bar mitzvah but it didn’t take.” The trail felt like a completion ritual, a way of getting to the next level. I didn’t get that feeling of accelerated manhood from my own bar mitzvah. Setting up an almost unachievable goal, like hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, was a replacement rite of passage. It became crucial for me to finish every step because I considered it a testing ground. I was scared that if I did it halfheartedly, I would only mature halfway. I wanted to test my resolve.

You draw a comparison between your father’s difficult childhood and your own relatively undemanding, charmed youth. How did your father relate to your decision to hike the trail?

In many ways my father was not prepared for the challenges he faced early in life. He was a first-generation American who grew up on the Lower East Side when it was still full of tenements, crowds, pushcarts, and horses in the streets, pulling wagons full of sundries and shmattes. His parents died of circumstances related to their poverty and he was orphaned by age nine, raised by Hebrew charities. He went on to serve in two wars—World War II and Korea. He had a spark of ambition that wouldn’t be extinguished, and he just kept making more of himself. He avoided taking the easy way out at all costs.

When my father heard about my plans to do the hike, he thought it was a hiccup on my professional path. He thought I was using the trail as a proxy for other kinds of career achievements or milestones: a law degree, a down payment on a house. Ultimately, he came to appreciate the idea of setting an almost impossible goal and then achieving it. He likes to remind me that our forefathers spent forty years wandering in the desert, so my choice to hike through a desert seemed strangely appropriate to him, as a Jewish man. The overlap between our stories is that we both succeeded by being tenacious, really driven.

So tenacity and drive are your survival mechanisms?

And humor, both in life and in writing. I think self-deprecating humor is a very Jewish trait. The idea is to set aside a bad memory and let it marinate for a while before finding the “funny” in it—even in the sections of this book where I talk about my awkward childhood or some of the selfish ways I behaved on the trail. That being said, there are still people who don’t get what I’m trying to do. Every once in a while I’ll encounter a reader who says, “Dan White, you’re a monster.” They can’t see the distance between the guy on that trail and the guy now, sitting hunched over the keyboard.

That’s the tricky thing about writing a memoir. You’re inviting people to comment on your life, on your character.

I wanted to tell the truth about who I was—but I didn’t want the reader to run away screaming because I sometimes appeared selfish, churlish, or goofy. That’s why I pushed the “voice” so hard in this book. I wanted to engage the reader, but I didn’t want to sugarcoat anything. Elliot Aronson, an American psychologist, cowrote a book called Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Me, in which he talks about the human impulse to cover your tracks and present yourself in a flattering light. I tried to create space for the reader to examine who I really was, warts and all.

On the hike, the more unpleasant parts of me were disengaged from other people, from the woman I loved. I was lost in the woods—both literally and spiritually. Writing the book gave me a chance to examine what I sacrificed in terms of love, and how I treated other human beings. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that writing about myself in a not entirely flattering way is a kind of atonement. I was very separate from the world during parts of the trail, very much in my own head.

There are numerous biblical references in the book, and you mention your religion early on. How conscious were you of writing this “wilderness epic” as a Jewish man?

I don’t think of this as a Jewish book per se, but I certainly think of myself as a Jewish writer. The Jewish experience colors the way I perceive reality in some ways—when I liken a part of the Sierra to the color of gefilte fish, for example. It’s a constant reference point, even when I forget it’s there.

I got pretty rhapsodic during the last third of the trail. Most of the intensely Jewish stuff that I thought about manifested itself during that solo portion of the hike. When I reached the North Cascades, near Glacier Peak, I was really frustrated. I had heard that the scenery on this section of the trail would be unmatched, but I arrived and there was thick fog. I had labored so hard, and now I was walking through clouds. I found myself praying that the clouds would lift. And sure enough, the fog and rain stopped. It was an overwhelming thing. I had been thinking so much about spirituality and God, that when the mountains suddenly revealed themselves, I felt there was a presence.

This must have contributed to the exultation you experience when you reach Monument 78, marking the end of the trail in British Columbia. You write, “For reasons that weren’t clear to me then, I burst into a loud Hebrew prayer, the Shema.” Are those reasons clear to you now?

It felt like a received experience. I had no plan to recite that prayer, it only occurred to me at the moment of completion. I was dancing around the monument, throwing spring water on it—consecrating it. And I was seized by a need to say that prayer. This was not a heralded moment; there were no witnesses, no one waiting at the end of the trail to take my picture. It was just the monument and me, and I needed to mark the occasion somehow. Saying the Shema was a reaffirmation of my faith, of my father’s faith, and all of our ancestors before us. At the time, I had no idea what the words meant. Sometimes we can make significant choices without being fully conscious of what we’re doing.

This quest was a great way to find out what was right and what was wrong with me. It solidified my sense of who I was in life. The trail, and its aftermath, helped me reengage with the world. And I have no doubt that it made me into a better person, too.

But one of Elkin’s earlier novels, which escaped the notice of his posthumous critics and has gone unread by all but the most ardent of fans, deserves more widespread attention. Published in 1967, A Bad Man shows the author delving into the stylistic experimentation that would come to be his trademark. He began to move away from literary realism—the more conventional settings and plots that marked, for example, his 1965 short story collection Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers—and the rational worldview he felt it represented. Perhaps as a result, A Bad Man is the first of Elkin’s novels to fully illustrate his pessimistic outlook: a refusal to embrace the hope, held by many of his peers in a crowded Jewish American literary field, that postwar society could correct the inexplicable wrongs of the past.

The novel’s opening is immediate and engaging. Leo Feldman, a wealthy department store owner in an unnamed Midwestern town, is arrested within the first few paragraphs.

“The jig is up!” cries an armed man, rushing into Feldman’s basement offices.

“I’m afraid I shan’t require your services for a while, Miss Lane,” Feldman shouts to his secretary.

His crime? Satisfying, from the lower depths of his store, his customers’ darkest desires: drugs, abortions, prostitutes.

Though he provides these services free of charge, Feldman is wrongly charged with bribery. Convicted mere sentences later, he has begun his journey to the penitentiary by the book’s second page.

The rest of the novel is set within the confines of a surreal penitentiary where the rules of engagement are constantly being revised and the “bad men”—Feldman among their ranks—are humiliated, forced to don clownlike, oversized mockeries of the clothes they wore prior to their convictions. Though Feldman is only sentenced to a year, he quickly discovers a Kafkaesque system of checks and balances that steadily tacks days onto his sentence. The master of this incomprehensible system is the aptly named Warden Fisher, a self-proclaimed “fisher of bad men” who takes an immediate dislike to his new prisoner, berating him for, among other things, his Jewishness: “What are you in our culture? A mimic. A spade in a tux at a function in Harlem.” Feldman responds to the warden’s taunts with increasingly antic behavior, dismantling the moral hierarchy of the prison with a gusto worthy of the Marx Brothers.

Feldman’s frequent clashes with Fisher—along with flashbacks to the merchant’s childhood and life pre-incarceration—reveal him as a narcissist, unable to control his deepest impulses, consumed by mercantilism and cruelty. In one telling scene, Feldman savagely beats a lumpish inmate in the shower. In another, a teenage Feldman sells his dead father’s body for 15 dollars. Elkin makes little attempt to find in the brutish desires of his protagonist any larger meaning. Redemption—of Feldman, the warden who controls him, or society at large—is not forthcoming in A Bad Man. “The novel,” Elkin told Thomas Leclair in a 1976 Paris Review interview, “is generally a kind of Christian device where people who are good get their just rewards and people who are bad are punished. I don’t believe that this is the case in life.”

