Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

May 11, 2009 by David Herman

By Tony Judt

Heinemann, 2008, £20

In the early 1990s Tony Judt was in his mid-40s, a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history. Three things happened to make him one of the best-known historians of his generation. First, in 1995, he became Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, just at the time when historians in New York were redefining the way we think about modern Europe. Then, in 2005 he published Postwar, the masterpiece of the new European history, a monumental 900-page, acclaimed account of Europe since 1945. Finally, at around the same time as Postwar, he wrote a number of controversial articles attacking Israel and Bush’s war on terror. He had become one of the best-known public intellectuals in America.

The Talmud

May 11, 2009 by Shoshana Boyd Gelfand

Ed. Rabbi Norman Solomon

Penguin, 2009, £16.99

Talmud is essentially an activity, not a book; you engage in it, rather than read it as you would a piece of literature.

Thus Normon Solomon introduces the challenge of how to reduce this epic work, how to capture the intricacies and richness of the Babylonian Talmud that shaped rabbinic Judaism and remains today a core element into a one-volume anthology. The Talmud consists of law and lore, literature and theology, humour and intellectual debate. It contains discussions of historical figures, commerce, Temple offerings, torts, holiday observances, family relationships, agriculture and capital punishments, to name but a fraction of the subjects covered within its 63 volumes. The task of selecting representative sections which reflect the diversity of the entire work is mammoth.

Illuminations

May 11, 2009 by Sue Vice

By Eva Hoffman

Harvill Secker 2008, £16.99

Reading Eva Hoffman’s new novel is a mixed experience. At first, I found the rarefied and brittle consciousness of the protagonist, Isabel Merton, hard to engage with. Her life as an internationally famous concert pianist seems both admirable and enviable, yet she is dissatisfied. However, Isabel herself experiences unease at what she thinks of as her ‘hard’ but also ‘de luxe late capitalist life’ as a concert pianist. We read of a European tour she undertakes, travelling between Sofia and Prague, Vienna and London and the cities blur into an indistinguishable round of concert halls and hotels. What stands out for Isabel is a meeting with Anzor Islikhanov, an exiled representative of the Chechen government, and a man driven by energies at odds with her distanced and orderly life. Each recognizes in the other a capacity for passion and commitment: in Anzor’s case, to vengeful patriotism, in Isabel’s, to the power of music. They embark on an affair that seems unlikely; like her namesake Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Merton is a young American confronted by European wiles — but this time of a profoundly historical nature.

Read more

Jews and Shoes

May 11, 2009 by Louise Sylvester

By Edna Nashon

Berg Publishers, 2008, £17.99

The startling image on the cover of this book is a work by the Israeli artist Nechama Golan. It is a high-heeled sandal made of paper, ink and glue. The shoe is printed with a rabbinic text which explains how a woman is acquired, bringing together a number of ideas discussed in this book. In her introduction Nahshon alludes to the ‘special niche in the Jewish closet of memories’ occupied by shoes and their makers. Her book includes research ranging from commentary on shoes in the Bible, to Jewish art, drama and films featuring shoes, via the cobblers of the shtetl and the figure of the Wandering Jew.

The Glass Room

May 11, 2009 by Rosa Anderson

By Simon Mawer

Little, Brown, 2009, £ 16.99

‘Light and space…that is everything you need’. So declares a visitor to the spectacular Landauer House, the architectural apotheosis of modernity erected in the days before the black nightmare of World War II. There would be something almost too neat about this perfect construction, this paean to rationality and progress, emerging just at the point the forces of barbarism are about to descend on Europe, were it not of course essentially true. (The story of the Landauer House, the Glass Room, is based in large part upon the modernist Villa Tugendhat in Brno.) The bright dawn of innovation, of creativity and expectation, slips into twilight even as the Glass Room’s final fittings are being made, without ever seeing the expected day of its promise fulfilled. It is an anachronism almost from the moment of its completion.

Jews and Sex

May 11, 2009 by Keith Kahn-Harris

By Nathan Abrams

Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99

In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young adults. Notwithstanding the naivety and crudity of some aspects of Jewish Continuity’s ‘anti-intermarriage’ agenda, a detailed picture emerged that contributed to the understanding of British Jewry. But I couldn’t help feeling then, as now, that something was missing — we didn’t investigate what young Jews thought about the prospect and the reality of sex with other Jews. Was intermarriage partially a result of young Jews finding other Jews a sexual turn-off? Are non-Jews more sexually alluring to Jews (and visa versa)? What, in short, is the ‘sexual economy’ of British Jewish life?

Laish

May 11, 2009 by Adi Drori

By Aharon Appelfeld

Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

In some sort of translation trompe l’oeil, this work appears longer in English and the book heavier and more substantial. The Hebrew original (published in 1994) appeared shorter and slimmer, not quite a novel and almost a long parable. Perhaps English, the language that mothered the novel, arguably more wordy and nuanced than its Semitic counterpart, helps to give the work a more novelistic air. Reading the same book in two different languages is always a peculiar experience: familiar sentences take on a new tone; things, barely noticeable, are added or taken away; and still, it is the same Laish.

Dictation

May 11, 2009 by Haim Chertok

By Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

Four Jiggers of James, A Whiff of Woolf.

I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For class acts, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick are a match for any literary backfield Boston, San Francisco, or other cultural capitals might field. In individualised manners, the first three are all realists whose imaginative work is significantly coloured by social or political concerns. Ozick, on the other hand, a keen observer of wounded conscience and blindsided consciousness, is more cerebral than the others as well as less absorbed in the ebb and flow of history.