This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

New York: The uber-hip Mondrian Soho hotel has unveiled neighborhood artist Sol Lewitt’s 1979 photographic work, On the Walls of the Lower East Side, quite literally on its Lafayette St. facade. Jenni Wolfson performs her searing one-woman show, Rash, which details her experience working for the United Nations in Rwanda, Sunday evening as part of the All for One solo theater festival (Nov. 20, 7 p.m., $20). On Monday, actress Anne Hathaway hosts the Public Theater forum titled “Does Culture Make Us Who We Are?” with New York Times columnist David Brooks as one of the panelists (Nov. 21, 8 p.m., $25). On Tuesday, McNally Jackson Books hosts writers André Aciman and Sven Sirkerts (Nov. 21, 7 p.m., free). Uptown, the 92Y holds a discussion about Jewish soldiers who fought in the Soviet Red Army in World War II, to accompany an in-house exhibit on the same topic (Nov. 22, 8:15 p.m., $29; exhibit runs through Dec. 29).

Memoirist and reporter Lucette Lagnado talks about her new book, The Arrogant Years, with writer Malachy McCourt at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan (Nov. 30, 7 p.m., $10). Next Tuesday, New York’s Asia Society puts on what is bound to be a knock-out event as part of its Great Debates series: Jewish Talmudic Debate (Nov. 29, 6 p.m., $15).

Elsewhere: In Chapel Hill, N.C., this weekend marks the final performances of the mostly omnivourous theater group The Performance Collective’s jarringly physical take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s dietary tome, Eating Animals (Nov. 18, 19, 8 p.m., $10). Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center exhibits “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” which addresses gender equality and women’s issues and was inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book, Half the Sky (through March 11, 2012, $10). Stop by Sunday to hear from Edna Adan Ismail, a Somalian activist featured in the exhibit (Nov. 19, 12:30 p.m.).

Abroad: On Sunday, the Koffler Chamber Orchestra plays the work of some of artist Marc Chagall’s favorite composers, including Mozart and Tchaikovsky, in conjunction with the very cool-looking exhibit “Chagall and the Russian Avant Garde” at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Nov. 20, 3 p.m., free with $25 museum admission; exhibit runs through Jan. 26, 2012). The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is putting on a panel called “The Innovators: New Frontiers in the Fashion World,” featuring the co-founders of the voyeur website The Coveteur (Nov 22, 7 p.m., $30).

Vienna’s Jewish Film Festival is under way, featuring the movingly brilliant documentary ‘Til We Meet Again, one Jewish family’s modern-day journey through Austria to uncover the story of a grandmother’s 1939 flight from Vienna (Nov. 27, 12:30 p.m., $8). London’s Jewish Community Centre continues its attention-getting programming Thursday with the discussion “Would we be better off without religion?” featuring former Member of Parliament Evan Harris and playwright Diane Samuels (Nov. 24, 8 p.m. $13 in advance). On Wednesday, in Israel’s port city of Ashdod, the Jerusalem-based Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design debuts the fruits of a two-year partnership with the city in the form of a two-day exhibit, “Bezalel in Ashdod,” with live music and street entertainment (Nov. 23, 7 p.m., free).

Agenda will return Dec. 2.

When I first read Fear of Flying, in 1988, I didn’t like it at all. Looking back, there are several plausible explanations. I was 12 at the time: too young to find anything amusing about the novel’s abundance of amorous psychoanalysts, and taken aback by the armies of stiff cocks standing at attention on nearly every page. Expecting terrific masturbatory material, I was saddened to see the smut diluted by so many thoughts of wounded egos. Above all, I could sense that the book’s author, Erica Jong, was engaged in some strange activity that seemed a lot like writing but was, in fact, not.

What was it? In the free spirit of Fear, a book that frequently borrows from cinema whenever mere words fail it, allow me the following anecdote: It was 1975, and John Schlesinger was shooting Marathon Man in midtown Manhattan. The film revolved around one particularly effective scene, in which the sadistic Nazi dentist, played by Laurence Olivier, tortures the intrepid doctoral student and amateur sleuth, Dustin Hoffman, with a large drill. Schlesinger, Olivier, cast, crew, were all ready to begin shooting, but Hoffman was nowhere in sight. An hour passed, then two. Finally, late in the afternoon, the young actor emerged, hair unkempt, eyes enflamed. Briefly, he explained that, being a Method actor, he needed to work himself up to the frenzy demanded by the scene. Hearing this, Olivier snickered. “My dear boy,” he’s rumored to have said, “I suggest that you drink a nice cup of tea, take a nap, then wake up and start acting.”

I wished I could say the same to Jong, whose prose is to literature what method acting is to Hollywood, namely an exuberant but ultimately erroneous conviction that one cannot do better than to reach deep within oneself for pure emotion, and that when said emotion is discovered, it needs no further refinement en route to becoming great art.

Take the way the book’s heroine, Isadora Wing, reacts shortly after meeting the charismatic British analyst Adrian Goodlove:

“My name is Isadora Zelda Stollerman Wing,” I write, “and I wish it were Goodlove.”

I cross that out.

Then I write:

Adrian Goodlove

Dr. Adrian Goodlove

Mrs. Adrian Goodlove

Isadora Wing-Goodlove

Isadora White-Goodlove

And on it goes for an entire page. Not for Jong this business about the right words in the right order. Instead, Fear operates on two principles: first, that an emotionally honest novel is a novel dedicated to revelation and that any suppression of puns, asides, or even sophomoric scribbling of maiden and married names is therefore oppressive and unwelcome; and, second, that demands for order or structure or commitment—from heroine and author alike, in the novel or in real life—are likely motivated by male desire to classify and control. “I started out being clever and superficial and dishonest,” Isadora confesses midway through the novel. “Gradually I got braver. Gradually I stopped trying to disguise myself. One by one, I peeled off the masks: the ironic mask, the wise-guy mask, the mask of pseudo-sophistication, the mask of indifference.”

