arts & life

b oo k s

FICTION continued from page 49

Max, adopted from two
teenagers in Montana,
in Don’t let My Baby
Do Rodeo (Harper), by
Boris Fishman. When
teenaged Max becomes
wild, the parents leave
their suburban New
Jersey lifestyle in search
of his birth parents.
■ Fat Chance (Quid
Pro Books) by Aviva
Orenstein is a first novel
by a writer who has
had a successful career
as a law professor who
comes from a family
of rabbis. Set in a suburban Jewish com-
munity, Orenstein’s heroine is a single
mother with a great job and a quirky
sense of humor. As she’s dealing with
the loss of her father, her difficult teen-
age son and always struggling with her
weight, she finds her way to better times,
to feeling newly comfortable, as she says,
in her ample skin.
■ Good on Paper (Melville House) by
Rachel Cantor is a splendid novel about
family, friendship and identity. For Shira
Greene, everything changes with a tele-
gram: She is a single mother living with
her daughter and a gay friend, a transla-
tor with a career that feels stalled as she
works temporary jobs wherever she finds
them. A Nobel-prize winning Romanian-
born Italian poet asks her to translate his
new book, which turns out to be a puz-
zling mix of prose and poetry. Cantor’s
own mastery of language makes for great
reading.
■ In her debut collection, author Helen
Maryles Shankman links stories set in
a German-occupied town in Poland.
Blending folklore and fact, In the Land of
Armadillos: Stories (Scribner) illuminates
the unfathomable experiences of both the

NONFICTION
■ In 1944: FDR and the Year
that Changed History (Simon
& Schuster), the last full year of
WWII is given the attention it
deserves by public historian Jay
Winik, who brings drama, power
and passion to telling the story of
this fateful year. He brings to life
the drama and horror while giv-
ing the reader a new appreciation
of both the triumphs and failings
of the leaders involved. He viv-
idly describes the horrors of the
Holocaust and doesn’t hold back
with charging FDR with willful
negligence in not confronting
them.
■ In Charlie Mike, A True Story
of Heroes Who Brought Their

50 June 23 • 2016

Mission Home
(Simon & Schuster),
award-winning
journalist Joe Klein
(author of Primary
Colors) puts the
focus on America’s
“new greatest gen-
eration” through the
triumphant story
of two decorated
combat veterans,
linked by tragedy,
who return from the battlefield
and use their military skills to lead
others in new and inspiring ways.
Both men eventually founded
powerful charitable organizations,
the Mission Continues and Team
Rubicon, and help their fellow vet-

victims and the perpe-
trators of violence at
the height of the Nazi
regime. One example: A
cold-blooded SS officer
is obsessed with rescu-
ing the creator of his
son’s favorite picture
book even as he sends
the artist’s friends and
family to their deaths.
■ Mike Greenberg,
cohost of ESPN’s Mike
and Mike, has created
a character worth root-
ing for in Jonathan
Sweetwater — smart,
sensitive and devoted to his wife and
children. In My Father’s Wives (William
Morrow), we see Sweetwater’s seemingly
perfect life fall apart, his journey to put
it back together and understand the rela-
tionship he never had with his father.
■ Piece of Mind (Norton) by Michelle
Adelman is a debut novel full of charm
and warmth. The main character is
Lucy, 27, who was hit by a truck at age 3,
resulting in a traumatic brain injury. She
lives an unconventional life at home with
her father, who does everything for her
— cooks, drives, makes sure she’s dressed
and has finished simple tasks. When her
father dies, her life is totally unmoored.
She moves to New York City to live with
her brother Nate, 21, who is ill-equipped
to meet the challenge. It is Lucy who does
so. Drawing on the experience of her own
sister Caren, who suffered a brain injury
at a young age, Adelman deftly recog-
nizes the intricacies of brain injury and,
with heart-felt emotion, creates Lucy as a
fully realized protagonist.
■ Arlene Heyman’s stories were writ-
ten over a period of 30 years, beginning
when she was a student of Bernard
Malamud’s at Bennington College. In

erans find a sense
of purpose. Klein
shows us how the
military virtues of
discipline and self-
lessness can provide
a path to peace, per-
sonal satisfaction
and a more vigor-
ous nation.
■ On March
29, 1516, the city
council of Venice
issued a decree forcing Jews to
live in il geto — a closed quarter
named for the copper foundry that
once occupied the area. Ghetto:
The Invention of a Place, the
History of an Idea (Farrar Straus
Giroux) is sociologist and author

her debut collection, Scary Old Sex
(Bloomsbury), Heyman, a psychiatrist,
looks deeply and knowingly into the
messiness of lives — complex relation-
ships, intimacy, aging and sex, and what
is often unspoken. Many of her charac-
ters are older women. Her story “In Love
With Murray” is dedicated to Malamud’s
memory.
■ Former Detroiter Linda Kass’ debut
novel, Tasa’s Song (She Writes Press),
was inspired by events from her mother’s
life. The main character is a gifted young
Jewish violinist who returns to her native
home in Poland to find her family has
been targeted by the Soviets and her
family estate is now in German hands.
With no safe place, she turns to her new
love interest and her music to survive.
As danger mounts, her family finally
flees to a friend’s underground bunker.
Throughout the story, Kass writes about
the bonds of love, the power of memory,
the solace of music and the strength of
the human spirit.
■ The Beautiful Possible (Harper) by
Amy Gottlieb is a first novel about faith
and ideas, love and loss, that unfolds
with insight. Gottlieb writes of a rab-
binical student at the Jewish Theological
Seminary, his fiance and his study part-
ner, a German refugee who lost his fam-
ily and spent the war years in India, and
their triangular connections over time.
Questions of Jewish thought are woven
seamlessly into the story.
■ The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem
(Thomas Dunne Book-St. Martin’s
Press), by Sarit Yishai-Levi, has become
a No. 1 international bestseller. Set in
the Golden Age of Hollywood, the dark
days of WWII and the swinging 1970s, it
is about mothers and daughters, stories
told and untold and the ties that bind
four generations of women. The rich
history of Jerusalem is more than just

Mitchell Duneier’s rivet-
ing account of how the
name stuck. Tracing the
idea of the ghetto — and
the scholars and activ-
ists who wrestled with
race and poverty in their
own efforts — from its
16th-century origins,
its revival by the Nazis,
to the black American
ghetto.
■ An illustrated his-
tory, New York’s Yiddish Theater:
From the Bowery to Broadway
(Columbia University Press), edited
by Edna Nahshon, covers many
genres and productions, artists and
audiences; the impact of Yiddish
theater on Jewish immigrants and

on American culture.
This volume accom-
panies an exhibition
at the Museum of the
City of New York.
■ The Lost Book
of Moses by Chanan
Tigay (Ecco) is a
historical drama
going back to 1883,
when a Polish-born
British antiquities
dealer claimed to
have discovered the oldest copy of
the Bible, which then mysteriously
vanished. The author searches
around the world for clues, uncov-
ering romance and tragedy along
with truth.