Sometime around July, the annual Torah reading cycle in synagogues reaches a portion called Balak that has a scene with a talking donkey. It’s never taught in Hebrew school, and it always struck me as the quintessential summer reading: The setting is familiar, but there’s a little extra room for the unexpected to happen.
Surveying possible summer reads, we’ve tried to select books with something of that same unexpectedness, whether the story they tell is imagined or real, whether it unfolds in the past, in the present or in a time that never existed. Some of these books and lives are enmeshed in Torah or Jewish observance; on others, Jewish experience lays only a feather-light touch. All offer a surprise or an adventure. Climb aboard!
NOVELS
California Dreaming
By Noa Silver
She Writes Press, 312 pp.
College graduate Elena Berg arrives in the Bay Area in 2011 as the very model of a modern seeker of enlightenment. She’s got a full set of ideals, a Teach for America job that will let her pursue them, and her mother’s copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet to connect her to the stories of radical activism she was raised on. Her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, taught geography to middle-schoolers and imbued her with his love of the profession; her mother, after a wild youth that included the Weathermen, teaches history at a university. Elena’s path is clear.
At first everything seems within reach. Elena finds a roommate who, like her, wants to do something real, to get away from “all my i-banking and consultant friends back home.” (“I had those friends too, and so I laughed and nodded, and we linked arms as we watched the sun start to set over the Bay.”) She falls in love with Kyle, an urban farmer, at an Occupy march. But her dreams lose altitude, as dreams can. Her school somehow fails to assign her a classroom, and she struggles to get the magic of Emily Dickinson across to high schoolers while teaching in a corner of the cafeteria. Nostalgic for her grandparents, she tracks down a Passover Seder and brings her friends to it, but they miss the point and argue with her about Israel.
Later, she leaves the teaching job to work at an educational startup, which shortly afterward “pivots” from educational products to develop a routine, if lucrative, scanner app. Whose ideals, if anyone’s, is Elena living? What is the way forward? It’s the question that governs many a classic novel: How do you find out who you really are? This very contemporary voyage of self-discovery is a satisfying take on an eternal story.
The Goddess of Warsaw
By Lisa Barr
Harper, 368 pp.
I’m not sure a novel about the sufferings of the Warsaw Ghetto should be this much fun, but Lisa Barr sure knows how to put together a high-stakes revenge thriller. The revenge belongs to aged Hollywood idol Lena Browning, who was once Bina Blonski, a young Jewish actress in Warsaw whose phenomenal acting skills and Aryan looks served her in resistance, escape, self-reinvention—and more. At the novel’s opening, Lena is finally set to reveal her dark memories to an equally strong-willed young star, Sienna Hayes, who’s determined to play Lena in a blockbuster movie about her life. Sienna wants to write and direct the movie, star as Lena and win an Oscar. But Lena has bigger plans even than that.
Barr, the author of the bestselling Woman on Fire and other novels, sets up a masterful plot-within-a-plot, then throws escalating surprises like a series of fireworks. She salts the over-the-top plot twists with real historical detail; even the valiant and doomed historians of the Oyneg Shabbos group, who buried the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto in milk cans so that the truth would outlive them, make an appearance. (That story has been catnip to novelists, understandably so, since the resurfaced archives were catalogued and publicized in 2009; Lauren Grodstein’s We Must Not Think of Ourselves late last year was a more serious treatment of the material, though it still managed to add some suspense, not easy when we know the historical outcome.) Don’t read The Goddess of Warsaw for serious themes, though; read it for high drama, great movie effects and Nazi villains so evil and twisted that they are almost (dare I say it) funny.
Goyhood
By Reuven Fenton
Central Avenue/Simon & Schuster, 288 pp.
A somewhat far-fetched PR blurb tried to sell this novel as a Jewish “Rumspringa,” the year Amish youths supposedly take off to sample all the wickedness of the outside world before settling into a lifetime of abstinence from it. Better to stick to English and just call it a romp. A first novel by a longtime New York Post reporter, who obviously knows his way around both the American heartland and Haredi Brooklyn, this kooky picaresque tale starts in a sweltering pinprick of a town in Georgia where twins David and Marty suddenly see a strange apparition: a Chabad menorah.
It’s the first of many surprises. When they get home, their mother, Ida Mae, is chatting with the new Chabad rabbi and confiding a secret: She never mentioned it to them, but she’s Jewish, so they are, too.
It’s the question that governs many a classic novel: How do you find out who you really are?
