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 History Made and Broke David Laskin’s Family
The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century By David Laskin Viking Adult, 400 pages, $32 David Laskin descends from the most privileged branch of an Eastern European Jewish clan that, like many, splintered into three groups during the convulsions of the last century. Geography turned out to be destiny: The Americans…
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Culture Yossi Klein Halevi Delivers a Masterful Saga of Seven Israeli Paratroopers
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation By Yossi Klein Halevi HarperCollins Publishers, 608 pages, $35 Israel’s Six Day War, in 1967, was its greatest military victory, but in the end, a costly one. The territorial gains that resulted became both flash points for conflict and bargaining…
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Culture A Hungarian Love Story Set Against the Backdrop of Wartime
● I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary By Marianne Szegedy-Maszák Spiegel & Grau, 370 pages, $27 World War II and the Holocaust extinguished so many millions of lives, so many hopes, that each reclaimed story seems like a precious work of salvage. In “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times:…
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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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