Our February Meeting

BOOKS DISCUSSED AT OUR LAST MEETING:

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. We have heard that this debut novel was one of the best new books of 2011. Therefore, we struggled mightily to find a Jewish connection in order to make it eligible for discussion at one of our Book Nosh meetings. The following qualifications were proposed: (1) A good friend of Bev Cohen’s son-in-law (who is Jewish) wrote it; (2) One of the main characters, Mike Schwartz, is Jewish; (3) It is about two topics that are close to the hearts of American Jews – baseball and literature. Upon motion, duly made and seconded, the book was deemed eligible for discussion.

This is a book about a supremely gifted shortstop who, at some point in his college career, gets the yips. It is also a book about striving for perfection, and coming to terms with one’s fallibility. It is about baseball as a metaphor for life, but also about reading and writing great literature, about growing up and figuring out what to do with one’s life, and about relationships among its archetypal characters. According to our reviewer, in its more than 500 pages, this book, like a good shortstop, covers a lot of ground. However, it is a quick and enjoyable read. Highly recommended by our reviewer.

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, by Jonathan Zimmerman. The little red schoolhouse is one of the iconic images of America. In fact, there are a lot of these schoolhouses in our part of the country, including Blue Bell, although they are mostly not red around here, they are not used as schools anymore, and of course none of us has ever attended one. All the more reason to read this quick, breezy, entertaining, and enlightening volume about an aspect of American life that is part history, part mythology, and all nostalgia.

Song of Slaves in the Desert, by Alan Cheuse. Historical fiction is enjoying something of a revival currently, and this novel fits right in. It covers the period of American history from the 1830’s to the start of the Civil War. It tells the story of Nathaniel Pereira, a young New York Jew, who is sent by his father to help out on his uncle's South Carolina plantation. It turns out that the uncle is involved in the slave trade, and young Nathaniel becomes an eyewitness to the horrors of slavery, as well as a participant in the daily interactions between masters and slaves.

Although perhaps not a great work of either literature or history, this book does raise an important question about the involvement of Jews in the slave economy of the antebellum South. There is some irony in the fact that during early colonial history, the South was more welcoming to Jews that many northern cities and, as a result, there were relatively large Jewish communities in such places as Charleston, SC, Savannah, GA, and Mobile, AL. And there is little doubt that some of these southern Jews became slaveholders. In the 150 years since the end of slavery in this country, Jewish intellectuals have struggled with this legacy of slave ownerships, and many Jews have sought to atone for it by becoming major figures in the civil rights movement.

Alan Cheuse is a skilled writer, who manages to weave into his novel various threads about the history of slavery and life in antebellum South, combined with stories of illicit love, intrigue, manumission, miscegenation, and all-around melodrama. An interesting book, but not recommended for young readers, because of its graphic depictions of sex and violence.

Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll. This book, by a former Catholic priest, has generated much controversy, because of its core contention that the Church has waged a two-thousand-year battle against Judaism. Carroll’s well-research and massive tome traces the history of Catholic anti-Judaism from the New Testament, through the early Church teachings, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holy Week incitements to pogroms, all culminating in the Holocaust.

This is a book that will infuriate any Jewish reader, but it is also an essential aid in trying to answer the age-old question haunting Jews: Why do they hate us?

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, by Michael Pollan. And now, for something entirely different, how about a few diet rules? (1) Eat food; (2) Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food; (6) Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients; (9) Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the term “low fat” in the title; (11) Avoid foods you see advertised on television; (12) Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle; (13) Eat only foods that will eventually rot; (20) It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car; (21) It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language.

There are 64 chapters in all, each devoted to one of these rules. Lots of good, and entertaining, advice on healthy nutrition – something that we can all use.

This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper. A family gathers to sit shiva for their father. This is the first time they have gotten together in years. Old grudges are dredged up, embarrassing secrets are revealed, old flames and jealousies are rekindled. Rage, tragedy, betrayal, and helplessness compete for primacy. In short, a laugh-out-loud comedy. Recommended especially for those of us who have sat through a difficult shiva or two. Kind of like August: Osage County, but Jewish.

