Whenever I write a book review, I try to come up with a catchy lede. The idea is to lure you in so that you'll read all the way to the end and I will have communicated my point about this or that subject. Don't ask me why but I get a smug satisfaction whenever I realize someone has read something I've written. It's even better if they enjoyed reading it.

As you may have guessed by now, I've had some trouble coming up with something catchy for Janice Eidus' novel, "The War of the Rosens." But don't let that fool you into thinking anything bad — this is a very good book and one of the most compelling stories I've read in a while.

The action in the novel centers on 10-year-old Emma, an introspective girl growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s. She makes the best of life despite her dysfunctional Jewish family. More...

The Spring 2008 edition of The Paris Review features a 'lost interview' with the late short-story writer Leonard Michaels.

While often compared to the likes of other great Jewish writers such as Grace Paley and Philip Roth, Michaels is not as well-known today. But, interest in his writing has increased with the publication last year of two works. The first, “The Collected Stories,” is an anthology of 38 stories, including the full contents of Michaels' first two short story volumes, “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could” (1975).  The second, “Sylvia,” is a fictionalized memoir about Michaels’s first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide. It was first published in 1992.

Here's an excerpt from the 'lost interview' in which the author talks about being a citizen of the sixties: More...

On the advice of my Parisian uncle, I plan on reading Tatiana de Rosnay's novel, "Sarah's Key." The book has gotten a lot of buzz on the international scene in the last year and I believe St. Martin's Press will be publishing a paperback version on this side of the Atlantic in September.

According to the novel's description, it is a fictionalized account of "the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz."

I'll probably write a review sometime this summer but in the meantime you can check out this recent interview with de Rosnay: 

For more information on this book, please check out the blog. To buy this book, click here.

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I'm having a hard time conceiving of what a 'Yiddish-Irish' brogue would even sound like. But it's apparently something that's been heard in Chippewa Lake, Ohio, of all places.

Here's more from an essay written by Sean Martin, associate curator of Jewish history at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, posted May 8 on The Forward's Web site:

The lilt of a Yiddish-Irish brogue is not heard often in northeastern Ohio. But thanks to the efforts of Eudice Landy Gilman, we can now connect Jewish Cleveland to the Emerald Isle.

Gilman, 91 — who remembers sitting on the porch of her family’s cottage in Chippewa Lake, Ohio, and listening to her grandmother’s stories about life in Ireland — recently resurrected an artifact from her family’s past, bringing those stories to a much wider audience. Gilman’s grandfather, Hyam (Hyman) Singer, a cantor who left Riga in 1888 and immigrated to Dublin, and then to Chicago in 1901, left behind a journal of writings in Yiddish and Hebrew. The poetry records his memories from Eastern Europe and his transition to life in Ireland. Gilman, a published writer herself, received the journal in the 1960s from her sister after their mother’s death, and she promised to find a translator.

She eventually succeeded and the journal was published under the title "I Will Sing You a Verse." Cantor Singer apparently wrote about themes that would be familiar to modern readers. Here's more from Martin's essay:

Singer weaves together universal themes, such as the tension between tradition and modernity and the sufferings of Jews over the centuries, and more common domestic themes, such as relatives’ weddings or his own marriage. Firmly rooted in the traditional Judaism of his day, Singer seems both impatient toward and tolerant of unusual behavior and changing attitudes. For example, he writes of one friend, Reb Shimen: “How do you abandon high style and pleasure? How can you be so warped as to pray in a woman’s dress?” Then later, sounding both politically correct and respectably concerned, he writes that it is not fitting to treat a wife “like a mezuze on the door frame, first a kiss and then a rap.”

You should read the full article on The Forward's Web site. If for no other reason, you should go there to check out the photo slide show posted at the bottom of the article. It includes several photos of turn-of-the-century Jews and a shot of Singer's handwritten journal.

Now, if only they had an audio clip of 'the lilt of a Yiddish-Irish brogue.' That would be something.

Rabbi Benjamin Blech, whose previous published work includes "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism," has apparently set off a firestorm with his new book about the Sistine Chapel called "The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican."

Blech, a professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University who wrote the book along with Roy Doliner, a docent and guide at the Vatican, says Michaelangelo's masterpiece contains secret insults to the pope and Jewish mystical symbols. One of the insults? A bent finger behind a figure Blech says represents Pope Julius II.

Blech told the New York Jewish Week that the critics are wrong to call the book insulting to the Pope or to Christianity:

It is more accurate to say that Michelangelo had a “personal animosity towards” Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work in the 15th century, Rabbi Blech said. Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor who was upset at having to stop his sculpting career to paint frescoes, he pointed out. “It ruined his life and his health and he thought the pope was corrupted ... and he snuck in two times [figures] giving the finger to the pope,” the rabbi said. The figures are seen with a bent forefinger, which Rabbi Blech says was an obscene gesture.

Nothing like a little controversy to stir up some book sales.

It's not often that I get enthused about a graphic novel but after reading this review on Salon.com I'm looking forward to checking out Joann Sfar's "The Rabbi's Cat 2."

Of course, I should probably start with the first installment, "The Rabbi's Cat," published in 2005.

Here's more from the Salon review written by Douglas Wolk:

In the Algiers of the '30s, a nameless, scrawny gray cat belonging to a cheerful old rabbi, Abraham Sfar, eats the rabbi's parrot and discovers that he can talk. The cat loves the rabbi's daughter, Zlabya, and the rabbi is uncomfortable with the talking cat hanging around her: he'd better study the Torah and the Talmud, lest he give her bad ideas.