Though real life was, perhaps, marginally kinder to Elkin than his decidedly satirical fiction might suggest, even his most fantastical novels contain traces of autobiography. A Bad Man is no exception. Elkin told Leclair that “there [is] something of [my] father” in both Feldman and his ragman father, Isidore. The author additionally credited his father Philip Elkin, a “master salesman” and “super pitchman” who traveled the Midwest selling costume jewelry, as a source of his verbose writing style.

Feldman’s father—himself a traveling salesman—more clearly embodies Elkin’s ideas about identity and artifice than any other character in A Bad Man. “Not ‘rags,’ not ‘old clothes,’” Isidore warns his young son, teaching him the ragman’s call. “What are you, an announcer on the radio? You’re in the street! Say ‘regs, all cloze.’ Shout it. Sing it. I want to hear steerage, Ellis Island in that throat. . . . What, you never saw the Statue of Liberty through the fringes of a prayer shawl?”

Of course, Feldman never traveled steerage; he never arrived at Ellis Island. He isn’t technically Jewish. Within the first fifty pages of A Bad Man, Isidore has admitted as much to his son: “Your mother was a gentile and one of my best customers. I laid her in my first wagon by pots and by pans and you were born and she died.” There’s an irony in Elkin’s decision to make his most fully Jewish character, a character who is teased and punished for his religion, a half-Jew. In Elkin’s world, nothing is as it seems, and this desire to toy with the perceptions of his audience underscores his commitment to representing a deeply irrational world.

Josh Greenfeld, reviewing A Bad Man in The New York Times, described the novel’s style as “one of expansive, glib Jewish American schizophrenia,” noting Elkin’s fascination with “the absurdist metaphor that the world is winless.” Given his imaginative prose and borscht-belt sarcasm, reviewers frequently compared him to black humorists such as Nathanael West, Bellow, and Mailer.

Elkin might have had another Jewish American writer in mind, however, as he was finishing up A Bad Man. Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, best seller and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for 1966, had been published just a year earlier. Based on an actual case, Malamud’s novel, like Elkin’s, tells the story of a wrongfully imprisoned Jew: Yakov Bok, a handyman living in Czarist Russia, who is accused of murdering a young Christian boy and draining his blood for ritual use. Locked up for years as he awaits trial, Bok refuses to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, hoping for the day when he will be allowed to defend himself in a court of law. The novel was an enormous critical and popular success, hailed as harrowing and brilliant.

There was at least one dissenting opinion, however. In the Spring 1967 issue of The Massachusetts Review, while still at work on A Bad Man, Elkin critiqued Malamud’s masterpiece as “bringing about some telling stasis. . . . The Fixer is immensely moving, but this quality is at once its supreme achievement and part of its downfall.” Even Malamud’s most ardent supporters had noted the author’s frequent use of symbolism—in The Fixer as well as past works like The Assistant—to illustrate the moral implications of Jewishness. Robert Alter, in a 1966 Commentary review, declared The Fixer “Malamud’s most powerful novel,” but also conceded that “to be a Jew in this novel does imply a general moral stance” and that, “assign[ing] a set of abstact values” to Bok’s situation may result in a connection that “strike[s] the reader as arbitrary.” For Elkin, such allusions were too predictable. “It’s always seemed to me that the best kind of book is the open-ended book where anything can happen,” he later told Peter Bailey in an interview for Review of Contemporary Fiction. “I hate a book which has one premise and the writer sticks to that premise so tightly that . . . the reader has no room to breathe.”

A Bad Man leaves plenty of room for the reader to breathe—perhaps too much. Feldman’s numerous prison misadventures verge on the picaresque, and Elkin’s lengthy sentences and labyrinthine rhetoric threaten, at times, to collapse in on themselves. Throughout the novel, Feldman’s character remains fluid, a far cry from Malamud’s symbolic Jew. To Warden Fisher, he feigns a stab at rehabilitation—attempting to act “ordinary,” at the Warden’s request—while his mind races with paranoid inner monologues and far-fetched fears. He effortlessly sells cases of guava soda and shoe trees to his fellow inmates in the prison canteen, even as he muses over the items’ uselessness. Perhaps as a response to The Fixer’s moral stance, Elkin goes so far as to bring Feldman’s very Jewishness into question.

Like his contemporaries, Elkin was concerned with identity in an increasingly irrational and haphazard world. What sets him apart in A Bad Man, however, is his insistence on a character as inconstant as his surroundings. Identity becomes artifice, a costume donned as easily as the mockery of a suit the prison’s “bad men” are forced to wear. Rather than attempt to change a world that the author himself described as “winless,” Feldman—as would the many Elkin protagonists to follow—chooses instead to adapt. It is a combative stance, one that would permanently set the writer apart from his peers.

Nevertheless, like Malamud’s Jewish everyman, Feldman endures much suffering: “He learned at last, then, that his punishment . . . was to be himself. It was ridiculous. How could he be Feldman if there was no one for him to be Feldman to?”

The school I went to as a kid was overly restrictive, so the book I wrote is about the fact that these schools don’t prepare girls for real life,” says Brianna, the nom de plume (nom de frum?) of the single, twenty-one-year-old blogger who grew up in the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey, NY, where she shares an apartment with another Orthodox young woman.

The book is really exposing certain issues that no one else has dealt with before, things that girls have no idea about: Like in the workplace, what do you do when someone hits on you? Or what about financially, getting paid ten dollars an hour when everyone else is getting paid fifteen? Somebody needs to teach these girls how to live.” She knows just the person to do it: Herself.

Among her Monsey peers, Brianna is an anomaly. As a child, her parents allowed her to spend hours at the library reading books—secular books, with sex and violence and nudity and trayf. Her parents are ba’alei teshuva; raised un-Orthodox, they chose to become devout several years before they married. That’s one reason I believe they gave me access to videos—although not TV—and allowed me to read pretty much whatever I wanted,” she says, citing books like Gossip Girl and Daughters of the Night.

Maybe that was their first mistake,” she says with a laugh. I had a different intellectual background than my peers.” At sixteen she mustered the courage to go to community college, instead of a seminary. While many girls in her world go to community college, it’s usually to schools that offer single-sex programs, and only after attending all-girl yeshivas. In any case, school is often a place holder before the real goal: getting married. Brianna’s parents paid her way through college, which was, she says, very open-minded.” They could have forced her to go to Monsey Academy, a school for female teenage misfits, but were smart enough to recognize that I’m very smart and would do well in college.”

Unfortunately, Brianna’s fictional account of an Orthodox girl struggling with her environment will likely never be read by her peers. The fiction that passes muster in the ultra-Orthodox realm has no sex, drugs, rock and roll, and certainly no ambiguity about Judaism. The world depicted, says Gennady Estraikh, a professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University, is a wonderful, peaceful, helpful, pious community with excellent women—but we know nothing about the women apart from the fact that they’re excellent,” he says. They never discuss how pretty they are—they are simply a notion of a wonderful mother and wonderful wife.”

In general, the themes of these books (published by decidedly Jewish houses, including Artscroll, Feldheim, Targum, and Mesorah), such as A Promise Fulfilled by Menachem Kagan and Yair Weinstock’s Eye of the Storm, are consistent: a family is reunited after the Holocaust; a person struggles after gaining wealth; a teenager is convinced not to abandon Orthodoxy. Rabbis are depicted only in a good light and sensitive topics like molestation or agunah are never mentioned. Everything takes place within Orthodox communities—mirroring the lives of these books’ readers.

