Moment’s 2024 Books Gift Guide

Should you give books as holiday presents? Of course you should! Still, it’s natural to hesitate. Giving someone a book is a gesture with many layers: You’re not just giving a gift, you’re starting a conversation, or continuing one. Any of these books published in 2024 are conversation-starters, whether they transport you to Napoleon’s Egypt, mid-twentieth-century Florida, the Mizrahi ghettos of 1950s Israel, or to Hamburg, Algiers or even your own backyard. 

FICTION

Napoleon’s Mirage
By Michelle Cameron
She Writes Press, 265 pp.

It’s 1798. The Napoleonic conquests have liberated the ghettos of Ancona, Italy, and emancipated the Jews there from a thousand years of oppression and discrimination. But freedom brings instability, and for no one more than for Mirelle d’Ancona, a free-spirited young woman who’s been maintaining a modicum of autonomy by her skilled management of the family business, a calligraphy workshop she inherited from her father. No one makes more beautiful ketubot, but with things so uncertain, will the wealthy Jews of Ancona still buy them? 

Mirelle is in love with her cousin Daniel, who is off accompanying Bonaparte’s armies on a military campaign to a destination that’s being kept secret from the troops but is rumored to be the Holy Land. (No spoilers, but the alert reader may know what country Napoleon actually invaded that year.) When she decides to go in search of him, it’s the perfect setup for a romping odyssey of a historical novel, through sieges and sea battles, the picturesque and the squalid, from Cairo to Istanbul to Jaffa. The historical detail is convincing without being weighty, and what with occasional appearances by real figures such as Talleyrand and Bonaparte himself, this is a pretty interesting corner of history to spend time in. If you like it, there’s a prequel, Beyond the Ghetto Gates, that came out in 2020, but this second story stands on its own.

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
By Lynda Cohen Loigman
St. Martin’s Press, 320 pp.

Augusta Stern is not the retiring type. Actually, rather than retire from the job she loves—as a hospital pharmacist—she’s been taking a full decade off her age on official forms. But when the hospital’s loathsome HR director finally catches up with her, wishing her a happy 80th birthday just to rub it in, Augusta knows the jig is up. She abandons New York for Florida and plunges into retirement with the same intensity she’s given to everything else in her life, from her work as a healer to her passionate long-ago romance with Irving Rivkin, who disappeared 60 years ago from a Brooklyn ballroom with no explanation, just when she thought he was about to propose. 

You know where this is going. Of course, Augusta runs into Irving again—on the very first day swimming in the pool at her new condo. Of course, Augusta’s not about to give up her daily swim just to avoid Irving, even if he does still call her “Goldie.” And of course, retirement’s the best possible time to start unraveling old mysteries, and not just about once-upon-a-time romantic entanglements. For instance, what about Augusta’s Aunt Esther, who may or may not have been a witch?  This is a sprightly journey with a heroine who’s endlessly good company and always has a little something up her sleeve. 

Dear Eliza
By Andrea J. Stein
Flashpoint Books, 366 pp.

Eliza Levinger lost her mother to cancer as a teenager. The last thing she expects at her father’s funeral a decade later, as this novel opens, is to be handed an envelope addressed to her in her mother’s handwriting. Inside is a bombshell: The man she’s mourning is not her biological father; instead, her mother conceived her during a brief, never-revealed fling with her high school boyfriend at their tenth reunion. Maybe leaving this information in a posthumous note to her daughter wasn’t the best parenting choice? But the idea that her lost, beloved mother wasn’t perfect is just one more thing Eliza isn’t ready to deal with.  

In good rom-com fashion, Eliza’s road to self-awareness runs through a series of plot twists of varying plausibility, interspersed with hyper-contemporary scenes of life among her friend group of New York City twentysomethings—a shiva, a Friendsgiving, a gala fundraiser she’s organizing at work. Will Eliza find her biological father? Will she find love? Don’t look for profundity, but this is a nicely told, satisfyingly wrapped up tale. 

Displaced Persons: Stories
By Joan Leegant
New American Press, 309 pp.

The title of this collection doesn’t lie: Joan Leegant’s characters are displaced, for sure, but always in exquisitely subtle ways. They’re never pushed so far off center that you can’t feel their urgency, wish you could help them solve their problems.

