William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).  [hidepost]
Ashery and Sansour felt that the ‘notion of a fictional graphic novel alone’ is not enough, and wanted the ‘process behind the book to be transparent and grounded in our daily reality’. Therefore, the graphic chapters unfolding the storyline are interspersed with photographs of the two in relevant locations in Israel/Palestine and London — from the separation wall to a Sunday roast meal and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth piece in Tate Modern, better known as ‘the crack’ — probably the most engaging and communicative piece of contemporary art in recent memory. Posing as two rather experimental performance artists (Ashery last seen dressed up as controversial 17th century  messianic figure Shabbtai Zevi; Sansour notorious for her Sombrero-donning, gun-slinging character Bethlehem Bandolero) next to a piece of art popular enough to become a tourist attraction speaks volumes of the main question posed herein: can art change the world? Old question – fortunately, this book articulates it in novel (or should it say Nonel? Or Vovel?) ways.
There is a reason why it will only be revealed at this point that Ashery is Jewish Israeli and Sansour Palestinian. There is a reason it will only now be mentioned that the central concrete nemesis (notwithstanding a handful of sci-fi ones) they confront as superheroes is the separation wall in Israel, which they intend to break down. There is a reason why this review will refrain from making an analogy between Ashery and Sansour asking themselves whether their artistic practice places them in a ghetto separating them from the ability to influence reality, and indeed the wall, stranding the Palestinians in a tragically non-metaphorical ghetto. And the reason for that is that the emotions, prejudices, fears, mistrust and pre-conceptions we have in regards to the conflict on either side of the wall and of the left/right political fence constitute the more elusive and therefore more difficult wall to demolish.
Simply by revealing that this book is made by a couple of lefty arty-farty bleeding hearts, one risks erecting a wall between the crucial insights offered in their book and considerable potential readership. How sad it is that being divided to camps doesn’t mean dialogue, even polemic – but a secret, crawling civil war. How sad it is that global political discourse is light years away from the level offered by this book. How tragically deep the chasm between what politicians and artists see, how uncompromising the latter’s honesty, self-doubt, investigative drive and clarity.  How seemingly easy it is for an Israeli and a Palestinian to find common ground anywhere besides their shared homeland.
Ashery and Sansour are lefty arty-farty types perhaps, but they are certainly not naïve and wide-eyed about it. On the contrary, they are only too aware of the traps and pitfalls they face, and go through acrobatic twists, leaving no stone unturned in their determination to understand their position as politically-engaged artists, and the relevance of said position for the rest of us unsuspecting fundamentalists. The quoted bitter assertion opening this review reveals their familiarity with the ways the world always finds ways to erect a dialogue-blocking wall around them: in 2000 their agenda is too ahead of its time to be noticed, and in 2009 they’re allegedly jumping some ridiculed bandwagon. To paraphrase Reem Fadda’s (rather opaque) text in the essay section closing the book, Ashery and Sansour seek a present where their voice is heard.
Therefore, the main conflict tackled by the book is not the Israeli-Palestinian one, but that besieging the artist torn between self-fulfilment and political commitment. The novel begins as our two artists are infected by a mysterious virus that is revealed to imbue them with ‘context-responsive’ superpowers, alas it comes on account of losing their creativity. Ashery and Sansour look political art in the eye as a praxis that often betrays selfish privilege camouflaged in good intentions. Ashery and Sansour ask one another the cruellest question: are we forced to choose between a life in pursuit of artistic goals and a life of committed activism? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, facing the severity of a century-long conflict, is the solution in the hands of heroes, freedom-fighters and messiahs? Are artists — and ordinary people for that matter — out of their depth in this equation? Is the position of the artist as a passive anarcho-pacifist — always averse to violence and to the notion of wielding any level of power — the privilege of those who are living a safe, sheltered life where strife and oppression are confined to the TV screen?
Ashery and Sansour’s quest for an answer constantly breaks the book’s ‘fourth wall’: their aversion to political power is exchanged with treating their practice as control freaks; they express reluctance to go with the flow of the genre and become ‘real’ heroes who at least make a difference in this imaginary realm. This compulsion to disturb narrative as such, shatter illusion whatever form it takes, refuse to serve as propagandists to their own agenda — as if illusion, myths, and propaganda are by definition enemies one must slay to unravel a precious, forgotten, common sense clarity — condemn them, and to a considerable extent every political activist, to remain perpetual underdogs — noble losers. Ashery and Sansour confess to being trapped; yet sharing this existential cul-de-sac with us stems out of a sense of responsibility and the urgency of a desire to break free.
The biggest underlying fear keeping every concerned citizen awake at night is, to quote John Lydon, that ‘better days will never be’: the impossibility to even imagine a world based on justice and peace. This fear underpins the superior text in the book’s essay section, curator Nat Muller’s allegorical sci-fi ‘Proposal for the Venice Biennnale Intergalactic Pavilion’. Muller is masterful — and hilarious — in imagining futuristic conflicts and trends leading up to ‘galactic liberation’, a utopian ground zero after which it becomes much harder to visualise the ways of the world and the role of its artists.  Muller suddenly needs strife to trigger interest and tension. Under the ‘foreseeable obstacles’ section of her surreal proposal she details ‘unstable meteorological conditions across the Mediterranean’ threatening the realisation of Nonel and Vovel’s project. The next section ushers back what we’d think we managed to get rid of by the year 2212 — security, needed as precaution against a cult of revisionist settlers who falsely maintain that Palestine was never liberated.
If the only function we can imagine for future peacetime art is a bizarre repetitive re-enactment of a by-then unneeded heroism; If the only possible excitement, the only projected life-force is nostalgia for the extinct need to resist, aren’t we admitting our secret collaboration with the present’s state of strife to which we seem to be addicted? Nonel and Vovel make the bold step of asking this question. Possible answers contradict the aforementioned essayist Fadda’s ‘liberation through entering history’ position — three hints will be provided. First is Lydon’s above quote. Second is Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence (resonating with pre-historical ‘dreamtime’ and negating monotheism’s linear history). Final is something the recently departed thinker, essayist, columnist and artist Amos Kenan said in relation to Zionism, quoted in the biography written by his partner Nurith Gertz, ‘Unrepentant’. I paraphrase: ‘if the dream comes true and it’s not what we thought we wanted, it means there must have been something inherently faulty with the dream to begin with. We must therefore examine what is wrong with our dream’.[hidepost]