A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, by Robert S. Wistrich. The author is the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. This work of scholarship, weighing in at more than 1200 pages, marshals the evidence demonstrating that genocidal anti-Semitism did not end with the Holocaust. On the contrary, it remains a salient aspect of the contemporary world.

None of us enjoys talking or reading about Jew-hatred, but sticking our heads in the sand will not make it go away. The more we learn about this ancient scourge, the more we keep our eyes wide open to see its persistence in the world around us, the more effectively we can confront it and fight against it.

Four Decades of Polish Essays, by Jan Kott. Our reviewer confided to us that she approached this collection of essays with some trepidation, given the history of anti-Semitism in Poland. However, she was pleasantly surprised to find that included in this volume were a thoughtful essay about the need to examine the complex role of the Polish people in the genocide of Eastern European Jewry and a sympathetic essay about Polish Hasidic Jews. Of course, there are many other essays in this book about life in Poland since the end of WWII that will be of particular interest to those of us who have ties to, or origins in, this part of the world. A surprisingly rich and rewarding collection of essays, according to our reviewer.

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Please join us for our next meeting, on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at 7:45 pm, at TBI.

Our January Meeting

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.

Helene Kaplan grew up in privileged circumstances, received the benefit of the best possible education, and was on her way to becoming an engineer when the war intervened. Using her wits, she survived in occupied Poland and German for 4 long years, passing as an “Aryan,” with many harrowing adventures and close calls. As her book makes clear, although she was one of the lucky few who survived, her wartime experiences left indelible psychic scars.

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.)

Sima’s Undergarments for Women, by Ilana Stanger-Ross. Our members read books of all kinds, light as well as heavy. This one is closer to the light end of the spectrum, but nevertheless an entertaining and enjoyable read. It is the story of a middle-age Jewish woman who runs a small business in Brooklyn, providing custom made (or as the currently fashionable phrase goes, bespoke) bras to women of all sizes and problems. She is not only a seamstress, but also a confidante and a shrink. The only secrets that she does not share are her own.

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.



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.

Our December Meeting

Great conversation about a broad range of books. What more could you ask for? Coffee and snacks, you say? Anything you want.

BOOKS DISCUSSED LAST NIGHT:

The Last Jew Standing, by Michael Simon. This book is a great antidote for those readers who might think that we only discuss serious books. Simon – a former college teacher, actor, playwright, and Texas probation officer – is the author of the Dan Reles crime novel series. His detective is a lieutenant in the Austin, Texas, police department. He is also the only Jew on the force, and the son of a gangster father with ties to the New York Mob. The last Jew of the title refers to Sam Zelig, who is the last of the great Jewish mobsters, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Abe Bernstein, Lefty Rosenthal, Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, and Harry Horowitz aka Gyp the Blood.  (Unlike the others, Sam Zelig is fictional, although there was, once upon a time, a New York mobster called Big Jack Zelig.)

When the novel opens, Lieutenant Reles’s father, Ben, shows up in Austin, with a Russian prostitute in tow, and the villainous Sam Zelig in hot pursuit. Complications ensue. According to our reviewer, the book is a fun read, quick and dirty, with lots of murder and mayhem, but also some interesting observations about race, religion, and prejudice in the “liberal” oasis of Austin, TX. Most importantly, it posits the thesis that Jews can also excel in such non-traditional endeavors as police detective or crime boss.

The Pity of It All, by Amos Elon. OK, enough levity. It would not be a Jewish coffee klatch if we did not, sooner or later, work our way around to some depressing book. The subtitle of this book is, “A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.” It is not a happy story.

However, it is an instructive story, with useful lessons for those who might get overly complacent in the warm glow of assimilation. As Elon exhaustively documents in this fact-filled volume, German Jews, time after time, managed to persuade themselves that this time things were different, only to be rudely reminded that anti-Semitism is never too far below the glittering surface.

Recommended reading for anyone suffering from excessive delusions of human harmony.

Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, by Neil Gillman. Rabbi Gillman is a professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained at JTS in 1960, and received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1975. He is the author of numerous books about Jewish thought and religious practice.

This particular volume, written as a road map for those wishing to discover, delve into, or reinforce their own religious beliefs, was the winner of the 1991 National Jewish Book Award. According to our reviewer, it continues to be an outstanding resource for readers wishing to arrive at their own answers to fundamental questions about the existence and nature of God, the existence of evil in the world, the importance of ritual, and the historical and philosophical underpinnings of Conservative Judaism.

