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Life

On The Bookshelf

Fall Into A Good Book

is drawn from, among other resources,
her personal writings.

Get ready for the autumn chill with a preview of the season's new books.

SAND EE B RAWARS KY

Special to the Jewish News

N

ew novels by Cynthia Ozick,
Philip Roth and Michael
Chabon head the rich list of
offerings this fall. Several novelists turn
to history and twist it imaginatively in
their work, and others focus on mys-
tery. And rabbis figure prominently.
There's a new novel about a woman
rabbi, another about a woman who
drops out of rabbinical school, and
also a first novel by a rabbi; in nonfic-
tion, several prominent rabbis have
new books.
Journalists, scholars, and memoirists
also offer new perspectives, adding to
the communal dialogue on Israel and
the Holocaust, as well as art, humor
and memory.

Novels

Cynthia Ozick's much-awaited novel,

Heir to the Glimmering World
(Houghton Mifflin), is set on the out-
skirts of the Bronx,
evoking
Depression-era
New York. Inspired
by Christopher
oNio l,v,IU
Robin, the story
*-0 1.1..tD
features a family of
German refugees;
their benefactor,
CYNTHIA °ZACK
heir to a fortune
his father made
writing children's books based on his
son; and the book's narrator, an
orphaned young woman who becomes
their nanny and research assistant.
As a backdrop for Philip Roth's novel
The Plot Against America (Houghton
Mifflin), Charles Lindbergh defeats
Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presi-
dential election. Roth, who has won
most major literary awards, chronicles
what life was like for his Newark fami-
ly and Jewish families around the
country, as they feared the worst.
In Joy Comes in the Morning (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), Jonathan Rosen
writes about a woman rabbi. While
struggling with her own questions, she
encounters a Holocaust survivor hospi-
talized for attempted suicide and then
is drawn to his son, a skeptical science
writer.

•

10/ 1
2004

56

Pearl Abraham's new work, The
Seventh Beggar (Riverhead), opens
with a young man obsessed with the
life and work of the Chasidic master
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslay. Set in the
Chasidic community in Monsey, N.Y.,
the novel is about family, God, golems,
spirituality, past and present.
In My Old Man by Amy Sohn
(Simon & Schuster), a rabbinical
school dropout faces her "quarter-life"
crisis, finding new love, new adven-
tures and ever-shifting relations with
her parents.
A new novel by the Hungarian
Nobel laureate, Liquidation by Imre
Kertesz (Knopf) is the story of a group
of friends who confront the suicide of
a member of their circle, a Hungarian
writer who survived Auschwitz.

Mysteries

From Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution:
A Story of Detection (HarperCollins) is
a short work involving an 89-year-old
once-famous detective and a 9-year-old
mute boy who escaped Nazi Germany
— along with a parrot who spews out
strings of German numbers.
In a murderous
thriller, Heaven's
Witness by Joseph
Telushkin and
Allen Estrin
(Tobey), a psycho-
analyst faces a case
that can only be
explained, it seems,
through reincarna-
tion. This award-winning team of a
rabbi and a screenwriter has pre-viously
collaborated on television episodes.
Batya Gur's mystery, Bethlehem
Road Murder (HarperCollins), again
includes Israeli police officer Michael
Ohayon. When the body of a young
woman is found in an attic in the Baka
neighborhood, the ensuing investiga
tion digs into the rifts of Israeli life and
also digs into Ohayon's past.
Another series, Sharon Kahn's mys-
teries featuring Ruby the rabbi's wife,
continues with an unforgettable title,

Which Big Giver Stole the Chopped
Liver? (Scribner).

First Novels

In Jan Goldstein's debut, All That
Matters (Hyperion), a suicidal young
woman finds healing with the help of
her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor,
who brings her to New York.
Help Wanted, Desperately by Ariel
Horn (Avon) is the story of a young
woman's misadventures in her search
for the perfect first job in Manhattan
after college.

Short Stories

Uncle Peretz Takes Off by Yaakov
Shabtai (Overlook) is the first collec-
tion of the late
Hebrew writer's
short fiction to be
published in
English, featuring
a memorable
bunch of idealists,
individualists and
schemers in1940s
Tel Aviv. After his
death, the Tel Aviv Municipality
named a street for Shabtai.
The stories of Argentinean-born
Edgar Cozarinsky in The Bride from
Odessa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) are
set in Buenos Aires and European
cities before and during World War II,
dealing with questions of exile, history
and ancestral memory.

Memoir and Biography

In The Story of a Life (Schocken),
Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld tells
of his experiences — and the chal-
lenges of remembering — escaping
from the Nazis as a child and making
his way to Israel, episodes of which he
has portrayed in his fiction.
Tattoo for a Slave (Harcourt) is nov-
elist Hortense Calisher's autobiographi-
cal story of growing up as part of a
southern Jewish family in the early
part of this century -- whose slave-
owning days still resonated — and
their eventual northern migration.
A surprising story, Fraulein

,

Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First
Woman Rabbi by Elisa Klapcheck
(Jossey-Bass) tells of the short and dra-
matic life of the Berlin-born Jonas,
who was killed in Auschwitz; the book

Nonfiction

Matt Rees, Jerusalem bureau chief for
Time magazine, focuses in Cain's Field:

Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the
Middle East(Simon & Schuster) on
the deep internal divisions in Israeli
and Palestinian societies. Rees believes
that neither side will be able to make
peace with the other until they begin
to heal their conflicts within.
For the Sake of Heaven and Earth:
The New Encounter Between Judaism
and Christianity by Rabbi Irving
Greenberg (Jewish Publication Society)
is a collection of essays in quest of
understanding, with responses by lead-
ing Jewish and Christian commenta-
tors.
"
You Are My
Witness: The
YOU A R. F:
Writings of the
M. Y
Late Rabbi
Marshall T. Meyer
WITNESS
edited by Jane Isay
(St. Martin's) is
drawn from the
teachings of the
late heroic human
rights leader who
was a powerful voice for Justice.
Rescued from the Reich: How. One of
Hitlers Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher
Rebbe by Bryan Mark Rigg (Yale) is
the dramatic story of a German soldier
of the Wehrmacht who kept his Jewish
background hidden while leading a
secret mission, in collaboration with
American officials, to protect the rebbe
and help him to escape from 1939
Warsaw.
Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair
with Comedy Teams from Burns and
Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd by
Lawrence J. Epstein (Public Affairs) is
a history and a celebration.

Sacred Texts

The Five Books of oses: A
Thanslation with Commentary by
Robert Alter (Norton) features a new
translation by the distinguished profes-
sor at the. University of California,
Berkeley. His English is lyrical and
lucid; the commentary reflects on the
literary and historical dimensions of
the text.

Poetry

The School Among the Ruins: Poems
2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich
(Norton) is a new collection of poems