Placed under the rabbi’s tutelage, David takes the usual bar-mitzvah-and-out trajectory; but Marty, henceforth Mayer, goes all in, becoming a yeshiva bocher in deepest Williamsburg and, soon enough, a fully subsidized full-time Talmud student married to the Rav’s daughter. But when Ida Mae dies, leaving a letter with the catastrophic news that she just made the whole Jewish thing up, Mayer is thrown into limbo. He manages to get an appointment for conversion in a week—though who knows what the Rav’s daughter will say about their questionable marriage—but meanwhile, what can the brothers do but hit the road? And can the cloistered Mayer and the aggressive David rebuild their relationship while traipsing through New Orleans, Instagram and other unsavory precincts of American life?
Does it work? Maybe, maybe not. But in the tradition of the great American road trip novel, complete with requisite stray dog, there’s definitely something here for everyone. Also, I really want Fenton to write a sequel about Mayer’s weird and terrifying wife.
To & Fro
By Leah Hager Cohen
Bellevue Literary Press, 416 pp.
This strange and beautiful puzzle of a novel has two interlocking halves titled To (starting with the front cover) and Fro (commencing upside-down from the back). Together, they form a dreamy fable about telling, learning and knowing. The first half opens incomprehensibly: We are in a foggy, indistinct world. The narrator, who’s on a journey, has a bicycle, though otherwise the landscape is primitive—or maybe post-apocalyptic, it’s hard to tell. She’s searching for the Captain, who has left on horseback, saying only that he is going to a place called Away-From-Here.
Later, the narrator comes to a long, low house from which emanates a hum of discussion: a House of Study. The people in the house are learning from a large book with a block of text in the middle of every page. Discussions of its meaning are arranged around the sides in different typefaces. The fog lifts slightly: These people, whoever and whenever they are, are studying Talmud. But the mystery only deepens: To continue with the book, the reader must turn it (get it?) and read from the other cover, the side called Fro, which unfolds in a completely different world where a different child is on a different journey, or possibly the same one.
The epigraph for the “Fro” portion is the famous line about the Talmud from Pirkei Avot, “Turn it and turn it, for all is therein.” The “To” epigraph reads, “There is no before and after in the Torah.” Whether or not reading this book is itself a form of Talmud study, you’ll never find a more haunting evocation of its essential nature, or of learning that echoes across the generations.
The Scrolls of Deborah
By Esther Goldenberg
100 Block by Row House, 384 pp.
In Genesis 35:8 there’s a stray reference, without context, to “Rebekah’s nurse, Deborah,” who “died and was buried near Beit El, beneath a tree, and that tree was called the Crying Tree.” Deborah otherwise goes unmentioned. It’s one of several apparent throwaway lines in the Torah that suggest the loss of once-familiar material, usually about female characters. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent signally advanced the project of filling in such gaps with what amounts to feminist midrash, but there are abundant lacunae still to fill.
Esther Goldenberg’s contribution to this genre could have been cheesy—many are—but instead it’s unexpected and creative. She invents a lineage for Deborah, riffing off a line where Abraham and Sarah are described as going down to Egypt with their goods and servants and their nefesh, or spirit. Since nefesh can also mean a person, she spins this into a reference to an unmentioned sister of Lot and cousin of Abraham, named Hallel, who went down to Egypt with the family and was left there as a concubine to Pharaoh. Deborah, Hallel’s granddaughter, is raised in Egypt. Sent back to Lot’s family after the Pharaoh’s death, she serves her cousin Rebekah and accompanies her when Rebekah marries Isaac, thus joining the familiar dysfunctional family of the patriarchs.
As a prism through which to view this family and its travails, this concept proves strikingly fertile. Deborah helps nurse Esau when Rebekah has her twins (of course—she’s overwhelmed) and nurtures a bond with Esau, which persists long after he is alienated from Jacob. Their connection plays a role in the brothers’ later reconciliation. When Jacob returns from 20 years with Laban, accompanied by a sprawling and equally dysfunctional family of his own, Deborah connects with young Joseph and persuades him to write down her life story on the eponymous “scrolls.” Is it convincing? Can more of these reimagined stories be sustained? This volume is marketed as Book 1 of a planned “Desert Songs Trilogy,” and I for one am up for it.
MEMOIRS
Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir
By Sara Glass
One Signal Publishers/Atria, 304 pp.
In an incongruous echo of California Dreaming (see above), figuring out who you really are and what to do about it is the theme of this lively and soul-baring memoir. It’s a highly readable contribution to the genre that’s come to be referred to as OTD, for “off the derech”—memoirs that tell of the journey from an ultra-Orthodox upbringing on the derech, or path, to a break from it and a life in the secular world.