Such a sentiment should appeal to anyone at 12—an age in which fidelity to the authentic self stands alone atop the heap of desirable virtues—but I never bought it for a moment. I knew then, as I know now, that art is artifice, and that we admire the writers and the sculptors and the musicians we single out for posterity not for their candor but for their craft, and that craft requires discipline and the sort of self-inflicted deprivations that are anathema on the therapist’s couch but indispensable in the artist’s studio.

Revisiting the novel this month, I expected to dislike it all over again. I didn’t. I found it charming, through no fault of its own. While Jong’s prose has not risen to new heights in the nearly four decades since the book’s 1973 publication, the literary landscape around her has sunk. Graded on a curve, Fear of Flying is today a delight.

Which, of course, invites commentary on the curve. Jong herself is fond of such sport. “Sex is discombobulating and distracting,” she wrote in a recent op-ed in the New York Times. “It makes you immune to money, politics and family. And sometimes I think the younger generation wants to give it up.” Jong is right for lambasting the youth, but mistaken in her reasoning; one need only occasionally glance in on the joyful antics of the Kardashian sisters to know that fucking is alive and well in America. The real problem is metaphysical and far more profound. It involves an utter lack of anything remotely resembling a self, a condition afflicting our young, ravaging our literature, and jeopardizing our future.

Like all far-reaching statements, this one, too, will be best served by an example. Among Fear’s most potent chapters is the one in which Isadora, living in Germany with her second husband, stumbles upon an abandoned Nazi-era amphitheater, an architectural wonder that’s been scrubbed from the town’s official tour guides and allowed to fall into disrepair. Intrigued, she researches its history and ends up publishing a scathing essay denouncing Germany’s inclination to repress its past. The discovery transforms her; it’s shortly after publishing her essay that she sounds the aforementioned cri de coeur about peeling off masks and becomes a writer in earnest. In a book so enchanted by thumping cunts and playful ids, it’s terrific to witness a moment in which the world is once again drawn to scale and the inherent insignificance of individuals once again recalled.

The passage put me in mind of another instance of a fictional young American visiting the old continent, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Foer’s narrator is a writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, who travels to Ukraine to search for the woman who saved his grandfather during the war and to write a bombastic work of magical realism about her village, pieces of which are strewn throughout the book. Foer’s other narrator is Alex, a local tour guide with a compromised command of the English language and American popular culture. Both men are hyperverbal, yet neither is capable of communicating clearly and honestly. Everything is a conceit.

Here, for example, is Alex boasting of his sexual prowess: “Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper.” Even if one overcomes the character’s incurable monotone—Alex is not so much a person as a book-length misnomer or the world’s longest ethnic joke—one is still left with little more in hand than ribald names for preposterous sex acts, the sort of stuff college freshmen love discussing shortly after perusing Internet porn and just before beer pong.

Compare Alex to Isadora. Here she is on the occasion of finally having sex with the dashing doctor Goodlove: “Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly, reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy—unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time.”

This is not great prose, but it’s not a gag, either. It’s a straightforward description of the great discoveries and the small disappointments we stumble upon when exploring a new lover’s body for the first time. To feel this way, to write this way, a writer must be present, unafraid of embarrassment, eager to connect. In other words, she or he must possess a true self, must be a human subject reluctantly seeking out other human subjects, craving love but ready for rejection. There’s none of that in Foer’s work, a tiring and heartless torrent of wit and whimsy. There’s none of that in most contemporary young writers, Jewish or otherwise.

How we got this way is a longer, more complex question. Technology is one culprit. As computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues, we live in the information age, but we don’t always understand that we, human beings, are more than information; we contain multitudes, most of which contradict each other. “You have to be somebody,” Lanier wrote, “before you can share yourself.” But we’re nobodies, and not in Emily Dickinson’s gloriously reticent sense. We’re nobodies because a piece of software now remembers our friends’ birthdays for us, and because we see so many virtual, perfect pricks and tits and cunts that the real things, so beautifully imperfect, no longer thrill us so much. We’re nobodies because most of us sext before we ever get to know real intimacy, which means that we’ll never get to live life like Isadora Wing and make the sort of sweetly ruinous mistakes that helped her soar. We’re nobodies because we took from Erica Jong all of her stylistic affectations and none of her warmth.

And the warmth’s the thing. Decades after its publication, young readers are still turning to Fear of Flying to understand what it’s like to be human and female, confused and in love, hopeful and afraid. The answers they find there aren’t always perfect, but they’re a start.

Most refreshingly upfront about its goals: Robert Kopman’s 30 Minute Seder: The Haggadah That Blends Brevity With Tradition (30 Minute Seder, 2011). Who needs all that blah blah blah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Tarfon? This haggadah isn’t appropriate, though, if your guests are the types to say, “What? It’s time to eat already? Can’t we please spend more time discussing whether there were 50, 200, or 250 plagues at the Red Sea?”

Least appropriate for a Seder in Lilongwe, Malawi: Yehuda Berg’s The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded (Kabbalah Publishing, 2009) would, it seems, be something of a faux pas over there this year.

Perfect if you find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions situation: For $18,000, the Premier Edition of The Szyk Haggadah gives you Arthur Szyk’s signature embossed in gilt on the cover, plus “22 carat gold tooling” throughout. Guaranteed to match your gold-plated karpas! For the non-insane, there are reasonably priced editions of Szyk’s 1930s anti-fascist allegorical masterpiece, such as The Szyk Haggadah: Freedom Illuminated (Abrams, 2011).

