On The Bookshelf

FICTION

Eve's Apple
By Jonathan Rosen; Random
House; $24.
In Rosen's debut as a novel-

TUNNINC.
NOVal,t)Cr

CKACKING
THE BIBLE.
CODE

ist, Joseph Zimmerman still
grapples with the suicide of his
older sister. So, as he learns
about girlfriend Ruth Simon's
bulimia, he is overwhelmed by
his concern about the disease.
He snoops into diaries and trash
cans to check for signs and then
even tricks Ruth into opening
her mouth so he can search for symp-
toms of bulimia-caused decay. A strik-
ing look at self-starvation.

NONFICTION

A History of the
Twentieth Centu-
ry; Vol. 1: 1900-
1933
By Martin Gilbert;
William Morrow 6
Company; $35.

help readers
find the
answers.

Cracking the
Bible Code
By Jeffrey Sati-
nover; William
Morrow er
Company; $23.

The debate
rages on. Dr.
l`NOVt-
Satinover shoots
the latest volley
in the back-and-forth about the
authenticity and meaning of the
codes, found in equidistant letter
sequences of the Torah. In the wake of
the best-selling and controversial The
Bible Code, Satinover still argues that
the codes are legitimate —
but is careful to stress that
they "cannot, as some have
said, be used to predict the
future."

Beyond Gender
By Betty Friedan; Johns Hop-
kins University Press; $21.95.

Gilbert is a
renowned histori-
an, the official
Friedan still supports the
biographer of Win-
women's cause but goes
A HISTORY OF
ston Churchill and
beyond those issues in her
THE TWENTIETH
the author of a his-
new book. She proposes
CENTURY
tory of the Holo-
changes in the approach to _
caust and other
politics and the economy in
works on Jewish
order to move forward from
themes. In the first
identity-based politics to an
of his three-vol-
economy that "puts people
umes-to-be, Gilbert traces world
first."
events from 1900 to 1933, ending in
the period of the election of FDR and
NEW IN PAPERBACK
the rise of Hider. Each year gets its
Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Leg-
own chapter, but the majori-
end
ty of the book concentrates
By
Alan Unterman;
on the impact of World War

I.

A Heart of Wisdom
Edited by Susan Berrin; Jewish
Lights Publishing; $24.95.

How does being Jewish
inform our relationships with
the elderly? How does living
and thinking as a Jew affect
us as we age? How can Jew-
ish tradition help us retain
our dignity in the process?
Harold Kushner writes the
book's forward and more
than 40 contributors, who
themselves are dealing with the life
passages that aging brings, begin to

2/27
1998

us

Thames and Hudson;
$19.95.
With its 222 illus-

trations and hun-
dreds of entries, this
book looks and
reads like a minia-
ture Jewish encyclo-
pedia. Only 7 x 10
inches and with only
216 pages, the Dic-
tionary has a wealth
of information that
belies its size.

— Compiled by Owen Alterman

-

ELLEN JAFFE MCCLAIN
Special to The Jew i sh News

By David Grossman; translated from
the Hebrew by Betsy Rosenberg; Farrar,
Straits and Girou.v; $24.

t's August 1970 in Jerusalem,
and young Nonny Feuerberg
whose bar mitzvah is the fol-
lowing Saturday, is put on a
rain to Haifa by his somber, work-
obsessed father and his father's long-
: time secretary/lover, Gabi.
On the journey, Nonny witnesses a
bizarre exchange of identities between
a prisoner and his police escort that
becomes even stranger when he see
they have left behind a letter addIesse
s
him, with instructions to report t
a certain compartment and ask one o
the passengers, "Who am I?"
That compartment, Nonny finds
out later, is full of circus performers
hired by his dad and Gabi, but
Nonny never meets them. He is dis-
tracted by a charismatic elderly man
in another compartment, a man who
inexplicably knows who Nonny is.
Within minutes, the man has
hijacked the train at gunpoint, he
and Nonny have escaped in a luxuri-
ous old Bugatti roadster, and Norm) ,
discovers that he is now traveling
with the notorious jewel thief and
con artist Felix Glick.

he'A

re
thin
famil

Ist

con
i ft,
d
of aniThe
ty
to m Catcher
gdh
dla s t he
escent KiNon n n y, a i RYe'
but the prepubescent
nirkY young ster w ho was once
respon
l y ram t
ep is ode bettei
al
cruelty
and ProP-
e

destruction, is no
Caulfield.
Tho h

f his

ci zigzagsin ble f.'Dsrtear fair

-

eHold

,

Ellen Jaffe McClain is the author of
"Embracing the Stranger."

plis ment

As

family- .secf4
„,
those conce
his mother,`
beautiful, wild Zohara, who die
when Nonny was an infant.
Grossman leaves almost no thread
hanging and wraps the whole thing in

a broad happy-ending ribbon on the
last page. It's all a little too tidy and
pat, but it should make a satisfying
movie that (studios: take note) doesn't1
have to be set in 1970 or in Israel.

1