Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein and @juliamklein.bsky.social
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture Imagine, if you will, a sort of Yiddish ‘Brigadoon’
Imagine a village in Poland so isolated that it has escaped the horrors of 20th-century Jewish history. This is the challenging suspension-of-disbelief that Max Gross, a former Forward staff writer, requires of readers of “The Lost Shtetl.” Their reward is a wryly engaging picaresque novel that toggles between social satire and bittersweet romance. The town…
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Culture An extraordinary yearning to understand a father’s life
Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow By Deborah Tannen Ballantine Books, 272 pages, $28 You may know the Georgetown University sociolinguist Deborah Tannen from her groundbreaking 1990 examination of how gender impacts conversational styles, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.” Or from…
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Culture Is it time to start taking beauty pageants seriously?
Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America By Hilary Levey Friedman Beacon Press, 256 pages, $25.95 Beauty pageants have haunted Hilary Levey Friedman since childhood. “I can’t remember ever not knowing what a beauty pageant was,” the Brown University sociologist writes in the opening pages of “Here She Is.” “In…
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Culture 50 shades of unconditional longing in a tale of erotic obsession
22 Minutes of Unconditional Love By Daphne Merkin Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 238 pages, $26 In her self-revelatory nonfiction, Daphne Merkin has written memorably about her bouts of depression and her sexual fixation on spanking. Her latest novel, “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love,” tries to meld two traditions: the erotic tale of female submission and…
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Culture What Trump (and Masha Gessen) can teach us about autocracy
Surviving Autocracy By Masha Gessen Riverhead Books, 270 pages, $26 Everything seems to move more quickly these days, including publishing. The epilogue of Masha Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy,” a polemic urging resistance to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian inclinations, is dated April 2020. It’s topical enough to reference both the COVID-19 crisis and the administration’s “disastrous” response….
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Culture Philip Roth’s ‘terrible gift of intimacy’
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth By Benjamin Taylor Penguin Books, 171 pages, $26 Their relationship developed at a slow burn. Benjamin Taylor and Philip Roth met in 1994, at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Four years later, after reading “I Married a Communist,” Taylor wrote a letter, and Roth responded with a…
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Culture The suicide epidemic of World War II
“Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself:” The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945 By Florian Huber; translated by Imogen Taylor Little, Brown Spark, 304 pages, $29 For Nazi Germany’s shattered populace, the spring of 1945 brought the apocalypse. Allied bombs had leveled German cities, and the country’s armed forces were in retreat. The advance of…
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Culture After the Holocaust, incalculable losses and jaw-dropping discoveries
House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family By Hadley Freeman Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $26 The most vivid of the characters striding through Hadley Freeman’s “House of Glass” is Alex Maguy, whose very surname is pure self-invention. Freeman’s swaggeringly self-confident great-uncle founded a fashion house and an art gallery,…
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