When you cram 15 to 20 Jewish books into a six-week reading period, unifying themes often emerge. Like pairing food with drink, here are some fiction and non-fiction book pairs that give each other an added dimension.
Let’s first consider Aharon Appelfeld. At 77, he is one of Israel’s most prolific and prize-winning authors, with more than 40 books to his credit.
The narrator of his most recently translated book is the 15-year-old orphan Laish, who gives his name to the novel (Schocken, cloth, $23.95). Adopted by a caravan of motley Jewish pilgrims trying to reach Jerusalem, Laish attempts to be the historian of their anarchic existence. Their original leader dead, the physically strong wagon drivers compete with the weak but scholarly old men for leadership of this group of widows, scholars, children, crazies, and thieves wandering around Eastern Europe in an unnamed era. In this dreamlike metaphor for Jewish history, Laish observes, “nothing is ever forgotten here. Our wagons groan beneath the weight of memories.”
The non-fiction pairing for Laish is a Holocaust memoir of survival, Crossing the River by Shalom Eilati (Alabama, cloth, $29.95). The author’s childhood in the Kovno ghetto — his escape, his life in hiding, and his harrowing journey overland to Palestine — are events which affect him to this day. “[T]hey transported the children in buses with windows shut with wire and painted white,” he tells us. “To this day when I see a long line of empty buses…my heart sinks.” But that does not remove his joy and appreciation of the life he built in Israel.
Our next novel concerns a visitor to Israel. In Todd Hasak-Lowy’s Captives (Spiegel & Grau, cloth, $27.95), Daniel Bloom finds himself there, but just for a visit. The successful Hollywood scriptwriter is having trouble: Marriage trouble, kid trouble, career trouble. Bloom can’t finish his latest action-thriller, his agent is threatening him with physical violence, and he’s so obsessed with the state of the world, his friends can’t stand him anymore.
A family trip to Israel becomes a solo journey after a bus bombing frightens his wife. There, he is hilariously paired with a guide who refuses to take him to Jerusalem (too dangerous), insisting Bloom experience the “real” Israel: Smoking dope, hanging out on the beach, picking up women, and having Shabbat dinner with his mother. But it’s in an Israeli cemetery that Bloom realizes what a mess his life is, and he’s able to return home to do some damage control.
It’s a sardonically funny story with a redemptive ending, its one sticking point is the use of dashes — not quote marks — to indicate dialogue, making some parts difficult to follow.
Pair the offbeat Captives with an Israel guide book that will also take you off the beaten track, but keep your visit a little more conventional than Bloom’s trip. Hiking In Israel (Toby, cloth, $24.95), by the editors of Eretz magazine, will guide you on 36 of “Israel’s best hiking routes.” From the most pedestrian stroll between Tel Aviv and Jaffa (seven kilometers) to an extreme outdoor challenge in Barak Canyon in the northern Negev, there are opportunities for hikers of all levels.
Our next novel is entirely set in Israel. It’s the second book by the young, talented and prizewinning Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund, The World A Moment Later: A Shadow History of Israel (Toby, cloth, $24.95).
By placing a series of fictional characters at significant points in Israel’s history from the 1920s to 1970s, Gutfreund asks us to think about the people involved in the creation of the state and its survival of three major wars. Many earned a place in history books, but most became ordinary Israeli citizens, picking up garbage, repairing small electronics, running real-estate empires, or becoming politicians. Some are not even Zionists. (One character, with a family history in Israel going back centuries, is so convinced the Jews will lose the war for independence, he allies himself with the Arabs.)
Others are North African Jews, sometimes called Mizrahi (Eastern), who fled their ancestral homelands in the wake of Arab nationalist violence that swept the region in 1948, only to find themselves doing the lowliest of jobs, distanced from the mainstream.
Pair this realistic novel with journalist Rachel Shabi’s We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands (Walker, cloth, $25).
Shabi, an Israeli of Iranian descent raised in England, directs our attention to the non-Ashkenazi Jews of Israel. She explains their history, how they came to Israel, how they were regarded (poorly) and treated (pretty badly) by the dominant Ashkenazi population, and what their status is today. It’s time for Israelis — and American Jews — to pay attention to Israel’s underclass.
Finally, if you decide to tackle Arnon Grunberg’s novel, The Jewish Messiah (Penguin, paper, $16), prepare to be offended. Grunberg, a successful young writer and son of a Holocaust survivor, must have made a list of the most extraordinarily inappropriate things he could imagine regarding Judaism — the Holocaust, Israel, the Swiss (he must really hate the Swiss) — and put them in this book.
The characters walk blankly through life, unaware of anyone’s feelings but their own. They commit the most atrocious acts of perversity. The protagonist, a gentile Swiss teen and the grandson of a Nazi SS officer, decides to become “the comforter” of the Jews. He lies about his heritage, suffers a botched circumcision, takes an Orthodox male lover, and eventually becomes prime minister of Israel. It’s meant to be a farce, and is funny at times, but Grunberg may have gone too far.
Pair this book with a fascinating memoir, The Pages In Between by Erin Einhorn (Touchstone, paper, $16). Einhorn told this story on public radio, so some may be familiar with it. An effort to find the woman who saved her mother during the Holocaust reunites an American and a Polish family, but also plunges Einhorn into a nightmare of Polish bureaucracy as she tries to determine ownership of the apartment building in which these righteous gentiles still live and decide if she is obligated to fulfill her grandfather’s promise to give the building to the family.