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.

Reappraisals is his first book since Postwar. It is a collection of essays published between 1994 and 2006. These two dozen essays mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. This is Judt as essayist and public intellectual, writing about writers, thinkers and politics from the Cold War to the Bush Years. He is opinionated and fluent, a sort of east coast David Starkey, with more than a touch of nastiness. He rages against Israel, dismisses French Marxists like Louis Althusser, and eviscerates a recent biography of Arthur Koestler. But he has his heroes, too. Koestler and Primo Levi, Edward Said and Albert Camus, ‘the best man in France’. His heroes are Jews and exiles, mostly men (and the occasional woman) in the dark times between the Russian Revolution and the height of the Cold War.

There are interesting continuities between these essays, mostly written while he was working on Postwar, and his acclaimed history of post-1945 Europe itself. In both there is a dark vision. He has no illusions about Europe (or America). There is no happy story of progress and he reserves some of his sharpest polemics for the post-1989 optimism and faith in free-market democracy that followed the fall of the Wall. Much of the history in these essays is brutal. He writes of the violence of Prussian troops in 1815 and what Romanian soldiers did to Jews in World War Two. He admires Hannah Arendt for the way she grasped the central importance of terror in totalitarian regimes and approvingly quotes the Polish thinker, Leszek Kolakowski: ‘The Devil is part of our experience… Evil, I contend, is not contingent … but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.’

The rise and fall of Communism was, according to Judt, one of the defining features of the twentieth century, especially the mid-twentiethth century. He keeps coming back to the great anti-Communist tradition, both critics of Communism and ex-Communists like Koestler and Camus. ‘They are,’ he writes, ‘the twentieth century’s Republic of Letters.’ Some of his fiercest scorn is for Marxists who never saw the light — the French Communist, Louis Althusser, and the historian, EJ Hobsbawm. His review of Hobsbawm’s memoirs is one of the best essays in the book. How could Hobsbawm stay loyal to Communism, after all that had happened? ‘Seventy years of “real existing Socialism” contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.’ And yet Hobsbawm remained a Communist. He was undoubtedly one of the great historians of his time, and yet, ‘he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.’

