I keep a log of all the books I read because a) otherwise I will have zero memory of having read them and b) because the list forms a sort of biography of my interior life. I don’t lead an especially adventurous life, and sometimes the most interesting part of the day is whatever is happening between the covers of whatever book I am reading.
(Okay, I am fudging here: I usually read on a Kindle.)
I toggle among Jewish and “non-Jewish” books, partly for professional reasons, and partly because — this may surprise you — there is a whole world out there that has nothing to do with being Jewish. For the purposes of this newsletter, however, here’s a list of the Jewish-themed books I read this year, some old, some new, some of which I wrote about.
“Yiddish: Biography of a Language”
Jeffrey Shandler shapes his history of Yiddish as a traditional biography: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity. He also debunks a few of the myths that non-Yiddish speakers, like me, continue to perpetuate, including the idea that Yiddish is somehow both vulgar and adorable, unlike the refined German from which it supposedly derives. My interview with Shandler also convinced me to take a beginner’s Yiddish class at The Workers Circle, which expanded my appreciation for the language and for my rapid loss of brain cells.
“Moshkele the Thief: A Rediscovered Novel”
“From the Jewish Provinces”
Two slim books — the first by Sholom Aleichem, the second by the early 20th-century writer Fradl Stock — demonstrate the overlooked possibilities of Yiddish. In “Moshkele,” appearing in a first-ever English translation by Curt Leviant, the cliches of the shtetl are turned upside down in the tale of a petty Jewish hoodlum and a Jewish women who runs off with a gentile man. An authentic shtetl peeks out from under the gloss of “Fiddler.”
“From the Jewish Provinces” is a collection stories, translated by Allison Schachter and Jordan D. Finkin, by a nearly forgotten poet and writer who moved to New York as a teenager, wrote for the Yiddish press, and largely slipped into obscurity, as so many women Yiddish writers were allowed to do. Stock’s stories — set in Europe and New York — often have a similar shape and theme: A young woman yearns for a bigger life beyond the narrow possibilities of her small Jewish village. The stories are charged with erotic longing, and gesture toward larger themes about the collision of tradition and modernity.
“Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice”
In her lively academic study of new kinds of Jewish belonging, Rachel B. Gross makes a bold claim: Jewish museums, genealogical societies and even delis create attachments to Jewishness as profound as anything that goes on in the synagogue. I challenged her in a fun, enlightening interview earlier this year, but I came away with a new appreciation for the ways material cultural and unconventional Jewish settings create and perpetuate meaning.
“The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive”
Human rights attorney Philippe Sands may be best known for his 2015 documentary “My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did,” which explores how the sons of two different Nazis deal with evidence of their fathers’ crimes.
Sands here tells the story of one of those Nazis — Otto Wächter, the Nazi governor of Galicia — and his attempts to escape justice after the war. “The Ratline” is an indictment of both the Catholic Church and the Allies — each active in shuttling unrepentant war criminals to new lives in the West — that reads like a novel by John LeCarre (who happens to show up in the book).
“Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection”
“The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family”
Sam Apple’s biography of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and indisputable odd duck Otto Warburg is two books in one: A history of German science before and after the rise of the Nazis, and a manifesto on how diet may be the overlooked factor in treating and curing cancer. Apple presents Warburg as a genius whose contributions to the science of cancer may have been overlooked because of his imperious personality and the compromises he made when he agreed to carry on his work in Hitler’s Germany.
Otto Warburg was a distant cousin of the “Famous Five” Warburg brothers at the center of Ron Chernow’s biography of the German banking clan. Chernow explores how German and Jewish history played out — triumphantly and tragically — on both sides of the Atlantic, and how the Warburgs tried desperately to hold onto traditions of business, philanthropy and noblesse oblige in the face of the upheavals of the 20th century. (Bonus: Read about Chaim Weizmann’s long-running affair with a Warburg daughter.)
“The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos”
Judy Batalion’s stirring book is about the young Jewish women who took amazing risks to help the resistance, passing as Aryans and acting as couriers under the noses of the Nazis and their collaborators. Batalion refuses to glamorize her subjects, and describes the physical suffering they endured and long-term effects — post-traumatic stress, survivor’s guilt — that haunted many of the women after the war. (I interviewed Batalion for a webinar in April.)
“A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg”
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper show how religion, real estate and politics came together to create the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg. Perhaps their most surprising insight is how the Satmar align themselves with New York City’s other minorities in the scramble for subsidized housing, while most non-Orthodox Jews have long been seen as part of the white majority in the ways they live and vote. (JTA’s Shira Hanau spoke to the authors in May.)
“Philip Roth: The Biography”
It was hard to untangle the late novelist from the scandal surrounding his biographer, after Blake Bailey was accused of sexual abuse and grooming by former students. Roth emerges from the biography both larger than life (a dedicated craftsman, a champion of other writers, a generous friend) and smaller (often aggrieved, callous and, even when it comes to lovers of whom he was obviously fond, caddish and worse). The best way to encounter Roth is in the pages of his own books, where he was invariably, brilliantly and sometimes tiresomely working out the themes of his long life.
“People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present”
Dara Horn’s book of essays explores the ways Jews and non-Jews try and fail to tell the Jewish story in the wake of the 20th century’s slaughter, displacement and ongoing antisemitism. She describes, for instance, how a Chinese city that was once home to a vibrant Jewish community wants to claim its Jewish history even as it obscures the ways its Jews were persecuted under Chinese rule, and tells the story of Varian Fry, the World War II rescuer of European intellectuals whose lionization similarly distorts all the ways the West failed to save average Jews.
“Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood”
Just three years after the massacre of 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue complex, Mark Oppenheimer offers a series of fresh and unexpected takes on an incident that I thought had been exhaustively covered — by us and others. As I wrote in October, “Squirrel Hill” is the story of a Jewish neighborhood, the American ritual of gun violence and its aftermath, and a deep dive into the ways tragedy can bind and divide a community.
I also read a number of excellent novels this year. Below are the ones with Jewish themes, in no particular order:
- “Morningside Heights,” by Joshua Henkin
- “The Vixen,” by Francine Prose
- “Evening,” by Nessa Rapaport
- “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen
- “Send for Me,” by Lauren Fox
Further Reading About Further Reading
My colleagues at Alma picked their “Favorite Books for Winter 2022.”