E

ven if you
haven't had
time to pick up
a book all year, when
summer comes most peo-
ple get the itch to read.
Whether it's a romance
novel for the beach, a
memoir for the ham-
mock, a thriller for the
cottage in the woods or a
self-help book for the air-
line flight to that dream
destination, it's been a
great year for books by
Jewish writers.
This year's Jewish News
annual summer reading
guide includes Simone
Zelitch's latest novel, a
Goldberg Prize winner
for Jewish Fiction; mem-
oirs by Ruth Reichl, the
former food editor of the
New York Times, and
newsman Daniel Schorr;
and an Internet guide to
spirituality.
Whatever's your pleas-
ure, you can find it
between the covers of a
book. So pick up a vol-
ume, forget your troubles
and while away a couple
of leisurely summer hours.

— Gail Zimmerman
Arts & Entertainment Editor

6/22

2001

66

Lose yourself in a great book with our annual roundup
of the best in Jewish fiction and nonfiction.

WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN
TIMES
By Linda Grant
(Dutton; 288 pp.; $23.95)

t the very outset of the
novel When I Lived in
Modern Times, Evelyn Cert
is recalling the day in 1946
when, at just 20, she stood upon the
deck of a ship bound for Palestine.
A British Jew who could never relate
to the kings and queens she'd studied
in school, Evelyn, at last en route to
the Jewish ancestral homeland, wasn't
seeking her own people's history, either.
No spiritual kin to Lot's wife, Evelyn
doesn't cast any backward glances.
With eyes fixed firmly on the future,
she wants "a place without artifice or
sentiment," where things are "above all
modern." Evelyn finds what she is look-
ing for in the Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv.
British colonialism is in its death
throes and Jewish Palestinians are
determined to resuscitate a decimated
Jewish people by creating an ultramod-
ern society in their "new-ancient" land.
It is a time of turmoil, terror, hero-
ism and hope. While in Tel Aviv work-
ing as a hairdresser, Evelyn falls pas-
sionately in love with a man for whom
she is prepared to risk everything.
Modern Times is Evelyn's compul-
sively readable story. But author Linda
Grant, a successful journalist and
prize-winning novelist, has an exciting
story of her own.
This latest novel has earned her one
of the most coveted and prestigious lit-
erary awards in the United Kingdom,
the Orange Prize for Fiction for 2000,
which honors originality and excel-
lence in novels written by women.
Grant's book focuses not on Israeli
independence and the aftermath, but
on the period leading up to it, when

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Jews were struggling against the British.
She says she developed a particular
interest in that period after discovering
that her father had been raising funds
for the Irgun, the militant Jewish
underground organization that fought
British restrictions on Jewish immigra-
tion into Palestine.
Knowing that her father, a British
Jew, actively supported a group
renowned for committing acts of vio-
lence against the British made a defi-
nite mark on Grant. "As a British Jew
myself, I was very interested in what it
would have been like if the country
that gave you your nationality was also
your enemy," she said.
In the book, Evelyn exploits her posi-
tion as a hairdresser to ferret out secrets
from the stylish wives of British military
personnel — secrets she then passes along
to her lover, a member of the Irgun.
Evelyn, who uses the tricks of her trade
to manipulate her looks and hence, her
identity, seems to symbolize the evolving
image of the Jew at that time.
— Marlena Thompson, JBooks. corn

PARADISE PARK
By Allegra Goodman
_
(Dial Press; 360 pp.; $24.95)

S

baron Spiegelman double-
knots the top of her macrame
bikini so that she doesn't lose
it in the surf. It's the mid-
1970s, and she's a recent arrival in
Hawaii; it's as though she was washed
up on shore to begin a long and tan-
gled journey home.
Allegra Goodman's new novel, Paradise
Park, opens with the folk-dancing, gui-
tar-playing, long-haired. Sharon waking
from a mystical dream in a fleabag hotel
in Waikiki. She has just been dumped by
the boyfriend she followed from Boston
to Portland, Ore., and then to Berkeley
and further west to Hawaii.
Her spiritual, return trip takes her all
over the Hawaiian Islands, to Israel,
Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and to
Sharon, Mass., over more than 20 years.

Her shifts in clothing from bikini,
tank tops and gauze skirts to a long
denim skirt, long-sleeved blouse and a
borrowed lace-covered apricot satin
bridesmaid dress with dyed-to-match
shoes parallel the many abrupt
changes in her lifestyle as she searches
for — although at first she can't name
it — God's presence.
Throughout the novel, the author
layers on details, often with humor
and satire, building a world around
her characters. It's easy to imagine
Goodman having a good time writing
this, as she creates a Hawaiian medita-
tion center with an edgy New York-
born guru, or the synagogue — whose
rabbi has a license plate reading
"Shaloha" — where Sharon teaches
Israeli folk dancing to seniors in
muumuus and leotards.
This is a coming-of-age story, with
Sharon ultimately connecting to a
chavurah-style Judaism. Often, Sharon
trips up over her own earnestness.
This is Goodman's first novel written
in the first person. As in her previous
novel, Kaaterskill Falls, and her linked
stories, The Family Markowitz,
Goodman writes naturally and know-
ingly about Jewish tradition and Jewish
practice. Here, she's again exploring
themes like community, forgiveness,
religious structures, spirituality, the
hunger for tradition and for meaning.
— Sandee Brawarsky

LOUISA
By Simone Zelitch
(Putnm;
a 377 pp.; $25)

smoked my first cigarette when
I was 6 years old. I found it on
the kitchen windowsill, though
the railway platform proved
more reliable," says Nora, the cranky,
chain-smoking, saber-tongued narrator
of Simone Zelitch's Louisa.
This striking literary novel named for
the Hungarian-born Nora's daughter-in-
law, opens in 1949. Nora is in her 50s,
arriving by ship in Haifa, having recent-

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