"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