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 A Family, Dispersed And Splintered By The Holocaust
MAYBE ESTHER: A FAMILY STORY By Katja Petrowskaja; translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Harper, 272 pages, $25.99 By Julia M. Klein More than seven decades after World War II and the Holocaust ruptured civilization, we’re still trying to make sense of the fallout. Intimate first-person accounts have ceded ground, in large part, to…
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Culture Dara Horn Asks The Fundamental Questions Of Life — Eternal And Otherwise
ETERNAL LIFE: A NOVEL By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pages, $25.95 Growing older, we wrestle with the brevity of life, the paucity of our accomplishments, the impossible desire for more time. Beset by nostalgia or regret, we may yearn for the chance to revisit our youth armed with middle-aged wisdom. In her…
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Culture A 95-year-old war hero tells his story
Guy Stern still remembers the day he almost saved his family
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Culture How A Father-and-Son Story Became A Real-Life Odyssey
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic By Daniel Mendelsohn Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages $26.95 When Daniel Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father asked if he might audit his son’s Bard College seminar on Homer’s “Odyssey,” the classicist feared that embarrassment might ensue. He wasn’t wrong. But his discomfort wasn’t the half of it. The…
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Culture Paranoia, Spies and Ariel Sharon in Nathan Englander’s Twisty New Thriller
Dinner at the Center of the Earth By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $26.95 In his fiction, Nathan Englander has written with uncommon verve about the varieties of Jewish experience. Among other subjects, he’s tackled the Holocaust and its legacy (“The Tumblers,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”) the…
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Culture Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser’s Excellent Israeli Adventure
Our Israeli Diary, 1978: Of That Time, Of That Place By Antonia Fraser Oneworld Publications, 176 pages, $16.99 Even on vacation, writers may not be able to set aside their vocation. And so we have this spikily charming diary by the British biographer and memoirist Antonia Fraser, a chronicle of a 15-day trip to Israel…
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Culture How The Ritchie Boys Helped Win World War II For America
Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler By Bruce Henderson William Morrow, 448 pages, $28.99 As the Nazi noose pulled ever tighter in Germany, many Jewish families prioritized sending their eldest sons to freedom. A few years later, some of…
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Culture Love In The Time Of Scholarship, Courtesy of Rachel Kadish
The Weight of Ink By Rachel Kadish Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 592 pages, $28 By now, it’s a familiar trope: stories set in the past and the present, at once parallel and intersecting, linked by writing that survives through the centuries. The many forerunners of Rachel Kadish’s new historical fiction, “The Weight of Ink,” include Tom…
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