October 31, 2007
I wanted to report on the bestselling Jewish books on Amazon.com but I ran into a slight problem: how do you define a “Jewish” book.
If you begin by searching for the word “Jewish” under Amazon’s Books category, you get a whole lot of results that have some reference to the word “Jewish” but the books themselves do not discuss Jewish topics or target a Jewish audience.
So, I dug a little deeper in the Books section and discovered that Amazon has several Jewish sub-categories of larger categories, such as Biography and Memoirs. If you look under World Literature, there are sub-categories for Jewish and for Yiddish. We really must be the People of the Book to get two. Of course, there’s also the Judaism sub-category listed in Amazon’s Religion and Spirituality section.
While these searches produced better results, I still never saw a single Philip Roth or Michael Chabon novel. Surely, I thought, these Jewish-themed books would be among the bestsellers in some category.
Alas, I could not find another Jewish category that listed Roth or Chabon or almost any of the books I’ve blogged about or reviewed this year. So, I decided to look them up one by one to see how they ranked overall in the Books category on Amazon.
All of these results are as of last evening, October 30. Amazon says they update the bestselling results each hour but I couldn’t find anything more on their methodology. If anyone knows more about this, I’d love to hear from you.
Here are the results of my own searches:
“Exit Ghost,” by Philip Roth ranked #194 in Books
“Foreskin’s Lament,” by Shalom Auslander ranked #239 in Books
“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” by Michael Chabon ranked #274 in Books
“Away,” by Amy Bloom ranked #439 in Books
“The Septembers of Shiraz,” by Dalia Sofer ranked #1,652 in Books
“The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” by Lucette Lagnado ranked #1,962 in Books
“The Ministry of Special Cases,” by Nathan Englander ranked #3,601 in Books
Here are the results of the Amazon category listings sorted according to ‘bestselling’ (don’t ask me why Hamlet is considered Jewish):
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Jewish
1. Hamlet (Shakespeare in Production) by William Shakespeare and Robert Hapgood (Hardcover – May 28, 1999)
2. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Nicholas de Lange (Paperback – Nov 1, 2005)
3. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) by Peter Cole (Paperback – Jan 2, 2007)
4. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel (Hardcover – 1995)
5. A Journey to the End of the Millennium – A Novel of the Middle Ages by A. B. Yehoshua (Paperback – Jun 15, 2000)
6. Literary Murder by Batya Gur and Dalya Bilu (Hardcover – Nov 1993)
7. Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten (Mass Market Paperback – Jan 2, 1991)
8. Wiesel’s Night (Cliffs Notes) by Maryam Riess (Paperback – Sep 5, 1996)
9. The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague by Yudl Rosenberg and Curt Leviant (Hardcover – May 1, 2007)
10. The Ineffable Name of God: Man: Poems by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward K. Kaplan, and Morton M. Leifman (Paperback – Feb 2007)
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Yiddish
1. Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (Library of Yiddish Classics) by Sholem Aleichem (Paperback – Oct 1, 1996)
2. Ineffable Name Of God: Poems by Abraham Joshua Heschel and Morton M. Leifman (Hardcover – Dec 2004)
3. The I. L. Peretz Reader by I. L. Peretz and Ruth Wisse (Paperback – Jun 1, 2002)
4. Rabbi Nachman’s Stories by Aryeh Kaplan (Hardcover – April 1985)
5. The Family Mashber: A Novel by “Der Nister”/”the Hidden One” by Nister and Leonard Wolf (Hardcover – Jun 1987)
6. The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) by Joachim Neugroschel and S. An-Ski (Hardcover – Jan 2001)
7. Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing by Ammiel Alcalay (Paperback – Oct 1996)
8. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories: Revised and Updated Edition by Irving Howe (Hardcover – Dec 20, 1989)
9. Great Works of Jewish Fantasy by Joachim Neugroschel (Hardcover – Feb 8, 1986)
10. The Shtetl by Joachim Neugroschel (Hardcover – Aug 1, 1989)
Top Ten under Religion and Spirituality > Judaism
1. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander (Hardcover – Oct 4, 2007)
2. Kosher Billionaire’s Secret Recipe by Stacy Cohen (Hardcover – Oct 9, 2007)
3. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter (Hardcover – Sep 10, 2007)
4. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel (Hardcover – Sep 11, 2007)
5. When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner (Mass Market Paperback – Feb 1, 1983)
6. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel (Paperback – Oct 30, 2001)
7. Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews by Poopa Dweck, Michael J. Cohen, and Quentin Bacon (Hardcover – Aug 21, 2007)
8. Jews and Power (Jewish Encounters) by Ruth R. Wisse (Hardcover – Aug 28, 2007)
9. The Jewish Study Bible: featuring The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation by Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane (Hardcover – Oct 15, 2003)
10. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Armstrong, Karen) by Karen Armstrong (Hardcover – Mar 2, 2004)
Top Ten under Biographies and Memoirs > Ethnic and National > Jewish
1. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander (Hardcover – Oct 4, 2007)
2. Night (Oprah’s Book Club) by Elie Wiesel (Paperback – Jan 16, 2006)
3. Anne Frank Lb by Anne Frank (Hardcover – Oct 3, 1967)
4. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (Hardcover – Sep 19, 2006)
5. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado (Hardcover – Jun 26, 2007)
6. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Hardcover – Mar 30, 2000)
7. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman (Hardcover – Nov 19, 1996)
8. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Paperback – Jun 15, 2006)
9. Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Paperback – Sep 1, 1996)
10. Night; with Connections by Elie Wiesel (Hardcover – Oct 1999)
As always, I welcome your comments. I hope to make this report a monthly feature here on the blog.
Jewish Literary Review.com is a blog that covers Jewish writing, philosophy, history and law. The site publishes book reviews, snippets of news about Jewish literature and the occasional author interview.
My name is Steven H. Pollak and I have written for the Baltimore Jewish Times, the Atlanta Jewish Times, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and American Jewish Life magazine.
In addition, I've written for several legal and business publications. At the moment, I work as SEO editor for an environmental news Web site.
Please send me an email if you'd like to pitch a book for review or if you want to send a review copy. ...Continue reading about this site.
Enjoy Jewish books? sign up for Jewish Literary Review's email alerts.
Follow Jewish Literary Review on Twitter. http://twitter.com/JewishLitReview
© Copyright Mom-Mom and Baubie Productions. 2006 - 2010. All rights reserved.