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 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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Culture An extraordinary yearning to understand a father’s life
Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow By Deborah Tannen Ballantine Books, 272 pages, $28 You may know the Georgetown University sociolinguist Deborah Tannen from her groundbreaking 1990 examination of how gender impacts conversational styles, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.” Or from…
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Culture Is it time to start taking beauty pageants seriously?
Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America By Hilary Levey Friedman Beacon Press, 256 pages, $25.95 Beauty pageants have haunted Hilary Levey Friedman since childhood. “I can’t remember ever not knowing what a beauty pageant was,” the Brown University sociologist writes in the opening pages of “Here She Is.” “In…
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Culture 50 shades of unconditional longing in a tale of erotic obsession
22 Minutes of Unconditional Love By Daphne Merkin Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 238 pages, $26 In her self-revelatory nonfiction, Daphne Merkin has written memorably about her bouts of depression and her sexual fixation on spanking. Her latest novel, “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love,” tries to meld two traditions: the erotic tale of female submission and…
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