"Mr
Arts & Entertainment
F3ooks lo Get Away With
each
B oo
Our annual summer reading guide
to some of the most interesting new
Jewish fiction and nonfiction titles.
In a series of stories that are funny
yet oddly pathetic, Lappin explores
the effect of a foreign background on
a woman and her marriage. The sto-
ries vary in locale, including North
America, Europe and the Middle East.
The women all have moved to for-
eign lands and cannot feel totally at
home despite their husbands' efforts
to acclimate them. The husbands, fre-
quently attracted to the exotic quality
of their wives' foreign backgrounds,
are generally blind to, or uninterested
in, their wives' growing dissatisfaction.
Lappin reveals a range of coping
strategies in each character's attempt
to find peace and a place in what she
hoped would be a happy marriage.
One bride, disappointed that her hus-
band misrepresented himself as more
successful than he is, begins buying
nonkosher meat and initiates an affair
with the butcher. Another withdraws
JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN
Special to the Jewish News
he ground rules are simple: There are none. This
year's summer reading list comes to you with no
discernable theme or political agenda. Read
through the reviews, and the offerings will become
as familiar as the titles on your own bookshelves.
Bookshelves are landmarks, arranged with a logic as individ-
ual as their owners. When a book gets plucked off the shelf,
the landscape is forever changed — on the shelf, in the room
and then ultimately in the mind.
If you're lucky, you can read a new book with child-like
abandonment, anywhere and everywhere. Is there a book for
you like that in this group? We hope so. Which one? Who
knows? It's a lot like love — subjectively in the eye of the
beholder.
Whether it be from this offering or pure serendipity, we are,
as Saul Bellow observes, looking for the next book that is nec-
essary to read. Sometimes, though, it's so hard to choose.
Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 208 pp.; $22.00)
The women in Elena Lappin's collection of short stories come from many dif-
ferent countries but share a common thread. Strangers in their husbands' home-
lands, they struggle with alienation and strike out in an effort to claim something
of their own in their new environment.
6/25
1999
74 Detroit Jewish News
into herself, painting and repainting
her toenails and sleeping with her
husband's identical twin.
As each woman finds the combina-
tion of love, excitement, resignation,
humor and hope that allows her to
reclaim her sense of self, a comic pic-
ture of the inner workings of marriage
and the female psyche emerges.
Yet, while pleasant to read and
intriguing in the range of marriage
combinations and disaffection, these
stories are ultimately forgettable.
Lappin has exposed a raw nerve in the
outwardly placid demeanor of her for-
eign brides. It is interesting to observe
but easy to leave behind.
— Reviewed by Rebecca E. Kotkin
FICTION
on page 76
NONFICTION
•
•
• Irving Berlin: American
• Troubadour by Edward Jablonski
• (Henry Holt; 405 pp.; $35.00)
•
•
•
•
•
• •
In many ways, Irving Berlin repre-
sented the classic American Jewish
success story. Arriving at Ellis Island
at age 5, he became a Lower East Side
singing waiter, then a published song-
writer at 19, then a celebrity for the
better part of eight decades. (Don't for-
get that Berlin, who died in 1989, had
a huge hit with "Alexander's Ragtime
Band" in 1911, three years before
World War I!)
This solid biography by Edward
Jablonski, who has also written
biographies of George Gershwin,
Harold Arlen and Alan Jay Lerner,
hits all the high notes but doesn't ven-
ture too far into the deeper harmonies
and dissonances.
With his copious lists of Berlin
songs and productions and his discus-
sions of nearly every collaborator and
musical project, planned or complet-
ed, Jablonski will satisfy nearly every
reader's need for facts about Berlin,
who did lead a fairly interesting life.
One point well made by Jablonski
is that Berlin was much happier as a
writer in the Tin Pan Alley style that
glorified individual hit songs rather
than as a composer of "concept" or
"story" musicals with well-constructed
plots. (His Annie Get Your Gun is cur-
rently enjoying huge success in a
revival on Broadway.)
Those who wish to learn something
about Berlin's connection with his
Jewishness will have to look elsewhere.
Surely Jablonski should have tackled
this issue: Berlin, born in the Pale of
Settlement and part of the massive
migration to America, married a non-
Jewish woman whose father was a
notorious anti-Semite. Beyond the
obligatory love-conquers-all scenario of
their courtship, we hear very little
about Berlin's feelings about his her-
itage. If he had none, that fact itself
would be worthy of comment in a
book that aspires to be a comprehen-
sive biography.
Moreover, despite Jablonski's mas-
tery of American popular song and of
Jazz Age lore, he slips up at a couple of —\
points in our more recent history. Elvis
Presley gained fame for successfully
melding rhythm and blues (an African-
American music) with country music
(a primarily white form of expression),
NON-FICTION on page 80