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 As in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ small disasters foretell the destruction of a world
The Slaughterman’s Daughter By Yaniv Iczkovits; translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf Schocken Books, 515 pages, $28.99 As history, family lore, and Yiddish fiction all attest, the 19th-century Russian Empire held numerous dangers for Jews in the Pale of Settlement: grinding poverty, pogroms, conscription into the Czar’s army. Sholem Aleichem’s folkloric stories mined this…
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Culture Digging into Holocaust history and finding a sort of gold
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pages, $27 Menachem Kaiser’s third-generation Holocaust memoir, in keeping with the genre, is an act of reclamation – or at least an attempt at one. In “Plunder,” Kaiser admits to the limits of his project and confesses his envy…
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Culture Who murdered a Nazi fugitive — and does the answer actually matter?
The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive By Philippe Sands Alfred A. Knopf, 417 pages, $30 “It is more important to understand the butcher than the victim,” the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas told Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London. That seems a questionable assertion, not least…
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Culture In Jerusalem, where lives intersect thrillingly — and sometimes violently
City of a Thousand Gates By Rebecca Sacks Harper, 384 pages, $27.99 As her epigraph suggests, Rebecca Sacks’ lovely debut novel, “City of a Thousand Gates,” concerns the impact of “the high drama of history” on individual lives. The phrase is drawn from Robert Musil’s philosophical novel, “The Man Without Qualities.” Here the lives are…
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Culture Long after the Kindertransport, the trauma remained
The Berlin Shadow: Living with the Ghosts of the Kindertransport By Jonathan Lichtenstein Little, Brown Spark, 311 pages, $28 Destroyed and divided, then rebuilt and reunified, Berlin is at once defiantly modern and haunted by history. In Jonathan Lichtenstein’s memoir, “The Berlin Shadow,” the city’s ghosts are even more present and powerful in its cafés…
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Culture After the Holocaust, displaced by indifference and paralysis
The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War By David Nasaw Penguin Press, 654 pages, $35 In the aftermath of World War II, Europe was in chaos, with millions homeless and in flight from violence, persecution or retribution for wartime crimes. Some had survived concentration camps; others had been forced laborers…
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Culture Who would marry a Nazi leader — and why?
Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany By James Wyllie St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages, $28.99 It is a cliché of Holocaust history to remark on the jarring contrast between the domestic lives of Nazi perpetrators and their murderous deeds. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, was also…
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Culture Imagine, if you will, a sort of Yiddish ‘Brigadoon’
Imagine a village in Poland so isolated that it has escaped the horrors of 20th-century Jewish history. This is the challenging suspension-of-disbelief that Max Gross, a former Forward staff writer, requires of readers of “The Lost Shtetl.” Their reward is a wryly engaging picaresque novel that toggles between social satire and bittersweet romance. The town…
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