A third theme in these essays, also familiar to readers of Postwar, is memory or rather, mis-memory.  Perhaps the most impressive essay in the book is a magnificent review-essay on the colossal seven-volume Les lieux de memoire, about French memory and history. Judt has a keen sense of the feeling of loss at the heart of this project. Despite its apparent solidity — 5,600 pages — Les lieux de memoire is an attempt to preserve a living sense of peasant and rural France at the very moment it was disappearing. At that time the French Left and the Catholic Church, indeed France itself, as a great power, were all in decline. ‘France,’ writes Judt, ‘was thus modernizing, downsizing, and splitting apart all at once.’ France in 1960 would have been recognizable to Flaubert or Hugo. ‘The France of 1980 did not even much resemble the country just ten years earlier.’ This Herculean attempt to capture the essence of France and its past was problematic from the start, writes Judt. The problem was that the French had lost a sense of a shared past: ‘there no longer is a received version.’ Since 1918, the story becomes more confused, less glorious, more troubling. The Third Republic was easy to commemorate — all those streets named after Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur. But the shame of Vichy? The dirty wars of Algeria and Indo-China? The decline of rural France? This is not unique to France. In the essays on Blair and ‘Heritage’ Britain and ‘The World We Have Lost’ we see that our relationship to the past is becoming more, not less, complicated. Even the recent past seems already remote. ‘The twentieth-century is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.’ ‘We wear,’ he writes, ‘the last century rather lightly.’

What can this mean? Surely the twentieth-century is still close to us? But Judt digs down to larger social changes which are cutting us off from the central experiences of the twentieth -century. As he writes about Koestler and Camus, he realises how remote these debates about Communism are to a generation born after 1989. War, or civil war, touched every European life in the first half of the twentieth- century. Now it is something which happens somewhere else.

Reappraisals is shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss: from the speed of social change that has eroded our sense of a shared world to the decline of the two great intellectual faiths of modern Europe, Catholicism and Communism On the disappearance of central and east European Jewry he quotes Manès Sperber, born in Galicia: “I am one of the last, one of the walking coffins of an exterminated world.”’

The nearer Judt comes to the present, the emptier and more desolate the scene. All the ideals are in the past. Communism; the belief in a free world, shared by Camus and Kolakowski; the idealism of the first generations of Zionists. All gone. . America has become shallow, unequal and strident. The hopes of post-1989 free market capitalism have become empty illusions. Blair’s Britain is ‘often squalid,’ the railways and hospitals don’t work, poverty is rampant.

And then there is Israel. There are only three essays on Israel, but they loom large. The first is a handsome tribute to his late friend, Edward Said, the second, a reassessment of the Six-Day War (his last piece for The New Republic) and the third, an all-out attack on Israel today, ‘The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up.’

Taken together, these essays are the most provocative and controversial part of the book. A number of key points run through them. First, ‘Israel’s international standing has precipitately collapsed’, and, conversely, the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the object of international sympathy. Israel, writes Judt, is internationally isolated, a pariah, dependent only on American support. Secondly, the ideals of the European founding fathers have given way to a new militarism, nationalism and religious irrationalism. Finally, Israel needs a dramatic change of strategy, ‘a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies…’ These would include; dismantling the major settlements, ‘opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’s bluff by offering its leaders something serious [sic] in return for the recognition of Israel and a cease-fire…’

At this point, Judt’s prose loses its analytic rigour and precision, becoming vague. Negotiations with ‘Palestinians’. Who exactly? Edward Said or Hamas (mentioned just once in the whole book)? Offering ‘its leaders’ (who?) ‘something serious’ (what?). Judt is quick to condemn, but he has nothing constructive to offer. His lack of empathy — Israel today is only the aggressor — leads to a jarring  one-sidedness quite distinct from his masterful, nuanced balancing of complexity in other chapters of history.When he writes about Israel Judt the historian and intellectual essayist descends into polemic and brawl. His tone becomes angry, hectoring and imprecise, as it does in his later attack on intellectuals — Bush’s ‘useful idiots’ — who supported the invasion of Iraq.