If your guests don’t like all these newfangled Seder elements: Take them back to the 15th century with The Washington Haggadah (Harvard, 2011), which offers a full-color reproduction of a manuscript illuminated in 1478 by a scribe named Joel ben Simeon (and which is named for its contemporary home, at the Library of Congress in D.C.).

The haggadah we’re still waiting for: When, when will Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander deliver that hipster haggadah they’ve promised? It tarries, but according to Amazon.com, it will finally arrive in October 2011: just in time for Thanksgiving! Next year in Park Slope, then?

Likely to disappoint the Shakespearean actors at the table: The intrepid Sue Fishkoff reports that the new edition of the Maxwell House Haggadah—the haggadah of choice of the Obama White House—includes, for the first time since 1934, an updated translation that has removed all those fusty faux-Renaissance linguistic touches we’ve all gotten used to, like “thee” and “thou.” Alas, alack! How art we supposed to worshippeth our Lord in just plain American English?

If you believe that the Holocaust should be invoked at every Jewish public event: A Passover Haggadah (Simon & Schuster, 1993) features Mark Podwal’s drawings and Elie Wiesel’s commentary and poems, which link the ritual to recent historical trauma: “A camp./ An inmate. … It is night,/ The first night of Passover. … The parable of Had Gadya is misleading:/ God will not come/ To slay the slaughterer.”

For big families who don’t understand the idea of economy of scale: If all you want is the traditional, Orthodox text, Artscroll’s Family Haggadah (Artscroll, 1981) is a bargain: only $3.59 a copy, bound in sumptuous-sounding leatherette (or $2.24 with a laminated paper cover). But it seems that somebody’s tam son must be responsible for the price on the slipcovered, leatherette set of eight, which costs $33.29 (that is, $4.16 per copy), as if to punish those who buy in bulk.

Good for fans of chanting: Eliahu Klein’s A Mystical Haggadah: Passover Meditations, Teachings, and Tales (North Atlantic Books, 2008) includes “a mystical meditation” before most of the rituals, drawn from the Zohar or from such gurus as the Rashash. These, along with anecdotes about the Hassidic masters and a dash of playful gematria, help Seder-goers in “achieving cosmic consciousness.”

For those who actually do want to tell the story of the Exodus, over and over, until the break of dawn: A Passover Haggadah: Go Forth and Learn (JPS, 2011) comes equipped with the extensive commentaries of Rabbi David Silber. The founder of the Drisha Institute in New York, Silber knows a thing or two about Jewish textual study and offers enough textual readings to keep you talking until the sun comes up.

Looks sharpest in your NPR tote bag: Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families (HarperCollins, March) allows you to greet Elijah alongside Cokie and Steven Roberts. The book comes to you straight from the D.C. intelligentsia, and brims with optimistic religious pluralism: as its authors told Vox Tablet a couple weeks back, Passover is by far the most Jesus-friendly of the Jewish holidays (blood libels notwithstanding).

For the tikkun olam crowd: Last year’s In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah (Devora Publishing, 2010) features a forward by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin praising the Joint Distribution Committee for its outreach to threatened Jews all over the world, plus commentaries by Ari Goldman—but it’s the photographs of Seders across the globe, from Yemen to Lithuania, that make an impression.

If you have a favorite Orthodox superstar rabbi: Then he has a haggadah for you, whether it’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Haggadah (Contiuum, 2007), or Norman Lamm’s The Royal Table (Orthodox Union, 2010), or The Carlebach Haggadah: Seder Night With Reb Shlomo (Urim, 2001), or Seder Night: An Exalted Evening (Orthodox Union, 2009), which includes “commentary based on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.”

Closest you’ll get to a Family Circus or Marmaduke haggadah: Richard Codor’s Joyous Haggadah (Loose Line Productions, 2008) features an energetic comic strip retelling of the Exodus—nothing cries out for the Sunday Funnies treatment like the Death of the Firstborn, right?—plus, charmingly, the Four Sons as performed by the Marx Brothers.

Most appropriate for a Seder fueled by psychotropic drugs: Newly available for shipping to the United States, Asher Kalderon’s Haggadah (Urim, 2011) features the artist’s lush, gradient-shaded images, which have all the trippy verve of 1960s rock posters.

Anyway! The competition was fierce, but Matthew Siegel, Mary Bilyeu, and Alex Solaño (whose haikus are also Jonathan Safran Foer-themed) can raise their figurative paddles high. They each win a copy of Eli Horowitz and Roger Bennett’s new book, Everything You Know Is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World.

Congratulations! Poems after the jump.

Matthew Siegel:

Paddles in our hands
We breathe this coldest season
Your father’s garage

Ball, light as winter
We swat, we sweat together
Don’t need ”I love you.”

Again the garage
the dangling yellow light bulb
At last we are saved

Our parents divorce
It does not matter you say
Million dollar serve

The world is this small
You hold the ball in your hand
Wind carries it off

Mary Bilyeu:

It’s mesmerizing …
Breath-taking, heart-stopping, too.
Change the world. Play Pong.

Alex Solaño:

It’s sad how badly
Jonathan Safran Foer
Got his ass paddled

Reading the books of
Jonathan Safran Foer
Makes your balls spin wrong

Eating animals,
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Might have helped your game

He thinks he’s so smart.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Gets balls in his face

Related: Smash [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Celebrities Cross Paddles
Jewish Bowling Haiku? Jewish Bowling Haiku

• The Shteyngart Shandy: Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and lemon seltzah (thanks to Bambi Shlomovich on that one).