There are religious Jews that work, shop and play exclusively with other frum people,” says Brianna, who came up with her pseudonym after hearing the name on a talk radio show; she does not want the community to know her identity. They create a bubble of isolation for themselves and pretend nothing valuable can be found outside it. They rarely, if ever, interact with non-Jews or Jews who do things differently. In those fictional worlds, people who aren’t frum Jews are limited to their job descriptions: the mailman or the police officer, for example. Although the characters are polite to outsiders, no meaningful relationships take place.”

These books are a lot like Christian fiction—those are always pure and clean, and though there might be conflict, it’s not real,” adds Daisy Marylses, the executive editor of Publishers Weekly. They’re not necessarily written that well, because what’s more important than the story is the message.” A case in point: Chaim Eliav’s The Runaway, which tells the tale of an Orthodox boy who defects from the fold, joins a cult, but eventually finds his way home to normalcy.”

Brianna, unsurprisingly, resents the limited depictions and the fact that some authors are shunned by the Orthodox. Naomi Ragen is excellent, but the community won’t allow her books in the schools,” says Brianna about the best-selling author of, most recently, The Saturday Wife. They said it’s ‘airing dirty laundry.’”

This airing dirty laundry” is an issue for many people who believe that fictional portrayals must be positive—both to themselves and to the world at large. Part of the reason Jewish presses don’t publish Ragen’s books is because she writes about suicide, adultery, and the like. *

Ragen, an American now living near Jerusalem, is exceptional in her refusal to bow to the community’s worst impulses. In Jephte’s Daughter, published in 1989, she tells of a Hasidic woman, fed up with her husband’s physical and emotional abuse, who jumps, with her three-year-old daughter, to her death. Sotah, from 1995, follows an ultra-Orthodox woman falsely accused of adultery. The Saturday Wife concerns a frustrated Orthodox woman who longs for a better life. Call her Emma Bovary-stein.

Ragen admits that she was conflicted about bringing these topics to light; she is Orthodox, and says she feels guilty about her negative depictions. She has refused to let her books be translated into Hebrew (Finnish, however, is another matter). She also has refused to sell film rights, because she doesn’t want the images she has conjured in print—of a religious Jew beating his wife, for example—on the big screen. Nevertheless, she is delighted to have opened the door,” she writes in an email. It’s a fascinating world, and deserves fictional representation.”

Censoring novels doesn’t curb the hunger for forbidden content. Brianna still visits the library regularly to find books that go beyond family issues, shidduch issues, and marriage.” Shtreimel, the pseudonymous name of a thirtysomething year old blogger who was raised in a Hasidic family in Brooklyn, recalls finding his mother’s stash of stupid, silly novels” buried deep in a closet. Though his parents bought him plenty of books in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English that passed muster, he was intrigued by what was off limits, and as soon as he discovered real”—that is, uncensored—fiction he became a public library member, visiting once a week.

Now a fan of World War II fiction, he’s wary of novels printed by Orthodox houses. Not that they’re on a worse level than those published by the leading publishers, nor are the topics boring or uninteresting. It’s the blatant lack of information that is hampering one from getting a full picture of what was going on at the time.”

Meanwhile, mainstream publishing houses are increasingly offering serious fiction set in the world of Orthodoxy, like Rochelle Krich’s Dream House, about a smart, sexy, Shabbat-observant Los Angeles journalist; Joshua Braff’s The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green; Tova Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxiliary and The Outside World; and Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1998. These novels take tradition seriously, not merely as something that needs to be shed in order to be modern or as nostalgic kitsch, but as a strong, worthwhile, contemporary presence in people’s lives.

Mirvis says she feels an obligation to write the truth—or her version of it. I have no interest in promoting a certain religious point of view, in affirming or even teaching about Orthodoxy,” she says. If the books teach people something about the Orthodox world, that’s fine, but my real interest is in the characters, the themes, the conflicts.”

Reared to the right of center” in an Orthodox community in Memphis, Mirvis says she is guided by Cynthia Ozick, who wrote in her essay Tradition and (or Versus) the Jewish Writer” that when a thesis or framework—any kind of prescriptiveness of tendentiousness—is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it, the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and commands.”

Brianna agrees—but she understands the hesitation on the part of the Orthodox community. People who come from this world have an emotional attachment to it. It’s hard to go against the grain,” she says. She even considered toning down some of the anti-Orthodox sentiments in her book, but decided against it. When you control what people read, what information they have access to, you control what they think,” she says. That is a far worse prison than any physical one could be.” In the meantime, she is posting chapters of her book on her blog. If the day should come that her literary ambition gets the better of her and she tries to get her book published, Brianna won’t send the manuscript to a Jewish press. It’s like sending The Da Vinci Code to a Christian publisher—kind of useless except perhaps as an insult.”

Mary Berg, born and raised in Poland, was nineteen in March 1944, when she stepped off a prisoner-of-war exchange ship from Lisbon and onto a dock in New York. She stood with her American-born mother, her Polish father, and her younger sister, clutching a suitcase that contained her U.S. passport (thanks to her mother’s citizenship) and a set of twelve diaries describing her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto. Before she cleared immigration, she met Samuel L. Shneiderman, a journalist who had come from Poland a few years earlier. Thirty-seven at the time, Shneiderman had worked as a reporter in Warsaw, become the Paris correspondent for a few Polish dailies, and covered the Spanish Civil War until he left Europe in 1940. In New York, he made it his mission to spread the news of Poland’s pain, and in particular the pain of its Jews. It’s not known quite how he and Berg met on the dock after her ship anchored; it seems he was milling about, seeking stories, and she captured his attention. (Judging from pictures, she cut a striking figure, tall and sturdy, with dramatic dark looks and gigantic eyes.) However it happened, he learned about her journals and convinced her to let him edit them.

The two worked together closely, Berg growing close to the journalist’s family as she spent weeks turning her Polish shorthand into actual narrative at Shneiderman’s kitchen table, his wife and two children looking on. After advising her about clarifications and additions he thought she should make, Shneiderman translated the narrative into Yiddish, and two months later, not long before D-Day, an excerpt appeared as the first in a series of ten monthly installments in one of New York’s leading Yiddish newspapers, the politically and religiously conservative Der morgen Zshurnal.

The grim facts Berg described are familiar to us now—all too familiar; we can easily fail to register their horror—but American readers in 1944 did not know them. A few other articles and pamphlets offering eyewitness testimonies emerged around the same time, but none did what Berg’s did: chronicled day-to-day life in the ghetto from its initial days through to the eve of residents’ first armed resistance, more than two years later.

Searching for food in the courtyard, drawn by Mary Berg

Here, in brief outline, is the story the excerpts told: Berg was fifteen in the autumn of 1939, when the German army invaded her native city of Lodz. She and her family fled, walking and bicycling the seventy miles to Warsaw. The ghetto was officially established about a year after the family settled in. As part of the moneyed class—her father was a respected art dealer and they’d managed to escape with some funds—they had it easier than many around them. (Berg felt guiltily aware of her advantages. “Only those who have large sums of money are able to save themselves from this terrible life,” she wrote, describing the hunger and sickness she’d seen in others.) In some ways, her accounts of daily life are astonishing for the normality they portray: relatives getting married, people going to work, friends chatting in cafés, students—herself included—working toward graphic arts degrees, theatre aficionados attending cabarets. But all that was short lived, and her accounts of the outrages she saw on the street are equally astonishing: “Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead.” In July 1942, Berg and others with foreign passports were put into the Pawiak prison, near the center of the ghetto, while most of the rest of the inhabitants were deported to their deaths. She watched them leave from the prison windows. “The whole ghetto is drowning in blood,” she wrote that August. “How long are we going to be kept here to witness all this?”