The collection has two halves, “East” and “West,” each with seven stories—the first half set in Israel, the second in the United States. (Two of the stories appeared originally in Moment.) Israeli stories are peopled by Americans and vice versa: In one of the more troubling, two 16-year-old American girls, Abby and Jennifer, visiting the Old City of Jerusalem with their families, wander off to a café by themselves and set off an incident that, though not exactly violent, turns plenty ugly. By contrast, many of the stories of families end up quietly redemptive. An aging father admits to his daughter that he spent a year in prison—and still has unfinished business to tend to. A family traveling in the American West and viciously bickering (tourism again!) experience a weird release when “something finally happens”—a deer nearly wrecks their car—and go on to have a much better time. Leegant’s work is a treasure-house of such slight but profound alterations, the minuscule detail that means something works or something doesn’t. 

Other novels we reviewed in 2024: Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Last Dekrepitzer by Howard Langer, To and Fro by Leah Hager Cohen, Mother Doll by Katya Apekina, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.

MEMOIRS

Roman Year
By Andre Aciman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 354 pp.

Andre Aciman is best known these days for his fifth novel, Call Me By Your Name, the book behind the steamy movie that made Timothee Chalamet a household name. But he’s also a prolific memoirist whose 1995 book Out of Egypt introduced the story of a family that, after fleeing the Jewish community of Alexandria, began a prolonged wandering that included Paris, Rome and ultimately the United States. This volume fills in the unhappy and cramped year the family spent trying to put together a life in Rome—not the Rome of tourism or Western imagination, though the teenaged Andre yearns for that imagined city while resenting the shabby life he’s living in the real one. It’s only an interlude, it turns out; his real life has yet to commence elsewhere, and yet Rome leaves its mark on him, as it does on everyone. This beautiful narrative, like all Aciman’s work, is mostly interior, and it’s worth reading just for his endlessly sensitive perceptions and reflections, as well as for the tantalizing glimpses of Rome and, later, Paris that pierce the fog of adolescent angst. 

Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening
By Elizabeth Rosner
Counterpoint Press, 240 pp.

More than a memoir, but structured around one, this lovely book is a wide-ranging meditation on one of the key ways we take in the world—by listening. The child of Holocaust survivors who shouted more than they listened, Rosner struggled to connect with her parents emotionally and to hear and be heard by them. Throughout this book, she traces their slow progress toward connection, while ranging widely through research, art and therapeutic practices involving the “soundscape” and the listening ear. Interviewing avant-garde composers, “horse whisperers” and podcasters, Rosner builds a sensitive portrait (or maybe it’s a soundscape, too) that helps her make sense of her own family’s communication styles and find a way to bridge them. 

The book returns repeatedly to the shattering moment in Rosner’s childhood when a friend casually commented that “your parents talk funny. They have accents.” “In that moment,” she writes, “some design in my awareness began to rearrange itself,” since before that, she’d been unaware of anything different about her immigrant parents’ speech. From there, it’s a journey of identity that will feel both familiar and revelatory. We have no “earlids,” Rosner observes; we have no choice but to take in auditory messages and make them our own, from whale song to talk therapy to communal prayer.

Other memoirs we’ve reviewed in 2024: My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

HISTORY

The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond
By Julie Kalman
Princeton, 259 pp.

This is the world of Napoleon’s Mirage but from a different angle entirely: a behind-the-scenes, banks-and-business view of the 19th-century Mediterranean and the warring imperial forces that fought for control of such key resources as the wheat harvest in Algeria. Such raw materials were hotly sought by the English, French and Americans but controlled by the Ottoman “dey” in Algiers and his close advisers, the Bacri and the Bushnach families. These two linked Jewish clans—the three Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Bushnach—played key roles in trade, commerce and diplomacy in the Napoleonic era; Jacob Bacri, one of the brothers, apparently dined with Napoleon and held the contract to provision his armies. 

Historian Julie Kalman argues that the story of the Bacris has escaped notice, falling as it does in the gaps between national histories and between social, political and economic historians’ areas of expertise. Her account of the families’ rise—and eventual fall—is told mostly through the eyes of the British and French diplomats who warred for influence at the dey’s court but could do nothing without understanding the Bacris’ role. The reader, put in the position of spying with them, waits with mingled amazement and trepidation for the inevitable catastrophe. 

The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I
By Steven Ujifusa
Harper, 364 pp.

