Notes from Around the Web: Literary Links for Shabbat

  • Ann Goldberg shares lessons learned at the Jerusalem Writers’ Seminar.
  • Carlin Romano reviews a new essay collection focused on Primo Levi and concludes: “Primo Levi was not just a Holocaust survivor or ‘great Holocaust author.’ He was a humanist who insisted on justice—one whose incisive voice against those who murder the innocent still speaks to all lands, and all cultures.”
  • A hearty Mazel Tov to Gary Shteyngart, the first American to win the Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction for his novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Named for the British humorist, the prize isn’t exactly kosher, though–it confers, among other items, a pig named in Shteyngart’s honor.
  • The Whole Megillah’s series on using social media to promote Jewish children’s books continues.
  • Finally, just in case you missed my musings on the Jewish Book NETWORK/Meet the Author programs, you’ll find my list of tbr discoveries here and an account of my Sunday evening here.
  • Shabbat shalom!

    TBR: Forthcoming Books by Jewish Book NETWORK Authors

    One of the best parts of participating in the Jewish Book NETWORK‘s Meet the Author Program as one of the 2011-12 authors is the opportunity I had on Sunday evening to meet some fellow NETWORK authors whom I’ve admired for a long time. For example, I was able to tell Melissa Fay Greene how much I learned from The Temple Bombing; I finally met Joan Leegant; and, thanks to the privileges of alphabetical order, I sat right next to David Bezmozgis (whose novel, The Free World, I’m just starting to read on my Kindle).

    Many of the authors I had the good fortune to meet on Sunday–and others who may have shown up for one of the other sessions (this program is so large that not all of the authors can be accommodated in one evening)–are promoting books that have not yet been published.

    Here are just ten forthcoming titles that were discussed on Sunday and/or are featured in this year’s Jewish Book NETWORK guide that I’m especially eager to read. (And if you’re a book reviewer looking for summer/fall titles to review, maybe you’ll find some here to interest you as well.)

  • Ellen Feldman, Next to Love (Spiegel & Grau, July)
  • Martin Fletcher, The List (St. Martin’s, October)
  • Pam Jenoff, The Things We Cherished (Doubleday, July)
  • Jodi Kantor, The Obamas (Little, Brown, November)
  • Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, November)
  • Alyson Richman, The Lost Wife (Berkley/Penguin, September)
  • Rebecca Rosenblum, The Big Dream (Biblioasis, September)
  • Philip Schultz, My Dyslexia (Norton, September)
  • Anna Solomon, The Little Bride (Riverhead, September)
  • Evelyn Toynton, The Oriental Wife (Other Press, July)
  • Two more things: Evan Fallenberg’s novel, When We Danced on Water, was released just last week. So, technically, it’s no longer “forthcoming.” But I wanted to give it (and Evan, an author I’d heard about but hadn’t met before Sunday) a shout-out here, anyway. I also have to mention Randy Susan Meyers’s The Murderer’s Daughters. Randy was there on Sunday to promote the paperback, and I told her very honestly that a copy is atop the stack on my nightstand right now.

    Reactions? Thoughts?

    TBR: How to Spot One of Us, Poems by Janet R. Kirchheimer

    One of the highlights of this past week was my attendance at a conference on “German-Speaking Jews in New York City: Their Immigration and Lasting Presence.” Co-sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Baruch College Jewish Studies Center, the conference featured several panels. I was on one of those panels, and that’s where I met Janet R. Kirchheimer, fellow panelist, poet, and author.

    In our session, Janet read several poems from her 2007 collection, How to Spot One of Us. The first poem she shared, “This Is How My Opa Strauss Died,” nearly brought me to tears. (The poem is available online, so you can read it for yourself. I dare you not to be moved. Then, you can read some additional poems of Kirchheimer’s on the same site.)

    Janet is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and her identity and familial experience are at the heart of this book. With this collection, as Rabbi Irwin Kula notes in his foreword, she “has taken a particular Jewish event—the Holocaust—a particular family’s experiences, and the personal and intimate details of particular people in particular places at particular moments and has aspired to a universal revelation of a new sense of reality. There is no easy catharsis here and yet as we read the poems and experience the intimacy of tragedy, loss, anguish, and despair we are invited with fierce grace to preserve our humanity and faith.” Or, as Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg adds in an introduction, these poems “…so shall the words written in this book not return empty-handed but will infuse the mind of every reader, giving life to the dead and compassion to the living.”

    I’d hoped to manage to return to the conference for an evening conference session, where I’d have been able to buy a copy of How to Spot One of Us and ask Janet to sign it for me. Alas, life intervened, and I had to make do with an online order. Luckily, the book has already arrived (thank you, Amazon Prime!). And somehow, it seems to be autographed.

    I really can’t wait to read this book. It’s the absolute next title on my TBR list. Perhaps it should be on yours?

    Notes from Around the Web: Literary Links for Shabbat

  • Having recently read Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key (trans. Damion Searls), I appreciated this profile of the almost-101-year-old author
  • As we conclude National Poetry Month, let’s take a moment to celebrate that remarkable poet from the past, Hannah Senesh. as well as a newer, current poetic voice: that of Yehoshua November.
  • Poet and editor Jill Bialosky is now also the author of a memoir, about her sister’s 1990 suicide, and in this interview she discusses Jewish mourning rituals–and Judaism’s complicated relationship with suicide.
  • Yom Hashoah begins at sundown on Sunday, May 1, and that makes me it seem especially important to share with you today my latest essay-review for Fiction Writers Review: “Looking Backward: Third-Generation Fiction Writers and the Holocaust.”
  • On my other blog, this week’s “post-publication post” provides some background on the real-life inspiration for one of the characters readers are meeting in my short-story collection, Quiet Americans.
  • Shabbat shalom.

    Digital Storytelling: “A Wrinkle In Time,” by Paul Zakrzewski

    Paul Zakrzewski has many literary talents, and to his collection of authorial skills he has recently added digital storytelling. An early result: this short video essay, “A Wrinkle in Time.”

    As Paul explains:

    This short video essay covers a trip to Poland I took with my wife and 13-month-old son. That was in July 2008.

    We spent a week with Genia Olczak, who was my dad’s nanny before WWII and hid him and several other Jewish family members during the Holocaust.

    The film was made in a workshop sponsored by the Center for Digital Storytelling in April 2011.

    Genia passed away in September 2008, a month after our trip. She was 95.