After its initial appearance in Der morgen Zshurnal, translations of Berg’s tale landed on the pages of several other papers—the leftist (and nonreligious) English-language P.M., Aufbau, a German-language paper aimed at a Jewish readership, and Contemporary Jewish Record, a precursor to Commentary. Soon after, in February 1945, L.B. Fischer—a German press that fled Europe and established temporary wartime headquarters in New York in 1942—published the diary in book form with a dust jacket Berg herself had drawn, an image of the brick wall that marked the ghetto boundary. Laudatory reviews appeared in the Saturday Review and The New Yorker. In The New York Times Book Review, Marguerite Young wrote, “Without qualification, this reviewer recommends Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto to everybody.” Fellow Poles realized the significance of the books as well.

The original cover of Warsaw Ghetto, drawn by Mary Berg

Renowned poet Julian Tuwim, also a native of Lodz and an occasional customer of Berg’s father, called the book “a Baedeker of our misery.” Over the next two years, translated versions appeared in five countries, and Berg became widely enough known that she was considered a New York celebrity. She marched on City Hall with signs demanding action to save Jews still alive in Poland. She gave talks before audiences and interviews on the radio. And then she, along with her book, disappeared.

In fact, if you’re not a Holocaust memoir buff, you’ve probably never heard of Berg’s wartime account, whereas you surely learned of Anne Frank’s diary before you were old enough to be a buff of anything. That’s in part because Berg’s book fell out of print in the early 1950s, right around the time the English-language edition of Frank’s diary was issued. (Frank’s has been in print continuously ever since.) On the surface, the two teenage diarists had a lot in common. Both were from well-off families, both wrote about the hardships they suffered. Both began their diaries on their birthdays (or, in Berg’s case, on her adopted birthday, because her actual one coincided with Hitler’s, and Jews weren’t allowed to be born on the same day as the Führer). But Frank was hidden from the full horror of the war while she wrote her diary; her entries necessarily focus on her own emotional development and the quotidian aspects of life in a small space. Berg stepped out into the streets and saw atrocities every day. Her words bear witness to the suffering and violence all around her and make her tale harder to take. Lawrence Langer, author of the landmark study Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, puts it this way: “Anne Frank’s diary was and is more popular because it records no horrors; the horrors came after she stopped writing, so readers don’t have to confront anything painful.”

S. L. Shneiderman in 1992

Last year, Susan Pentlin helped usher into publication a new edition of Berg’s diary—sixty-two years after its initial release. Pentlin, a professor emerita of modern languages at the University of Central Missouri, suggests that Berg’s withdrawal from the public eye played a big part in the forgetting of the book. Pentlin interviewed Shneiderman in the early 1990s, a few years before he died, and he told her that Berg walked away from the book at some point in the early 1950s. She wanted nothing more to do with it and hoped to forget the life she’d led in Europe, Berg had told him, as she broke off contact with him and his family. Sometime earlier, in 1950, L.B. Fischer disbanded its American outpost and returned to Germany. The company sold the rights to Berg’s diary to A.A. Wyn, publisher of Ace Books, an imprint famous for its paperback genre novels and, at the time, for its stinginess toward authors. Wyn sat on the rights. After he died in 1967, his widow sold them back to Shneiderman. Berg still refused involvement.

Until the diary was republished last year, interest in it had been scarce. Historians and researchers knew of it, certainly, as it appeared frequently in bibliographies of Holocaust studies, but it was only in the mid-1980s, when a Polish version was published for the first time and a Warsaw theater staged a dramatic reading, that public attention rekindled briefly. The play’s director contacted Berg to invite her to the show, but she responded through friends, refusing to return to Poland to watch it, according to a New York Times article at the time. And when Pentlin contacted her in 1995 about the possibility of reprinting the book, Berg responded bitterly.

Mary and her sister Anna in the Warsaw Ghetto

“Instead of continuing to milk the Jewish Holocaust to its limits,” she wrote, “do go and make a difference in all those Holocausts taking place right now in Bosnia or Chechin….Don’t tell me this is different.” Berg wanted nothing to do with any revival. “She told me to ‘bug off,’” Pentlin says. “I also understand that she has denied being Mary Berg on several occasions.” At the time, she was seventy-one years old and still living in the United States; if she knows where, Pentlin isn’t saying. Pentlin also says she doesn’t know if Berg is alive today, and there is no obituary on record.

It goes without saying that Berg was one of the lucky ones. Unlike Anne Frank, she escaped Europe alive. Her family escaped with her, and she saw her story published. She heard critics, reviewers, and readers call her a hero, her story evidence of, as The New York Times put it, “the dignity of man.” But perhaps this reception was what eventually drove Berg away from her story. “Dignity,” says Langer, “is the last word I would use to describe the anguish of the ill and starving Jews in the ghetto. If you check some of the early reviews, you will see how eager most of them were to transform this into a heroic story.” Berg did not want to be a hero. As she wrote from the Vittel internment camp in France, where she was sent after her ghetto imprisonment, “We, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other. Had we the right to save ourselves? Here everything smells of sun and flowers and there—there is only blood, the blood of my own people.” The account in Der morgen Zshurnal was published before the war ended, before the Jews of Hungary were decimated, while it was still possible to hope some people might be rescued. Berg published her diary as a call to action. “I shall do everything I can to save those who can still be saved,” she wrote. “I will tell, I will tell everything, about our sufferings and our struggles and the slaughter of our dearest, and I will demand punishment for the [Germans]….who enjoyed the fruits of murder….A little more patience, and all of us will win freedom!”

Mary Berg as a young girl

But not all of them did, of course, and Berg’s disappearance suggests that even those who escaped were never free. Is it grim to wonder what would have become of Anne Frank had she survived Bergen-Belsen, what would have become of her book? Philip Roth does so in his first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer. Alive and in hiding (according, at least, to Zuckerman’s imagination), Frank, under her assumed identity, explains why she could not reveal herself after learning about the publication of her diary: “I was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint.”

With memoir, it is the fact of a life outside the pages that gives the book its aura. If that life has a tragic end, like Frank’s, it’s possible, as Roth suggests, to feel a kind of catharsis—often a desperately needed one. If the life that comes after is one of triumph over adversity (like, say, Elie Wiesel) we derive something different—a sense of hope, perhaps, or at least satisfaction. Mary Berg’s diary offers neither catharsis nor satisfaction. The story that comes after it is not tragic or triumphant; there is, in fact, no story. A terrible, true event took place, and someone lived to tell about it, and the world responded either indifferently or with misguided sympathy, and many hundreds of thousands more died despite the truths that had been told. After that there was nothing left to say.

Judith Katzir’s second novel, Dearest Anne—published in Israel in 2003 and newly available in English—is written in the form of letters from a young girl named Rivi Shenhar to Anne Frank. The letters are rife with intimate details of Rivi’s discoveries and indiscretions, as she navigates the eighth grade, reads voraciously, and explores her sexuality—notably through a passionate, scandalous love affair with her married literature teacher, Michaela. They’re also richly descriptive of the particulars of Israeli life in the 1970s.

Since her first book, a group of four novellas titled Closing the Sea, was published in Israel in 1990, when she was twenty-six, Katzir has been deliberately building on the relatively new tradition of women writing in Hebrew. Now with seven books to her name, she’s working on one based on the handwritten memoirs of her great-grandmother, who moved to Palestine from Russia in 1906, and eventually settled in Tel Aviv—where she lived in an unconventional communal arrangement with her husband, their five children, and her lover (a vegetarian fascinated by world religions who was nearly ten years her junior).

Katzir was born in Haifa and today lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a literary editor and teaches creative writing.

Until about twenty years ago, Hebrew literature was pretty much dominated by men. How did you experience this, and how does it relate to your work?

