2011: A Year in Books

 

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.

2010: A Year in Books  D.G. Myers,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  From the popular to the scholarly, a reader's and buyer's guide to 34 of the best books of 2010.  SAVE

Retrieving American Jewish Fiction  D.G. Myers,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  A historical symposium of some neglected classics, and an introduction to the avot and imahot of American Jewish writing.  SAVE

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Look for the Union Label

 

With the din from the Occupy Wall Street encampments fading in the early winter chill, it's time to step back and consider the phenomenon as part of the broader history of the anti-capitalist struggle in America.

Drowning in the Red Sea  Ruth R. Wisse,  Jewish Review of Books.  When it came to the multi-factional Yiddish press, you couldn't tell the players without a program.  SAVE

Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl  American Social History Project.  A project of the City University of New York presents documents, interviews, and a film about the lives of immigrant girls in the New York garment industry at the beginning of the 20th century.  SAVE

Fannia M. Cohn  Thomas Dublin,  Jewish Women's Archive.  A biographical sketch of the ILGWU's first woman vice president, a leader in workers' education.  SAVE

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The Yiddish Silver Screen

 

Nobody is sure exactly how many movies were ever made in Yiddish. James Hoberman's exhaustive study Bridge of Light (2010) lists some hundred such films, made in the 20th century primarily in America, Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, and Russia.

Yiddish Film in the U.S.  Sharon Pucker Rivo,  Jewish Women’s Archive.  During the "Golden Age" of Yiddish film, 1936 to 1939, more than two dozen films opened in New York City to encouraging box-office income.  SAVE

Yiddish Musicals  National Center for Jewish Film.  A catalog of Yiddish musical films, with plot summaries, reviews, and production details.  SAVE

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Enmity; or, Yiddish in America

 

He was irascible, neurotic, self-obsessed, and socially inept; a brilliant misfit and misanthropic dilettante. Upon his death in July 2010, Harvey Pekar's few close friends insisted that the underground comic-book writer was also a gem in the rough, an out-of-date socialist naïf.

“I’ve been aggravated . . .”  YouTube.  Harvey Pekar gained notoriety for his clownishly antagonistic appearances on NBC’s David Letterman Show.  More from a formidable Pekar video archive here and here.  SAVE

“Whadya think?”  Harvey Pekar, Tara Seibel,  Jewish Review of Books.  A comic review of R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, in which Pekar attests to the artistic versatility of his long-time collaborator.  SAVE

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View More in Yiddish

Insight & Analysis

The Great Assimilator  Christopher Hitchens.  Atlantic.  Martin Amis vividly remembered something Saul Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal. (2007).  SAVE

Canon Fodder  Itay Zutra.  H-Net.  For the eminent literary critic Dan Miron, the prominence of Jewish authors writing in non-Jewish languages is proof of the impossibility of assembling a modern Jewish literary canon..  SAVE

Drowning in the Red Sea  Ruth R. Wisse.  Jewish Review of Books.  The history of Yiddish publications in America shows what moral credit writers of the highest order were prepared to extend to the Soviet Union.  SAVE

Dreyfus, My Child  Itzik Gottesman.  Yiddish Song of the Week.  In a rare Yiddish song, Captain Alfred Dreyfus is transformed into a child in the crib, representing the entire suffering Jewish people. (With audio).  SAVE

The Prophet  Dara Horn.  Jewish Review of Books.  In two magnificent novellas, published before World War II and now available in a new English edition, the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein devastatingly foresaw the shape of things to come.  SAVE

Samson without Delilah  Saul Bellow.  New Republic.  A novel by the Yiddish writer Zalman Shneour provokes reflections on varieties of Jewish strength and Jewish pride, and on the strangled roots of postwar Yiddish culture. (1945).  SAVE

Touched by a Jewish Angel  Peter Manseau.  Religion Dispatches.  Christian themes typify the work of the late actor Michael Landon (Highway to Heaven); sometimes, though, a Jewish sensibility bursts forth.  SAVE

On Books

 

Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam

 

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.

Continue Reading "Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam"  Ruth R. Wisse,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

Selected Poetry and Prose  Abraham Sutzkever,  California.  SAVE

Siberia  Abraham Sutzkever, Marc Chagall,  Abelard-Schuman.  SAVE

The Fiddle Rose  Abraham Sutzkever,  Wayne State.  SAVE

The Poet Reads  Abraham Sutzkever,  Smithsonian Folkways (Yiddish).  SAVE

A Vogn Shikh (A Cartload of Shoes)  Abraham Sutzkever,  YouTube (Yiddish).  SAVE

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