This is Books Briefing, your monthly tour of the Jewish literary landscape. I'm a culture writer at the Forward, and I spend lots 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. The holidays are over and the sun continues to set at an unspeakably early hour, which means it's time to find a couch that's hard to get out of and read until March. I've got enough recs to keep you oblivious to the next month of unremittingly gray skies. (No, I didn't check the weather; I just know in my heart this is how it's going to be.) First, I want to tell how I rang in the reading year. |
I spent the waning days of 2022 in Florida (where else?), not so much appreciating this view as plowing through Hernan Diaz’s Trust. It’s a literary mystery of greed and secrets and cold hard money, which in Diaz’s descriptions is an almost animate force, sensuous and sinister by turns. I know enough about the stocks to laugh at this meme and no more, but Diaz’s prose made me feel like I understood the way the market explodes and contracts — and the way those movements derail individual people’s lives. Disclaimer: There’s no Jewish angle to this book except that I am a Jew and I have read it. (As have many other members of the tribe, judging by its bestseller status.) But I wanted to write about Trust because it made me think about the way I want to read this year. Reading this novel brought me back to childhood, when I spent most Saturdays wedged between the cushions of the ancient living room couch, gnawing on bagels and lox and plowing through a book, sometimes two, before realizing it was time for dinner. It’s almost impossible to recreate that experience now. My smartphone dings; my sleep debt beckons; weekend chores (i.e., procuring my own bagels and lox) loom. I didn’t finish Trust in a day, but my desperate need to know what was going to happen compelled me to clear large chunks of time for reading. Now that grown-up obligations crowd my reading time, now that reading is part of my job (a very nice part, but work nonetheless), I want to start every year with a book like this, that reminds me how my reading life began. |
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Henceforth to be known as NOLTCLFY because there are simply too many words in this title, Sam Lipsyte’s latest makes great winter reading — if you’re willing to be constantly reminded that it’s cold outside. “My city is a tundra,” grumbles Jack Shit (no, this is not a typo), an East Village resident and guitarist in a spectacularly insignificant punk band called The Shits. (Also, unfortunately not a typo.) Despite the frigid weather on this 1993 morning, Jack has to venture out, because his roommate has stolen his precious Fender guitar. Searching for the missing guitar, Jack turns up a murder and a string of real estate cons leading to a certain orange-hued tycoon. Though it follows the arc of a detective novel, NOLTCLFY is more preoccupied with the existential anxieties of its punk rock protagonists, who live in unheated apartments and gripe vigorously about gentrification but all hail from comfortable homes in the suburbs — in other words, they’re the ones changing the down-and-out neighborhoods they claim to love. Lipsyte has a cackle-inducing ability to take this demographic down to size, starting with their names. Monikers like Jack Shit, the Banished Earl, and Cutwolf conceal NJB given names: Jonathan, Alan and, most ignominiously, Craig. Even the novel’s tough-talking cop, whom Jack idolizes as a beacon of authentic New York, turns out to be an Amherst faculty brat. (“For a while I figured I was the only guy on the force who’d read Foucault,” he remarks.) Jack spends most of the novel under the impression that he must distance himself from his petit-bourgeois origins in order to become a capital-A artist. But only when he stops posing as someone belongs does he overcome his feeling of being a tourist in the city and form real relationships with the other New Yorkers enduring the cold.
Don’t expect the whodunnit in NOLTCLFY to like, make sense. Do read for good-natured but stinging parody that feels (at least to this ex-suburbanite) humblingly relatable.