Sara Glass’s memoir is notable for a few additions to this familiar plotline. First, though raised in the strict Gur Hasidic sect, from early adolescence she’s felt—and acted on—her sexual and emotional passion for female friends, though she is certain of its wrongness and desperate to turn from it and subsume herself in marriage. Sara (then known as Malka) has another drive that sets her apart: With a mother who struggles with mental health issues, and a sister sent away to Israel because of similar though unspecified instability, she is secretly determined to earn a PhD in psychology and plunge into research that can make her sister well.
Though the path is predictably thorny, involving two marriages, two children, a complicated custody battle, layers of secrets and betrayals and a struggle to own her true nature, the letters on the author’s bio—“By Dr. Sara Glass, Ph.D., LCSW”—tell of the triumphant outcome. Fittingly, Glass has ended up as, in her own description, a therapist treating “members of the queer community and individuals who have survived trauma to live bold, honest and proud lives.” It can’t have been easy to write, but the struggle for honesty pays off.
Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure
By Mimi Zieman
Falcon, 244 pp.
Sometimes, finding your true nature means unlearning a lot of what you thought you knew about it. Mimi Zieman, a daughter of immigrants whose father survived the Holocaust, always saw herself as timid and cautious—until her third year of medical school, when she volunteered to be the sole medical support staff on an experimental four-person climb of Mount Everest. How did that happen? And how on earth was she to deal with the situation in which she’d landed herself, highly dangerous and demanding double measures of both courage and empathy?
In a thoughtful memoir that evidently marinated for many years—Zieman was 25 in 1988, when she climbed Everest, and has had a full career since then as a writer and ob/gyn—the author looks back on the moments of youthful clarity that propelled her to twin passions, a love of medicine and a love of the mountains. Ironically, an encounter not with an inspiring doctor but with a nasty one steered her to medicine, giving her the idea she could be a kinder, more approachable gynecologist than the one who frightened her at 13. Later, pure nerve sent her up the mountain, but it was the frightful conditions and near brushes with death that ultimately taught her to let go of her fears and “dance.” It makes a great tale. Few people can claim to have attained personal growth in such extreme and colorful circumstances.
Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice
By David S. Tatel
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp.
What makes a Jewish memoir Jewish? Nothing in Judge David S. Tatel’s memoir directly addresses his religious identity—though I have vivid memories of his “officiating” at a moot court on a point of Talmudic law at my son’s Hebrew High School graduation ceremony. Rather, his story tells of his lifelong struggle to come to terms with a different aspect of his identity. From an early age he had retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive eye ailment that would render him completely blind by his mid-30s.
As a successful civil rights lawyer and later a federal judge, Tatel writes, he strove to ignore and downplay anything that would tag him as a person with a disability, let alone as “the blind judge.”
Few people can claim to have attained personal growth in such extreme and colorful circumstances.
After retiring from 30 years on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he sat down to write what he thought would be a memoir about the values that have shaped his life and his distinguished legal and judicial career. (The seat he occupied on the D.C. court was the one RBG had held before her elevation to the Supreme Court.) As he wrote, he found that his blindness was inextricably intertwined with the story.
The book has garnered media attention for the bluntness with which it criticizes the current Supreme Court and its rulings. But it’s also worth reading for the sheer moral heft of Tatel’s career and the generosity with which he shares his journey of identity.
Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams and Broken Genes
By Jessica Fein
Behrman House, 280 pp.
It’s hard to tell the story of a child’s illness and death, let alone your own child’s, without drowning in sentiment. Despite all the superstructure of modern medicine, there’s no escaping the fact that these tragic stories happen. Grieving parents have shared them in unforgettable accounts (most recently journalist Sarah Wildman in her essays about her daughter Orli, who died of liver cancer in 2022). Jessica Fein tells hers with a gentle touch and a palpable love of her daughter that make the story gripping and wrenching in equal degrees. Adopted from overseas as a baby, Dalia radiated delight and cheer long before she could speak. But she never quite attained stability in walking—by kindergarten, she was stumbling like a toddler—and was diagnosed soon after with a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease to which she ultimately succumbed in her late teens.
I’d read about two-thirds of the way into this story, including a touching account of the author’s father’s death, before I realized that the father in question was Moment’s own cofounding editor, Leonard Fein. And indeed, the family’s Jewish values suffuse the story, which ends with Dalia’s valiant bat mitzvah, accomplished despite paralysis and a breathing tube that made speech impossible. “I’d need to decide whether the blessing or the curse defined me,” Fein writes in the painful aftermath of her daughter’s death, concluding that being mother to Dalia, a person of such joy and light, after all and despite everything was more blessing than curse.
Amy E. Schwartz is Moment’s opinion and book editor.
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