Raised in the East End, all his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. His parents, he told The Guardian, ‘were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against Communism.’ As a teenager he was passionately pro-Israel — ‘I was a gung-ho, utterly committed, leftwing Zionist.’ Now, sixty, he has two modes for dealing with the loss of the two faiths that once drove him. One is a kind of mourning for a lost world, the other is a form of contemptuous rage Neither have much to do with the great historian who wrote Postwar and has helped us, through a lifetime’s work, with great sublety and care, understand the complexities, silences and darkness of our recent history.

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.

Some have attempted this feat before using different presentation methodologies. They have chosen their favourite sugyot (sections), their personal ‘top ten’ list of passages they think capture the essence of the Talmud. Others have shared passages outlining the various styles of writing or methods of reasoning that the Talmud utilises. Normon Solomon, however, has chosen to follow the classic outline of the Babylonian Talmud, maintaining the identity and integrity of the original volumes by selecting a passage from each to present in this anthology. In this sense, the anthology follows a very traditional pathway — parallelling the daf yomi model where Jews study a page a day of Talmud from the beginning to the end — so too does this anthology lead its readers through an abbreviated version of the Talmud, briefly touching on each masechet before moving to the next.

In other ways this anthology diverges significantly from tradition. The introduction expresses an appreciation of scholarly methodologies for studying Talmud, providing historical context, social and cultural history, literary analysis and even some references to textual criticism. In addition, the appendices contain numerous reference tools for those beginning their exploration of  Talmud, including maps, illustrations, timelines and an extensive bibliography and index.

The selections themselves are uneven in terms of both length and accessibility to the novice. This is perhaps unavoidable within the framework that Solomon has chosen, as most modern readers will find that the selections from tractates about Shabbat or marriage will be more relevant and engaging than those chapters regarding purity of Temple objects or tithes to the priests. Solomon has seemingly tried to offset this ‘relevance imbalance’ by allowing for longer selections from tractates that might resonate more with the modern reader.

The use of different fonts, spacings, upper and lowercase letters, and bold typeface makes the intricacies of talmudic discourse more accessible to the beginner. In addition, Solomon provides a useful introduction to each tractate, summarising the contents and contextualising the particular passage. All of these elements — the introductions, the appendices, the typeface — make this edition eminently readable.

The question is, however, how best to use this resource. Ironically, it suffers from the same challenge as the Talmud itself; as talmudic material is organised according to a logic of its own, it is difficult to find a particular passage that speaks to the issue you want to explore. The stream-of-consciousness methodology of talmudic discourse defies modern taxonomic categories. Therefore, without an index and/or extensive knowledge of the entire Talmud, this remains a resource that requires a teacher or a guide. What Solomon does not provide is a commentary to walk one through the passages themselves. Though this is understandable as adding commentary would have expanded an already substantial tome into at least a second volume.

It is the perfect text for a university professor to assign varied sections of Talmud for study in a history of Judaism class. Alternatively, a rabbi might use it as the text for an English language ‘Introduction to Talmud’ adult education course. The casual reader picking it up off the shelf in a bookstore, however, will be at a loss to utilise this resource. Perhaps Solomon’s next project could be to write a mishneh torah to guide students through the intricacies of the passages he has chosen.

This weakness, however, is also the very strength of the Talmud. While it is not readily accessible to the casual reader, it remains one of the richest ever literary and legal creations. This new anthology is a welcome addition to the ever-growing bookshelf of Talmudic literature in English translation, which allows teachers to guide those without knowledge of Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew into the ‘Sea of Talmud’.

As it is written in Pirkei Avot ‘Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.’ One could apply this same statement to Solomon’s anthology. It contains everything, which is exactly what makes it difficult to navigate. But if one invests the time to ‘turn it’, it has everything, or at least a little bit of everything, and more than one could rightfully expect from 822 pages.

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.

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 collection is divided into themed sections. The first of these, entitled ‘Religion and the Bible’, begins with a psychoanalytically inflected discussion of the meanings of shoes and shoelessness in the context of God’s desire for an intimate relationship with human beings. This is followed by a study of Halitzah (the ceremony of removing the shoe from her brother-in-law by the childless widow of his dead brother, releasing him from the obligation of marrying her). In this chapter the shoe aspect, though explored in the context of which kinds of shoes were permitted for the performance of Halitzah, is secondary to a feminist enquiry into the history and meaning of Halitzah and Levirate marriage. The next chapter considers late nineteenth and early twentieth-century shoe-shaped tombstones found in cemeteries in eastern Europe. Even though the primary data (the tombstones) is damaged by acid rain and human forces, and there is no scholarship on them, Rivka Parciack offers two fascinating suggestions to account for these unusually shaped tombstones. The final chapter in this section deals with the wearing of sandals as an expression of ideology in the modern Israeli state, and traces back the forging of the new Jewish identity through the wearing of what became known as Biblical sandals from the 1920s onwards.

