Over the course of three decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, a Boston-area professor of English named Harry Kemelman published a series of 12 crime novels featuring a young rabbi working as an amateur sleuth. But Rabbi David Small is no run-of-the-mill religious leader. He’s a scholarly Jew...
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Memoirs are not my thing. I rarely read them unless I’m heavily invested in the author, either as an historical figure who can cast light on events I want to understand better, or as a writer whose work I love. The latter explains why I couldn’t wait to read Gary Shteyngart’s...
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A review of The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A brilliant young girl, daughter of a Rumanian-Jewish rug merchant, becomes an adviser to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the age of 8 in 1880s Istanbul.
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When we think of the Warsaw Ghetto, our minds turn to the four months early in 1943 when starving Jews fought back against the Nazis with smuggled and makeshift weapons. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising vividly displayed heroism and desperation in equal measure, and it has deservedly entered history as...
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One of the lessons I learned very early in my three-decade-long career writing and editing fundraising appeals was that statistics numb the brain while a gripping tale of one individual can unlock torrents of emotion in the reader. So it was no surprise to me that the story of one young refugee...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes James McBride won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird. It’s an often-hilarious novel about the abolitionist John Brown’s ill-conceived attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. That act is often...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes The seemingly unstoppable orgy of murder called the Holocaust probably didn’t end when or how you thought it did. What really happened has come to light in mutually inconsistent accounts in some of the books written about World War II’s final months....
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Many of the French authors I’ve read don’t follow the rules. They blithely mix fiction and nonfiction, change perspective and verb tense from one chapter to the next, and leap from present to past without warning. Such a book is author and actress Anne Berest’s award-winning...
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A review of The Debba, by Avner Mandelman. @@@@@@ (5 out of 5). David Starkman, a naturalized Canadian citizen, was a trained killer for the Israeli armed forces who carried out black missions in Arab capitals in the 1960s. When he learns of his father’s murder in Tel Aviv, Starkman is suddenly pulled back into the ethically murky environment he had fled seven years earlier.
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Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany crowded into France in the years leading up to World War II. Among them were a great many prominent intellectuals and artists, including the painter Max Ernst and the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. In France, they congregated with Anti-Nazi French artists including...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The “war girls” of the title are three young Polish women whose lives we follow from the Nazi invasion to the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. Stefa Majewski is Jewish. Stefa lives in the city with her parents, Izreal and Rose, and...
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In the years 1933-41, a passion for isolationism gripped the American psyche, keeping President Roosevelt from speaking out against the growth of Nazism and the ever-tightening vise of oppression and violence directed at Germany’s tiny Jewish minority (less than one percent of the...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Today, Northeim is a railroad town of some 29,000 people in northern Germany. But only about 10,000 called it home in 1930, when the Nazi Party began its explosive rise to dominance throughout the country. Historian William Sheridan Allen chose the town for his...
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Ever since the close of World War II eight decades ago, stories have been surfacing about heroic men and women who saved Jews from certain death in the Holocaust at great risk to their own lives. Names such as Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved several thousand,...
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Few subjects are more likely to set off heated arguments among American Jews than the actions of the State of Israel. Since the country claimed its independence in 1948, Israel’s wars and its relations with the Palestinian Arabs who live inside its disputed borders have accounted for more...
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The most important thing I can tell you about the Mel Brooks memoir, All About Me!, is simply put. It took me twice as long to read the book as it otherwise would have because I spent so much time laughing my head off. Mel Brooks may not be the funniest man alive, but he’s certainly near the...
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Take a look down the page at the map I copied from Amazon.com’s review of this outstanding historical novel, and you’ll get a sense of the extraordinary scope of the story. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks will carry you on the eloquence of her prose through the...
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So, you think you know a little Yiddish? Well, unless you speak the language, you’ll learn a lot of it from Michael Chabon’s award-winning speculative novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Maybe you already know words like ganef (thief), macher (big shot), and shlemiel (sad sack...
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The first Jew arrived in the future United States in 1621. But Jewish history in America didn’t start in any meaningful way until 1654, when 23 bedraggled and impoverished Portuguese Jews arrived in New Amsterdam. They had been wealthy merchants in Brazil forced to flee their homes when the...
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I read historical fiction for the ways it can illuminate the past. When the characters are fictional, it’s the historical setting that intrigues me more. So, imagine my disappointment when it only gradually dawned on me that this novel was not about the Polish Jewish resistance and the...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.