• HTMLGIANT provides the recipe for Roth’s Gin n’ Jews (gin, orange juice, and grapefruit juice), but executive editor Jesse Oxfeld notes that his cocktail would contain liver, crushed.

• Here are Dan Klein’s “Instructions” for the Guri-tonic War: Gin, tonic and penny served in a balloon. Understand you hold a drink.

• And Dan’s Dreyfus Affair: Equal parts Champagne, Bordeux, Chartreuse, Jewish parents. Shake drink while accusing it of treachery. Let sit locked in cabinet for a decade. Unlock and serve with an olive.

• The Icy Bashevis Singer has cold slivovitz and pickled beets.

• The Eggnog Ferber is imbibed on Hanukkah, not Christmas.

• The Jonathan Saffron Foer is a Sephardic spirit, a sangria featuring Spanish wine and enticing spices.

You know what the comments are for!

Avner Yonai did. And it came, fittingly enough, while he was watching the film Everything Is Illuminated, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Which led, of course, to the mandolins.

But first, the epiphany.

Yonai, who runs a moving and storage company in California, was born in Israel. His father’s family emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1932; his mother’s family, or at least some of them, did the same in 1935. Those that didn’t perished in Treblinka, along with the other Jewish residents of Gora Kalwaria, or as it’s known in Yiddish, Ger.

No one in Yonai’s family talked much about life in Ger. “Living in Israel, they had no desire to return to Poland, or to talk about it,” he said. And Yonai didn’t think much about it until he found himself in a darkened theater, watching Elijah Wood return to his character’s ancestral shtetl and stand before a monument commemorating the date of the massacre in which most of his forebears lost their lives: March 18, 1942.

“I was born on March 18,” Yonai said. “I don’t believe in signs, but that was too much of a coincidence.”

Within two weeks, Yonai was in Ger, trying to find traces of his own family. He met with a survivor, one Avrum Henryk Prajs, now 94, who pulled out the town’s Yizkor book and proceeded to show Yonai a photograph of his grandfather, two great uncles, and a cousin, taken sometime in the early 1930s.

It was a photo of an orchestra. The Mandolin Orchestra of Ger.

One can still find mandolin orchestras in most large cities in this country. In the early decades of the 20th century, when the Gibson guitar company actively promoted them, mandolin orchestras were everywhere—especially among the immigrant communities for whom the mandolin carried memories of home.

The mandolin originated in Italy in the 15th century, and there exists a large body of Baroque and classical music for the instrument. Cheap and portable, it rapidly became a staple of folk music across the continent, especially in the eastern parts; there is Slovakian mandolin music, Ukrainian mandolin music, and a significant amount of Jewish mandolin music. “The mandolin was the instrument you would sit around and play with your friends,” said mandolinist and guitarist Jeff Warschauer.

Sometime in the 19th century, some enterprising soul realized that mandolins could be built in different sizes and grouped just like bowed string instruments: mandolinas for violas, mandocellos for cellos, mandobasses for contrabasses. Thus was born the mandolin orchestra, Jewish versions of which quickly sprang up across Europe and North America, their mostly amateur members furiously picking away in a mass of quivering, shimmering tremolos. My old mandolin teacher, Mr. Katz, led just such a group in Montreal when he wasn’t schooling little kids in Eastern European chestnuts like “Tumbalalaika” and “Dark Eyes” (“Ochi Chornye”)—the latter having been a favorite of my maternal grandfather, who emigrated to Canada in the early 1920s from Krynki (Krinek), just 150 miles northeast of Ger.

That black-and-white portrait of the Mandolin Orchestra of Ger eventually led Avner Yonai to some long-lost relatives in Israel. But that was hardly the end of it. Given that most of his mother’s family had played in the orchestra, Yonai decided to resurrect it.

Figuring out what the orchestra played has not been simple. Prajs can identify its members, but he was just a child when they gathered at the Y.L. Peretz Library in Ger during the 1920s and 1930s. In a YouTube video you can see him struggling to recall what they might have performed.

One can hazard a guess as to the general outlines of the group’s repertoire based on the kinds of music that were popular among Eastern European Jews at the time, and on what Jewish mandolin orchestras in America played during the same period. “I would expect that they would be playing light classical pieces, tangos, Yiddish theater songs, and folk favorites,” says Warschauer, who has examined the repertoire of the old Workmen’s Circle Mandolin Orchestra in New York, among others. But it’s still a guess. As Yonai says, “There is not an archive where we can go and ask the librarian, ‘Give me the repertoire for the mandolin orchestra of Gora Kalwaria.’ ”

But Yonai is not one to give up easily. He has used the genealogy website JewishGen and the YIVO archives to find contacts and archival materials among the scattered descendants of the Jews of Ger. He has hired a doctoral candidate in ethnological studies at the University of Warsaw to pore over old newspapers, sheet music, record catalogs—anything that might hint at the mandolin orchestra’s repertoire. Together with the Israeli mandolinist Benny Bilsky, who has volunteered to act as music director for the project, he has even visited the large community of Gerrer Hasidim in Bnei Brak, Israel, searching for tunes that might have found their way into the orchestra’s book.

(It’s a safe bet that the orchestra dealt mainly in secular material, but you never know. As Warschauer points out, the old Jewish mandolin orchestras here in North America played “some Yiddish things, some things we might call klezmer, and even some Hasidic things.”)

A resurrected version of the Mandolin Orchestra of Ger is scheduled to perform at the 26th annual Jewish Music Festival in the Bay Area this coming March. The program has not yet been finalized, nor, for that matter, has the personnel list, though the festival’s director, Eleanor Shapiro, hopes to attract a roster of international mandolin virtuosi.

