Welcome to Books Briefing, your monthly tour of the Jewish literary landscape. I'm a culture writer at the Forward, and I spend a lot of time combing through new releases so you can read the best books out there. You can shop this newsletter by visiting the Forward's Bookshop storefront. If you shop from our page, the Forward will earn a small commission. Like this newsletter? Forward it to a friend and encourage them to sign up here. |
I am an avid and dedicated sleeper, and few forces on earth can keep me awake until the titular hour of Ken Kalfus’s new novel. But I stayed up all night reading “2 A.M. in Little America” — once I got started, the idea of going to bed without reaching the ending was simply inconceivable. Grim but surprisingly funny in its grimness, the novel envisions a near future in which the United States has devolved into civil war, sending civilians — and their partisan animosities — abroad as stateless refugees. I reached Kalfus at his Philadelphia home to chat about writing routines and the real experiences behind the novel. His daily routine: Right now, I write full time. I have breakfast with my wife, I empty the dishwasher, and work my way up to the office. I still work on a desktop with a program called XyWrite from the 1980s, which shows you how long I’ve been doing this. I turn off my modem when I work, so I don’t have any access to the internet. I get in a game of tennis if I can, but I work until the afternoon or the evening. On first drafts: I call it the vomit draft. I don’t look back as I’m writing it. And then I rewrite and rewrite. I just finished a vomit draft of a new novel. It’s very vomitatious. Now I’m going back through it to figure out if it’s savable. There’s some rewriting and some brooding, some note-taking, some secret expressions of disgust. What he needs to work: I need a thesaurus. I’m very adamant about using a bound thesaurus, Roget’s International Thesaurus, which organizes synonyms according to theme. It’s much better than alphabetical thesauruses, and the online ones are useless. To find the right word, you really need to find out the adjacent thematic synonyms. My elbow is resting on my Roget’s right now.
What inspired his latest book: The basic ideas for the book came from a year I spent in Yugoslavia as it was breaking up. That made a profound impact on me. Yugoslavia was a great country with very decent people, and it had a terrible war with atrocities against civilians, ethnic cleansing, rape as a weapon of war. What I noticed, traveling in Yugoslavia during the war, is I would meet good people who were living their own tribalized histories. Their perceptions of basic facts were countering each other’s. When you think you know something, and someone who you respect personally has a different view of reality, it causes a kind of dissonance — a derangement.
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I never asked my grandparents, who were born in the United States and lived through World War II, when they realized what was happening to the Jews of Europe. As sobering as it is to learn about the Holocaust as a kid in the 2000s, the idea of witnessing it as a tragedy in the making, rather than a historical one, seems much worse. The first book by French-Argentine writer Santiago Amigorena to be translated into English, “The Ghetto Within” tries to capture the sense of dawning horror that Jews outside Europe must have felt as the full implications of the “Final Solution” emerged. Not quite a novel and not quite a biography, the book is told from the perspective of Vicente Rosenberg, Amigorena’s grandfather, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Argentina in the 1920s. Vicente assimilates easily into his chosen home, learning Spanish and choosing a bride from an established Argentine Jewish family. He attempts to convince his mother and brother to join him, but they prefer to stay in Warsaw; by the time they’re ready to flee, it’s too late. As Vicente’s letters from his mother become more sporadic and more disturbing — “I never believed it was possible to be so hungry,” she writes — Vicente tries to figure out, via vague newspaper reports, exactly how and why she is suffering. The most poignant part of the book comes in a postscript, when Amigorena admits that in real life, Vicente never discussed his mother’s fate or his own experience of the war years — the story reported by Amigorena is entirely fabricated. Just as Vicente can only imagine his mother’s reality in the Warsaw Ghetto, so Amigorena must reconstruct what his grandfather was unable to tell him. One generation, the author seems to argue, can never communicate the enormity of the Holocaust to another. |
In the fifth chapter of his newest book, chef and food writer Michael Twitty quotes at length from a Lenny Bruce monologue in which the comedian classifies different foods as “Jewish” or “goyish.” Pumpernickel bread is obviously Jewish, while the baked goods brand Drake’s Cakes is goyish. Fruit salad? Jewish. Instant potatoes? You can probably guess. The bit relies on the audience’s inarticulable conception of some foods as inherently Jewish, whether or not they agree with every item on the list. (Personally, I’d like to contest the Drake’s Cakes verdict.) “Koshersoul” both delights in that instinctive affinity and challenges it. Snap judgments about what foods are or aren’t Jewish can be funny and incisive. But in America, where white and Ashkenazi narratives have long dominated Jewish life, they can also shore up a monolithic and exclusive vision of Yiddishkeit. Twitty is known for his work as a historical interpreter, chronicling and preserving the cuisines created by enslaved African Americans. Now, he turns his eye to the way food has shaped his journey as a Black Jew. For Twitty, cooking is a way to affirm his multiple identities and navigate a world that seeks to “render me exotic or odd or negligible.” It also emphasizes his differences within the primarily white synagogues, Hebrew schools and Jewish institutions where he’s looking for community. For historically minded readers, “Koshersoul” traces the paths of different foods across continents and onto Jewish plates. For anthropologists, there are interviews with Black Jewish leaders like Tema Smith about the foods that represent their particular spiritual and communal experiences. (Smith is a contributor to the Forward.) And for the cooks, there are dozens of recipes for dishes like yam latkes and collard green kreplach filling. Whatever dishes you choose to prepare, Twitty argues, are far more than the sum of their ingredients. |