The great migration of Eastern and Central European Jews to the United States around the turn of the 20th century, part of the tremendous flood of Jews and other immigrants that definitively shaped Ashkenazi Jewry along with many other American ethnic communities, is so familiar a part of so many family histories that it’s easy to overlook the feats of practical infrastructure that made it possible. How did all those people, most of them devoid of resources or education, make it out of Russia to the great ports of Hamburg and onto the steamships that brought them to the New World? 

In this colorful telling, a big part of it came down to three influential figures, who saw a need and also a chance for profit, and who competed fiercely to move immigrants: J.P. Morgan, Jacob Schiff and the lesser-known Albert Ballin, who ran the Hamburg-America Line (known as HAPAG) that made mass emigration possible. Schiff and Ballin were Jewish, while Morgan, with his enormous resources, sought to “Morganize the Atlantic.” The turbulent period from 1882 to 1914 saw nearly 10 million immigrants, 2.5 million of them Jews, make the crossing against a backdrop of resurgent pogroms and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the European side of the Atlantic and, on the American side, the answering rise in antisemitism that eventually choked off the flow. 

The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust
By Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa
Simon & Schuster, 290 pp. 

It wouldn’t be the holidays without a new volume about a previously unknown hero (or, in this case, heroine) who bravely opposed the Nazis. Especially since Judy Batalion’s groundbreaking 2021 The Light of Days, there’s been more emphasis, and considerable scholarship, on such heroines—forgotten women who worked undercover in a variety of roles. When in the 1960s a manuscript came across the desk of historian Elizabeth B. White containing the amazing account of the woman who called herself the Countess Janina Suchodolska, and who under that false identity worked to save thousands of lives, mostly Polish prisoners, in the concentration camp Majdanek, White found the story too improbable to take seriously. Other mainstream historians also ignored the manuscript for years, but eventually White and Joanna Sliwa revisited the subject and managed to confirm through Polish archives the most bizarre and improbable aspect of the story: The crusading “countess” was not only posing as a Polish aristocrat but was actually Josephine Mehlberg, a Jewish professor of mathematics from Lvov.

Nervy and daring, the high-profile “countess” survived numerous close calls, made it through the war and emigrated to America, where she resumed teaching mathematics and lived out her life quietly in Chicago. The authors combine the stories in the memoir with their own research, and it’s a thrilling read. 

Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth
By Asaf Elia-Shalev
University of California Press, 344 pp.

So many different Israels jostle for space in the public imagination— military juggernaut, besieged outpost of democracy, still-scrappy startup, tormented public sphere divided against itself—that it’s fascinating to look back at one of the earliest controversies to complicate the nation’s self-image. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern countries poured into the young Israel and began to form a large and marginalized underclass, a group of these young Mizrahi Jews turned to activism, taking inspiration—and their name—from America’s Black Panthers. 

The panterim, as they were called in Hebrew, were responsible for strikes and marches, culminating in a “Night of the Panthers” in 1971 when clashes with police and outbreaks of violence landed several leaders in prison. Los Angeles-based reporter Asaf Elia-Shalev tells the movement’s story with vivid sympathy, tracing its arc mostly through the troubled life of Moroccan-born activist and key strategist Reuven Abergel. Unlike their namesakes, he writes, the Israeli Black Panthers weren’t Marxist revolutionaries, or even especially political; they fought, rather, against the racial discrimination and unfair treatment that forced Mizrahis into ghetto neighborhoods and holding camps and denied them opportunity. Their movement sputtered, but its influence lingers, along with the injustices and inequalities it protested and that remain so far from resolution. 

Write Like a Man
By Ronnie A. Grinberg
Princeton University Press, 367 pp.

In New York at midcentury, the clique known as the New York intellectuals—brilliant, aggressive, argumentative—fired theoretical and critical barrages back and forth from the bows of Commentary, Partisan Review and other warships. But while the best-known names from that era are men—Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling—a few women sought to join the crew. Many were either married to the aforementioned New York intellectuals or moved in their social circles. They faced obstacles, though, beyond the general sexism of the time. The intellectuals’ swaggering style and taste for literary fisticuffs, Ronnie Grinberg argues, reflected an underlying concern with masculinity among these New York Jewish men. When Diana Trilling, Midge Decter, Pearl Kazin Bell and others joined the fray, they too had to evince a muscular, masculine approach, whether by attacking one another, dismissing feminism or internalizing rejection of “feminine” ways of writing. 

