HoopDance

Indignation, Philip Roth’s newest, is a small but potent box of surprises: a little J.D. Salinger, a bit of Henry James, and a dash of Alice Sebold’s voice from beyond.  Roth follows sophomore college student Marcus Messner from his Newark Jewish neighborhood to Ohio’s WASP Winesburg College. A master commentator on country and conscience, Roth’s story is set in 1951 as the draft reaps any man without a deferment for the bloody foxholes of Korea. Young Marcus, a kosher butcher’s son, is a true American innocent in spite of his intimate acquaintance with butcher shop blood and entrails.  Roth’s foreshadowing lovingly develops the boy’s meat market education in all its gory detail.

Soon enough Marcus and Roth’s readers will discover that killing can be done with more than a cleaver. (Read on …)

When a spiritual polymath with a poetic voice encounters a worthy biographer, who is himself an expert in French poetry,  thorough researcher, sensitive interpreter, and eloquent writer, the result is stunning.  Such is Spiritual Radical, volume two in Edward K. Kaplan’s study of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a foremost thinker of 20th century American Judaism. Winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish Studies given by the Jewish Book Council, the book covers Heschel’s escape to the United States in 1940 until his death.

Walk the shelves of Temple Isaiah’s library noting author’s names, and you will touch the cast of this book. The seminal Jewish-American thinkers appear in intimate detail, revealed through their synergy and their cultural wars with Heschel. For readers it’s a verbal trip to Heschel’s study, piled with books and papers, as the man himself sits smoking a cigar, sharing notes from his latest conversation about “radical amazement.” The immediacy is heightened by numerous candid photos. (Read on …)

Mystery fans, get your whodunits with a dash of Jewish panache. Check out local author Ayelet Waldman’s, Playdate with Death, third in her Mommy-Track series. Juliet Applebaum, an L.A. lawyer now full-time mother, has a penchant for detection and a plethora of corpses.

In this novel, her personal trainer “commits suicide,” but Julie suspects murder. Kids in tow, this sleuth with a diaper bag tracks clues into a complex of drugs, infidelity, illegitimacy, anti-Semitism, and genetics. “Those with a taste for lighter mystery fare…relish the adventures of this contemporary, mother- of-two Nancy Drew,” one critic said.

Or join Ruby the Rabbi’s wife, and cruise mates from Temple Rita in Eternal, Texas for Don’t Cry for Me, Hot Pastrami by Sharon Kahn. This is a Caribbean cruise-from-hell, cooked up by Temple Rita’s chutzpah queen AKA Fundraising Chair, Essie Sue and her slimy schlockmeister cousin, who just happens to captain the ship.

When the trip’s lectuer drops dead on Ruby’s shoes at the gangplank, the mystery is joined. Throw in a send-up of temple politics, a tincture of romance, mish mash of Elvis impersonators, dollops of danger, and a plot with more twists than challah, and you’re ready to laugh out loud at every outrageous page.

Closer to home, local author Alan Jacobson weighs in with False Accusations, a mystery novel (suspense, but no Jewish content) turning like a lens on a deliberate hit-and-run, and horrific use of the “Big Lie” technique, which seems to unravel under criminal analysis. His villainess (evil twin to Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction) is one readers will love to hate. His hero, a respected surgeon with no alibi, appears destined for San Quentin. But as guilt and innocence grind together in the darkness of the soul, some facts seem, well, not quite kosher.

A version of this review column by Val Morehouse
appeared in the Temple Isaiah Ruach, June/July 2005.

 

© Val Morehouse, version: Jan 2006.

 

All Rights reserved.

There’s more to Jewish comics artists than superheroes. Readers of Art Speigelman’s classic Maus: a Survivor’s Tale I and II and Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will catch a luminous glimpse, not only of heroes that vanquish villains, but also storytelling sprouting like weeds from penny chalk drawings on city sidewalks, and the indelible desire not just to tell, but to make you see good and evil. Temple Isaiah Library has acquired some graphic novel examples (long form comics with more complex story lines aimed at older audiences).

In superb semi-autobiographical pencil sketches bleak as the ghetto itself, Joe Kubert’s Yossel, April 19, 1943, a fiction within a fiction, tells of 15-year-old comics artist Yossel and a ragged band of sewer-dwelling Jewish rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto: “We huddle around the burning candle, for warmth, for consolation, for courage…I take out my pencil stub and paper and by the candle’s pale glow, I start to draw.” Page after page, the eyes haunt you, as the drawings’ drama pulls you into their despair, degradation, and raw determination.

The great Will Eisner (1917-2005) draws a bead on the 19th century anti-Semitic forgery by Russian secret police, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used by Nazi propagandists and the Russians to justify “the Solution” and the pogroms against Jews. The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was finished shortly before Eisner’s death. Orgainized like a comics “Law and Order” episode, parallels to current headlines are inescapable. Visual “chapters” track the “Protocols” effect from France to the United States in 2003. …Recommended for adults and older teens.

Review originally published Ruach, Jan. 2006, p.4.

 

© Val Morehouse, version: Jan 2006.

 

All Rights reserved.