arts & entertainment

Chanukah Books from page 65

FOR THE BROADWAY BUFF
Barbara Eisenberg's Tradition!:
The Highly Improbable, Ultimately
Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood
Story of Fiddler on the Roof the World's
Most Beloved Musical (St. Martin's Press)
is a Broadway- and Hollywood-infused
chronicle of the making of this great
iconic work — from the moment of first
inspiration to opening night on Broadway.
Isenberg also looks at the creation of
the film and follows Fiddler as it travels
around the globe.
Seth's Broadway Diary (Dress Circle
Publishing) is famed Sirius-XM radio
host Seth Rudetsky's first book in a
new series, featuring stories from such
Broadway greats as Patti LuPone and
Chita Rivera (both of whom appeared at
the Berman Center with Rudetsky this
year), as well as Raul Esparza, Jonathan
Groff and more.

FOR THE SEINFELD FAN
Set in a fictional Jewish commu-
nity on Long Island, It Won't Always
Be This Great (Bancroft Press) by Peter

Diary of the Fall (Other Press) by
Michel Laub is a literary novel explor-

ing memory and history. A young man,
the grandson of a Holocaust survivor
and the son of a father suffering from
Alzheimer's, looks back at a mistake in his
own past, searching for forgiveness. Laub
was named one of Granta's Best Young
Brazilian Novelists.
The Betrayers (Little, Brown) by David
Bezmozgis is the story of an event-filled
day in the life of a Soviet Jewish dissident
turned Israeli politician, who escapes to the
Crimean resort of Yalta when some mis-
deeds are exposed. There, he encounters a
former friend who had denounced him and
must come to terms with being betrayed —
and betraying others close to him.
Jonathan Kellerman collaborates with
his son Jesse Kellerman on The Golem
of Hollywood (Putnam), a suspense novel
that leads a Jewish detective with the LAPD
from Los Angeles to Prague to solve a baf-
fling murder in the Hollywood Hills, where
there is no body but only a Hebrew word
burnt into the kitchen counter. This book is
the first in a series.
Another member of the Kellerman family
pens Murder 101 (William Morrow). This
is the latest in Faye Kellerman's Decker/
Lazarus series, featuring a Jewish detective
and his Orthodox wife, who have now relo-
cated from Los Angeles to a college town in
upstate New York, where she gets involved
with the local Hillel and he is pulled into a
murder case.
The Mathematician's Shiva (Penguin)
by Stuart Rojstaczer is a comic first
novel — laced with complex math, Yiddish
and Polish — written by a geophysicist.
After the death of a brilliant Polish emigre

68

December 11 • 2014

JN

Mehlman — a former Seinfeld writer
who coined such Seinfeld-isms as "yada

yada," "shrinkage" and "sponge-worthy"
— captures modern Jewish life in a novel
about a podiatrist who, walking home in
the sub-zero wind chill of a Friday night,
stumbles upon a bottle of horseradish and
mindlessly hurls it through the window
of a popular store selling over-sexed teen
fashions. This impromptu act of vandal-
ism turns his life into a terrifying series of
events, filled with crooked cops and with
suspicions of anti-Semitism, both accurate
and paranoid.

FOR THE SNL DEVOTEE
Ten years after its first release and
coinciding with the 40th anniver-
sary of Saturday Night Live, Live From
New York: The Complete Uncensored
History of Saturday Night Live as Told
by its Stars, Writers and Guests (Little,
Brown and Co.) by James Andrew
Miller and Tom Shales is back, updated
and revised with nearly 200 pages of
new material.

FOR THE SITCOM FAN
Norman Lear is the Jewish creator of
iconic TV programs including All in the
Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons
and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; a
social activist; and the thrice-married
father of six children, ages 19 to 68. In
Even This I Get to Experience (Penguin
Press), he recounts his memorable life and
extraordinary career, with many previ-
ously untold stories of some of America's
most beloved performers, backstage and
off-camera.

FOR THE BIOGRAPHY BUFF
In Hope: Entertainer of the Century
(Simon and Schuster), Richard Zoglin,
a contributing editor to Time magazine,
writes the first definitive biography of Bob
Hope (1903-2003), making the persuasive
case that he was the most important enter-
tainer of the 20th century and the only
entertainer to achieve top-rated success in
every major mass-entertainment medium.
In the process, Zoglin reveals intimate
details of Hope's life.

