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 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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Culture Can You Sing A Novel To The Tune Of ‘Fiddler On The Roof’?
After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by “Fiddler on the Roof” By Alexandra Silber Pegasus Books, 336 pages, $25.95 “Fiddler on the Roof” ends with the dairyman Tevye and most of his family evicted from their shtetl of Anatevka and heading to new lives in America. In their musical adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish-language tales, Joseph…
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Art How Jewish Athletes Defied Stereotypes Throughout History
Never Walk Alone: Jewish Identities in Sport At the Munich Jewish Museum Through January 7, 2018 The 1936 Berlin Olympics showcased the Nazi love of spectacle and buttressed the regime’s international legitimacy. To avert boycott threats, the government temporarily muted overt manifestations of its anti-Semitic policies, removing discriminatory signage and toning down newspaper rhetoric. But…
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Art How Henryk Ross’s Amazing Photos Unearthed The History Of Lodz — And Mine As Well
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through July 30 The story of the Lodz Ghetto has become folkloric. Chronicled in novels such as Leslie Epstein’s “King of the Jews” and Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Emperor of Lies,” this was the place that the dictatorial Mordechai Chaim…
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