Posted on December 21, 2007 by Steve Pollak
A few recent Jewish book items from around the Web:
Nextbook.org
The Nextbook folks have unveiled their "best of" list for 2007. But, they let you know up front that this is no typical list:
This is the time of year when top-ten lists spread like kudzu, when critics and editors muse over the greatest works of the past twelve months and agonizingly select the very finest of the fine. This is not one of those lists. We've ignored the big works, flouted comprehensiveness, and made very personal choices. Seventeen of them, to be exact.
Here's a little sneak peak: The winner of the Best Novel to Read Aloud in a Mel Brooks-Style German Accent is ... "Irene Dische’s pitch-perfect The Empress of Weehawken
." Mazal tov, Irene!
The New York Jewish Week
Jewish Week Book Critic Sandee Brawarsky this week wrote about "Every Day Lasts A Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland
," a book of letters and autobiographical writings compiled by a son who never knew about his family's ordeals during the Second World War nor his father's problems upon arrival in the United States. Here's a taste from Brawarsky's piece:
Joseph Hollander left the untold story of his life packed up in a suitcase, waiting to be found.
His son, Richard Hollander, found it in the attic of his parents’ Westchester house in 1986, after the two were killed in a tragic car accident. The younger Hollander uncovered piles of letters, neatly stacked, from a family he didn’t know — his father’s mother, three sisters and their husbands and children — written from Poland between November 1939 and December 1941, to Joseph, who managed to leave in 1939 and make his way to the United States. Each envelope had a large hand-stamped Nazi imprint on the back.
When Richard Hollander, the only child of his parents, found the suitcase, he was still so devastated by his parents’ sudden death that he packed up the contents again and stashed it in his own attic for more than a decade. Also packed inside, along with the letters, were files and court papers involving the U.S. government’s efforts to deport Joseph when he arrived as an undocumented refugee, a case Richard hadn’t heard about. Richard also found photographs, his father’s unfinished hand-written autobiography, with a preface to his grandchildren — he didn’t know his father was working on this — and also a stack of letters between his parents, during their courtship and marriage.
JBooks.com
Bezalel Stern reviewed James Kugel's "How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now
." Stern writes:
Kugel conjectures, in his book’s conclusion, that in Judaism, at least, “Scripture is ultimately valued not as history, nor as theology, nor even as the great, self-sufficient corpus of divine utterances” but instead the “basic divine commandment” of loving and serving God. “With such a purpose foremost, the Bible’s original component texts easily lent themselves to flexible reinterpretation.”
In other words, Kugel is arguing here for a Bible created by man, a Text that should be viewed as Divine simply because it has divine aspirations. To be sure, his argument is radical, and it may even be flawed. But, in making it, Kugel courageously refuses to bow to the pressure of either apologetics or ignorance, and at the same time allows himself to admit that the Bible, because of the generations of readers who continually molded and reinterpreted it, has a power and significance that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
The Forward
Lastly, in the pages of the Forward, Jay Michaelson, who is the editor in chief of Zeek and the author of "Another Word for Sky: Poems
," talks about how he "finally learned to stop worrying and love (okay, like) Christmas." Here's how he started off in his relationship with the Most Wonderful Time of Year:
Being not just any American Jewish boy but a suburban, angst-ridden, intellectually minded one, I created my own myths of the horrors of Christmas, stories that lasted well into adulthood. Egged on by my Jewish day-school teachers, I scoffed at the commercialization of it all (this was before I lived in Israel and encountered the mivtza anak shel Pesach! at the Jerusalem mall). I noted how Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer had nothing to do with Jesus. And I hated, hated, hated Santa Claus.
Yeah, he's had to come a long way.