When I was in school, we studied mostly male writers. Maybe we read two stories by women, and a few poems. We had the male canon, but I had to find my own subversive canon of women’s literature, translated from other languages. It was a strange concoction of high literature like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, and things like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Anne Frank was a very, very important model for me: She was not only a woman writer, she was a girl writer.

It was important for me not just to read about women’s experience, but to create a portrait of a female artist for myself. Even when I wrote my first stories, in my early twenties, there were very few women writers active in the literature scene here. There was the first book of Orly Castel-Bloom [the story collection Not Far From the Center of Town], and we studied Amalia Kahana-Carmon’s stories in school. In the ’80s, she said that if Hebrew literature is a synagogue, the part of the women is behind a curtain. But now I believe that women writers have built a parallel synagogue for themselves.

Since you didn’t really have female writers as role models, did you feel like you were doing something new?

Yes. Critics said Closing the Sea included the first description of female orgasm in Hebrew literature. I had new areas to explore, and I felt I was among the first to explore them: the feminine body, the aging body, sexuality, relationships between women, mothers and daughters, relationships between men and women. For me, it’s very important to be an insider witness for these topics that are quite new to Hebrew literature.

Was it shocking for people when that kind of writing by women first came out in Israel?

Feminism in the U.S. developed in the late ’60s, early ’70s. I think in Israel we’re about twenty years behind. A Room of One’s Own was translated in the beginning of the ’80s, along with Doris Lessing and a few others. But gender studies in universities started maybe less than ten years ago. So we are behind. But people were quite open to reading such literature. My first collection was a great bestseller here, which is very rare for a collection of stories, and for the first book of a very young woman.

That book was not feminist per se, though the four main characters are all women. They aren’t political stories; they deal with other subjects, like the memory of the Holocaust. The first novella is about two cousins, ages thirteen and fourteen, who spend their summer at their grandparents’ house in Haifa. Their grandparents are Holocaust survivors, and the cousins go to the attic and play “Anne Frank and Peter in Hiding.” Another one of my stories is about a mother and daughter; another about two friends from childhood, and what happens to their friendship when they are in their thirties.

Your work also brings to life historical women writers who haven’t gotten a lot of attention, like Dvora Baron. What attracted you to Baron, and made you decide to write a play about her?

I found her life story much more fascinating than her stories, actually. Her father was a rabbi, and he let her get an education like her brother. And at the age of sixteen, she moved with her brother from their tiny village to Minsk, and studied there, and started to write and publish stories in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1911, she arrived in Palestine. She met the editor of one of the workers’ magazine—she edited the literature part of the magazine—and they got married and had one daughter. In 1920, she discovered that her brother Benjamin had died in Russia, and she decided not to leave the house anymore. For thirty-five years, until her last day, she was in the house, most of the time in bed. She wrote her stories in bed. Her daughter was an epileptic and never sent to school, and she became a kind of servant for her mother.

Baron was a very difficult personality, very clever and egocentric. The play is about the relationship between her and her daughter; the main character is actually the daughter. It takes place on the day of Baron’s death, and is based on the daughter’s flashbacks.

You mentioned that Anne Frank was an early influence on you, and she’s a very strong presence in your writing. How did you first come across her?

In the ’60s and ’70s, when I was a child, many of my friends’ parents were Holocaust survivors. My father’s parents arrived from Poland before the war, but many of their relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. I’m not a second-generation Israeli, but in many ways my generation is a second generation, because we knew many elderly people who had a blue number. But the subject was hushed. They were post-traumatic, and they wanted to protect the children by not telling them about what happened.

We experienced the Holocaust as a big secret, with many images that we didn’t understand. Every year there was a ceremony in school for Yom Hashoah, with the same speeches and the same songs. It was stiff, not personal. Now young people, when they are sixteen or seventeen, go to Poland to see the camps. But we didn’t; young people had to play macabre games in order to control their anxiety about the subject.

So my first real acquaintance with it was through Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a very good introduction to the Holocaust for young people, because she wrote about life in hiding, about the fear, the claustrophobia, but she never wrote about the hunger and disease and death in the camps. Most of the time, her point of view is very optimistic. But still, I knew she was murdered, so it gave me my first knowledge about life destroyed. For me personally, she was very important as an icon of a writing girl, and for all the victims she symbolized. But in Dearest Anne, it was important to take her off the pedestal and relate to her humanity.

The character of Rivi Shenhar appears in both Dearest Anne and your earlier novel Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly. How did she develop over the years?

The two novels are like two pillars of the same house. When I started to write Dearest Anne, I didn’t know it was going to be about the same Rivi. It was important to me that the reader experience the story from the perspective of the young character, without moral judgment. So I decided to write it in present tense, as a diary of what happened to this young girl every day. Then I thought about Anne Frank as an icon, an address for this character, who decides that she’s the fictional Kitty. Kitty doesn’t have a biography or a face, so every girl can decide that she’s Kitty. She’s only a silhouette. I started to see that this was the same soul as Rivi from my previous novel, and I decided it was going to be her, in a different part of her life. She’s a sort of alter ego, but there are differences as well.

In her afterword to the English translation of Dearest Anne, Hannah Ovnat-Tamir writes that the book reminded her of “growing up and coming of age in a time of great historical and national importance.” Was this something you had a sense of when you were growing up?

Yes, but in the book most of the important nation-building issues are in the background. What’s much more important to Rivi is her relationship to her family, and her relationship with Michaela. It’s an alternative way to look at Israeli history. What’s important for most people were issues like the peace process. But for a young girl, what’s important is her world.

In addition to being an avid interpreter of dreams, Sigmund Freud was also an avid interpreter of jokes, and a collector to boot—Jewish jokes in particular.

He was not the only significant historical figure who had a thing for a good yuk; for centuries, people of all backgrounds—philosophers, linguists, statesmen, and, of course, comedians—have collected jokes, and have also endeavored to explain what it is about them, exactly, that makes people laugh.

Jim Holt, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, is among these enthusiasts. His new book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, traces the evolution of the bit from the Ancient Hellenic world all the way to the present day. Holt tells Nextbook about the curiously named joke collector G. Legman, shares his own favorite punchlines, and explains why the word “Kalamazoo” ought to make you chuckle.

In the early 1930s, Leo Rosten was a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago, living at home with his parents, his career stalled by an unfinished thesis and an academic job market only beginning to open up to Jews. In mild desperation, he took a job teaching English to adult immigrants in a night class at the Jewish People’s Institute, a settlement house on Chicago’s rough West Side. To his surprise, he found a wellspring of inspiration in his students’ malaprops and mangled English, and on the side began weaving a series of comic vignettes based on his classroom experience. Hoping to pay off some medical bills, he sent one of them to The New Yorker under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross, so as not to attract the attention of his presumably stuffy and humorless professors.

On August 22, 1936, the first of Leo Rosten’s many stories about Hyman Kaplan, the indomitable—if supremely challenged—English student, and Mr. Parkhill, his beleaguered instructor at the American Night Preparatory School, ran in The New Yorker under the title, “The Rather Baffling Case of Mr. K*a*p*l*a*n.” With its publication, “one of the great and enduring characters in English literature,” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called Kaplan, was born.

A middle-aged immigrant from Kiev, Kaplan presents a deceptively unprepossessing appearance: “A plump, red-faced gentleman with wavy blond hair, two fountain pens in his outer pocket, and a perpetual smile . . . vague, bland, and consistent in its monotony.” Yet his ability to wage verbal warfare not only on the sensibilities of his instructor, “Mr. Pockheel” (as Kaplan pronounces “Parkhill”) but on the English language itself, is anything but bland. He advises his glass-eyed brother-in-law that if his “eye falls on a bargain, pick it up.” In Kaplan’s world, the plural forms of “library” and “cat” are, respectively, “Public library” and “Katz.” And conjugating the verb “to die” is an unsentimental exercise in compressed narrative: “Die, dead, funeral.”

