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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Books Fall Brings a Rich Harvest of Books
A bounty of Jewish and Israeli-themed books awaits readers this fall, with choices ranging from the gently nostalgic to the deeply disturbing. In both fiction and nonfiction, the past is very much present. Much of the fiction draws heavily on history (“A Guide for the Perplexed,” “Dissident Gardens,” “The Lion Seeker”) or autobiography (“Between Friends”)….
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Culture Heyday of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Made Publishing House Seem Like ‘Mad Men’
● Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux By Boris Kachka Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, $28 Descended from the influential Straus and Guggenheim families, Roger W. Straus Jr. bestrode the publishing company he co-founded in 1946 with “a sui generis blend…
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Culture The Rediscovery of a Yiddish Master Painter From Czernovitz
In 2002, during a visit to his native Israel, Haim Baron’s mother urged him to buy one of his cousin Isiu Schärf’s artworks. Baron had seen some of Schärf’s work before in the apartment of his maternal grandmother, Schärf’s aunt, who had sponsored the artist’s emigration from Romania to Israel in 1974. And Baron and…
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Books The 12 New (Jewish) Books For Summer
Summertime, when the living is said to be easier and vacations beckon, can favor us with more reading time. But heat doesn’t necessarily mean light — and not all our book suggestions, split evenly between new releases in fiction and nonfiction, are typical beach fare. Though cineplexes fill with frothy comedies and special-effects epics, publishing…
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Culture Vera Gran’s Biographer Reconsiders the Stigma of Wartime Collaboration
● Vera Gran: The Accused By Agata Tuszynska Translated from the French of Isabelle Jannes-Kalinowski by Charles Ruas Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $28.95 To contemporary American readers, the name Vera Gran may be unfamiliar. But Gran was a celebrated singer, a beauty with an unusually deep voice and a passionate following in Poland and…
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Culture Diary of Girl’s Time in Concentration Camps Invites Comparisons to Anne Frank
● Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp By Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel W.W. Norton, 240 pages, $24.95 Seven decades after the Holocaust, survivor stories are still trickling out, adding nuance to a familiar and gruesome narrative. It is sometimes hard for these latecomers to get the attention…
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Culture Thriller Writer Janice Steinberg Preaches Gospel of Second Chances
● The Tin Horse By Janice Steinberg Random House, 352 pages, $26 At 85, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, “a brisk, no-bullshit woman” who worked as a civil rights attorney, is downsizing as she prepares to enter a retirement community. The University of Southern California, which wants her papers, has provided an eager young archivist to help…
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Culture Shining Light on American Complicity In Harboring Nazis
● Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals By Richard Rashke Delphinium Books, 622 pages, $29.95 There is horror to spare in Richard Rashke’s “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals,” an engrossing cri de coeur about our country’s skewed post-World War II priorities. The…
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