So, if you have a chest of old mandolin music from your great-grandfather’s collection moldering in the attic, or a Yizkor book that happens to mention the pieces that your great-uncle’s mandolin orchestra played in Poland in 1933, drop Yonai a line. He’ll be happy to hear from you.

For Avner Yonai, this is not just about mandolins. It is about connecting to a past that otherwise exists only in fading memories and rare photographs. And it is, first and foremost, about a small group of people who stayed behind when others, more prescient or maybe just luckier, chose to leave. People he met on his first trip to Ger, gazing at him in black-and-white across the span of nearly one hundred years.

“For me,” he said, “it is a family thing.”

***

Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic (Algonquin, October), for one appositely titled example, guides readers back to fin de siècle Vienna, where a young Jewish clerk lusts after a young lady he spots at the theater one night with a certain Dr. Freud. Evincing its own lust for history, folklore, and collisions of the two, Skibell’s book introduces its protagonist not just to the granddaddy of psychoanalysis, but also to Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, the Jewish doctor who invented Esperanto. Further complicating matters is the hero’s father, who speaks entirely in Biblical quotations, rendered here in Hebrew characters as well as in translation—and, finally, one tenacious dybbuk.

***

Concerned as much with the failure of romance as with its successes, Andrew Winer’s The Marriage Artist (Henry Holt, October) likewise evinces a fascination with the mating habits of Jews in pre-WWII Austria. It shuttles between the contemporary New York art scene and 1928 Vienna, where a young boy learns the art of ketubah embellishment from his Ostjude grandfather. Love isn’t exactly idealized in the novel (lovers argue, undermine each other, divorce, and throw themselves out of windows), but Winer’s art critic protagonist protests that loving “painfully” is inevitable, at least for him and his Russian Jewish flame: “Was there any other way for two people to love each other … when they were each married to someone else?”

If Winer’s novel’s structure—alternating chapters that link Jewish characters across a linguistic and/or historical divide, with a touch of typographical whimsy thrown in at the end for good measure—were to be named after its most iconic practitioner, it would have to be called Foerian Alternation. The History of Love (2005), by Nicole Krauss, is a prime example of that narrative strategy (and before publishing it, Krauss married the technique’s namesake). Great House (Norton, October), her third novel, ups the ante, joining four narrative strands, through its characteristically alternating chapters set in New York, Jerusalem, London, and Oxford. Given their ambition and playfulness, there’s reason to fear an exponential series developing between these two talented writers: Foer’s next novel featuring 16 intertwining stories, Krauss’ 256, then Foer’s next 65,536, ad infinitum.

The index case of Foerian Alernation was, of course, the popular Everything Is Illuminated (2002), in which a young writer with the same name as the book’s author confects a magical, technicolor vision of a Ukranian shtetl that owes more to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the fables of Jorge Luis Borges than to anything that Jews have ever said or done. Which is to say that Foer’s project was precisely not to write what has now been published, with a preface by Foer himself, as The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (Pegasus, October). In it, Avrom Bendavid-Val attempts to uncover the actual history of the locale that Foer’s protagonist employed as a blank canvas upon which his imagination could run riot.

***

Like Foer’s and Krauss’ clever children and adolescents, the protagonists of Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares (Knopf, October)—a follow-up by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan to their tikkun olam­-mentioning, Michael Cera-driven-adaptation-producing Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist—are at times impossibly charming. In the words of one blogger: “It’s just so so so so so so so CUH-YUTE—the romance!” The novel gets started during Christmas break when boy meets girl’s Moleskin notebook (at the Strand! among J. D. Salinger’s books!) and follows the 16-year-olds (in alternating chapters!) as they trade dares and flirt and act pretty damn adorable. Oh, and there’s also, unsurprisingly, a “gay Jewish dancepop/indie/punk band called Silly Rabbi, Tricks Are for Yids.”

***

Naomi Ragen’s take on contemporary Jewish romance is much less happy-go-lucky: Her latest novel, The Tenth Song (St. Martin’s, October), begins with a woman delighting in “the answer to every Jewish mother’s prayer” who will soon marry her daughter, a Harvard Law student, when a piece of bad news arrives: her accountant husband’s arrest “for transferring money to support terrorist organizations that are responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.” This impels the whole family to travel to Israel, where they can reconsider their values.

***

Before romance novels began crowding the racks at supermarkets, there were romantics: the 19th-century kind, like the composer Gustav Mahler. The British novelist and classical-music journalist Norman Lebrecht makes a decidedly personal case for the continuing relevance of that particular sort of romantic in his widely panned Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Pantheon, October). Among other aims, the book pushes what one reviewer describes as Lebrecht’s deeply held, though not widely accepted, belief that Mahler, who converted to Catholicism so as to take a gig directing the Vienna Court Opera, “was not … uneasy about, or in flight from his Jewish background, but rather fully and even happily determined by it.”

***

All romances end. Even the passionate, eccentric ones, like the marriage of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter and his second wife, Antonia Fraser—“the working-class Jewish boy from the East End and the Catholic aristocrat with her title,” who found common ground in their mutual membership in what she calls “the Bohemian class.” Fraser, a biographer, chronicles their relationship in Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter (Nan A. Talese, November), a mix of her diaries and more recent reflections, which one reviewer has described as having “at times a bosom-heaving, lace-handkerchief-fluttering quality.” Torrid as the relationship may have been—it began, scandalously, with an all-night, extramarital lovemaking session that Fraser recalls—it could not outlive Pinter’s death in 2008. Except in the form of this book, of course, where, like other literary romances, it will outlive all of us.

