Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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Culture 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 Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec
● La Boutique Obscure By Georges Perec Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker Melville House, 214 pages, $18.95 The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a…
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Culture Debut Novelist Helene Wecker Dreams of Jinnis (and Golems)
● The Golem and the Jinni By Helene Wecker HarperCollins. 496 pages, $26.99 In “The Golem and the Jinni,” Helene Wecker mines the mysticism of two peoples to masterfully create a magical world out of clay and fire. Her story is so inventive, so elegantly written, so well constructed, it is hard to believe that…
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Culture Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish History on Portuguese Tour
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
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Culture Growing Up Jewish in Christian Suburbia
By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass. Brandeis University, the only thing Jewish about Waltham, was 20 minutes away. We had moved to Waltham because we couldn’t stay in…
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The Schmooze Rutu Modan’s Secrets and Revelations
The Property By Rutu Modan, translated by Jessica Cohen Drawn & Quarterly, 232 pages, $24.95 The past takes many forms in Rutu Modan’s graphic novel “The Property.” There is Regina, an elderly woman returning to Poland from Israel for the first time in over 60 years; overzealous re-enactors encountered by her granddaughter Mica on the…
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The Schmooze Assimilation and Romanticizing the Past
Earlier this week, Joanna Hershon wrote about an insult and a memorial service she attended for a friend’s father. Her new novel, A Dual Inheritance, was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series….
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The Schmooze Edouard de Pomiane’s ‘Recollections and Recipes’
Last week, Rebecca Miller wrote about Gluckel of Hameln. She has been sharing texts that shed light on the history of Jewish life in France, the setting of her new novel, Jacob’s Folly. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series….
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