Leaving Lucy Pear
Award-winning novelist Anna Solomon’s second novel Leaving Lucy Pear, now out in paperback, is a masterfully woven web of ambition and lies.
The Comedown
There is pleasure to be had in a work of fiction whose scope spans two generations. Characters are introduced or shown in flashbacks as children, and we see how they fulfill – or don’t – the expectations placed on them by their parents, or how traumas they experience later come to bear. In The Comedown (Henry Holt) – as in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s recent epic of the African diaspora, or Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club – Rebekah Frumkin explores the ways in which choices made by parents echo through children and grandchildren for decades
The Book of V
The lives of three fiercely driven women intersect and overlap through time and space in Anna Solomon’s enthralling new novel.
Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman Among Books
Jewish women for almost five thousand seven hundred seventy years have struggled with a tradition that moved them into a life of modesty, early marriage and motherhood. Formal education was forbidden to women, a point brought home in Maggie Anton's three novels "Rashi's Daughters I, II and III". Women inherited wisdom by what was referred to as Binah, a mystical process where they acquired all the knowledge necessary to sustain their family's needs. The progressive streams of Judaism recently have opened up their doors to women's full participation in all aspects of religious and communal life. The author Ilana Blumberg's journey is that of a woman in love with learning of Judaism whose full participation in the Modern Orthodox world is often blocked by the rules in the sacred texts she reveres.
Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
Venerable film critic Molly Haskell unveils a warm respect for the blockbuster filmmaker, discussing his evolution from wunderkind to serious filmmaker through the lens of his very personal struggle with Judaism.
The Family Tabor
What do we choose to show to others, and what do we keep hidden? How do we curate our public face?
Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent
In his highly readable and concise biography – Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press) – of the famous philosopher, Paul Mendes-Flohr, chief editor of the 22-volume German language collection of Buber’s works, described him as a man who championed “a life of dialogue” and taught that “all real living is meeting.”
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
While Europe in the Middle Ages was characterized by an agrarian feudal economy, in the same period, the mostly Muslim-controlled lands surrounding the Mediterranean thrived on trade—from Spain to North Africa, Palestine, Persia, Yemen, and India.
The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
In her book, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, author and book critic Donna Rifkind vividly describes the 1930s and 1940s, when 10,000 German-speaking refugees, most of them Jews, found a safe haven from Nazism in Los Angeles.