Israeli books: Assaf Gavron's The Hilltop is set in a West Bank settlement

“The Hilltop is recommended to all readers who enjoy a good story grounded in current events.” -- from my New York Journal of Books review. Also see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Israeli books: Assaf Gavron's The Hilltop is set in a West Bank settlement

Israeli fiction writers have set their narratives in rural kibbutzim, moshavim, in small mainly Sephardic towns, in urban settings in Israel’s three largest cities, as well as overseas, and now novelist Assaf Gavron has set his fifth novel and seventh book The Hilltop (published last week by New York publisher Scribner) in perhaps the most controversial setting of all, an unauthorized West Bank settlement. In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend The Hilltop “to all readers who enjoy a good story grounded in current events.”

British author William Sutcliffe also set his Young Adult novel The Wall in what appears to be a West Bank settlement, but his settlers are represented by a single abusive two dimensional character. By contrast, Gavron’s settlers in The Hilltop are more complicated and more believable characters.

Roughly one in twenty Jewish Israelis lives in a West Bank settlement. Four fifths of these settlers live in settlements close enough to Israel’s 1949 armistice line that they could be incorporated into Israel as part of land swaps in a comprehensive peace agreement.

Gavron’s settlers in the fictional settlement Ma’aleh Hermesh C are among the fifth of settlers who would have to be evacuated in the event of such a peace agreement, and since it is an unauthorized settlement, an order for its evacuation has already been issued. Whether that evacuation order will ever be executed is a central plot element in The Hilltop.

My recommendation “to all readers” in my NYJB review may be too broad. Perhaps the ideal reader is one who can care about the novel’s characters (even though they show no empathy toward their Palestinian neighbors) while at the same time disapprove of their settlement enterprise and its objectives, one of which is to prevent a comprehensive peace agreement to end the Israel-Palestine conflict through the partition of the country into two states, Israel and Palestine.

This past spring U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

There are indeed Israelis who share Secretary Kerry’s apprehensions, but they include some of Israel’s newly affluent shoppers who consume organic produce and dairy products produced in settlements similar to Gavron’s fictional Ma’aleh Hermesh C. For a fuller discussion of The Hilltop see my NYJB review.

Assaf Gavron

Jewish books: Stephanie Feldman's The Angel of Losses is an auspicious debut

"Stephanie Feldman’s debut novel The Angel of Losses, which was published last week by New York-based HarperCollins imprint Ecco Press, is a welcome addition to the Jewish fantasy fiction genre." --examiner.com

In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I write, “The Angel of Losses is recommended to nerdy (in the best sense of the word) secular Jewish and philo-Semitic readers whose genre interests include the confluence of contemporary and fantasy fiction.” Read that review first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Jewish books: Stephanie Feldman's The Angel of Losses is an auspicious debut

Stephanie Feldman’s debut novel The Angel of Losses, which was published last week by New York-based HarperCollins imprint Ecco Press, is a welcome addition to the Jewish fantasy fiction genre. In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I write, “The Angel of Losses is recommended to nerdy (in the best sense of the word) secular Jewish and philo-Semitic readers whose genre interests include the confluence of contemporary and fantasy fiction.”

The novel might also appeal to the growing number of gentiles who, like its protagonist Marjorie Burke, discover they have Jewish ancestry, as well as to those who always knew that a parent or grandparent is Jewish. In my NYJB review I cite the case of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who learned at age 60 that her parents were Jewish apostates. Current Secretary of State John Kerry, on the other hand, has always known that his paternal grandparents were born Jewish. In my own family some of my paternal great-uncles married Protestants and raised their children in their mother’s faith. But one of my dad’s Protestant first cousins was fascinated by her Jewish father’s religious heritage, converted to Judaism, and married a rabbi.

In The Angel of Losses Marjorie’s sister Holly converts to Judaism without knowing about her grandfather’s ancestry. What tips Marjorie off that her late grandfather might have been Jewish are stories he wrote about a character he called The White Rebbe. The stories also draw the attention of her brother-in-law Nathan who is a member of a mystical Jewish sect called The Berukhim Penitents who are mentioned in the stories.

Feldman does not refer to the Berukhim Penitents as Hasidic, and even dates the sect’s founding to the Sixteenth Century thus predating Hasidism which started in the Eighteenth Century, but the Hasidim are the only sects who call their rabbis rebbe. Moreover the Berukhim Penitents are so preoccupied with the coming of the messiah that when their rabbinic leader died centuries ago no successor was chosen, and instead they await their deceased rabbi’s return.