Grinberg’s cameos of these three women and others are trenchant and often ironic. (Diana Trilling sharpens her critiques to sound aggressive, while her husband, the eminent critic Lionel Trilling, longs for the truer swagger of writing fiction—his masculine ideal is Hemingway.) The women worry about feminine softness, while the men overcompensate for stereotypes of the weak or passive Jew. The era doesn’t feel as distant as you might think, and anyway, these colorful and unbelievably articulate characters are always worth a visit. 

The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us
By Rachelle Bergstein
One Signal Publishers/Atria, 248 pp.

If you’re a child of the 1960s or 1970s; if your happiest, or at least most indelible, childhood memories involve passing around bootleg copies of Forever or Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; if you went to see the movie version of Margaret or maybe even inflicted it on your kids, just to see how hard they’d laugh at you; and if all that wasn’t enough Judy Blume for you, then this book is the perfect nostalgia trip. Blume, as critic Rachelle Bergstein contends and as anyone sentient would agree, was more than just a best-selling purveyor of what was then just emerging as the genre of Young Adult (YA) literature. Her books helped generations of kids realize that their desires were normal, as were their struggles with everything from bullying to acne to annoying siblings. 

Grist for Blume’s books, these issues also played out against a backdrop of Blume’s own struggles. She fought to express herself in meaningful work, was divorced twice and saw the relentless rise of a cultural conservatism that targeted her books all the more as they grew in influence. Blume today remains a dogged supporter of the freedom to read, a bookstore owner and a beloved avatar of teen freedom generally. This book is a warm bath in those values, which still need all the support they can get. 

Other volumes of history and biography we reviewed in 2024: Hitler’s Atomic Bomb, by Mark Walker; Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine by Oren Kroll-Zeldin 

JEWISH THOUGHT

The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud
By Gila Fine
Maggid Books, 249 pp.

The original “madwoman in the attic,” now an established trope of feminist criticism, was the deranged and murderous secret wife of Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. She’s a monster, not an individual; her function in the story is to contrast with demure Jane and bring on catastrophe. Feminists took up this demonized figure and gave her a past and a personhood: In what might as well be termed a midrash on Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys invented a back story for her in the 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, filling in her history and the reasons for her rage. The image came to be shorthand for all the suppressed and raging women whose voices can’t be heard. 

The clever title is just one enjoyable element of this creative reclamation and rediscovery of the female figures who make far-too-occasional appearances in the vast body of the Talmud. Some, like Beruria, engage in scholarship along with male rabbis, but eventually meet a horrible fate; others are objectified or silenced. A generation of female attention to the tradition has brought new life to these neglected and downplayed figures and to the issues that might have motivated them. Gila Fine, a longtime lecturer in Talmud at the Pardes Institute in London, goes a step further, close-reading the Talmudic stories to find they themselves often contain these hidden depths of empathy. This is a smart, creative and accessible romp through the burgeoning field of feminist Talmud. 

The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism
By Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg
Jewish Publication Society, 384 pp.

The liberal, life-embracing side of Orthodox Judaism and particularly of the Modern Orthodox movement has long been exemplified by Yitz Greenberg, a champion of interfaith work and opportunities for women (and a regular contributor to Moment’s “Ask the Rabbis”). Greenberg is now 91, and The Triumph of Life is his attempt to summarize ideas that have evolved over a long career. As a young scholar first encountering the full horror of the Holocaust through research at Yad Vashem, he believed for a time that the occurrence meant God had abrogated his covenant with the Jewish people. But eventually he developed a more complicated theory of covenant, in which the relationship between divinity and humanity passes through historical stages: first a biblical age of miracles and direct encounter, then a rabbinic period of interpretation and law, and now, with the full flower of scientific achievement, a period when God’s apparent absence signals that it is time for humans to take full responsibility—even for the very worst that can happen. Judaism, Greenberg concludes, with ringing affirmations on nearly every page, is a religion that celebrates and upholds life. Read it as an antidote to the fear of rising rigidities and darkening times. 

Other books on Jewish thought we reviewed in 2024: Noah Feldman’s To Be a Jew Today; Debra Band and Menachem Fisch’s Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living