arts & entertainment

Page Turners from page 55

"There are worse
crimes than reading
books. One of them is
not reading them."

— Joseph BO*

/ Ito

Olga Grjasnowa tells of the adventures
of a young, headstrong, multilingual
immigrant from Azerbaijan whose Jewish
background has taught her that she can
survive anywhere. Yet, ill-equipped to
deal with grief, she must face it.
Acclaimed Israeli author David
Grossman's Falling Out of Time (Knopf)
is part play, part prose and a fable of
parental grief: a powerfully distilled
experience of understanding and accep-
tance — and of art's triumph over death.
Translated by Jessica Cohen.

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

(Grove/Atlantic), by Eve Harris, is set
in 2008 London and tells the story of a
19-year-old haredi girl about to marry a
man she has met only a few times. The
novel was long-listed for the 2013 Man
Booker Prize.
In The Never Never Sisters (Penguin
NAL), a novel of family secrets by L.
Alison Heller, marriage counselor Paige
Reinhardt is eager to reconnect with her
workaholic husband, Dave, at their cozy
rental cottage in the Hamptons. But a
mysterious crisis at his work ruins their
getaway plans, and her troubled sister
suddenly returns after a two-decade

silence. Paige is shocked to discover how
little she knows about the people closest
to her.
In The Museum of Ordinary Things
(Scribner), Alice Hoffman writes about
a freak show on the Coney Island board-
walk in the early 20th century — with
"living wonders" including the Wolfman,
the Butterfly Girl, the Goat Boy, the Bird
Woman and more — while spinning a
love story set against New York history.
Motherland: A Novel (Counterpoint
Press), inspired by stories from author
Maria Hummel's father and his German
childhood, as well as letters between
her grandparents that were hidden in
an attic wall for 50 years, is the author's
attempt to reckon with the paradox of her
father — a product of her grandparents'
fiercely protective love and their status as
Mitlaufer, Germans who went along with
Nazism, first reaping its benefits and later
its consequences.
In the thriller The Lie (Scribner), by
Hesh Kestin, who spent two decades as a
foreign correspondent in the Middle East,
the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict hit home for a hard-edged
female human-rights attorney infamous
for defending accused Palestinians in
Israeli court. She accepts a position as
the government's arbiter of the state's use
of torture (which she has no intention of
permitting). When her 22-year-old son,
a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces,
is kidnapped by Hezbollah and the man
who holds the key to his whereabouts is
in an Israeli prison, she must decide how
far she will go to save her son.
Seventy-five years after the death of the
father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud,
two new novels beg the age-old question:
What do women want? Dreaming for
Freud (Penguin), by Sheila Kohler, is the

story of Ida Bauer (aka Dora), a 17-year-
old whose deep unhappiness motivates
her parents to send her to Freud for
psychoanalysis (Freud based much of
his work on "female hysteria" on Bauer);
and Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story (She
Writes Press), by Rebecca Coffey, uses
Jewish humor to humanize the relation-
ship between Freud and his supremely
devoted daughter Anna, who became
his disciple and whom he treated as his
patient (the novel also covers Anna's
long-term relationship with Dorothy
Burlingham, an heir to the Tiffany for-
tune).
Jean Hanff Korelitz's new thriller, You
Should Have Known (Grand Central
Publishing), tells the story of a family
therapist who's written a book on how to
avoid romantic mistakes; she finds she
may have missed warning signs in her
own life when her physician husband is
implicated in a murder, and she must
reinvent her own life.
In Zachary Lazar's novel, I Pity the
Poor Immigrant (Little Brown), a mur-
dered poet, an investigative reporter and
Meyer Lansky's mistress (a Holocaust
survivor) are connected in a web of vio-
lence that includes the American and
Israeli mafias, biblical King David and
the modern State of Israel.
In Mannequin Girl (WW. Norton),
Ellen Litman writes a coming-of-age
tale about a young Jewish girl growing up
amid the bleakness of the Soviet Union;
diagnosed with scoliosis, she is outfitted
with a brace, sent to an institution and
struggles through the turmoil of adoles-
cence to become the person she wishes
to be.
Visible City (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt), the new novel from Tova
Mirvis, follows three Manhattan couples,