The first two chapters of the next section, ‘Memories and Commemoration’, are rooted in early twentieth-century Europe. Nahshon reprints an extract from a memoir describing the different shoe-making professions (making the soles, making the uppers, mending shoes) in the Polish village where the author, born in 1916 and briefly apprenticed to a shoemaker, grew up. This is followed by a collection of Yiddish expressions and proverbs about shoemakers. Accompanying these, and offering its own commentary on this period, is Jeffrey Feldman’s essay which draws on his first encounter with the piles of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and accounts of the Eichmann trial where shoes were first held up as evidence of the mass murder of children. Feldman questions the meanings of these exhibitions and compares them with the exhibit about the Iraq war made of boots arranged in fields in the formation of tombstones. He is interested in the decay and conservation undergone by the hair and shoes remaining in the death camps and, above all, in visitors’ confrontations with the smell of the decaying leather.

The third section, ‘Ideology and Economics’, contains two chapters. The first traces the history of the Wandering Jew in drama and art, setting out a range of arguments about the place of the Wandering Jew in anti-Semitic discourse in Europe and the adoption of this figure by early Zionist thinkers who rejected the idea that Judaism is built on exile. Zionists are said to have ‘converted’ to the Christian theology of nineteenth-century nationalism, seeking to reinscribe the Jewish people in the pages of history and reconnect them to their land. The chapter is extremely well researched but only tangentially related to the idea of shoes. It is followed by a history of dress, including shoes, in the early history of Jewish settlement in Palestine and later in the new state of Israel.  A different context for some of the material discussed in the ‘Biblical Shoe’ chapter is offered here, suggesting that, despite its title, the earlier chapter might have been better placed in this section.

The final section of the collection, ‘Theatre, Art and Film’, begins with a discussion of sexuality centering on shoes and religion in the work of Bruno Schulz, whose drawings feature androgynous yeshiva boys and high-heeled dominatrixes with their abject admirers. The essay balances description and the contextualisation of Shulz’s work in theories of art history and psychoanalysis. Sonya Rapoport’s chapter describes how her 1970s work Shoe-Field was put together, but the discussion does not place the piece within any theoretical context, and her reason for choosing shoes is never explained. ‘The Theatrical Shoe’ is a textual, theatrical and cultural history of Gronemann’s comedy King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler, later translated into a Hebrew musical and first staged in Tel Aviv in 1943. It is a well-researched cultural history of theatre in Palestine and then Israel, but the topic seems to have been slightly wrenched to fit the shoe theme. Finally, in ‘The Cinematic Shoe’ Jeanette Malkin discusses an early film by Ernst Lubitsch. She interrogates the ‘Jewish’ portrayal of the petit bourgeois milieu, concluding that Lubitsch drew on the East European Jews often portrayed in the Jewish theatre. Lubitsch’s portrayal aroused controversy because he was working in a mass medium: he produced a too-public depiction of a reviled section of the Jewish population of Berlin at a time of rising anti-Semitism. The piece includes some discussion of the role of objects in Lubitsch’s films and notes the early product placement evident in the fashion show featuring shoes lent by Berlin emporia.

The book is generously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings and drawings. Each essay is accompanied by footnotes and bibliography, and the index is meticulous. The question I was left with, however, was whether scholars and general readers interested in the many fascinating topics discussed in this book would think of looking here for them.

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.

Insatiable as our appetite seems to be for the full bloody history of the collapse of ‘rational’, ‘progressive’ Europe into insanity and savagery, we are fascinated also by those moments just preceding it, as if, were we to look in the right place, we would somehow discover the point of return, the stone that, placed just right, might alter the flow of history. Mawer himself seems similarly fascinated by the years and months leading up to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, with the first half of the novel reconstructing the early days of the spectacular Landauer House, of its creation by the brilliant architect Rainer von Abt and inhabitation by the Jewish automobile tycoon Viktor Landauer and his non-Jewish wife Liesel.

