A small but hardy band of book lovers, displaying cavalier disdain for torrential downpours, ignored their flooded basements, donned their waders, forded the raging river formerly known as Skippack Pike, and joined us in the dry, warm and cozy confines of the TBI Library to embark on the second year of our voyage on this bobbing bark that we call Book Nosh.
BOOKS DISCUSSED LAST NIGHT:
Haikus for Jews, by David M. Bader, is the perfect book for the lazy reviewer. It is an easy read, with only 17 syllables per page, and instead of analysis, the reviewer can simply quote an example or two from the book:
Today I am a
man. Tomorrow I return
to the seventh grade.
If that one is a bit jejune for you, maybe this one comes closer to your own stage of life:
Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she beams—nice, but
her son is forty.
Still not right? Try this one on for size:
Jewish nudist camp,
surgical scars compared—who
did your gall bladder?
The List, by Martin Fletcher. This is a brand new novel, not scheduled for release until October 11, 2011; however, we had a chance to peruse an “Advanced Uncorrected Proof” of the book, thanks to the insider status of one of our members.
Martin Fletcher is the former chief of the NBC Tel Aviv News Bureau (this was in the days when our broadcast networks still had foreign news bureaux), who has written a novel set in 1945 London and Palestine. The plot centers on an Austrian couple who have managed to escape the Holocaust, and are currently trying to find out the fates of their families, who had stayed behind (hence the title). They are also trying to make their way to Palestine in the teeth of the British blockade, and become entangled with an Irgun-type organization. Our reviewer says that it is a quick, enjoyable, interesting read.
This novel is the 2011-2012 One Book, One Jewish Community selection of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Martin Fletcher is coming to speak about, and sign copies of, his book on Sunday, October 30, 2011, 7:00 p.m., at Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA.
OK, enough of that serious stuff. Have another haiku:
Sorry I’m not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news.
Homer & Langley, by E. L. Doctorow. A new novel by the well-known Jewish author. Although the front of the book contains the usual disclaimer, to the effect that this is “a work of fiction” and “any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental,” in fact the book is based on the lives of two actual people, brothers Homer Collyer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947), who lived their entire lives in a Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City, and who were somewhat unusual characters, to put it mildly.
According to our reviewer, one of the (presumably fictional) conceits of Langley was that he could create a “universal” newspaper. His unique “insight” was that what passes for news is actually the same darn thing over and over again; therefore, if he could only manage to write down these few archetypal stories in sufficiently vague and universal form, and put them all together in one newspaper, people could simply buy his one “universal” newspaper once, and never need to spend another dime buying daily papers.
It is possible that Langley was not entirely sane, but one interesting side effect of his endeavors was that he carefully bought every single paper published in New York City every single day, and read each issue cover to cover, in order to tease out the recurring “meta-stories.” Yet, when Jewish men started knocking on the brothers’ front door, telling stories of terrible persecutions of Jews in Europe, and seeking contributions to aid the refugees, Langley found their stories hard to believe. After all, he had ready nary a word in any of the New York papers about this alleged barbarity engulfing European Jewry.
This is just one of many interesting observations about the 20th century that Doctorow is able to tell through the eyes and ears (Homer was blind) of the Collyer brothers.
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. According to our reviewer, this is the opposite of a quick, easy read. However, it was placed on this year’s recommended summer reading list by the rabbi of one of our neighboring congregations, apparently in an attempt to prevent his flock from suffering mental degradation from unfettered reading frivolity over the summer. Our poor reviewer fell prey to his ploy, and actually spent his time at the beach reading about Zornberg’s psychoanalytic insights into various Biblical figures, ranging from Adam and Eve, through Noah and Jonah, all the way to Esther and Ruth, bringing to bear her renowned erudition in all (obscure) matters Talmudic, psychological, and literary.
All kidding aside, our reviewer noted that Zornberg’s writing serves to remind us of all the great Jewish thinkers of the past two millennia who have left to us their keen insights into human nature, which has not changed much since Biblical times, and whose remarkable writings we often overlook, if we are familiar with them at all. There is an entire world of profound Jewish writing out there, and it behooves us to go and learn something about it.
But first, how about a Jewish haiku?
Beyond Valium,
the peace of knowing one’s child
is an internist.
Our last review was of the controversial best seller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua. The author is a Chinese-American mother, married to a Jewish American father, and the parent of two Jewish Chinese-American daughters. Both parents are professors at Yale Law School, and both kids are typical, gifted, high-achieving teenagers, just like our own kids about whom we like brag after minyan. The thesis of Ms. Chua’s book is that traditional Chinese parenting methods are superior to the decadent, “western” parenting ways that she professes to observe in contemporary America. However, it was the consensus of our group last night that Ms. Chua’s traditional Chinese parenting methods are not all that different from traditional Jewish parenting methods, with the exception of Ms. Chua’s bad-tempered public shaming of her children, which we “decadent” Americans try to avoid. As Garrison Keillor likes to observe, we all have above-average children, but we don’t all write books about our above-average parenting skills. Nevertheless, there is some truth to Ms. Chua’s generalizations about the changing approaches to parenting as we move from first generation immigrant parents, to second generation parents, to third generation and beyond. According to our reviewer, this is an interesting book, especially to those of us who have been there and done that, and enjoy comparing our own parenting mistakes and triumphs to those of this self-proclaimed “tiger mother.”
Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I’ve done?
