We kicked off 2012 with another great meeting, during which we once again ran out of time to discuss all the books sitting on the table. So many great books, so little time.
Speaking of great books, check out this link to the “38 best Jewish books of 2011,” according to the literary critic D. G. Myers, writing in Jewish Ideas Daily.
BOOKS DISCUSSED AT OUR LAST MEETING:
Letters from Jerusalem 1947-1948, by Zipporah Porath. In 1947, Zippy Porath, an 18-year-old American high school student, won a one-year scholarship to attend Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She arrived in October of 1947, just in time to observe first-hand the birth of Israel, and she has never left (except for periodic lecture tours in the U.S. and elsewhere). She served as a medic in the Haganah, and then, after independence, in the IDF and the fledgling Israeli Air Force. One can imagine that her parents and sister, back home in the U.S., might have been slightly concerned about her welfare during those tumultuous times. To assuage their concerns, she wrote a series of letters, which she subsequently compiled in this book. According to our reviewer, the letters constitute a lively, contemporaneous account by an eyewitness to history, and she highly recommends this book. If you want to buy a copy, you can write to Zippy at her email address (Or you can be boring, and just buy it on Amazon.)
I Never Left Janowska, by Helene C. Kaplan. Our faithful member, Alex Redner, is a treasure-trove of Holocaust memories. He has also been friends with lots of Holocaust survivors (many of whom are unfortunately no longer with us). Alex seems to know, and to have read, every memoir written by a Holocaust survivor, and he has an unerring sense for picking out, and bringing to our attention, the best of them. He knew Helene Kaplan, who died in 1989 in Schenectady, NY, and was able to paint a vivid portrait of this fascinating woman for us.
This book is out of print, but you can borrow it from TBI’s Holocaust Resource Library, courtesy of Alex and Lilly Redner. (Alex’s notes for this review are reprinted in full at the end of this blog post.)
Then one day a young, well-endowed Israeli woman appears to purchase a bra, and stays on as a seamstress and shop assistant. As they work and chat together, secrets are revealed and both women mature and progress in their quest for happiness and fulfillment. “Uplifting,” according to our reviewer.
Death by Deadline, by Larry Kane. A mystery thriller by local TV anchor and celebrity, Larry Kane, this light read gains additional interest as a result of insights it offers into local TV news, politics, personalities, locales, and gossip. This being a murder mystery, there is of course murder and mayhem, but also – because this is set in Philadelphia – there is plenty of political corruption, journalistic preening, and mobster machination. In addition, there is humor, sexual derring-do, and enough plot twists to leave you with whiplash. How can this be anything but a fun read, particularly for those who want to decipher the real identities of the characters and locations depicted in the book? Recommended by our reviewer.
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| Larry Kane is in the middle. |
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. Imagine that somehow all the Internet traffic generated in the entire world in the course of a day or two somehow became frozen in a very large drop of electronic amber, which was then lost and forgotten. And then imagine an intrepid explorer, stumbling onto this large drop of amber, a thousand years in the future, after our civilizations has long since disappeared and been largely forgotten, and somehow cracking the drop and downloading its contents. What an amazing amount of information and trash would our explorer find.
Well, that is more or less what happened to Solomon Schechter (of JTS fame) when he visited the Cairo Geniza in 1896. He found treasures and trash generated by the Mediterranean Jewish community during the tenth to twelfth centuries of the common era, which included not only business correspondence, marriage contracts, love letters, divorce proceedings, liturgical and romantic poetry, shopping lists, and reprimands from mothers to neglectful sons, and from abandoned wives to faithless husbands, but also ancient, treasured, and long-lost documents covering the entire Second Temple period, from about 536 BCE to 70 CE. There was Ecclesiasticus, in the original Hebrew; Maimonides, in his own handwriting; lost poems by the seventh century poet Yannai; correspondence that resolved the mystery concerning the fate of the famous Jewish poet Yehudah Halevi, and much more.
This book is a very readable account of the discovery and subsequent exploration of the contents of the Cairo Geniza by an army of scholars, working for more than a century, with many more discoveries yet to be made.
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Current best seller, and a very interesting biography of the recently deceased giant of the computer age. Apparently, Steve Jobs was not a nice guy, but he was a genius, who managed to give us the personal computer, the IPod, IPhone, ITunes, and IPad, not to mention all those Pixar characters. Lots of vignettes from those who knew him, had to live with him, or, worst of all, had to work for him. A good read; you may want to download it for your Kindle.