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We'll be discussing our own Adam Langer's Cyclorama at 3 p.m. EST on Jan. 25. Adam will be our special guest — you don't want to miss it! To get registered and keep up with book club events, email [email protected]. |
If I cried while hunched over my laptop squinting at the PDF version of Sam, you will cry reading this book in (I hope) more comfortable conditions. Sam is a half-Jewish girl growing up in Beverley, Massachusetts. (Think Manchester-by-the-Sea vibes, since it is literally next to Manchester-by-the-Sea.) She lives with her overworked mother and little brother and without her father, whose addictions make him an intermittent presence in her life. At the age of 7, she takes up rock climbing, which provides friends, first loves and some much-needed stability. But it may also lead her away from the path her mother envisions towards college and a steady job. Yes, I know I just said “rock climbing,” and if you’re anything like me, this is a subject that has never before failed to make your eyes glaze over. But persevere! Goodman is an excellent writer of childhood, managing to stay in Sam’s head even when evoking the very adult problems she faces from a young age. As a result, I felt invested in even the novel’s smallest victories, like Sam’s mother finagling enough time off to drive to a rock-climbing competition. I wish the novel did more with Sam’s Jewishness, especially since her Jewish father is one of the most complicated characters: Irresponsible and infuriating, he’s still somehow a loving and lovable parent. But I appreciated that Goodman doesn’t force Sam to prove herself exceptional in order to overcome her circumstances. She doesn’t have to be a good student, or get into a prestigious college, or even be the best ever rock climber to earn her happy (well, bittersweet) ending. |
Cribside and Other Stories features poems, short stories, and memoirs, newly translated from Yiddish, all highlighting the complexities of women's experiences. This free, digital anthology explores complex and commonplace issues such as a mother’s decision to leave her children alone for the sake of work or political commitments, women risking their lives in the struggle against fascism, and the challenges of upholding Yiddish culture in a modernizing world. We hope you enjoy this issue. |
Each chapter in this collection of personal essays, the last Malcolm wrote before her death in 2021, uses a photograph as a springboard into memory. A snapshot of 5-year-old Malcolm leaving her native Prague by train leads to an account of her Jewish family’s flight to America in 1939. Photos of her parents spur loving — if unsparing — reflections on each of them. For Malcolm, photographs often symbolize the gap between the way people present themselves and the lives they actually live. Examining a gauzy studio portrait of her glamorous grandmother, Klara, Malcolm looks for traces of this matriarch’s difficult marriage, recounted in whispers over the years. If you come to this book out of interest in Malcolm’s career as journalism’s perennial "enfant terrible," be warned — this isn’t a public intellectual’s memoir. Reading Still Pictures is like listening to a series of rambling stories told by someone else’s grandmother. But grandmothers tend to have interesting things to say, and I loved Malcolm’s description of New York’s Czech refugee community. Families like hers took full advantage of the postwar boom years: Though Malcolm’s parents didn’t have much money, they read widely, cultivated a social circle of intellectual emigres with elegant Upper Manhattan apartments, and wrote erudite letters to the newspaper. Still, the legacy of war, displacement and violence surrounded her. Malcolm’s parents anglicized their surnames on arriving in America (Weiner became Winn, Malcolm’s maiden name) and sent her to Lutheran Sunday school to help her fit in. By the time she learned she was Jewish, Malcolm recalled, she had learned antisemitic slurs on the playground and was “shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the ‘good’ side of the equation.” Family friends who arrived after WWII had suffered terrible losses in the Holocaust. In one chapter, Malcom recalls visiting a family friend whose entire family was murdered at Auschwitz. “She was gentle and kindly and indifferent. I cannot say anymore,” Malcolm writes. The cognitive dissonance of a prosperous childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust clearly haunted Malcolm, and it pervades this book. |
Don't miss “Playing Anne Frank,” a podcast series about one of America’s most iconic and impactful cultural works. The seven-part series is a deep dive into the history of The Diary of Anne Frank and how its shaped those involved in it. We’ll be launching our first episodes on Jan. 24. Listen to the trailer here. |
🌊 I read The Road when I was way too young for it, and I’m still too freaked out to venture further with Cormac McCarthy. But Jackson Arn has the scoop on the octogenarian’s two new novels and their Jewish protagonists. (The TLDR: Read The Passenger, skip Stella Maris.) 👨👦👦 The past isn’t past, much less dead, in this collection of essays from Peter Orner, which mixes family memories with literary criticism. (In semi-related news, read my interview with the author’s brother, graphic novelist Eric Orner, here.) |
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