This sounds a lot like the Bratslav (or Breslov) Hasidim who have remained devoted to their story telling rebbe Nachman since his death in 1810 and have never chosen a successor, and instead await Nachman’s return as the messiah. Chabad Lubovitch is another messianic Hasidic sect that has not chosen a successor since it’s seventh rebbe’s death in 1994 and likewise awaits his messianic return. Feldman’s fictional Berukhim Penitents combine aspects of both sects, and like the Lubovitch Hasidim were originally based in Lithuania, whereas the Bratslav Hasidim were from the Ukraine. In his doctoral dissertation Conservative Rabbi David Siff points out that the two sects that don't have a living rebbe are the most messianic of all the Hasidic sects.

One detail that seemed odd to me was when Feldman referred to Lithuanian Orthodox synagogues as temples. Reform Judaism often refers to its houses of worship as temples, but that appellation is rarely used among the Orthodox. But that is a minor quibble that is easy to overlook in this entertaining and enjoyable read. For a fuller discussion of the novel read my NYJB review. Stephanie Feldman

Book review: A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

Slava Gelman, the protagonist of Boris Fishman's debut novel A Replacement Life, fabricates Holocaust narratives for elderly Russian immigrants' reparations claims applications. In my NYJB review I write, "Slava knows that to make his stories convincing he has to get the details right, and despite the leaps of faith Fishman demands he provides more than enough correct details and well crafted figurative turns of phrase to convince most readers to go along with him—and those who do will be amply rewarded by this multidimensional and handsomely written debut novel." For additional remarks about A Replacement Life see my examiner article, which begins with the next paragraph.

Meet Boris Fishman the newest star novelist of the Little Odessa Renaissance

With the publication this week of his debut novel A Replacement Life by New York based publisher HarperCollins Boris Fishman joins the ranks of fellow writers of The Little Odessa Renaissance who immigrated from the Soviet Union to The United States and Canada as children including Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmogis, Anya Ulinich, Nadia Kalman, and Ellen Litman all of whom explore the theme of having one foot in Russian and the other in American culture.

Fishman’s protagonist Slava Gelman is an aspiring writer who fabricates Holocaust narratives for fraudulent reparation applications on behalf of Russian Jewish immigrants of his grandparents’ generation. In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I write, “Slava knows that to make his stories convincing he has to get the details right, and despite the leaps of faith Fishman demands he provides more than enough correct details and well crafted figurative turns of phrase to convince most readers to go along with him—and those who do will be amply rewarded by this multidimensional and handsomely written debut novel.”

I really enjoyed reading A Replacement Life, but besides “the leaps of faith” my other reservation concerns the way Fishman portrays his fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union as a community of liars and cheats. I hope that defamatory characterization is an overly broad generalization. For a more detailed discussion of the novel read my New York Journal of Books review.

Boris Fishman

Book review | Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus

In my NYJB review of Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus I recommend the book "to serious readers who will want to reread its stories gaining new insights with each reading.” Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Books: novelist Ben Marcus returns to the short story in Leaving the Sea

Future literary scholars may look back to the second decade of the Twenty-first Century as a silver age of the short story. The golden age would be the late Nineteenth through the middle of the Twentieth Century.

After that a writer's book of short stories became more often than not a journeyman’s apprenticeship on her way to becoming a novelist. Until recently writers like John Updike, who continued to publish in several genres over the decades, have been the exception.

Now more fiction writers alternate between the novel and the short story. Junot Diaz, for example, followed his debut novel with a second collection of short stories instead of with another novel. After four decades of novel writing Amos Oz returned to the short story in his last two fiction books. And last year the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Alice Munro who only writes short stories.

And now novelist Ben Marcus returns to the short story inLeaving the Sea, a book of short stories published today by New York publisher Knopf. Some of its 15 stories predate his most recent novel The Flame Alphabet and several share its dystopian theme. For a fuller discussion of Leaving the Seasee my New York Journal of Books review in which I recommend it to serious readers.

NY Jewish books: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

A language epidemic erupts among Jewish families; children’s speech makes their parents deathly ill. Soon it spreads to the rest of the population. This dark fantasy is the premise of Jewish New Yorker Ben Marcus‘s new novel, The Flame Alphabet published today by Knopf. In my New York Journal of Books review I write,

New York Journal of Books

“Ben Marcus was already known as a daring, experimental writer’s writer on the strength of his three previous books of fiction. The good news for the general reading public is that his fourth book, The Flame Alphabet, is his most accessible to date, and its comparative clarity and linearity in no way diminishes its power, inventiveness, and originality. The quality of the writing also compensates for the book’s thin character development. Instead, Mr. Marcus deploys his potent prose to tell a tale about a world in which all language becomes lethal.”

One of Mr. Marcus’ inventions is a new form of Judaism in which couples worship in forest hideouts on Thursdays instead of Friday nights and Saturdays. Like the epidemic itself, this aspect of the novel requires a suspesion of disbelief. The ominous nature of the fictional events lends the narrative a sense of gravitas that Mr. Marcus’ prose style is well equiped to express. While the book has all the necessary elements to make it a cult classic, a book this well written deserves the widest possible audience.