living behind the windows of facing
buildings, whose lives intersect.
Israeli crime writer D. A. Mishani's
new book, A Possibility of Violence
(Harper; July 1), is a sequel to 2013's The
Missing File, and reintroduces Inspector
Avraham Avraham as he returns from a
vacation spent recuperating from his last
investigation. Upon his return, he con-
fronts a bomb threat to a building filled
with children and a warning that a suit-
case containing a fake explosive is only
the beginning. The stakes are heightened
when a person of interest, a father of two,
suddenly disappears.
British writer Sally O'Reilly's first-
published U.S. novel, Dark Amelia:

A Novel of Shakespeare's Dark Lady
(Picador), is based on the life of Amelia
Lanyer, one of England's first female
poets, a daughter of a Jewish Venetian
musician in King Henry VIII's court and
the woman rumored to be the real-life
muse of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" son-
nets.
Based on an actual 1945 case involv-
ing the children of high-ranking Soviet
officials and featuring real-life as well

"Reading is entering the
consciousness of another
human being"

— Gary Shteyngart

r!"111111144
1–

Page Turners on page 57

Jews

I Nate Bloom
• mi Special to the Jewish News

s. Movie Memos

Irish filmmaker John Carney, who made
(1) the wonderful – if bittersweet – Dublin-
■ I set musical film Once, has moved his
41) camera to New York for Begin Again.
• 4 Greta (Keira Knightley) and her long-
time boyfriend, Dave (Adam Levine,
35), split up when Dave gets a big
record-label contract. He gets a big
head and proceeds to romantically
cheat on her. Mark Ruffalo co-stars
as Dan, a washed-
up record exec who
chances to hear Greta
sing and is captivated.
Catherine Keener
plays Dan's estranged
wife, and Hailee
Steinfeld,17, portrays
his teen daughter.

56

June 26 • 2014

The film opens on Wednesday, July 2.
The new film Then They Came is
getting a very limited theater release
(no openings in Detroit). The good
news is that on Friday, June 27, the
same day it has its theatrical open-
ing, it can be seen via On Demand
services.
This flick has pretty good buzz. Paul
Rudd, 45, plays a candy mogul who
threatens to shut down Amy Poehler's
little candy store. Of course, they fall in
love. But you guessed it: They fall out of
love and have to find each other again.
David Wain, 44, directs, with a script
by Wain and Michael Showalter, 43.
You'll recognize tons of names in the
supporting cast, including Michael Ian
Black, 42, and Max Greenfield (New
Girl), 33.
Film buffs will notice that this flick
reunites many Wet Hot American
Summer (2001) veterans. Wet, which

was set in a Jewish summer camp,
opened to OK reviews and small box
office but has since become a cult
classic.
Wain directed that flick, again with a
script by Wain and Showalter. Co-stars
included Black, Rudd and Poehler,
now all household names like Bradley
Cooper, who made his film debut in

Wet.

New On TV

Eric Dane (Dr. Mark "McSteamy" Sloan
on Grey's Anatomy), 41, co-stars in
the new TNT series
The Last Ship, which
debuted on Sunday,
June 22. It airs at 9
p.m. Sundays.
Here's the official
synopsis: "Their mis-
sion is simple: Find a
cure. Stop the virus.
Dane

Save the world. When a global pan-
demic wipes out 80 percent of the
planet's population, the crew of a lone
naval destroyer must find a way to pull
humanity from the brink of extinction."
Dane, who plays the ship's com-
manding officer, is the son of a Jewish
mother and non-Jewish father. While
he was not raised with much religion,
he did have a bar mitzvah.
Meanwhile, Ben Savage, 33, who
also had a bar mitzvah, co-stars in
Girl Meets World, which debuts on the
Disney Channel at 9:45 p.m. Friday,
June 27.
Savage co-starred as Cory Matthews
on the ABC series Boy Meets World
from 1993-2000. It followed Cory from
elementary school through college. It
ended with his marriage to Topanga
(Danielle Fishel), who also appears in
GMW. The new show focuses mostly on
Riley, their daughter.

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