And, Armstrong writes, just as we no longer burn live cats or engage in bear-baiting for amusement the way fun-loving Westerners did centuries ago, we need to continue to evolve as moral people. Which is why it’s time to stop eating meat. “[W]hat I am suggesting is that if you love children’s literature, you cannot kill animals just because they taste good on a bun,” she writes. “There’s more than a bit of hypocrisy involved in urging children to empathize with pandas and polar bears and bunnies and ducks in books and at a distance and then feeding them hamburgers and sliced deli meats. The United States kills approximately ten billion land animals every year for human consumption, which works out to over one million animals per hour. No number of books about runaway bunnies, or ducklings negotiating Boston traffic, or terrific and radiant pigs can compensate for that scale of violence, in my opinion.” Her best line: “What is [a child] to make of the trusted adult who holds in one hand a living baby chick to caress with tender care and a chicken nugget in the other hand to eat with special sauce?”

It’s a valid question, even for those of us who nix the nugget because McDonald’s isn’t kosher. Meat is still part of the American Jewish family experience—Shabbat dinner often still revolves around the roast beast; the Jewish deli, while disappearing, still holds iconic cultural pride of place.

Some Jewish writers have recently considered the moral issues around what we ingest. Sadly, as we all know, kashrut isn’t always synonymous with eating morally—look at Postville and the way the Rubashkins’ plant treated animals and workers. I’m involved in a kosher, ethical meat co-op and have followed with interest the attempts by Conservative and Modern Orthodox activists to certify kosher meat as ethical as well as “kosher” according to the letter of halakhah, Jewish law. Ethical kashrut should involve respect for humans and animals. I don’t eat much meat—I joke that I’m in a mixed marriage because I married a Reform Jew from Wisconsin who lives for bratwurst and owns a “Bacon is a Vegetable” t-shirt—but when I do eat meat, I need to know its origins and trust the source. My standards of kashrut wouldn’t be acceptable to some other Jews, and my standards of what’s ethical wouldn’t meet those of vegetarians or vegans. We all have our line in the sand.

And that line can shift. The one time as an adult I willfully broke my own standards of kashrut was when I was writing for a travel guide in rural Greece. On a remote island in the late 1980s, a family insisted I come home with them for dinner. They were fishermen. They caught a fresh squid and smashed it against the side of their fishing boat. I felt just as caught as the cephalopod. I thought about having to explain not just kashrut, but what a Jew was. And I decided that their philosophy of philoxenia, kindness to strangers, was more important than my kashrut. Just that time, and just for me.

At that family’s table I stared down that calamari, heart pounding—I’d never had any unkosher seafood before—and slowly brought one of those ring-y things to my mouth.

Holy moly, it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

Thus ended my one and only foray into non-kosher seafood. So, what’s the moral here? That it’s hard to generalize about ethical rightness. We’re often weighing different goods. And of course, for many people kashrut isn’t about morality at all—it’s about following God’s literal word. Attaching Western values to kashrut is specious, according to many Orthodox folk, because kashrut is about obedience, not moral choice.

My kids love the story of me quaking over a plate of squid rings. Josie tends to follow Daddy’s religion (meat is God), and Maxie tends to follow mine (an occasional hot dog, some white meat, but generally not a fan of the fleisch), and they both revel in tales of my anxiety and waffling—welcome to childhood, where parents’ dithering is children’s joy. Both my kids have experienced that classic youthful moment of revelation, drumstick on way to mouth: Wait, you mean chicken is chicken? Both were briefly horrified; both also forgot or compartmentalized. I expect the classic “OMG, I am so going vegan” to happen, on schedule, in the teen years. If at any point they choose to go fully veg, we’ll accommodate. The amount of meat we eat now is a constant, low-level source of tension (Jonathan wants more; I want less), so adding still more thrumming demands to the mix will only add to the merriment.

In any event, for now, despite my family’s love for our kitty Yoyo and for William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, we will continue to eat meat. Some more, some less; some only kosher, others wrapped in prosciutto and stuffed with crawfish. But Armstrong’s essay should make us all think, wherever we fall on the fleshtastic and/or kosher end of the spectrum. Where does food come from? How do we refrain from exploitation of workers, animals, resources? How do our consumer choices affect the planet? We should all be sweating a little. That goes for kashrut-keepers who don’t think the conditions in a slaughterhouse matter, or who wish to shove any further questions about this issue under the blood-stained rug; it goes for vegans with easy answers about what everyone else should do; it goes for Michael Pollan, whose seven-word mantra (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”) doesn’t allow for class or cultural nuance.

The word “mitzvah” doesn’t actually mean “good deed,” though many people think it does. It actually means “obligation.” And one obligation that comes with having kids is not getting to go for easy answers anymore. Let’s keep reading, and keep asking the questions. It’s a mitzvah.

Ah, but Judaism’s like that, we say with pride. Labyrinths of text. Allusions to allusions. You can’t just blunder in. You have to master the rules of Jewish rhetoric. But the haggadah is weird even by Jewish standards. What other liturgical text instructs us to recline like aristocrats and discuss at length the fine points of flat bread, parsley, and eggs? What other service requires us to drink to excess and eat a sandwich for an appetizer?

There’s a reason the haggadah feels goyish: Formally speaking, it’s Greek. It’s a Judaicized version of a Greek genre called “symposium literature.” You’ve read other examples in philosophy class. Plato loved the form. So did his fellow student of Socrates, Xenophon. The symposium enshrined the most appealing traits of the Hellenic personality: conviviality, Epicureanism, a love of good conversation.

