Some days, I can't help thinking back 25 years to my high-school French course, which is where I first encountered the concept of the juste milieu—the happy medium—and the difficulty of achieving it. Why is the happy medium so elusive? Why do I more often feel caught betwixt and between or, even among my fellow Jewish-American writers, alone?
The holidays are over, the coffee-table books have all been unwrapped and set aside, and winter isn't going anywhere for a while. In short, it's time to settle in for some good reading. The literary critic D. G. Myers here presents the 38 best Jewish books of 2011, all of which merit your attention.
The poet Samuel Menashe, who died on August 22 at the age of eighty-five, grew up in Queens, New York. His poems have always been appreciated by other poets; but, until late in his life, his poetry did not receive the attention it deserved.
Der Nister (center; Marc Chagall is in front); 1923.
The saddest saga in Jewish literary history involves some 500 Soviet Yiddish artists who were stolen away by Stalin's henchmen in the late 1940's. They met a tragic fate after twenty years under a relentlessly repressive regime whose creation they had greeted with utopian fervor.
Aryeh Tepper
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was the poet of Jewish national rebirth and a leading light of cultural Zionism. To be more precise, he was a power station. Composing poems, writing essays, founding journals, raising up the sparks of Israel's past, Bialik became an essential source of energy for Jewish cultural revival.
Ruth R. Wisse
It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died this Wednesday, January 20, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. A descendant of rabbis, Sutzkever applied to the writing of poetry the standards of refinement that his ancestors had practiced in obedience to Jewish religious law. During World War II, when he was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless—but only of truly timeless—work.
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