Posted on December 7, 2007 by Steve Pollak
A few Jewish book items and reviews recently published elsewhere on the Web:
The Forward
The Forward's literary critic, Joshua Cohen, gives his take on Emuna Elon's debut novel, "If You Awaken Love
." He writes:
“If You Awaken Love” is a debut novel consecrated to the adolescent condition: Beginning with 1967’s Six Day War and proceeding chronologically, it follows the rise of the Israeli right from the inscrutable ashes of the Yom Kippur War, and ends its political peregrinations upon the eve of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 at the hands of Yigal Amir, a young religious extremist. These are the formative years, both for Israel as Zion and for the couple of Shlomtzion Dror and Yair Berman, Elon’s star-crossed caricatures who eventually sunder their tender and tenuous union as if in a symbolic rift of the state.
Also in this week's Forward, George Mason University Professor David Kauffman reviews Max Apple's, "The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories." Halfway through the piece, he talks about why writing short stories can be more difficult than novels:
A short-story collection is a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off. Short stories, after all, are the creatures of magazines and are meant to be read singly, each one on its own. They borrow their brevity and their touch from poetry, and their narrative structure from novels. But they have neither the emotional and rhetorical sweep of the lyric nor the space for the thick descriptions of motive or locale that a longer plot permits. So much in the short story depends on tone and on ambiguous resolution.
You'll have to read the review to find out if Kauffman thinks Apple succeeded.
HaAretz
Shiri Lev-Ari discusses the rise of detective stories in Israel, noting that "More and more contemporary and classic detective novels are being published, and they're selling well. More academic researchers are examining the detective in literature as a social seismograph, and discussing the disappearing gap between high and low literature." She writes:
In Israel, the sleuth genre began as cheap commercial paperbacks. In 1932, journalist Shlomo Ben-Yisrael and sleuth David Tidhar started the "Detective Library." Tidhar was an officer with the British Mandatory Police and later opened his own private investigations office. The two writers published magazines of detective stories written about the Land of Israel, its people and its landscapes, based on the experiences of Tidhar, which very quickly made him a popular figure.
The modern sleuth first appeared in original Israeli literature in the 1980s, in the books of Amnon Jackont, and later in two series - one by the writer Batya Gur, with her protagonist Michael Ohayun in "Saturday Morning Murder," and the other by Lapid, with Lizi Badichi in "Local Paper." Uri Adelman, Yair Lapid, Ehud Asheri, Limor Nahmias, Gal Amir, Shimon Adaf and many other Israeli writers also have written mysteries.
Zeek
In this month's issue, Zeek's book review editor Gordon Haber says neither "The Israel Lobby" nor Abraham Foxman's "The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control" is as obnoxious as anything Ann Coulter has written. He goes on to say that, "neither book is particularly subtle or well-argued. In fact, they share a disingenuousness that often spills over into intellectual dishonesty." He writes:
Reading these books reminded me of another controversy that’s recently returned to the fore: the video of the killing of Mohammed Al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who died in the middle of an Israel-Palestinian firefight in Gaza at the very beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada in September, 2000. Depending upon their politics, some claimed that the video was Palestinian propaganda, others that it was proof of Israeli brutality. Recently, a French judge has decided to review the tapes to puzzle out what really happened. Each side seems to believe that if the judge finds the other responsible, their struggle, indeed their whole worldview, will be vindicated.
Meanwhile, the boy is still dead.
The New York Jewish Week
The Jewish Week's "In The Mix" columnist, Julie Wiener, wrote a piece about "Life in the Present Tense," a collection of Jewish Week columns by the late Rifka Rosenwein. Wiener delivers a rather stinging rebuke to the editors who put the book together ("[T]he low-budget quality and sloppy proofreading gives this book something of a self-published feel," she writes). But, Wiener says, these superficial complaints should not detract from Rosenwein's writing. Here's more:
[O]n the weeks her column ran in The Jewish Week it was the first thing I turned to. I enjoyed her honest, detailed and often self-deprecatingly hilarious observations about balancing career, kids, Judaism and secular life. As an aspiring columnist myself — I started my Jewish Week column, “In The Mix,” almost exactly a decade after “The Home Front” debuted — I admired how Rifka’s pieces packed a world of meaning into 800 words, hooking the reader from the first line.