Symposia came in many flavors. Some featured communal singing; some began with prayer. But all revolved around table talk, freewheeling discussions of everything from the origins of the world to the peculiarities of different kinds of fish, meat, and  vegetables. These conversations were recorded (or made up), says the Greek historian Plutarch, to further “a deeper insight into those points that were debated at table.” For, he continued, “the remembrance of those pleasures which arise from meat and drink is ungenteel and short-lived … but the subjects of philosophical queries and discussions remain always fresh after they have been imparted.”

Nowadays, Jewish scholars deny that the haggadah comes from symposium literature. Symposia, they say, were likely to degenerate into bacchanalias; seders are comparatively sober. Ancient Jews ate communal meals too; they didn’t need to model theirs after the Greeks’. Besides, we know why the rabbis came up with the seder. They needed to reinvent Judaism after the destruction of the Temple. We have seders because we can’t offer the sacrifice of the paschal lamb.

All this may be true without diminishing the likelihood that the rabbis took from the symposium the components that make the seder different from all other Jewish festive meals, namely, the instruction to talk and a mandate to do what it takes to get a good conversation going. And what does it take? Two things: first, the egalitarian ethos of the dinner table, rather than the hierarchical etiquette of the yeshiva or the synagogue. As Plutarch pointed out about the symposium, “Questions should be easy, the problems known, the interrogations plain and familiar, so that they may neither vex the unlearned nor frighten them from the disquisition.” And second, a relatively rare (for the rabbis) spirit of indulgence. As the rabbis themselves put it: On Passover, “it is a commandment to please one’s children and the members of one’s household … with wine. Rabbi Yehudah says, [please] women with what is befitting them and children with what is befitting them.”

So, this Passover, be sure to drain your glass before you pour the next one; pass the nuts and candy; and let no conversation die before its time, lest you violate both the spirit and the law of the seder.

This essay is to appear in Jonathan Safran Foer’s The Unfolding Haggadah, which is scheduled to be published by Little, Brown next year.

Judith Shulevitz is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author or the newly published The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

In the funniest scene from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, several Ukrainians attempt to understand what exactly is wrong with an American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer who refuses to eat any meat. Almost a decade later, Foer has finally explained himself, in Eating Animals (Little, Brown, November), a nonfiction cri de coeur against factory farming. By temperament a sentimental maximalist, and now with an actual cause to champion, Foer pulls out every stop: science, humor, horror, pathos, celebrities. Natalie Portman proclaimed last week that Foer has single-handedly transformed her into a vegan. If Foer’s dog, sweet Holocaust-surviving grandmother, and infant children have anything to say about it—and, oh, they absolutely do—you’ll think twice before devouring the flesh of another mammal, kosher or not.

Unlike Foer, but like Tablet contributing editor Eryn Loeb, Mollie Katzen discovered vegetarianism through kashrut: “I loved meat when my mom cooked it,” she once told Hadassah Magazine, “but when I wasn’t at home, my way of keeping kosher was not eating meat, and that led me to look for other vegetarian options.” She helped found the Moosewood Collective, in Ithaca, New York, and went on to author some of the most popular vegetarian cookbooks ever published. Yet, like Foer before fatherhood, Katzen’s hardly a dietary absolutist, and Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen (Harper Studio, October)—aimed at beginners—includes recipes for Pan-Seared Garlic Prawns and Linguine with Clam Sauce along with Grandma Betty’s Brisket and a range of vegetarian fare. Foer would prefer the latest volume from the Moosewood Collective itself, Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health: More than 200 New Recipes for Delicious and Nutrient-Rich Dishes (Simon & Schuster, November), a thoroughly Pollan-ified (whole grains, no “white foods”) update to the Collective’s shtick.

* * *

The nagging question of how Jews can maintain some form of kashrut without refusing to eat at restaurants and at non-Jews’ houses—which Katzen solved by going veggie—resulted, in large part, from the developments chronicled by Michael Goldfarb in Emancipation: How Liberating the Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance (Simon & Schuster, November). A radio and print journalist, Goldfarb relies on academic historians, weaving their findings into an upbeat tale of how freedom from persecution and insularity led Europe’s Jews onward to remarkable cultural feats. Goldfarb simplifies matters rather formidably—“One day we’re being completely segregated,” he says, describing the book in an audio report, “next thing you know, Napoleon comes through town, tears down the ghetto gates, and we can do whatever we like, sort of”—but many readers will enjoy his anti-lachrymose view of Jewish history.

Just as Goldfarb credits Napoleon with the emancipation of Europe’s Jews, Tablet columnist Seth Lipsky regards the U.S. Constitution as having produced and safeguarded in perpetuity the freedom of Americans, Jews included. Having once praised The Founders’ Constitution, a collection of primary sources from the time of the document’s composition, as the “American Talmud,” Lipsky has now produced what might then be called an American Tosafot, in which he riffs on the original document and its sources and contexts. He calls the result The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide (Basic, November), though a more accurate name would be The Conservative’s Constitution, seeing as how Lipsky’s book is “free of the tendentious liberal ‘interpretations’ so typical of other guides,” in the words of the Conservative Book Service.

* * *

Recent work by historians of the Mediterranean and Middle East suggest that contrary to Goldfarb’s central generalization, even the Jewish communities that we might imagine as most powerfully isolated from their surroundings were, in fact, engaged in complex and important relationships with the non-Jewish communities around them. Attending to what he calls “integration” in antiquity, for example, Seth Schwartz proposes in Were the Jews A Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, November) that “Jews were more deeply implicated in Roman and Mediterranean bonds of reciprocity and honor than is commonly assumed.” In Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy (Cambridge, November), Joshua Holo focuses on the through the the 13th centuries BCE, and on the often Greek-speaking Jews of the Byzantine empire, examining how this community’s dual economic spheres, one internal and another external, dramatize the Jews’ “acculturation and ambivalence.” It isn’t startling news, meanwhile, that Jews and non-Jews interacted in deeply resonant ways during the Spanish Golden Age, but the paperback publication of The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, November), offers up 200 lush color images of artifacts, all testifying visually to the vigor of those relationships.