When they appeared, Rosten’s stories of classroom warfare were light years away from what The New Yorker, that temple of genteel American wit, generally published; they hardly seemed part of the same universe as Robert Benchley’s tales of the small irritations of daily life or the manic and absurd wordplay of S.J. Perelman’s feuilletons. In 1938, a year after Kaplan’s debut in The New Yorker, a collection of columns was published, under the title The Education of H*y*m*a*n* K*a*p*l*a*n*, and quickly shot up The New York Times best-seller list. By this point, Kaplan’s struggles with the English language had gained such wide popularity that The Nation began its review with the following: “I hope it is not really necessary to explain that Hyman Kaplan is that member of a beginner’s class in English for Adults whose exploits have been described in the pages of The New Yorker.”

With just enough realism, the stories’ dialect-driven comedy opened a window onto a world that was foreign to many of the magazine’s readers, populated as it was with Mitnicks and Blooms and cutters in dress factories. Rosten’s ear for the subtleties of Yiddish-inflected English enabled him to create, in Kaplan, a fount of uniquely creative spelling, wordplay, and cringe-worthy diction. Beyond the jokes, however, each installment worked to sustain an ongoing meditation on the immigrant experience, attentive in equal measure to the cross-fertilizing influences America and its immigrants exerted on one another. Evelyn Waugh, never one to issue compliments lightly, described the book as “not a work to be read and thrown away, but to be kept at the bedside and constantly resorted to,” calling its protagonist a “potent force for European-American understanding.”

Why did a book built on malaprops and crazy turns of dialect hit such a popular and critical nerve? Its resonance was so great that during World War II, it was the very first pocket-sized book issued by the military to soldiers via its Armed Services Editions. In April 1968, a musical version appeared on Broadway.

When Kaplan made his first appearance on the printed page, the American Jewish community was on the cusp of change. By the 1930s, Jews of Eastern European origin were increasingly confident, working assiduously to leave behind not just the shtetl, but the tenements and crowded streets of the Lower East Side, and to join in American life more fully. Perhaps no one could sum up their growing Americanization as well as Kaplan himself, explaining to Mr. Parkhill one day that he declined to attend his friend Jake Popper’s funeral, opting instead to “tink like Americans tink! So I tought, an’ I didn’t go. Becawss I tought of dat dip American idea, ‘Business before pleasure!’”

Rosten himself knew that transformative immigrant experience firsthand. He was born in Lodz and moved with his family to Chicago at the age of three. He grew up poor on the city’s West Side, where his family owned a small sweater-making business. Both parents were descendants of rabbinical families, and Rosten was reared to respect learning above all, his father telling him that any book he read as a child was akin to “laying down inventory.” In Rosten, inventory ran deep. He was a gifted linguist with a particular fondness for humor and the subtleties of the Yiddish insult. In addition to earning his PhD in sociology, Rosten went on to write several screenplays, including the 1941 Humphrey Bogart vehicle All Through the Night, Hollywood’s first anti-Nazi film. He also published a sociological study of the Hollywood system, worked in Washington at the Office of War Information, and wrote some forty books, primarily on language, Judaism, and humor, including the incomparable The Joys of Yiddish, published in 1968. Rosten remains best known for Joys, a seemingly simple English-Yiddish lexicon that, in many ways, is an assertion of security in identity from the American Jewish community.

But it was The Education of Hyman Kaplan that established Rosten as a keen cultural observer with an ear for the subtleties of language. Although Kaplan is the ostensible protagonist, the book ultimately—and ironically—tracks the education of his teacher, Mr. Parkhill. As the novel opens, Mr. Parkhill is a confident teacher, sure of himself and his ability to guide his students to greater competence in English. The presence of Hyman Kaplan in his classroom, however, deeply shakes him, for in spite of Kaplan’s countless mistakes, his certainty and bravado never waver. As Robert van Gelder described him in The New York Times review of the book in 1937, Kaplan is “morally indomitable, with tireless energy and exquisite sophistry . . . twisting the language of Shakespeare and Milton to his will as casually as we might twist the language of Confucius—if we knew enough about it to catch hold of it all.” Though he may start out looking the fool, Kaplan ultimately triumphs over Parkhill’s careful corrections, his own insane logic watertight.

In a practice letter addressed to his brother, Max, he signs off “with all kinds entusiasm, your animated brother,” explaining to his classroom nemesis, the pedantic and exacting Miss Mitnick, that he wrote “to mine brodder in Varsaw mit real antusiasm!” As Rosten notes, “the implication was clear: Miss Mitnick . . . let her brothers starve, indifferently, overseas.”

This awareness of a world “overseas” and “brodders in Varsaw” is a constant in the Kaplan stories, and resonates with a particular poignancy. In 1937, when Rosten was writing these pieces, the news from Europe was dire, and contemporary readers can easily guess the fate of those “brodders in Varsaw.” Though Mr. Parkhill’s students are committed to a new life in the United States, they bring their foreignness with them, through their accents, their overseas relatives, and their concerns. The classroom of the American Night Preparatory School is in many ways a bridge between two worlds, the students and teacher attempting to seek common ground between old and new.

It’s as if Rosten were analyzing his own status as an American, the balance struck somewhere between his bemused, exasperated, and unquestionably gentile alter ego, Mr. Parkhill, and Parkhill’s worst student, the decidedly foreign and—though the word is never used—unquestionably Jewish Hyman Kaplan. Parkhill’s sense of himself as a calm, benevolent dispenser of wisdom is repeatedly upset by Kaplan’s “dark and baffling logic.” Parkhill is the apotheosis of the bland American, perhaps just the type to whom Rosten himself lost many early academic jobs as a result of his Jewishness. (As Rosten told Mitchell Krauss in 1976, “I suppose I’m one of the people who benefited from anti-Semitism because when I got my degree I had been led to believe I would get a teaching post. Instead, I became a writer.”) Rosten is not Parkhill, but neither is he the Yiddish-inflected Kaplan, whose voice no doubt bears a closer resemblance to Rosten’s parents than to Rosten’s own. Rather, he is a blend of the two, much as America itself was incorporating the vibrancy and energy of its newest citizens into its culture.

And those citizens in Mr. Parkhill’s classroom were getting a true American education. There is a focus on civics and the pantheon of greats—Valt Viterman, Tom S. Jefferson, and Mocktvain, the author of Hawk L. Barry-Feen. The travails Kaplan and his peers endured at the American Night Preparatory School are part of the necessary process of muting their foreignness in order to become citizens. Yet Rosten’s stories suggest that their foreignness is to be accepted as a welcome contribution to the American character. This was not a popular sentiment among Americans in the 1930s, as Father Coughlin railed against Jews and foreigners on the radio, and as strict immigration quotas erected virtually insurmountable barriers for the vast majority of those seeking to flee Europe. Rosten is adamant that a new American is being created in Mr. Parkhill’s classroom, and that is a cause for celebration, not despair.

Who better to tell the readers of The New Yorker how their country was changing than Rosten, an immigrant who could pass as American born? In The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten plays the teacher yet again, albeit this time an overtly Jewish one, celebrating not only the pleasures of the Yiddish language, but the deep inroads Yiddish has made into American English. Mr. Parkhill is a beneficiary of that infusion, poking gentle fun at Kaplan yet all the while feeling “nourishing juices course through his veins. For the priceless spark of life, the very heart of learning, had been revived.” Here is the first of Hyman Kaplan’s great triumphs. For all his ostensible intransigence in the face of education, he has clearly learned the primary lesson of the mythology of America: that one can be and become anything one wants, unrestrained by background, religion, or, least of all, the rules of grammar.