That's the premise that begins the French cartoonist Joann Sfar's graphic novel series "Le chat du rabbin." (The first three volumes were collected in English in 2005 as "The Rabbi's Cat"; the fourth and fifth have just appeared as "The Rabbi's Cat 2.") The joy of the series, though, is that it hasn't quite stuck with that setup. Instead, it has become a loose, playful exploration of a lost moment in Jewish culture, riffing on the Sfar family's history and drifting freely between precise historical details, enthusiastic tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn't share it.

Sounds kind of heavy for a comic book, huh? You might be surprised to learn how 'literary' these graphic novels have become in the last decade or so. Check out 'The Rabbi's Cat' to find out for yourself.

On the eve of Israel's 60th anniversary, Benny Morris' new book, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War," is receiving a lot of attention.

First, writing in the Sunday New York Times Books Section, David Margolick, a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine, called the book evenhanded and exhaustive. If anything, Margolick says Morris might have spared readers some of the more tedious details:

Deep inside Morris’s book is an authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile event. He has reconstructed that event with scrupulous exactitude. But despite its prodigious research and keen analysis, “1948” can be exasperatingly tedious. The battlefield accounts, dense with obscure place names and weapons inventories, are so unrelenting, and unrelentingly dry, that you are grateful for the full-page maps (which themselves are hard to follow). The narrative cries out for air and anecdote and color.

Second, the book received a review this week in The New Yorker. Editor David Remnick didn't say a lot about the new book but he gives a broad overview of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he delves into Benny Morris' career. 

Here's more:

In the late eighties, Israel encountered its first revisionist historians, a group of rigorous young scholars intent on seeing clearly the founding and development of the state, come what may. At the head of that small and diverse movement was Benny Morris, a Sabra and a Cambridge-educated leftist, who, like Israel itself, was born in 1948. His latest book on that pivotal year of war and transformation, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale; $32.50), is a commanding, superbly documented, and fair-minded study of the events that, in the wake of the Holocaust, gave a sovereign home to one people and dispossessed another. Remarkably, the book makes every attempt at depth and balance, even though its author has professed a “cosmic pessimism” about the current situation in the Middle East and has denounced the Palestinian leadership in the harshest terms imaginable.

It's been a while since we checked out the Jewish bestsellers on Amazon so I thought we'd take a gander at what's selling.

As usual, the books that make it into Amazon's 'Jewish' categories can leave you scratching your head (Hamlet as the number one Jewish book?) Nevertheless, it's a worthwhile exercise just to see which books come on and off the lists.

So, without further ado, here are the results of the Amazon category listings sorted according to ‘bestselling’: More...

The Forward published a story last week about Heshbon, an esteemed Yiddish literary journal based in Los Angeles, which will most likely fold after celebrating its 150th issue last October.

The 87-year-old editor, Moshe Shklar, told the Forward that health problems have begun to take their toll on his ability to produce the semiannual journal. In addition, there are financial considerations. It costs about $5,000 to publish each issue. Some revenue comes from the 100 or so subscribers but the journal has had to rely more and more on private donations in recent years. According to the Forward, the majority of those funds "dried up" after the death of Heshbon's major backer, Simcha Lainer.

Here's more from the Forward article:

The demise of Heshbon would deal a serious blow to the Yiddish literary landscape of L.A. and beyond. Of the more than dozen Yiddish journals once published in America, only a handful remain. Heshbon, founded in 1946 by the writers who made up the ranks of the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club, is one of the last surviving outlets for contemporary Yiddish poetry, fiction and literary criticism.

“This is like losing The Paris Review of Yiddish,” said Miriam Koral, founder and director of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language and a lecturer in Yiddish at University of California, Los Angeles. “It symbolizes the lack of continuity of a certain high form of Yiddish literacy.”

I hope the journal lives on in some form. There's certainly an opportunity to create a Web site for Heshbon (I didn't find one when I searched Google.) In fact, for the cost of producing just one of those print editions, Heshbon could have an excellent site. And, you've got to believe that there would be a lot of value in putting an archive spanning 150 issues of an esteemed Yiddish literary journal on the Web — with the English translations, of course.

It's something for the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club to think about.

There's a good story out there about the history of Christian-Jewish relations in a small German village called "Benheim." But, I'm not sure Mimi Schwartz captured it in her new book, "Good Neighbors, Bad Times."

Schwartz, a professor emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and the author of five books, including the 2003 collection of essays, "Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed," set out to explore the stories she heard from her father about growing up in a German village before the second World War. For most of her life, she paid little attention to her father's anecdotes. But then she learned from someone else that the local Christians rescued a Torah from the village on Kristallnacht. It was her 'a-ha' moment:

I was surprised. I never thought of ordinary Germans rescuing a Torah or anything else Jewish back then. My images were of black boots marching across the Hollywood movies I grew up watching at the Queens Midway Theater, ones full of Nazis I hated and feared. I looked at the old Torah, almost four feet in length, and wondered who grabbed it from the fire and why? And how many helped to carry it, a heavy thing, to safety? And did the neighbors see them? And were they denounced? Echoes of my father's nostalgia came back. In Benheim we all got along! But he had meant a boyhood before Hitler, not during Nazi times.

And so, Schwartz began a 12-year journey to discover more about her late father's stories. She interviewed former villagers living in New York, Baltimore and Israel and she took several trips to Germany to talk with those who never left. She also visited a few German archives to see what the documents might say. More...