Felicia Berliner’s first novel debuted early in August, but it’s been seared into my consciousness for months. It feels like every critic and bookfluencer I follow has posted a slick photo of the cover, on which a bold red title hovers over a single hamantaschen positioned in a decidedly suggestive manner. The cover is at once specifically Jewish and broadly legible, sexy and — since I will never not associate the word “shmutz” with my mother licking her finger and wiping food off my face — weirdly haimish. And so is the book itself. Raizl, our heroine, is an 18-year-old Haredi Jew from Brooklyn who — outwardly, at least — fulfills all her community’s expectations. She’s pious. She’s dutiful. Though she’s a little more ambitious than her parents hoped, she’s using her brain to get a degree in accounting and support her brothers’ education. But the laptop she uses for schoolwork, a rarity in a Haredi household, poses big problems: After discovering online pornography, she quickly develops an addiction that both teaches her about sexuality and threatens to derail her actual life. Berliner, who writes under a pseudonym and told the Times of Israel that the novel was inspired by “my lifetime of relationships with Orthodox family and friends,” has set herself a hard task: Depicting the world of online smut as perceived by someone who has spent her life sheltered from any discussions about sex. She doesn’t always succeed. The novel’s use of Yiddish slang to describe sex can feel extremely clunky. (The word “shtupping,” for example, appears way too many times to be funny.) And the novel’s focus on Raizl’s porn addiction, its most salacious component, obscures quieter and more interesting concerns: Raizl’s relationships with her brothers, who love her but feel frustratingly entitled to the money she earns; the enigmatic female boss, known only as “The Rebbetzin,” who may or may not be sexually harassing her; and her parents’ fraught marriage, which Raizl fears she will replicate. What feels fresh and even transgressive in “Shmutz” is its nuanced portrayal of Raizl’s dissatisfaction with Haredi life. Overwhelmed by the pressure to marry and conform, Raizl experiments with rebellion, purchasing clandestine jeans and even arranging an abortive sexual encounter with a friend from college. But she never truly believes that she can solve her problems by ripping off her modest garb and diving into the lake of secular life. (Hello, “Unorthodox.”) Like most of us, however independent we may believe ourselves to be, Raizl is far too bound up in her family and community to leave it. By showing how Raizl safeguards her independence while doing what’s expected of her, “Shmutz” rebukes the sensational portraits of Haredi life that often prove so popular with secular audiences. Read more on the novel from our critic Lauren Hakimi here. |
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Dotted with phrases like “kosher stud-muffin” and “Semitic Adonis,” Jean Meltzer’s romance novels are hyper-Jewish. And her protagonists are always pushing the envelope of what Jews are “allowed” to do. In her 2021 novel “The Matzah Ball,” a Jewish writer comes to terms with her addiction to Christmas. Dara Rabonowitz, the heroine of her latest novel, goes even further. A millennial millionaire and the CEO of a fictional version of the dating app J-Date, she’s tapped to star in a reality show about her own love life. While filming, she falls for her non-Jewish coworker, Chris Steadfast. “Mr. Perfect On Paper” operates on classic, satisfying romance novel tropes. There’s a spunky sidekick sister; a gaggle of grandmothers guiding Dara towards love; and a hunky single dad (in possession, it must be said, of absolutely no fortune) desperately in want of a girlfriend to take his daughter bra shopping. Meltzer tailors those tropes to a specifically Jewish experience: Dara’s sister is a Modern Orthodox mom from the suburbs, her grandmother delights in day-old deli fare (“All the fat coagulates”), and Chris impresses his beloved by learning how to keep a kosher kitchen. And while the agita over interfaith marriage feels a little stale (about 42% of us are doing it, according to a Pew survey, and the sky hasn’t fallen yet) the novel also introduces new elements. Meltzer, who lives with chronic fatigue syndrome, often shows her characters grappling with long-term illness or mental health issues, and “Mr. Perfect on Paper” is no exception: Dara’s anxiety disorder and panic attacks drive the plot. (As do a truly mind-boggling array of food allergies and choking hazards, another hallmark of the novel’s Yiddishkeit.) The intrusion of these real-life concerns into the gauzy, stylized world of romance is sometimes surprising. But it’s also auspicious — the romance industry, which boasts an astounding 29 million annual readers, has an almost unparalleled ability to decide which stories are “normal,” which are worth sharing. Now, Dara’s is one of them. |
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