That Used To Be Us, by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. More trenchant analysis or trite pablum (depending on your point of view) from the authors of The World Is Flat series of prescriptions for making America great again. According to the official blurb: “Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. They analyze the four challenges we face—globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and our pattern of excessive energy consumption—and spell out what we need to do now to sustain the American dream and preserve American power in the world.”

According to our reviewer, this latest installment in the series is well worth borrowing from the library.

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Happy Chanukah to all our members and to all our readers. We will see you all back as soon as you have recovered from all those sumptuous holiday feasts, exciting football games, thrilling parades, and strutting mummers. (Our next meeting is on Tuesday, January 3, 2012, at 7:45 pm.) Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012.

Our November Meeting

We are privileged to have two Holocaust survivors as members of our group, Alex Redner and Norbert Zeelander. At our last meeting, we took advantage of their presence to ask them about their experiences, not during the war, but during presentations that they each regularly make at local schools and colleges. We found out that young people today know very little, if anything, about the Holocaust, but are generally eager to learn and receptive to the survivors’ presentations, underlining the importance of continuing to preserve the memories of the survivors among us, and continuing to give these recollections as wide a circulation as possible, especially among the youngsters in our schools.

To repeat George Santayana’s frequently quoted aphorism: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Of course, before we can learn from history, we must first know history, which is why those who teach about the Holocaust perform such an invaluable service.

It is fashionable nowadays, when a sports team or a business corporation sustain a devastating loss, to say that they were decimated. People do not necessarily realize that the word decimation originated with the occasional practice by especially ruthless Roman generals of punishing military units guilty of mutiny or desertion by executing every tenth man. Unfortunately, to say that European Jewry was decimated during the Holocaust is a gross understatement. A more accurate description would be to say that they were ‘halved.’ Approximately one-half of all European Jews alive during World War II were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.

We discuss books about the Holocaust, and we do what we can to perpetuate the stories of the survivors, to keep the promise that we have made to ourselves, to our parents, and to all Holocaust survivors: “Never again.”  

BOOKS DISCUSSED LAST NIGHT:

Darkness Hides the Flowers, by Ida Hoffmann Firestone, et alia. When the Nazi’s invaded France in 1940, Ida Hoffmann and Alex Redner’s wife, Lilly, were two Jewish girls living in the same village in France. Miraculously, and unbeknownst to each other, they both survived the Holocaust. After the war, they both married, and they both settled in the Philadelphia area. Many years later, and completely by accident, they found each other once again.

Unfortunately, Ida died last year, but prior to her death, she was a piano teacher, a painter, a poet, and a dedicated Holocaust educator. She spoke frequently to students throughout the Philadelphia metropolitan area, teaching compassion and tolerance by sharing her personal story of survival. Her story, her paintings, and her poems all became part of this slender, but beautiful and touching volume.

On Sunday, November 20, 2011, 1-3 pm, Ida’s paintings will be displayed, and her story discussed by her co-authors, Dr. Jerry Jennings and Joanne Silver, at the Klein JCC, Polonsky Theater, 10100 Jamison Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19116. Please check out the program listing by clicking on this link, and please attend this program if you can possibly make it.

Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, by Charles Stainback and Jeffrey Wolin. Wolin is an accomplished portrait photographer, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a second cousin of one of our faithful members, Janie Siman-Glatt. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Wolin has spent many years capturing, in stark black-and-white portraits, the faces, the numbers tattooed on forearms, and the character of Holocaust survivors. The photographs collected in this volume somehow manage to capture not only the painful memories etched into the faces of these people, but also the courage and determination that enabled them to emerge from the cauldron of the Holocaust into the sunshine of new and productive lives. This wonderful volume of photographs and stories not only helps to put a human face on what is otherwise such an unimaginable tragedy and crime, but it also manages to be inspirational and uplifting at the same time.

