Get lost in a goo
book with help
from our annual
seasonal roundup
of recent titles.

Gail Zimmerman
Arts & Entertainment Editor

FICTION

An American Type (Norton), the final
posthumous novel by the late Henry Roth
(Call It Sleep), is autobiographical like
his other fiction. The book is set in the
Depression, with Roth's alter ego, Jewish
writer Ira Stigman, conflicted between his
ghetto roots and literary aspirations.

The Invisible Bridge (Knopf) is Julie
Orringer's debut novel after her highly
praised short story collection How to
Breathe Underwater. This story, set in
Paris and Budapest during World War II,
involves brothers, great love, family strug-
gle and dislocation during the war.

Steve Stern brings to life The Frozen
Rabbi (Algonquin) — a 19th-century
Polish rabbi who winds up in the base-
ment freezer of a 21st-century home in
Memphis and is thawed out by the 15-
year-old son of the family, who discovers
him. The narrative follows the rabbi's
journey from Europe, linked with the boy's
adventures in contemporary Memphis.
Stern has been compared to Michael
Chabon and Philip Roth in his creation of
contemporary Jewish-American fantasy.

Also employing magical realism is author
Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures), whose
novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon
Cake (Doubleday) is the tale of Rose
Edelstein, who discovers at age 8 that she
can taste in every bite of food the emo-
tions of the people who prepared it. She
endures an unwelcome portal into the
thoughts of everyone around her, includ-
ing her own unhappy family.

The bestselling author of Life of Pi, Yann
Martel, spins another intricate tale explor-
ing questions of humanity, this time with
a Holocaust-related theme. The characters
in Beatrice and Virgil (Spiegel & Grau)
include a taxidermist who aspires to be a
writer, along with a monkey and donkey
that are preserved.

In Something Red (Scribner), Jennifer
Gilmore takes readers back to the 1970s
and the Carter administration, providing
an inside view of a Washington, D.C., fam-
ily with mixed ties to radical politics as
the era of protest is fading into history.

In Joshua Braff's Peep Show (Algonquin),
a young man graduating from high school
in 1975 is faced with the choice of join-
ing his mother's Chasidic sect or working
in his father's business, which involves
a porn theater in Times Square — two
worlds with many secrets. Braff, brother
of actor Zach Braff, is the author of The
Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green.

Mitchell Kaplan's first novel, By Fire, By
Water (Other Press), is set in Spain during
the time of the Inquisition. It features an
actual historical figure, Luis de Santangel,
a chancellor of the royal court, financier of
Christopher Columbus and son of a con-
verso family.

A historical novel, From the Four Winds
by Haim Sabato (Toby Press), translated
by Yaacob Dweck, is set in a ma'abara
(transit camp) in Israel in the 1950s. A
young man, whose family has come from
Cairo, is confounded by the Hungarian
Holocaust survivors, until he is befriended
by one of them.

Almost Dead by Assaf Gavron (Harper) is
a thriller and dark comedy about a thir-
tysomething Tel Aviv man whose narrow
escape from three suicide bombings over
the course of a few days turns him into
an instant media celebrity; as the story
unfolds, his own life appears connected
to the life of a Palestinian suicide bomber.
The author is a translator (he translated
Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer into
Hebrew) and musician; this is his first
book to be translated into English.

Sarah/Sara by Jacob Paul (IG Publishing)
is a novel about faith and survival — the
story of a young Orthodox woman who
takes off alone on a kayak trip across the
Arctic Ocean after her parents are killed
and she is disfigured by a terrorist attack

in a Jerusalem cafe. To kayak in the Arctic
had been the dream of her father, who
survived 9-11 (as did the author).

Sarah Blake's The Postmistress (G.P.
Putnam's Sons), set just before America is
drawn into World War II, moves between
a small Cape Cod town, London during
the Blitz and the Jewish refugee crisis
in continental Europe as a young radio
journalist and spinster postmistress in
Massachusetts are entrusted with letters
that concern the same man, to be deliv-
ered to his newlywed wife.

In Cathleen Schine's The Three
Weissmanns of Westport (Sarah Crichton
Books), an elderly mother and her two
mature daughters, faced with divorce and
career reversals, leave their New York City
dramas to take up residence in a small
cottage in Connecticut; this novel is a
modern retelling of Jane Austen's Sense
and Sensibility.

Detroit native E.M. Broner's comic novel,
The Red Squad (Pantheon), about a group
of restless Midwestern grad students in
the 1960s, is told through the voice of
Anka Pappas, once a raven-haired English
instructor at a Detroit university, now a
professor trying to spur her students to
nonviolent political action.

Summer Reading on page 54

June 24•2010

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