SIN Entertainment The newest books — by Jewish authors, about Jewish subjects or of interest to Jewish readers. 'Snow In August' FICTION By Pete Hamill,. Little, Brown & Co.; $23.95. The Secret Book Of Grazia Dei Rossi By Jacqueline Park; Simon and Schuster; $25. 1947 Irish Catholic neigh- Michael enters the building. borhood in Brooklyn Thus begins an unusual friend- comes alive for the 1997 ship between Michael and Rab- reader in Pete Hamill's bi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from new book, Snow in August. Prague. Michael soon becomes From the charming, hazy-look- the rabbi's Shabbos gay and his new protege. ing cover depicting laun- The two discover dry hanging on REVIEWS they have much in com- clotheslines strung be- mon: They treasure tween apartment build- ings to the feel of standing in a learning and books. Over many neighborhood candy store, he Saturdays, each makes new catches you up in the spirit of discoveries. Michael learns Yid- dish; the rabbi learns English. the times. The story begins with Michael learns about Kabbal- Michael Devlin, an 11-year-old ah and the golem; the rabbi learns about base- ball and Jackie Robinson. Inside the small shul where they meet, their friend- ship flourishes and is protected. Outside, however, is another, less ac- cepting, world. A gang of street thugs has been terrorizing the neighborhood, particularly Jews, and Michael wit- nesses the brutal beating of a Jew- ish candy-store owner. Threat- ened by the thugs and questioned by the police, Michael is in a quandary. He is afraid to talk and afraid not to, even when the thugs beat him. When Author ol A Drinking he confides his problem to the altar boy on his way to church rabbi, he is gently reminded in the midst of a terrible snow- that to keep quiet about a crime storm. Hearing a voice calling is just as bad as committing the to him from a small synagogue, crime itself. But it is only when he turns to find a bearded man the rabbi is beaten by the same pleading with him to turn on a gang that Michael decides he must act. light switch. From the mysticism of 16th- Overcoming his fear, partic- ularly of Jews and things Jew- century Prague to the realism ish, by pretending to be one of of swastikas on synagogues and his own comic-book heroes, the bigotry at Ebbets Field, Snow in August is a tantaliz- ing summer read. Beverly F. Mindlin The Shovel And The Loom By Carl Friedman; Persea; $20. THE D E TR O I T J EW IS H NE WS A 88 is a staff writer for the Cleveland Jewish News. — Beverly F. Mindlin of Our Crowd, Birmingham has written about a fabled liquor dy- nasty, governed by a Russian im- migrant patriarch and his German-Jewish wife; it also is the story of wealth and scandal, high society and murder. Translated from the Dutch, this second novel by Friedman simply relates the story of a young woman, in Antwerp in the 1970s, and her search for meaning and humanity in the shadow of her parents' Holocaust experience. NONFICTION THg SECRET 1300K, of firaZia r Pt y cAesci The Sun At Midday: Tales Of A Mediterranean Family By GiniAthadeff; Pantheon; $25. JACQUELINE PARK In the vein of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, this is a sweeping Mabuse and M, which includes the feeding of Nazi slogans to the mouths of the film's most evil characters. The film, of course, was banned by the Nazis, but Lang was invited by Joseph Goebbels to direct Nazi produc- tions. Fearing a trap, and that they would discover his mother's Jewish background, Lang caught a train to France that very evening. Misha: A Memoir Of The Holocaust Years By Misha Defonseca; Mt. Ivy; $24.95. At the age of 7, Defonseca's parents were arrested in Nazi- occupied Belgium; she was sent to a safe house in Brussels. Turn- ing out to be not-so-safe, she fled into the woods, beginning a four- year, 3,000-mile trek across Eu- rope, looking for her family and safety. She found massacres, rapes, the Warsaw Ghetto, par- tisans, kind nuns and wild wolves. Tearing The Silence: On Be- ing German In America By Ursula Hegi; Simon and Schuster; $24. novel of the Italian Renaissance. It tells — through a secret diary, a legacy to her son — of an heiress to a Jewish banking dynasty forced to choose between two men and two worlds. Debut novel of Park, professor emeritus at NYU. The Reader By Bernhard Schlink; Pantheon; $21. A German novel of a schoolboy and a former Auschwitz employ- ee who fall in love. The Wrong Kind Of Money By Stephen Birmingham; Dutton,. $24.95. Social historian, chronicler of the Jewish upper class and author Born in Alexandria, Egypt, and raised in Cairo, Khartoum, Florence and Tokyo, Alhadeff had a Catholic upbringing. As a young woman, she discovered her Sephardic Jewish roots. In seek- ing more information, Alhadeff came across her grandfather, forced to leave his Italian colony on Rhodes for Egypt under Mus- solini's racial laws; a gynecolo- gist uncle who was interned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; and a "violet-eyed aunt who refused to have new slipcovers made for her sofa so President Nasser would find the worn ones when her house was impounded." Fritz Lang: The Nature Of The Beast By Patrick McGilligan; St. Mar- tin's; $30. The life of the Viennese-born film director of Metropolis, Dr. The award-winning author of Stones from the River and Float- ing in My Mother's Palm, Hegi "tears the silence" that has haunted the lives of post-war German immigrants in Ameri- ca, exploring the Holocaust through a story we have not heard. Interviewing 15 German- born Americans, who were small children during or just after World War II, the interviewees confront the silence that made any mention of the Holocaust taboo in their homes and schools while growing up. Hegi includes her own personal journey of leav- ing Germany at 18.