Yesterday 14 PSJCers (of whom all but two had read the book) held a lively discussion with almost everyone participating and voicing their observations and opinions about Boris Fishmans debut novel A Replacement Life, which portrays the assimilation of immigrants from the former USSR most of whom are children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Most of us are glad we read the book despite its shortcomings and praise Fishman for creating a protagonist about whom we care what happens notwithstanding disliking him. Several participants felt that the novels beginning section should have been shorter. Looking ahead, future discussions will include the following works of fiction: March 7 The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. by Gina Nahai “a wide-ranging, page-turning, magical realist, multigenerational family saga and Iranian-Jewish-American immigration tale enveloped in a murder mystery.” — David Cooper, New York Journal of Books. “…the characters are engrossing and the book rarely flags…” —Fran Hawthorne, The National. BPL has five and NYPL has 11 print copies. Electronic copies are also available. An audiobook version is available from audible May 9 The Unamericans by Molly Antopol who recently won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award for this collection of eight short stories which has been long listed for the National Book Critics Circles John Leonard award for a first book. “Whether her stories take place on the Upper West Side, or in Tel Aviv, or in Southern California, or Belarus, there’s always a pressing sense of history behind her characters, their mantels ‘cluttered with portraits of black-bearded, stern-eyed ancestors.’ These ancestors are judging them from their graves.” —Dwight Garner, NYT. “The stories are as satisfying as individual novels. They often keep going right past the point where you thought they would end. And spreading them out geographically lets Antopol look at fragile connections between people in couples and in families. Theyll make you nostalgic, not just for earlier times, but for another era in short fiction. A time when writers such as Bernard Malamud, and Issac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley roamed the earth.” —Meg Wolitzer, NPR. BPL has 22 copies. An audiobook version is available from audible Ms. Antopols New Yorker article about researching her familys past is also worth reading. July The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis, which has been shortlisted for Canadas Scotiabank Giller Prize. “The Betrayers, David Bezmozgis’ new novel, continues his project of imagining the Soviet Jewish experience. And he has boldly chosen to place at the center of the story the man who is probably the most famous Soviet Jew of them all: Natan Sharansky, whose life and career are in almost every detail the model for the novel’s main character, Baruch Kotler. …The Betrayers is the rare book that makes being Jewish feel not just like a fate or a burden, but a great opportunity.” Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine. BPL has 35 copies. An audiobook version is available from audible Nov. The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron translated by Steven Cohen, winner of Israels Bernstein Prize for Literature. “The Hilltop … is a ‘great Israeli novel’ in much the same way that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was a “great American novel.” Like Franzen, Gavron writes realistic fiction with a comic edge that aims to take the temperature of his whole society, to tell us how Israelis live now. Accordingly, The Hilltop embraces all the archetypal settings of Israeli life—the kibbutz, the nightlife of Tel Aviv, even the obligatory stint living among other Israelis in New York. The center of the action, however, is the hilltop settlement of Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a tiny outpost in the West Bank, where a group of intrepid and blinkered Jews are trying to create a community of their own. …Gavron offers a welcome antidote to the panic and pessimism that informs so much American Jewish discourse about Israel. Despite everything, he suggests, there is room for hope, for laughter, and for sheer ordinary life.” Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine. BPL has 16 copies. An audiobook version is available from audible
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 20:44:14 +0000
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