Marienbad, by Sholem Aleichem. Contrary to the impression that we may have created by the contents of this post up to this point, we at Book Nosh actually spend most of our time chatting about current events, economic and political developments, our life experiences, and most importantly, of course, books that we have read. Although we get serious once in a while, we like nothing better than laughing at a good joke, or enjoying a funny book. In a way, Sholem Aleichem is the perfect author for our group. A prolific author, he used humor to describe, and soften the hard edges of, life in the shtetls “beyond the Pale.” As he himself said once, “No matter how bad things get, you've got to go on living, even if it kills you,” and humor helps us to get there.

This particular book, written toward the end of Sholem Aleichem’s all-too-short life, is actually a departure from his usual milieu. It describes affectionately, but with his usual rapier wit, the lives of well-to-do Jewish women who escape from their traditional husbands and fathers in the Warsaw ghetto to the chic spas of Germany and Bohemia in an amusing attempt to become part of fin-de-siècle Central European “jet set.” (I guess it was the “cabriolet set” back then.)

Breaking News, by Martin Fletcher. As we discussed in our September post, Fletcher’s novel The List is the 2011-2012 One Book, One Jewish Community selection of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. According to our reviewer, this non-fiction work by the same author is really an essential companion volume to his novel. Fletcher, as most novelists, bases his fiction upon his own life experiences. It is therefore helpful to know what those life experiences were, especially for a writer who has led such an interesting life.

A Jewish boy who grew up in London, and son of Holocaust survivors, he has spent his adult life as a journalist covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, including the incessant conflicts in the Middle East. He brings an unusual level of understanding to the costs of war and to the psychology of the survivors left behind. Given his background and experiences, it is not surprising that he is a passionate advocate for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, including the rights of Palestinian refugees. It is also enlightening to learn about his views about the difference between the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, who founded and built Israel, and the Palestinian refugees, who continue to live in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria today. As Fletcher puts it, the Jewish refugees did not nurse their grievances, did not demand reparations, did not talk about a right of return; they rolled up their sleeves and built a new home and a new life for themselves.

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama. Schama is another Jewish boy who grew up in London, the son of Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey. He is now a professor at Columbia University, and a renowned author and historian. He is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series, A History of Britain. As behooves any proper Upper West Side New Yorker, his politics are decidedly left of center. However, to his credit, he has been a vocal critic of those academics, particularly prevalent in Great Britain, who have been calling for a boycott of Israel, supposedly because of Israel's alleged oppression of the Palestinians. Writing about academicians calling for a boycott, Schama wrote: “This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores.”

Schama’s writing is always incredibly learned and erudite, always very commercial, and usually contentious and intriguing. However, his thinking can veer from brilliant (see, e.g., his introduction to Jews/America: A Representation ) to muddled (see, e.g. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution).

This particular work, The Embarrassment of Riches, comes down on the brilliant end of the spectrum, according to our reviewer. It is an economic history of 17^th century Holland, a time when the Dutch were the leading commercial empire in the world, enjoying unprecedented material wealth and culture, indulging in unrestrained consumerism and unfettered speculation. It was a time of the tulip mania and other speculative bubbles, a time of fortunes quickly made and lost, a time when speculators and con artists gradually took over from the manufacturers and traders who had made the nation great. It was also, especially in hindsight, a time of gradual but irreversible decline. In other words, it was a time that might be instructive to those of us living in the United States in the early 21^st century. Certainly a book that it would behoove us to read.

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The discussions during our meeting were so interesting and far-ranging that we ran out of time long before we had a chance to discuss all the other books that our members brought to the meeting, including:

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . and Where We're Going, by George Friedman

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, by George Friedman

The Coffee Trader: A Novel, by David Liss

Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Elliott Friedman

The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon

With any luck at all, we will discuss all those books, and many more, at our upcoming meetings.

Our October Meeting

The TBI Book Nosh started off the new year with a far-ranging discussion of issues great and small. The books that launched our debates are listed below. But first, on behalf of all of us, let me thank Rabbi Kalev for graciously offering the use of his study for our meeting. The cozy confines of his office were a nice change of pace for our group.