* * *

You may never have heard of Emmanuel Radnitzky, but if you’ve ever visited a half decent collection of 20th-century art, you’ve certainly seen some of his work. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, to a pair of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and raised partly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he took on the name Man Ray before producing his Dadaist and Surrealist paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as a set of haunting short films (such as 1926’s Emak Bakia). He lived in Paris for decades, where he photographed James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein; his creations in a range of media were exhibited alongside the works of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. An exhibit opening at New York’s Jewish Museum on November 15 explores the artist’s “willful construction of veiled identity”; the catalog, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Invention (Yale, November)—with biographical and critical essays by curators and art historians, plus hundreds of examples of Man Ray’s work—is much cheaper than a trip to Manhattan.

The cinematic version of the book, directed by the stage and film actor Liev Schreiber and out in theaters today, also wants to emphasize that, in the end, this is a Ukrainian story. Easily half the film is in Russian and Ukrainian, and Schreiber even takes care to distinguish among regional accents. He is fastidious in his efforts toward verisimilitude; the hand soap on a train and a flask of vodka in a rural restaurant are local brands. Schreiber pushes Ukraine (and the Eastern Europe for which it stands) to the forefront of the story, but the place he discovers is completely different from the Ukraine of Foer’s novel.

In addition to doing away with the magical-realist chronicle of a shtetl that consumed half of the book, the film makes another crucial departure. (Caveat lector: the following is a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the film.) In the book, Grandfather, a gentile, is an anti-Semite who turns out to have sent his best friend, a Jew, to his death during a Nazi raid on their village when forced to choose between him and his own family. His journey with the novel’s protagonist to what turns out to be the scene of his act of complicity forces his acknowledgment and repentance of his sins.

In the film, too, Grandfather begins as a virulent anti-Semite, but the identity concealed beneath the sting of his bigotry isn’t that of a gentile accomplice; Grandfather, it turns out, is a Jewish survivor. Having inadvertently survived an execution squad in his hometown, he casts off his yellow-starred jacket and absconds into a new life as a gentile. His transformation is so resolute that we meet him as someone who knows no way to refer to Jews except as “zhidy,” or “kikes.” (In fact, the film’s only failure of veracity comes when the American informs his guides that he knows very well what their constant references to him as a zhid mean—”Jew.” It’s worse. Much worse.)

What did Schreiber, who adapted the screenplay in addition to directing, intend by this single but tremendous transformation of a major character? Why turn the film’s main anti-Semite from a philo-Semitic gentile to an anti-Semitic Jew? Does the change hint at a possible reconciliation, a symbiosis of suffering of the we-are-all-Jews variety? Or is Schreiber letting Ukrainians off the hook when he allows his camera to focus on a Jew instead of a gentile accomplice?

Schreiber claims to have had something else in mind. “Whenever we memorialize the Jews who died in the Holocaust as heroes, I believe we overlook the impact that it has on those who have survived,” Schreiber told me in an email. “At the very least, they were required to deny their identity and faith…. For me making the most vehemently anti-Semitic character in the film Jewish was a way to articulate the burden of guilt and shame that so many survivors live with today.”

What Schreiber, the grandson of a 1916 refugee from Eastern European pogroms, seems to be saying is that only a second-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors could dare to re-imagine Jewish death—and life—during World War II through such a complicated, nuanced, eminently unheroic perspective on survival. Their elders are inclined either to put the tragedy behind them or to insist on an unadulterated worship of survivors as heroes. Cleverly, Schreiber is using a youth-oriented film—Everything Is Iluminated was wildly popular among younger readers, and the film works to feel kinetic and hip—to press its youthful viewers to think in less preconceived ways about what it means to have survived the Holocaust. This way, Schreiber appears to be arguing, is a more difficult confrontation with the legacy of that tragedy, but for all that also a more sincere veneration. True empathy, after all, comes from appropriation and identification, not bequeathed dogma.

There is a chuckling commonplace in the literary world that Jonathan Safran Foer, who was 25 when he published his novel, which brims with sagelike inquiries into and pronouncements on the meaning of it all, writes like an old man. The film only underscores this. The novel’s notion of Eastern Europe, after all, was a fairly traditionalist American Jewish view: the Ukrainian gentiles were the killers and the Jews were the victims. Foer’s wishful, personal innovation was that it took the visit of a young American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer to call out the hibernating guilt and shame of the former.

Schreiber offers an entirely different picture. He hardly avoids the Holocaust, but he wants to expand our notion of what it meant to survive it. Survival, after all, takes place mostly after the tragedy. And the great tragedy of Eastern Europe was not only that it helped to kill Jews during the Holocaust, but also that it refused to acknowledge their suffering and honor their true identities after it.

It’s hard to blame Grandfather for his self-denial during the war, but it’s more difficult to exculpate him for his postwar self-rejections and devolution into an anti-Semite, Ukraine’s inhospitable postwar terrain for Jews notwithstanding. The unpleasant aftertaste of Schreiber’s film is that survivors were not only heroes.

It’s not an argument Schreiber could have advanced with an American Jewish character. If Grandfather had emigrated to America instead of remaining in Ukraine, of course, he would have become a “hero.” And by choosing to focus on an anti-Semitic Jew rather than a philo-Semitic gentile, Schreiber returns a kind of agency to Jews themselves—an agency missing from Foer’s novel—although at the enormous cost of complicating their wartime and postwar identities.