This is Books Briefing, your monthly tour of the Jewish literary landscape. You can shop for books in this newsletter by visiting the Forward's Bookshop page. If you shop from our page, the Forward will earn a small commission. Know someone who would like this newsletter? Tell them to sign up here. I may have resolved to be a better-rested version of myself in 2023, but bedtime simply did not exist for me this month — I was too busy reading a slew of un-put-down-able new releases. But first: My colleague Beth Harpaz sat down with Walter Mosley, the author of over 46 (46!) detective novels. Mosley talked about his upbringing as the child of Jewish and Black parents, the ways American antisemitism has changed over his lifetime and his latest book, Every Man a King, a hard-boiled thriller in which a Black detective has to investigate a white nationalist with disturbing connections to his own life. Here’s a taste of Beth’s piece. |
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Mosley’s mother, Ella Slatkin, moved from New York to LA after college and met Mosley’s father in a school where he was a custodian and she was a personnel clerk. Mosley grew up in LA surrounded by his mother’s extended family, all immigrants from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. “All of them were intellectuals,” Mosley said. “Most of them were Trotskyites — you know, Trotsky was Jewish. And of course they all spoke Yiddish.” But Judaism wasn’t a “religious thing that drove them. It was a cultural thing. It was also political, and so a lot of the ideas and the politics in my books come out of my mom and what she talked about living in America.” Did his mother’s family accept him, a biracial boy? “There was never a moment where I felt ostracized or ignored,” he said. “I got along great with them, hanging out with them, doing things with them. They were wonderful.” He paused wistfully to remember his favorite, Uncle Chaim, 80 years old and 4 feet 9 inches, who’d been a tailor in the old country: “I just loved him.” The food at those family gatherings was good, too. His mother’s cousin Lily made matzo ball soup, roast chicken and knishes — though in the cultural melting pot that was LA, she used wonton skins to wrap the knishes. Read the full conversation here. |
Eritrean novelist Haji Jabir has published five novels. But since little of his work has appeared in English, I encountered him for the first time through Black Foam, a sweeping account of an Eritrean man’s escape from his war-torn country. Known at different times as Adal, Dawoud, David or Dawit, our chameleon-like narrator adopts and jettisons identities at every step of his journey: He spins tales about his youth to gain entry to an Ethiopian refugee camp, then pretends to be an Ethiopian Jew in order to join a group migrating to Israel. By the time the narrator arrives in Israel — where, of course, he has more trouble fitting in than he anticipated — he himself can’t distinguish between his real past and the stories he’s fabricated. “Sometimes survival had more to do with breaking others down than keeping oneself out of harm’s way,” the narrator observes after a chilly welcome in yet another refugee camp. Jabir, who fled Eritrea to Saudi Arabia as a child, is especially concerned with the ways refugees and other disenfranchised people turn against each other to get by in a system stacked against them. Israeli society proves the perfect canvas on which to illustrate this observation. The Ethiopian Jews with whom the narrator travels face racism from Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis; but they themselves look down on the non-Jewish African refugees who crowd Tel Aviv’s poorest slums. Those refugees in turn resent the resettlement privileges Ethiopian Jews enjoy. And Palestinian characters, who see the state promoting Jewish immigration at their own expense, sometimes vent anger in racist insults. The narrator himself isn’t above “breaking others down” when necessary. In fact, he calmly lies, cheats and commits low-level arson to achieve his aims. But the novel persuades us to care deeply for him, and to feel his despair at his marginal status in every society he inhabits. Jabir reminds us that the narrator doesn’t need to be a “perfect” refugee to deserve the things many of us take for granted: Safety, security, a home. |
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In 1944, a Jewish father instructs his teenage son to jump off a train headed to Bergen-Belsen and run for his life. The son, András, makes his way back to his native Budapest, survives the war, and immigrates to Brazil, where he marries another Jewish refugee and starts a family. Yet that moment of decision, and András' survivor’s guilt, will haunt the family for decades to come. Written by András’ son, the Brazilian editor and publisher Luis Schwarcz, The Absent Moon is a memoir that unfolds on two fronts: Schwarcz’s childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust, and experience managing the bipolar disorder that has defined his adulthood. Schwarcz proceeds methodically through his traumatized parents’ marital woes, their complete reliance on their only son to provide the happiness they can’t give each other, and the author’s feeling that his childhood was over before it had a chance to begin. Just as interesting as Schwarcz’s excavation of his own family is his description of São Paulo’s ascendant Brazil’s Jewish bourgeoisie. His parents and their friends owned thriving businesses and whiled away afternoons at the Club Hungáro, but many were starting new families and lives after losing everything in Europe. Some aspects of his upbringing — the Borscht Belt-esque vacation destinations, the Beatles albums on which Schwarcz relied for solace during a lonely adolescence — feel akin to the American Jewish postwar milieu. Other details, like Schwarcz’s casual revelation that his father hired a sex worker for his post-bar mitzvah (bar mitzvah!) initiation, will startle. As a storyteller, Schwarcz tends to dart back and forward in time, letting his father’s imagined experiences interrupt his own recollections and returning, over and over again, to that one moment on the train. That elliptical prose communicates better than any explicit explanation Schwarcz’s sense of being forever bound up in his parents’ past — and their halting, sometimes unsuccessful attempts to start anew. |