BOOKS DISCUSSED LAST NIGHT:

To the End of the Land, by David Grossman, the well-known Israeli author and noted left-wing critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. This is a work of fiction, ostensibly about a love triangle, and about a long walk by two of the protagonists, up north to the Sea of Galilee, and then back south to the Negev. But the real meat of the novel is the running discussion by the two hikers about the emotional strains that family members of soldiers experience when their loved ones are deployed into combat. Grossman’s writing is informed by his own experiences as an IDF member, working in military intelligence during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and as a father who lost a son during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict. According to our reviewer, even though Grossman is a controversial writer, this book is an engrossing – and fast – read (despite weighing in at over 600 pages), which offers incisive insights on the long-term psychological effects of Israel’s many wars on the soldiers who actually fought in them, and on their families.

Recommended by our reviewer.

Also mentioned: Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson, by David Grossman. Look for a review during one of our future blogs.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks. Created in the 14th century, the Sarajevo Hagaddah is one of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images. It has somehow survived through centuries of book burnings and anti-Semitic purges, and most recently survived the 1992-95 Bosnia-Herzegovina War. Geraldine Brooks was inspired by the story of the Hagaddah to write a fictional account of how it might have come to be.

In Brooks’s novel, a rare-book expert is asked to authenticate and restore the book in 1996, after the most recent war’s end. In the process of her work, the expert finds various clues about the book’s origin and travels: An insect wing; a white hair; a wine stain; a salt crystal; and so on. From each clue, the author unfolds vignettes about what happened to the book. She takes us to: 14th century Muslim-ruled Andalusia; Inquisition-era Venice; decadent 19th-century Vienna; and finally, Nazi-era Sarajevo. With each vignette, the author shows us a glimpse of the Jewish predicament at that time. However, her message is rather hopeful, as she illustrates how right-thinking people of many different faiths put themselves at risk to save the book.

According to our reviewer, this book, which is part DaVinci Code mystery, part historical travelogue, is an entertaining and quick read.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor E. Frankl. When the Third Reich annexed Austria in 1938, the author was a prominent Viennese psychiatrist. In 1942, he, along with his wife, and his parents, was deported to the Theresienstadt. Thereafter, they were transported to Auschwitz, followed by several other concentration camps. Of his family, Frankl was the only one to survive. He was liberated by the United States Army on April 27, 1945.

After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, and became the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of Existential Analysis, also known as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The first part of the book, which was first published (under a different title) in 1946, chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate. The second part of the books describes the psychotherapeutic method that Frankl developed as a result of his experiences, called “logotherapy.” Frankl, unlike Freud (who founded the first Viennese school of psychotherapy), did not believe that sexual instincts and urges were the driving force of life; rather, he believed that a person's deepest desire was to search for meaning and purpose.

Our reviewer highly recommends this deeply felt, personal, and inspirational volume.

Also mentioned:  Born Jewish: A Childhood in Occupied Europe, by Marcel Liebman. The author was a young child in Nazi-occupied Belgium. He survived the Holocaust, thanks in part to the help of Catholic nuns. His older brother was not as lucky, and perished in Auschwitz.

After the war, Liebman became a well-known Marxist-Leninist and a historian of, and apologist for, the Soviet Union. This slender volume deals with his personal experiences during the war, including descriptions of class conflict and class differences among Jewish populations in occupied of Belgium, and accounts of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.

Our reviewer mentioned this book only in passing, without necessarily endorsing the author's views.

Also mentioned: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman. As soon as our reviewer mentioned the name of the author of this book, a lively debate ensued about a wide range of topics. As far as we can remember, the substance of the book was never discussed, but many other aspects of the current political climate, the economic problems in Europe and here, the contrasts between today’s leaders and the Founding Fathers who managed to agree upon a Constitution right here in Philadelphia, and many other topics were discussed.

Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds, by Joel L. Kraemer. Unlike every other book ever reviewed during Book Nosh, our reviewer did not actually recommend this book. However, the book did serve as an excuse for a discussion of one of the great Jewish thinkers (is that redundant?) of all time, of his life experiences, his achievements as a Jewish theologian, as a physician, as a leader of the Egyptian Jewish community, and as a rationalist thinker in a world then governed by superstition and ignorance (as opposed to now, of course). The subject of the book was interesting; the author not as much.

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This was a fun meeting, with lots of heated but informative and good-natured discussion. Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, November 1, at 7:45 pm. To those of you whom I have not seen in person in the last couple of days, G'mar Chatimah Tovah.

Our September Meeting

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 20^th 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?