Elisa Albert, Fiction Editor
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman

Hadara Graubart, Staff Writer
Lust in Translation by Pamela Druckerman
Growing Up Rich by Anne Bernays

Eve Grubin, Poetry Editor
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

Sara Ivry, Senior Editor
The Far Euphrates by Aryeh Lev Stollman
Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molina

Lawrence Levi, Senior Editor
Teitlebaum’s Window by Wallace Markfield
In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

Eryn Loeb, Associate Editor
The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel
What Are Big Girls Made Of? by Marge Piercy

Joanna Smith Rakoff, Editor in Chief
The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark
Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler

Julie Subrin, Podcast Producer
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

Ellen Umansky, Features Editor
Natasha by David Bezmozgis
The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

Elisa Albert, Fiction Editor

I’m reading: E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel is a rules-bending, walls-climbing, bets-off rollercoaster of a novel. Part rant, part political battle cry, part investigative odyssey, part lament, it jumps from first person to third person and back again. Daniel is the son of the fictional Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, an alternate-universe Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He and his sister Susan were small children when their parents were arrested, imprisoned, questionably tried, and executed. And “his” book is a perhaps brilliant, perhaps insane attempt to make sense of his family’s fate—a book as full of furious intensity as its subject matter demands. “I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution,” Daniel writes near the end, before a detailed account of his parents’ deaths. “I know there is a you. . . . YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution.” A wild, sometimes alarmingly unhinged ride.

I’m rereading: I barely glanced through Allegra Goodman’s Paradise Park when it came out in 2001. At the time, three hundred-plus pages about some messed-up flower child’s spiritual quest and eventual return to Judaism failed to engage me. Can’t say what led me to pick it up again; Sharon Spiegelman, the novel’s unlikely heroine, would likely appreciate this, given her mystical inclinations. Goodman is wonderful with plot in a way many contemporary literary authors are not; the novel goes places. Sharon’s journey spans twenty-odd years, taking her from a Hawaiian pot-farm to a Buddhist monastery to Crown Heights. It’s an engaging, thought-provoking, charming read. If the story’s resolution seems too pat, and Sharon’s family background a bit too easily skipped over, her narrative remains, simply, a joy. A novel this ambitious, this straight-shooting, and this full of life can, like the penitent soul, be forgiven a multitude of sins.

Hadara Graubart, Staff Writer

I’m reading: Pamela Druckerman’s Lust in Translation is that rare book that feels fun and naughty to read but is also thought provoking and thoroughly researched—and will make you a hit at dinner parties. In her investigation of attitudes toward sexual fidelity across cultures, Druckerman learns that the French are not as cavalier as she expected, that transgressive sexual behavior was a rare freedom under the repressive Soviet regime, and that, according to one Talmudic scholar, a husband should start to worry when his wife’s been alone with another man for “the time it takes a woman to remove a wood chip from her teeth.” (That one raises more questions than it answers.) While she never succeeds in finding the one comprehensive study that will illuminate worldwide sexual behavior, the anecdotal evidence she gathers is plenty provocative.

I’m rereading: Anne Bernays’s 1975 novel Growing Up Rich brings readers into the head of troubled, lonely teenager Sally Stern as she’s forced by tragic circumstances to move from New York City to Brookline, Massachusetts, to live with a family she hardly knows. She discovers that outside the Upper East Side, not all Jews share the view of their ethnicity that she had been raised with: “Presumably if you didn’t mention it, it would go away.” Set in the late 1940s, the book is full of delicious sociological details, such as a ritzy synagogue where yarmulkes are considered gauche, “like wearing the American flag on the seat of your pants to a DAR meeting.” Sally’s blunt insights are familiar—“Jews act differently with non-Jews . . . a slight readjustment of style, a change of emphasis”—and her bitter, scathing perspective is oddly endearing. I wonder why everyone knows The Catcher in the Rye but so few have read this equally captivating book.

Eve Grubin, Poetry Editor

I’m reading: Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, a precise, elegant, and intellectually honest account of the lives of the poet and literary figure Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas. Malcolm focuses on the time the two spent in France during World War II: How did two elderly Jewish lesbians living in Europe survive Hitler? She suggests in the beginning of the book that these women seemed indifferent to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, identified themselves as elite, gentile European intellectuals rather than as the Jewish American expatriates that they were, and were professionally ambitious at all moral costs. (This internalized anti-Semitism and lack of care for fellow Jews reminds me of Simone Weil.) As always, Malcolm seems to be setting out to expose the dark emptiness beneath the glittery, pretentious surface of untouchable literary personalities.

I’m rereading: George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, explores the tensions between English society and morality through the prism of Judaism and Zionism. While Eliot’s intellectual peers and the literary giants of her day were famously anti-Semitic, one finds in Daniel Deronda a deep respect for Orthodox Judaism and religious Jews (who play central roles in the novel), a critique of anti-Semitism, and an explanation of Zionism. (Reform Judaism, peripherally present, is rejected in the novel.) There’s a Shabbat meal that feels quite detailed and authentic, and the title character, an upper-class gentleman who discovers that his biological mother was Jewish, represents a morality that emanates from his faith.

Sara Ivry, Senior Editor

I’m reading: In a perversion of the adage to avoid judging a book by its cover, I have for some time found myself drawn to Aryeh Lev Stollman’s The Far Euphrates, with its titular suggestion of a distant desert land. As it turns out, it’s set not in Iraq but in Canada, and its plot concerns Alexander, a daydreaming boy who, in the years after World War II, grows into a young man among a tight-knit group that includes Holocaust survivors from Strasbourg. A rabbi’s only child, he’s viewed with circumspection by his unwell, emotionally removed mother, and as the prized hope of this tiny coterie, who’ve cobbled together emotional refuge from the collective wreckage of grief and disappointment. Employing a prose style that reminds me of both Death in Venice and Swann’s Way, Stollman deftly creates the intimate world of a child who discovers vulnerability and perseverance all around him.

I’m rereading: When I started reading Antonio Munoz Molina’s novel Sepharad by the ocean last summer, I thought it was as close as I would get to time travel. An unnamed narrator escorts the reader through a book that is part fiction, part history, and without traditional plot—an episodic voyage that often wades into stream of consciousness. The narrator drops in on European locales and real personalities (Kafka’s lover Milena Jesenska, for example) who endured the myriad tortures—genocide, fascism, exile—of recent history. Munoz Molina seeks to catapult the reader into a state of existential uncertainty: “When I travel I feel as if I were weightless, as if I had become invisible, that I am no one and can be anyone, and this lightness of spirit is evident in the movements of my body; I walk more quickly, with more assurance, free of the burden of my being.” This is not typical beach reading, certainly, but it transported me across the deep blue.

Lawrence Levi, Senior Editor

I’m reading: I’m halfway through Teitlebaum’s Window, Wallace Markfield’s uproarious 1970 novel set in Depression-era Brighton Beach, and I don’t want it to end. The protagonist is Simon Sloan, whom we meet as a child, “all rosy and redolent of matzo and milk,” and follow (so far) into adolescence. While his short-fused father and self-pitying mother bicker (“in Jewish,” Simon says), he seeks refuge with the Battle Aces, a tiny gang of smart alecks. Between movies, they torment patrons at Hebrew National and “squeeze tits” on Ocean Parkway; there’s a tour-de-force chapter-long circle jerk “on the Oriental rug” in one of their living rooms. Simon’s journal entries describe secret pride in his schoolwork, a burgeoning existential crisis, and a clash with his French-class crush, Clare Dushler: “You know what your main and basic trouble is? You’re not serious,” she declares. He replies, “Sure I’m not serious, how can I be serious, I’m Jewish.” That could easily be Markfield talking.