Morel Fiction

mathematician, her colleagues crash the
house of mourning to find her solution to a
mathematical puzzle with a million-dollar
prize attached.
Populated with characters from the
Talmud and based on extensive research,
Maggie Anton's Enchantress (Plume) is
the story of Hisdadukh, the daughter of Rav
Hisda, a practitioner of mystical, magical
arts that involve incantations and demons.
In Tony Schumaker's thriller The
Darkest Hour (William Morrow), it's
1946, World War II is over and the Nazis
have emerged victorious, occupying Great
Britain and using brutality and fear to con-
trol its citizens. A former war hero turned
drunk, whose own family perished in the
Nazi attacks on London, finds an 8-year-old
Jewish boy in hiding, awakening something
in himself he thought was long gone.
Another thriller, The Washington
Stratagem (Bourbon Street Books/Harper
Collins; paperback) by Adam Lebor, is
a novel of international espionage and a
sequel to The Geneva Option. This time,
United Nations negotiator Yael Azoulay
returns to root out corruption in the heart of
America's military-industrial complex, even
though her physical and emotional wounds
from her brush with death in Geneva are
still raw.

Lucky Us (Random House), Amy
Bloom's first novel in seven years, tells a

story of unconventional family life, weaving
in the relationship between two half-sisters,
their lives of new money, old Hollywood
and the impact of World War II on ordinary
people here and in Germany.
In Tod Goldberg's funny and fast-paced
Gangsterland (Counterpoint Press), mur-
derous Sal Cupertine of the Chicago Mafia
undergoes many plastic surgeries and some
intensive training to disappear into the
identity of Rabbi David Cohen. Leading his
growing Las Vegas congregation, he feels his
wicked past slipping away from him — but
the Mafia isn't quite done with him.
A novel that ranges across time and
space, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
(Random House), Tom Rachman's second
novel (following 2010's highly acclaimed
The Imperfectionists), centers on 30-some-
thing Tooly Zylberberg's journey to unlock
the mysteries of her past. An American
owner of a sleepy bookstore in the Welsh
countryside, she receives startling news
from an old boyfriend in New York. As old
memories surface, Tooly is launched on a
search for answers.
Lisette's List (Random House) by Susan
Vreeland blends fiction, art and World War
II history, incorporating such Jewish paint-

FOR THE TV NEWS JUNKIE
Jewish journalist Barbara Walters paved
the way, but for decades, women battered
the walls of the male fortress of television
journalism, until finally three — Diane
Sawyer (married to the recently deceased
Jewish director Mike Nichols), Katie
Couric (born to a Jewish mother but raised
Presbyterian) and Christiane Amanpour
(married to Jewish former U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State James Rubin) — broke
through, remaking America's nightly news.
In The News Sorority (Penguin Press),
Sheila Weller (author of Girls Like Us:
Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon
— and the Journey of a Generation) looks
once more to the lives of three singular
women, following their individual paths
and shining a spotlight on a time of great
change.

FOR THE COMING - OF - AGE
In Not That Kind Of Girl: A Young
Woman Tells You What She's Learned
(Random House), Lena Dunham, the
Jewish creator, producer and star of HBO's
Girls, offers a series of keenly and very

ers as Camille Pissarro and Marc Chagall.
Gina Nahai's The Luminous Heart of
Jonah S. (Akashic) is a family saga set in
the close-knit Iranian-Jewish community in
Los Angeles, with reflections back to life in
Iran; it's a novel of immigration, exile and
identity, with a mystery at its heart.
In her debut novel, The Goddess of
Small Victories (Other Press), Yannick
Grannec captures the era of Vienna under
the Nazis and of Princeton University just
after the war. In 1980, a young translator,
the daughter of mathematicians, is given the
task of befriending Adele, widow of math-
ematician Kurt Godel, to release his papers.
Along the way, she learns of the life of Adele
and the story of her marriage.
Down Under (McWitty Press) by Sonia
Taitz is a love story of a couple from dif-
ferent backgrounds — she's Jewish, he's
Catholic — who meet as teens and then
again much later in life, when she is living
in the suburbs and he's an Australian film
star with anti-Semitic leanings.
From the author of the mega-selling The
Red Tent, Anita Diamant's The Boston Girl
(Scribner) is a novel told in the first person
as an 85-year-old grandmother looks back
on the life she created — from an immigrant
background in Boston's North End to her suc-
cess in career and in love — in response to a
question from her granddaughter.
A new thriller by the bestselling novelist
(and a practicing attorney) who is thought
to be Israel's leading crime writer, Asylum
City (Harper) by Liad Shoham is set in the
world of asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. When a
volunteer aid worker is murdered, the lead
detective, a woman, senses that something's
not quite right when an African refugee
confesses to the crime.

