Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture In Amsterdam, borne back ceaselessly into a Jewish past
House on Endless Waters By Emuna Elon; translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 The plot of Emuna Elon’s lovely novel – about history, fiction and the importance of family ties — begins with a broken promise: The prominent Israeli novelist Yoel Blum has agreed to return to…
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Culture From Treblinka, a story of anguish and healing
Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father By Diana Wichtel Heritage, 278 pages, $22.95 Diana Wichtel’s father was an improbable Holocaust survivor. He managed to squeeze through the window of a rail car on its way from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, leaving his mother and other relatives to…
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Culture On The Trail Of Nazis And Nazi Hunters In America
Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America By Debbie Cenziper Hachette Books, 300 pages, $28 In his 2016 book, “The Nazi Hunters,” Andrew Nagorski suggested that, with nearly all the Nazi perpetrators gone, the time had come to tell the story of the men and women who had pursued them across continents…
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Culture A Survivor’s Story Where No One Is Exactly Who They Seem
The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing By Adam P. Frankel Harper, 271 pages, $27.99 Whenever he excelled, Adam P. Frankel’s paternal grandmother offered these words of encouragement: “Good genes.” The astute reader may detect a hint of ironic foreshadowing. Frankel’s memoir, “The Survivors,” takes a series of surprising, sometimes unwieldy, twists and…
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Culture To Protect A Predator: How Ronan Farrow Unmasked A Conspiracy
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators By Ronan Farrow Little, Brown and Company, 448 pages, $30 While Ronan Farrow was investigating sexual harassment and assault accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein for NBC News, Weinstein was reaching out repeatedly to Farrow’s bosses to quash his reporting. In one chilling exchange,…
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Culture From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey By Mikhal Dekel W.W. Norton & Company, 417 pages, $27.95 It was the prompting of an Iranian-American colleague at the City College of New York that stirred Mikhal Dekel’s interest in her family’s Holocaust narrative of flight, hardship and survival. Dekel’s initial idea was to collaborate on a book…
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Culture Pregnant At 57, A Woman Finds Tragedy And Reconciliation
On Division: A Novel By Goldie Goldbloom Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 271 pages; $26 The world conjured by Goldie Goldbloom’s “On Division” lies somewhere between realism and magical realism, at once vaguely possible and highly improbable. That liminal space seems just right for this elegant novel about a Hasidic woman cocooned by her close-knit faith…
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Culture How They Brought Down Harvey Weinstein And Jump-Started #MeToo
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement By Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey Penguin Press, $28, 310 pages In “She Said,” New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey raise the thorny question of whether the #MeToo movement has gone too far — or not far enough. Then…
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