Job, by Joseph Roth. No, this is not Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Eric Roth, or Mandy Roth, or even Geneen Roth or Veronica Roth; no, this is the great, but largely unknown, Jewish writer, Joseph Roth, introduced to us by our reviewer extraordinaire, and literature professor emerita, Bev Cohen. Roth was born in 1894 in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died in 1939 in Paris, of accidental suicide through alcoholism. In his relatively short life, he became an extremely successful journalist in Berlin, and the author of numerous works of fiction. He is best remembered today for Radetzky March, a family saga about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for Job, a novel based on the eponymous book of the Bible. According to Stefan Zweig, Roth’s contemporary and friend, “Job is more than a novel and legend, it is a pure, perfect poetic work, which is destined to outlast everything that we, his contemporaries, have created and written. In unity of construction, in depth of feeling, in purity, in the musicality of the language, it can scarcely be surpassed.”
Unfortunately, we ran out of time before Bev could finish her presentation, but she promised to tell us more about this unjustly neglected author at our next meeting.
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It is hard to believe that we managed to discuss all these books in one short meeting. Those of you who missed it will surely want to make it to our next meeting, on Tuesday, February 7, 2012, at 7:45 pm, at TBI. See you there.
And finally, here are Alex Redner’s notes:
I NEVER LEFT JANOWSKA
By Helene Kaplan
We discussed recently the book on Janowska Concentration Camp written by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter who dedicated his life to bring the torturers to justice. The second edition included some 40 comments by top politicians, religious leaders and justices, commenting on the issue that was the central concern of WiesenthaI's book: Can we pardon a German SS who participated in, and is responsible for, the death and torture of thousands of Jews, men, women and children?
It is difficult to follow up or perceive the Janowska camp testimonies without picturing first the camp itself: The camp was located within the city limits of Lwow, along Janowska Street, behind the Jewish cemetery. The camp encompassed some industrial buildings, many barracks built by prisoners, a ravine called "PIASKI" that became the site of daily executions and the final liquidation of Lvov ghetto, and a rail terminal that became the loading platform for trains with the destination of Belzec.
Soon after the Germans took Lwow, they organized the camp as a set of workshops for repairs of uniforms, trucks, and for taking care of whatever needs they had, using Jews captured in the streets for daily forced labor. Since Jews desperately needed an "Ausweiss," giving [the holder] a right to exist, some Jews volunteered for this camp. German "Entrepreneurs" soon arrived to get army business, using cheap Jewish labor, just as Mr. Schindler did in the well-known movie by Spielberg.
As the camp grew, in October of 1941, it was suddenly enclosed with barbed wire, and the workers became inmates. The camp kept growing, using street raffles. The attrition rate was defined as "maximum 3 month survival."
Some inmates, including Simon Wiesenthal, were marched to work to out-of-the camp sites. Many others worked in the offices or workshops in the camp, including Helene Kaplan.
How did I get this book? Leon Richman, a Janowska camp survivor, was our family friend He was working in the truck repairs workshop, with an excellent view of the roll-cal1 field, where he had daily opportunities to witness the sadistic bestiality of the SS guards, killing thousands mercilessly. He succeeded in escaping, survived the Holocaust, and wrote a book, entitled: WHY? EXTERMINATION CAMP, LWOW, 134 Janowska Street, Poland. This book provides the most detailed description of daily life and death in the camp, containing not only facts, but names of victims and perpetrators. His daughter, Sophia Richman gave me Helene Kaplan's book, and we donated this outstanding book to the TBI Holocaust Resources Library.
About the author, Helene Kaplan: Helene grew up in Boryslaw, a booming oil-town, where her father was a managing director of a French-owned oil drilling and exploitation company, an exceptional position for a Jewish industrial manager in Poland. Helene was a child of the "very rich." Her book is an autobiographical account of her life under the Soviet occupation, and then, after the German invasion in 1941, her survival during the Holocaust.
Before the war, she had decided to become an engineer, and enrolled in the Architectural Faculty of the Lwow Polytechnic Institute. When Germany invaded western Soviet Union [which included the eastern half of Poland at that time], she was trapped, like all Jews in Europe. The book describes her heroic struggle for survival. First in Janowska Camp, where she was fortunate to work in the office of an Italian army officer, then back to the ghetto of Drohobych, back to Lwow, where she was survived using forged Aryan ID, constantly fearing a denunciation, and facing arrest on several occasions.
In many instances she was helped by strangers, and remained constantly on the run, moving from one city to another city. One day, she spotted an advertisement, "looking for young, intelligent Polish girl, wanted to work in Bavaria." Helene volunteered, got the slave labor job, and after all kinds of harassment, and fear of being recognized by a co-worker as Jewish, she SURVIVED.
But the fear of being recognized as a JEW terrorized her and left a deep impression not only on her life, but also on hundreds of others who survived by passing as Aryans, using forged documents. Till today, many Jews living in Poland and in other places occupied during WWII have kept their "Aryan" names, and keep on living in hiding.