Yet it remains nigh on impossible to read a novel such as this without an overwhelming sense of fatalism, of all roads leading only to one place — and for the most part Mawer does not attempt to force us to abandon this oppressive sense of inevitability. (Viktor Landauer feels ‘the tremors of uncertainty’ in Czechoslovakia, while his wife Liesel is struck by the image of herself and her husband as ‘evanescent creatures within the transparent walls of glass, like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives’). He is interested in all the contradictions — personal and political — inherent in the erection of this impressive, rational building just at the moment it becomes clear that it cannot be built to last, that if it survives at all it will be through sheer luck. What, and where, are the shadows cast by this palace of light?

Beyond the Glass House, the shadow of Nazism and genocide naturally looms large. Within it is drawn Viktor’s working class lover, Kata, a Hungarian-Slovak Jew he meets in Vienna, whose figure casts a shadow of its own over the Landauers’ marriage. Viktor’s discovery ‘that love, the focused, thermic lance of passion and hunger should be centred not on the figure of his wife, but on the body and soul of a half-educated, part-time tart’ is a shock to him, and to his wife when she discovers that, for all his championing of transparency, he is drawn to the ‘shabby opaque world’ he shares with Kata. And Liesel herself has her own shadowy secrets — the love Hana, her closest friend, has confessed she has for her, and her conflicted, uncertain response to this revelation. The Room ‘is only as rational as the people who inhabit it’, Hana claims: it cannot bestow rationality, only reveal the complex patterns of desire and deceit formed by those beneath its roof.

The subsequent history of the house suffers by contrast, as if, once the original inhabitants have been forced to flee for their own safety, Mawer knows it is necessary to bring us up to speed in time for the eventual reunion (the novel opens with Liesel’s return years later), but is nowhere near as careful about getting there as he was in building up to the moment of the Landauers’ exile. Though the later characters are linked to the Landauers both by theme — of art, of music, of questions of faith and faithlessness in love — and through Hana, the links have a tenuousness about them. Hana’s declaration of love to Zdenka, who works in the house in its later years under Communist rule, is so similar to her prior declaration to Liesel years earlier that it’s hard to think of it as anything other than Hana’s pursuit of the shadow of her lost love, rather than a true expression of feeling.

Perhaps this is because, for all its promise of the future, the Glass Room has been unavoidably claimed by the past. That it was created to be the herald of a new dawn just at the moment darkness descended ties it irrevocably to the past it sought to be free of. Von Abt’s great project was ‘to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air’, away from the shadows and into the light. But to float forever is to exist beyond history, outside the unpredictabilities of human behaviour, an impossibility. Any space that Man inhabits can only bring the shadows rushing back.

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?

It struck me then as now that the topic of Jews and sex is a crucial one if we are to understand Jewish behaviours and attitudes, particularly towards assimilation and intermarriage. So I was eager to read the unambiguously-titled collection Jews and Sex edited by British-Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams. The book has its roots in Abram’s essay on Jews in the porn industry, published in the Jewish Quarterly in the winter 2004/5 issue, and the nude cover photo of Jewish porn star/performance artist Annie Sprinkle suggests a welcome openness about sexual matters.

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Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

And Laish is a strange and wonderful book, a curious story of an extraordinary journey: a convoy of Jews travelling through Eastern Europe on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The travellers are all strangers to each other — old religious men, traders, thieves and murderers are crammed together in the wagons — and none stranger than the narrator, the orphan Laish, because nothing could ever be familiar to a boy with no family. Laish knows nothing about his parents and does not know much about himself either, not even the meaning of his name, only that ‘the name comes from Hungary’. (But Laish, your name comes from the Bible, from the story of Palti, son of Laish, who tearfully followed his wife Michal to the gates of Jerusalem. She was reunited with David and he was ordered to turn back. So he, like you, tried to reach Jerusalem.) Aharon Appelfeld the boy was orphaned at a young age. Eight years old when World War Two broke, young Aharon escaped from a labour camp and spent several years hiding in the forests of Ukraine, somehow surviving and waiting for his parents to come back to him. Appelfeld reached Palestine in 1946 and today lives in Jerusalem.

