arts&life
books
THE HOLOCAUST
ISRAEL/JUDAISM
• Sylvia Ruth Gutmann is one of the
youngest survivors of the Holocaust.
Her family was murdered when she
was 3 and she emigrated to the U.S.
when she was 7, moving in with an
uncle and aunt who insisted she
put the past behind her. But she
had one haunting memory, of her
mother boarding a train and leav-
ing her behind. In A Life Rebuilt:
The Remarkable Transformation
of a War Orphan (Epigraph Books),
Gutmann traces her past as her life
comes full circle.
• The Oxford Illustrated History of
the Third Reich (Oxford University
Press), edited by Robert Gellately,
provides a deep look into the rise of
the Nazis through art, propaganda
and rare photographs. From the
Third Reich’s rise to its collapse in
1945, this book shows an era that for-
ever changed the modern world.
• In Letters to My
Palestinian Neighbor
(Harper), American-born
author Yossi Klein Halevi
writes 10 lyrical, provocative
letters, sharing his passion
for his adopted homeland
of Israel and why he refuses
to despair of peace between
Israelis and Palestinians.
• When New York Times
editor Jonathan Weisman
was attacked on Twitter by
a wave of neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, he
began to wonder how the Jewish experi-
ence has changed, especially under a
leader like Donald Trump. In Semitism:
Being Jewish in America in the Age of
Trump (St. Martin’s Press), he explores
the disconnect between his own sense of
Jewish identity and the expectations of
his detractors and supporters, showing
how hatred can slowly and quietly chew
for kids and their families facing
serious illness or potentially life
limiting illness,” to make sure that
the care is in line with the family’s
values. He returns to the United
States to do a specialized fellow-
ship and comes back to Hadassah
with the hope of continuing that
work in Israel. But that didn’t work
out as Hadassah was facing seri-
ous financial and other difficulties.
He then made the tough decision
to return to America.
Hadassah has since disas-
sembled the pediatric oncology unit,
a move he felt to be “extremely
shortsighted and stubborn, depriving
Jerusalem of a real gem.” All the
senior doctors resigned.
Now married and the father of
a young son, Waldman lives in
Chicago, where he is associate
chief, division of pediatric pallia-
tive care, at the Ann and Robert H.
Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Usually, he travels to Israel twice
a year to see family (both of his
siblings live there as do his parents,
who made aliyah after he did), and
to work on a project he’s involved
with at Augusta Victoria Hospital in
Jerusalem. Still, his dream is to set
up a pediatric palliative care service
in Israel.
Does he think about returning to
Israel?
“Every day,” he says. “I would do
it if a philanthropist came up with
the money to fund a program.”
Thinking ahead, he reflects on
his patients who get a terrible diag-
nosis and then set off on a journey,
“knowing they will be transformed
and having faith that there will be
meaning in all of that.” •
MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
• Leonard Bernstein — com-
poser of On the Town and West
Side Story, chief conductor of
the New York Philharmonic,
TV star, humanitarian and
the life of every party — was
also a dad. In Famous Father
Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up
Bernstein (Harper), his eldest
daughter, Jamie Bernstein,
invites us into her family’s
private world, where Lenny
(who would have celebrated
his 100th birthday on Aug. 25)
taught his daughter to love
the world in all its beauty and
complexity.
• Historian and thinker
Gershom Scholem pioneered
the study of Jewish mysticism
and profoundly influenced
the Zionist movement. In
Gershom Scholem: Master
of the Kabbalah (Yale), David
Biale traces his life through
embracing Zionism as the
vehicle for the renewal of
Judaism in a secular age, his
participation in the creation
of the Hebrew University and a
life spanning two world wars,
the rise of Nazism and the
Holocaust.
• Ilana Kurshan finds herself
alone in Jerusalem after emerg-
ing from a painful divorce.
Struggling to find meaning, a
friend suggests she takes up
daf yomi — reading one page
of the Talmud each day. If All
the Seas Were Ink (St. Martin’s
Press) is Kurshan’s tale of find-
ing balance and rebuilding a
life after a painful episode.
• By his own estimation, liter-
ary and political intellectual
Lionel Trilling wrote up to 600
letters a year. When he died in
1975, his obituary, on the front
page of the New York Times,
said, “In the hands of Lionel
Trilling, criticism became not
merely a consideration of a
work of literature but also of
the ideas it embodied and
what these ideas said of the
society that gave them birth.
Criticism was a moral function
…” For Life in Culture: Selected
Letters of Lionel Trilling
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; due
September 2018), Adam Kirsch
culled the thousands of letters
penned between 1924 and 1975
down to a couple hundred, pro-
viding an intimate glimpse into
Trilling’s life and times.
• Seymour Stein grew up in
World War II-era Brooklyn,
away at the moral fabric of society.
• The story of Jews coming to America
is the focus of Steven R. Weisman’s The
Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an
American Religion (Simon & Schuster;
due August 2018), starting with the
Diaspora arriving in New Amsterdam in
1654. Weisman chronicles the struggles
and triumphs Jews faced in the 18th and
19th centuries, and how Judaism adapt-
ed to the New World.
rushing home from shul to
hear the weekly rundown of
the Top 25 music chart. In
Siren Song: My Life in Music
(St. Martin’s Press), Stein tells
of 60 years in the music busi-
ness, as the founder of Sire
Records, as a pioneer of New
Wave music — discovering
Madonna, the Ramones, the
Cure, Lou Reed, Squeeze and
more. Full of hilarious scenes
and big personalities, the story
also discusses the slow accep-
tance of diversity in America
and the violent death of his
ex-wife Linda Stein, a high-
powered real estate broker to
the stars. “Sixty-plus years in
the music business,” he writes,
“and I keep hearing the same
old groan: that pop music isn’t
what it used to be. But the
truth is there’s always great
stuff happening. You just have
to go out and find it.”
• In 1886 New York, the
Statue of Liberty stood unlit
and unloved by American
politicians. Nearby, actor M.B.
Curtis was achieving over-
night success as one of the
nation’s top actors in a play
that transcended common
stereotypes of Jewish charac-
jn
ters at the time. The Jewish
actor, an immigrant who
grew up in Detroit (his fam-
ily, the Strelingers, remained
in the city), came to the aid
of Lady Liberty. In The Man
Who Lit Lady Liberty: The
Extraordinary Rise and Fall
of Actor M.B. Curtis (Heydey),
historian Richard Schwartz
rescues Curtis’ story from the
dusty archives of forgotten his-
tory.
• Shaul Mayzlish’s The
Rabbinate in Stormy Days:
The Life and Teachings of
Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac HaLevi
Herzog, First Chief Rabbi
of Israel (Gefen Publishing
House) tells the story of Rabbi
Yitzhak Isaac HaLevi Herzog.
F rom his youth in Poland, to
his days in the new Jewish
state, the rabbi was a person of
faith who maintained a mod-
ern life.
June 21 • 2018
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