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
-
Culture The Enduring Mysteries of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust By Ingrid Carlberg, with an introduction by Kofi Annan; translated by Ebba Segerberg MacLehose Press, 639 pages, $29.99 He was the multilingual scion of a powerful Swedish banking family, a gifted artist and architect, a…
-
Culture Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
-
Culture For Harry Houdini’s Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick
Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly Atria Books, 320 pages, $26 The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” The Irish…
-
Culture Magical Realism and Sexuality Energize Holocaust Novel
Unspeakable Things By Kathleen Spivack Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages, $25.95 Severed fingers tapping out a Schubert melody, violated flesh sizzling with sulfurous handprints, ghosts wrapping themselves around the living – these are among the images, unspeakable and clamorous, that populate Kathleen Spivack’s grotesquely poetic debut novel. Audaciously conceived and gorgeously written, “Unspeakable Things” is…
-
Culture Before the War, They Found a Last Resort in Ostend
Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark By Volker Weidermann, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon, 176 pages, $24.95 In the summer of 1936, Nazi Germany was preparing for the propaganda triumph of the Olympics, and Spain was exploding into civil war. Meanwhile, in the Belgian North Sea…
-
Culture Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
-
Culture How We Tell Holocaust Stories Without Survivors
We’ve reached a pivotal cultural moment in Holocaust historiography and memoir, poised between the final thoughts of the last survivors and the attempts of their children — and, more recently, their grandchildren — to make sense of their legacy. It’s a phenomenon with an equivalent in Germany, where the so-called Third Generation has been reckoning…
-
Culture Geraldine Brooks Reimagines King David — for Better and Worse
The Secret Chord By Geraldine Brooks Viking, 320 pages, $27.95 Musician and warrior, shepherd and poet, anointed of God and guilt-ridden sinner, the biblical King David is a compelling and contradictory figure. In her latest work of historical fiction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks (“March,” “People of the Book,” “Caleb’s Crossing”) heightens those contradictions,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
- 2
Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
- 3
News Meet the Jews who helped elect Zohran Mamdani
- 4
Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Zohran Mamdani reportedly tells business leaders he will ‘discourage’ the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’
-
Fast Forward Mike Huckabee denounces killing of Palestinian-American in the West Bank as ‘terrorist act’
-
Fast Forward Andrew Cuomo lists several Jewish endorsements on his website. But do they still apply?
-
Fast Forward Antisemitic memes fail to disqualify Elon Musk’s ‘MechaHitler’ bot from Department of Defense contract
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
