The newest books — by Jewish authors, about Jewish subjects or of interest to Jewish readers.
FICTION
'Inside Out A Memoir Of The Blacklist'
The Man In The Box
By Thomas Moran; Riverhead
Books; $21.95.
By Walter Bernstein; Knopf,' $24.
T
he next time you visit the dancy of Sen. Joe McCarthy
local video emporium, made such distinctions irrele-
rent The Front, a 1976 vant.
film of the Hollywood
One of the earliest victims of
blacklisting of the 1950s, star- the blacklist, Bernstein (like
ring Woody Allen and Zero Mos- many others) entered a shadow
tel. As the final credits roll,
world of aliases and
you'll discover that the
"fronts," channeling his
director, the principal
work anonymously like
REVIEW
supporting players and
a spy in enemy territo-
the screenwriter of the film
ry. He witnessed the slow
all were blacklisted themselves destruction of promising ca-
during the 1950s.
reers, the friendly and un-
Walter Bernstein, the author friendly testimony of colleagues
of that screenplay, has now before congressional commit-
penned a memoir that brings tees, and the painfully gradual
those years of fear vividly to life.
process whereby the country ex-
Written in a staccato style orcised itself from self-induced
that weaves memory and in- paranoia.
sight together like a
tapestry, Inside Out is
remarkably free of
rancor or regret. Bern-
stein recounts his boy-
hood in Brooklyn and
the early love affair
that ensued between
himself and the
movies. His family, a
tightly knit and abra-
sive ensemble of Jew-
ish immigrants, also
gave him the dual
legacy of hard work
and political con-
sciousness that would
shape the subsequent
course of his writing
career.
That career found
him, after military
service in World War
II, working in Holly-
wood. The war and
the economic depres-
sion that had preced-
ed it had made social
relevance acceptable
in the context of the
cinema. Many writers
and directors, shaped
by the history of their
times, embraced an
emphatic (if some-
what nebulous) faith
in the liberalism of
leftist politics. Some
were Communists;
some were not. By the
early '50s, it didn't
matter. The Cold War
and the rising ascen-
That last development is
worth emphasizing. Bernstein
makes a point of stating that
there never was a single, com-
prehensive tally of names that
was "the blacklist." The black-
list went from being a noun to
a metaphor almost. overnight.
Only the fiction of George Or-
well offers up a more telling por-
trait of pervasive fear.
That an individual prevailed
through such times, remaining
true to his own personal vision
as a writer and a citizen, is a
compelling enough reason to
read the book.
In this debut novel, Moran
tells of a Jewish doctor in 1943
who flees Innsbruck to a Ty-
rolean village. The father of a
boy whose life he once saved now
insists on hiding him, and the
doctor develops a "friendship"
with the boy and his best friend
(a blind girl). As New York Times
reviewer Lee Siegel says, "At-
tached to every instance of al-
truism, bound up with every
amiable or affectionate or ro-
mantic impulse in this novel, are
the beasts of prejudice and self-
gratification.
LEONARD
mainly of Grunberg's own ad-
ventures prowling the seedy un-
derworld of Amsterdam.
The Stories Of David Bergel-
son: Yiddish Short Fiction
From Russia
By David Bergelson; Syracuse
Univ. Press; $34.951 cloth;
$14.95/paper.
Aharon Appelfeld has called
Bergelson "the most important
Yiddish writer, following the
three classical authors who es-
tablished modern Yiddish liter-
ature: Mendele Mocher Sforim,
I.L. Peretz and Sholem Ale-
ichem." This new volume con-
tains two short stories and one
novella from the early period of
the author who, born to a Cha-
sidic family in the
Ukraine, perished
GARMENT in a prison camp in
1952.
— Robert del Valle
Robert del Valle leads
Borders' Jewish Book Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Walter Bernstein has written a memoir of that period in
Inside Out.
Group.
NONFICTION
Castles Burning:
A Child's Life In
War
By Magda Denes;
W.W. Boron; $24.
When Denes
was 5, in 1939, her
father, a Jewish
publisher of anti-
Nazi articles, fled
Budapest to New
York, abandoning
herself, her mother
and her brother.
Castles Burning is
the story of her
family in hiding
and escape, dealing
with the war, their
abandonment and
the results on their
spirits.
My Journey from Brooklyn,
Jazz, and Wall Street
to Nixon's White House,
Watergate, and Beyond...
Crazy Rhythm is Leonard Garment's memoir of his career
—from Brooklyn jazz musician to White House adviser.
The Here And Now
By Robert Cohen; Scribner Pa-
perback; $11.
A half-Jewish man befriends
a Chasidic man and his wife.
Humor pervades as the charac-
ter's uncommitted life is affect-
ed by each one in different ways.
Blue Mondays
By Arnon Grunberg; Farrar,
Straus & Giroux; $22.
Written on a dare, Blue Mon-
days was first published in 1994,
when Grunberg was 22, and
went on to sell over 70,000 copies
in its native Netherlands. It tells
The Shadow
Man
By Mary Gordon;
Random House; $24.
Gordon's father was a Jew
who converted to Catholicism
and embraced his new religion
with fervor; her mother came
from an anti-Semitic Italian
Catholic family. In Shadow
Man, Gordon explores her spir-
ituality and roots.
Crazy Rhythm: My Journey
From Brooklyn, Jazz, And
Wall Street To Nixon's White
House, Watergate, And Be-
yond ...
By Leonard Garment; Random
House; $27.50.
.