arts&life

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books/on the cover

Whether you’re looking for a poolside page turner
or a substantial thinker, our annual compilation
of summer reading has got you covered.

FICTION

• Having grown up in a
Midwestern Jewish fam-
ily, Jessica Fishman moved to
Israel after earning degrees
in business and journalism.
In Chutzpah & High Heels
(Yotzeret Publishing), Fishman
tells with self-deprecating wit
of overcoming many obstacles
— including one that tests the
core of her identity and the ide-
ology that brought her to Israel.
• In the sweeping historical
novel After Anatevka: A Novel
Inspired by “Fiddler on the
Roof ” (Pegasus Books), actress,
singer and author Alexandra
Silber imagines what happens
to the characters of Fiddler on
the Roof after the curtain falls.
• In the tradition of The Red
Tent, David and the Philistine
Woman (Top Hat Books; due

Aug. 2017) is award-winning
documentary filmmaker Paul
Boorstin’s inspired reimagin-
ing of the ultimate narra-
tive of good triumphing over
evil — the clash of David and
Goliath. Here, he adds Nara —
a blacksmith’s daughter and
the Philistine woman in the
title — who is betrothed to
Goliath because of her remark-
able height and strength, and
whose fate collides with David’s
destiny.
• Pulitzer finalist and New
York Times best-selling author
Nathan Englander has writ-
ten what some are calling his
best work yet: Dinner at the
Center of the Earth (Deckle
Edge; due Sept. 2017). In it,
Englander weaves together a
handful of vastly different lives
— a prisoner in a secret cell,

the guard who’s watched him
for years, Israel’s most contro-
versial leader who lies dying
in a hospital, the only person
who knows of the prisoner’s
existence. It’s a political thriller
that interrogates the anguished
division between Israelis and
Palestinians.
• Joshua Cohen, called by
the New York Times “a major
American writer,” weaves
together the housing crises
in America’s poor black and
Hispanic neighborhoods with
the world’s oldest conflict in the
Middle East. But the story in
Moving Kings (Random House;
due July 2017), about faith, race,
class and what it means to have
a home, is told in a profoundly
intimate way.
• The Bed Moved (Random
House) is the audacious debut

NONFICTION

• Detroit in 1963, then enjoying many
successes, is at the heart of Once in
a Great City: A Detroit Story (Simon
& Schuster). Author David Maraniss,
who grew up in a primarily Jewish
neighborhood in Detroit, at Dexter,
attended Winterhalter Elementary
School until he was 7 and his family
left Michigan. The city’s complicated
time before its pinnacle in 1963 and
its decline afterward are traced to

22

June 29 • 2017

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of writer Rebecca Schiff and her
razor-sharp wit and surpris-
ing tenderness. Her collection
of stories offer a fresh take on
adolescence, death, sex and on
being “Jewish-ish.”
• A single work of art — a
painting by Chaim Soutine,
a Jewish artist who died in
France while hiding from the
Nazis — connects the lives of
two very different women sepa-
rated by generations but strug-
gling with the same demons. In
The Fortunate Ones (William
Morrow), Ellen Umansky
reveals a haunting story based
on historical fact.
• The Weight of Ink
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
tells the story of two remark-
able women separated by cen-
turies: one an emigrant from
Amsterdam who is permitted

the period highlighted. Maraniss, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor
at The Washington Post, explains why
Detroit at its peak was threatened by
its own design.
• In 1929, non-Jewish French jour-
nalist Albert Londres set out to docu-
ment the lives of Jews at this time. His
travels to England, Eastern Europe
and Palestine resulted in a book, now
translated to English: The Wandering
Jew Has Arrived (Gefen Publishing

to scribe for a blind rabbi, just
before the plague hits the city;
the other an ailing historian
with a love of Jewish history.
In many ways, author Rachel
Kadish has written a book
about books.
• A week before Stalin’s
death, his final pogrom in
full swing, three government
officials attempt to arrest an
actor, now an old man, which
sets in motion a series of zany
and deadly events. The award-
winning The Yid (MacMillan),
by reporter Paul Goldberg, tells
a tale that is hilarious, moving,
intellectual and violent — with
historical figures such as Paul
Robeson and Marc Chagall
wandering through the nar-
rative — a tragicomic piece of
historical fiction.

House). Moved by the unswerving faith
of the Jews, the misery and plight he
witnessed, Londres redeems the bleak
picture with his gentle humor and
unforgettable portraits of people he
met along the way. He depicts the birth
of Zionism and the wave of pogroms,
and provides insight into how the
Holocaust could happen, all on a very
personal level.