When Laish is ordered to record the names of those in the convoy who die along the way, he too, like Appelfeld, finds himself in the role of the storyteller. Speaking from the depths of loneliness, his voice, the voice of the uprooted, comes from nowhere, with no vantage point of space or time.

Telling stories does not come easily to the boy. He is a cautious narrator, not used to being listened to, or to making himself too visible. In the dangerous environment of the convoy, a child alone is wary of getting in people’s way. He tries to disappear in the story and carefully encodes his emotions. ‘In his last days,’ he says of the man for whom he used to run errands, ‘although he goaded me, he did not make me hate him, even though his wickedness overflowed from him’. Then, after the man dies, Laish remarks dryly, ‘I became someone else’s property’.

Laish is unlike other orphan storytellers. The orphan in Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous ‘The Voices’ cycle, for example, directly confronts the readers with the abysmal agony of his being. His tone is disturbing and accusatory. Pip, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, is a self-helping Victorian. True to the ideology of his time, Pip leads himself from orphaned boyhood to independent manhood by the power of his storytelling. But Jewish Laish narrates as he lives, almost in hiding. He is reluctant to talk about himself too much. He opts for the ‘we’ instead of the ‘I’ and does his best to blend in with the rest of the human mass moving towards Jerusalem. It is easier to chronicle the journey, other people, other people’s heartaches. So he quietly observes the bizarre collection of human beings on the wagons: Mamshe, the girl who lives in a man-size birdcage; Ephraim, who has visions from other worlds; the dumb, the drunk, the demonic. Some live their nightmares in their sleep and some live them in waking. Some are haunted by their past, others by an unknown future.

The convoy is delayed again and again, by greed, violence and disease. But maybe it is not delayed at all. Laish’s ‘employer’ believes that the pilgrimage is nothing but a fraud. ‘I don’t believe that the convoy intends to reach Jerusalem,’ the boy admits. ‘Even though wherever we arrive, the dealers declare our destination at the top of their lungs.’ The dealers deal, the beggars beg and no one is nearer Jerusalem. Yet somewhere else Laish confesses he dreams of the city, ‘a broad, light-filled city — a city where there is no frost or dampness, where a man can lay his head on a stone and fall asleep.’ But then, quickly, apologetically, ‘I must surely be wrong.’

So the days are full of deception, and the nights are full of terror. Bundled in their corners, the weak suffer. The thieves, quick-fingered and ghost-like, rob them of the little they have and the thugs threaten to throw them off the wagons. And in the midst of this, the old men, desperate to reach Jerusalem, slowly die one by one, as the convoy continues to stall. The book’s chapters are short and disorienting, and reflect the movement of the convoy. This is no straightforward movement. It is slightly out-of-time, slightly otherworldly, slightly not what it appears to be.

In this time-out-of-time, there are moments when compassion comes stiffly, in small measures,‘Once he bought me a bar of halva’, Laish remembers of his ‘employer’. Sometimes, there are even shows of affection: ‘From time to time people will say, ‘Laish is a good lad, he helps the old men’, and I am moved’. At these moments, the convoy briefly becomes something like a community. And then there is finally a hint of redemption, and a glimpse of Jerusalem.

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

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.

This is not to say Ozick stands aloof from the passing scene, but her concerns tend to be more instrumental than thematic. A chronicler of human fallibility, her characteristic tone is ironic or derisive. Of the four stories in Dictation, her current collection, two culminate in lacerating laughter and another with the revelation that lying or self-deception is the universal language of mankind. Consequently, although she never tires of acknowledging Henry James as her Master, her work is equally redolent of the mature visions of Twain and Melville.

Of my Bronx quartet, Ozick, craftiest at her craft, is by far the most difficult for many readers to grasp. To that end Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), her most recent novel, may be confidentally exploited as a kind of concordance to this new compilation of not-so-very short stories. In one of them, for example, the surviving Jewish sect of Karaites of Heir to the Glimmering World are reincarnated as sectarian exponents of a utopian, universal language aimed at ameliorating the global discord etiologically symbolised by Babel and its Tower.  Another Heir to the Glimmering World recurring, apposite motif in these new stories are mistreated babies who, symptomatic of an adult world that has lost its bearings, serve not as symbols of hope or redemption but as heirs to victimhood, mayhem, and murder.

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