It’s a big month for imperfect victims at this newsletter: Jabir’s name-shifting narrator, Schwarcz’s family of Holocaust survivors, and now Tara Ison’s young Danielle, the 12-year-old daughter of a wealthy French Jewish family who must go into hiding when the Germans invade Paris in 1941. Sent to live in the countryside with her grandparents’ aging servants, Claude and Berthe, Danielle is (understandably) querulous and ungrateful: She can’t fathom how this coarse peasant couple ever waited on her haughty grandfather, much less understand why she has to take the name Marie-Jeanne or memorize Catholic prayers. What distinguishes this book from similar narratives of hiding and survival is Danielle’s queasy transformation as her time in disguise as Marie-Jeanne ticks on. She doesn’t just come to love Claude and Berthe; she adopts their religion and the antisemitic beliefs they both hold, despite sheltering a Jewish child. Has Danielle repressed her memories and her identity in order to survive, or has she become a genuinely committed Vichy fascist? Ison, an American author whose Hungarian stepmother hid with a Catholic family during World War II, makes it hard to answer that question, or to form a definite opinion of any of her characters. Claude is vociferously supportive of the Vichy government, even though he breaks many of its rules to feed his family and protect Danielle. Berthe is suspicious of the Nazi propaganda that inundates the village, but can’t help making comments about “those people” to the Jewish girl she’s hiding. Luc, the couple’s teenage son, is a devoted member of the town’s fascist youth group even while falling in love with the daughter of its one Jewish family. Instead of populating her novel with saintly victims, courageous saviors and cartoonish villains, Ison conjures up a scarier, more realistic world where most people are somewhere in between — and where unethical actions are easy to rationalize in the name of survival. |
Nothing, and I mean nothing, commands my attention more completely than novels about young women embarking on affairs with wildly inappropriate men. Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel, My Last Innocent Year, unites this genre with another of my great pleasures, the campus novel. Set at Wilder College, an elite institution smacking of Dartmouth (which Alpert Florin attended), the novel follows shy senior Isabel Rosen. The only daughter of a struggling appetizing store owner, Isabel has already lost her mother to cancer and spent three years as a working-class anomaly on a campus full of aspiring finance bros; and in the novel’s first chapter, a tipsy hookup with a friend turns into something more like sexual assault. So when a writing professor, the very married, not-so-famous poet R.H. Connelly (no relation of mine, I can only hope), takes an unusual interest in her work and future, it’s only natural that Isabel would seize on this escape from her travails. My Last Innocent Year takes place in 1998, two decades before #MeToo. But like many of the best novels published in the movement’s wake, it pushes beyond the idea of “consent” to explore the inevitable but not entirely predictable imbalances in relationships between powerful men and less powerful women, no matter how willing those women are. Smart, capable and mercifully unafflicted by writer’s block, Isabel has much more going for her than Connelly, who’s quickly approaching has-been status and brings to their relationship only his ego and his sexy hands. Alpert Florin eschews stereotypes of hapless female victims dependent on men who toss them aside. What troubles Isabel about this passionate, secretive relationship is that, pragmatic Lower-East-Sider that she is, she can’t imagine its future. Meanwhile, Connelly emerges as both a practiced sleaze and a genuinely troubled man, mired in delusions of a second youth with his new lover. My one quibble with My Last Innocent Year is that an older, retrospective Isabel narrates the tale, putting an adult’s gloss on the novel’s events. When Connelly invites Isabel to spend the summer at his remote cabin near the Canadian border, we don’t need her future self popping in to point out that this is an unbelievably bad idea. As a college senior, Isabel is old enough to know something is off, but young enough to consider the invitation anyway, and to believe she’s the only woman to have received one. I would have preferred to experience the story through her eyes only. |
A couple weeks ago, I hosted a small Sunday night dinner that doubled in size two hours before the guests were set to arrive. And you know what? I didn’t panic. I made the simple and simply named Turkey Pasta from Noah Galuten’s “Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook.” An offshoot of Galuten’s YouTube show, which he started with his wife, the comedian Iliza Shlesinger, to teach people how to cook from their pantries during the first COVID-19 lockdowns, the cookbook is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of un-fussy, one-page recipes with ingredient lists that won’t send you running to the supermarket. In its pages, California hippie fare (Probiotic Ranch dressing, less gross than it sounds) mixes with staples from Galuten’s Italian-Jewish childhood (I was today years old when I learned what actually goes into minestrone) and kids’ menu dishes gussied up for adults, like the aforementioned Turkey Pasta. Was it the most innovative dish I ever made? No. But my worst dinner party fears (not enough food for seconds) were averted, I got to look like a good hostess, and the presence of frozen sauce in my freezer is carrying me through my end-of-winter lethargy. |
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