I’m rereading: The true story of Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives is just as gripping and gasp-inducing the second time around. First published in 1984, it’s about a ferocious Oedipal struggle over Freud’s legacy. In the late 1970s the Sigmund Freud Archives’ founding director, K.R. Eissler, handpicked as his successor (with the approval of Freud’s daughter Anna) a brash, young Sanskrit scholar named Jeffrey Masson—a self-proclaimed “intellectual gigolo” who, after gaining access to restricted letters, became determined to prove the spuriousness of Freud’s main theories. That Eissler, perhaps the most revered psychoanalyst of his era, could be seduced by Masson (“Even my own secretary warned me about him,” Eissler says) is one of the book’s many mysteries. The NYRB Classics edition features an afterword, written by Malcolm in 1996, describing Masson’s subsequent libel lawsuit against her and the book’s publisher; it lasted ten years.

Eryn Loeb, Associate Editor

I’m reading: For five years beginning in 1929, Florence Wolfson was a faithful diarist, penning nearly two thousand entries without ever skipping a day. In 2003, writer Lily Koppel found Florence’s crumbling diary in a Manhattan dumpster. Bewitched by its strangely familiar contents, she pored over brittle pages that recounted the young woman’s longings, literary aspirations—which involved hosting a salon attended by the likes of Delmore Schwartz—and her burgeoning sexuality. The Red Leather Diary reconstructs Florence’s biography through these original entries and Koppel’s own interviews with Wolfson, now in her nineties. Florence’s voice, steeped in the legendary New York of the 1930s, would be compelling enough on its own, but it’s intensified by her bittersweet reunion with her old diary, and the reminder that there are treasures hidden among the city’s castoffs.

I’m rereading: Marge Piercy’s poem “Maggid” is a staple of my family’s Seder, and this year it sent me searching my shelves for her 1997 collection What Are Big Girls Made Of? What the book lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in fierceness. Classically feminist poems that take on sexual harassment and torturous beauty standards are offset by more restrained meditations on love and aging: The sensual, climactic “The Art of Blessing the Day” finds Piercy reflecting on “the discipline of blessings,” and “Coming Up on September” captures the ambivalence that accompanies the passage of time. In the new year, she writes, “I will find there both ripeness and rot, / what I have done and undone, / what I must let go with the waning days / and what I must take in.”

Joanna Smith Rakoff, Editor in Chief

I’m reading: With the sixtieth anniversary on my mind, I’m turning to a couple of rarely read British novels that examine earlier, but no less turbulent, periods in Israel’s history, while laying bare the anti-Semitism of Britain’s upper classes. Published in 1965, on the heels of her bestsellers The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark’s odd, elliptical The Mandelbaum Gate awed critics but baffled fans. Set in Jerusalem, in 1961, during the Eichmann trial, the novel follows Freddy Hamilton, a mid-level British diplomat, and Barbara Vaughan, the prim, Bible-quoting schoolteacher for whom he falls (never mind that she’s in Jerusalem to meet up with her fiancé, an archaeologist unearthing the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan). The trouble is that Vaughan—like Spark herself—is half-Jewish and, thus, prohibited from crossing the titular gate into Jordan. It’s not giving too much away to say that she does so anyway and Spark’s melancholic, character-driven tale turns into an espionage novel, complete with costumed escapes and desert hideaways. Thrilling stuff, sure, but there’s more at play: difficult questions of ethnicity, identity, and faith.

I’m rereading: More difficult, however, are the ethical conundrums at the heart of Arthur Koestler’s fierce, brilliantly observed 1946 novel Thieves in the Night, which chronicles the establishment, in the late 1930s, of a kibbutz on land purchased from the mukhtar of an Arab village. Like Barbara Vaughan, Koestler’s hero, Joseph, is a bookish, half-Jewish Briton, which makes him an anomaly among his fellow settlers, the “phlegmatic and sturdy Sabras”—farmers’ sons “haunted by no memories”—and the new immigrants from Europe, whose “faces were darker, narrower, keener; already, they bore the stigma of things to forget.” As Britain turns away shipload after shipload of refugees and the younger generation of local Arabs grows increasingly radicalized—gorily murdering Joseph’s closest friend—quiet, apolitical Joseph finds himself drawn to a radical offshoot of the Haganah, regarded as “fascist” by the pacifist members of his commune. Joseph is a character of tremendous complexity, but Koestler inhabits his secondary characters—from the kind mukhtar and his dimwitted son to a host of British officials and a gung ho American journalist—with equally perfect pitch.

Julie Subrin, Podcast Producer

I’m reading: I am now “with child,” and in the few months I have left before all hell breaks loose, I’d like to read Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. The book, published in 2001, is a best seller regularly foisted upon new mothers, and the title is, admittedly, cloying. But from what I can tell, Mogel does not engage in psychobabble, or Bible-babble. She worked for fifteen years as a child psychologist, and before writing the book spent several years immersed in Talmud and Torah study. Her ultimate advice, it seems, is pretty straightforward: Don’t coddle your children. Your job is not to cultivate happiness, but rather, in her words, “honesty, tenacity, flexibility, optimism, and compassion.” In the near future, I’ll probably be more focused on cultivating a good night’s sleep, but I wouldn’t mind getting a head start on the bigger stuff.

I’m rereading: The writing in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, written after he served with the Red Army in 1920, is sneaky. Things unfold quietly, with turns of violence so sudden you have to read the story again to see what you missed the first time. In “Crossing the Zbrucz,” he begins with a lush landscape along the curves of a misty river, and then tosses in this little grenade: “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head.” In the same story, it’s not until the middle of the night that the narrator, a soldier billeted in a ransacked Jewish home, realizes he’s been sleeping next to an old man eviscerated by Polish forces. Again, no warning, and no explicit judgment. Babel forces you, over and over, to fend for yourself—to read vigilantly, only then discovering the pathos buried underneath.

Ellen Umansky, Features Editor

I’m reading: I still remember being floored by David Bezmozgis’s short story “Tapka” when I first read it in The New Yorker years ago. It’s a wonderfully dark, unsentimental tale of how a young Latvian immigrant becomes complicit in the near-murder of his neighbor’s beloved dog. Somehow, though, I’d never read Bezmozgis’s story collection, Natasha, in full. It follows the Bermans—Roman, Bella, and their only child, Mark—as they struggle to adapt to post-Soviet life in Toronto. “This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause,” Bezmozgis writes in “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” a story that expertly illuminates the humiliations (some minor, some major) that recent arrivals endured. Bezmozgis has a keen sense of story that short fiction can often lack, and his spare prose is attuned to the ironies and moral dilemmas of everyday life—qualities that also characterize the rich accounts he’s written for Nextbook.

I’m rereading: I first read Grace Paley’s stories in college, and they so struck me that I feel some trepidation in returning to them—what if they don’t measure up to my memories? Paley, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, captures the stories and rhythms of the world in which she grew up in lean, Yiddish-inflected prose, at turns lyrical, surprising, and wholly her own. “I was popular in certain circles,” is how the inimitable narrator of “Goodbye and Good Luck” introduces herself. “I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.” The elliptical stories Paley wrote from the ’50s to the ’80s—available in one volume, The Collected Stories—don’t shy away from larger disappointments (marriages are always unraveling, politicians are constantly disappointing), but one is left with a feeling of possibility, in storytelling and beyond. “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life,” she writes.