Many writers seem daunted by the autobiographical novel—ashamed to write of themselves, as if that were either self-indulgence or exploitation. And of course with James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paragon, many do not even dare to try. But Joyce didn’t frighten off E.L. Doctorow, who mined his own Depression-era childhood in New York for the 1986 National Book Award-winning World’s Fair.
On 1979, an Israeli censorship committee chaired by the justice minister deleted five evocative paragraphs from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir: his first-person account of the expulsion of Arab residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-49. The description contradicted the heroic official line, which pictured Arabs as fleeing the fighting, not being deliberately forced out by Israeli forces.
The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen // Alfred A. Knopf // 2015, pp. 320, $27.95
When Jack Miles approached me with the proposition to edit the Judaism volume of the projected Norton Anthology of World Religions, I was naturally flattered but also confounded. There are, of course, many anthologies of Judaism in different formats. But the Norton anthologies are different.
Eichman Before Jeruslem: The Unexamined Life ofa Mass Murderer / Bettina Stangneth / Translated from the German by Ruth Martin / Alfred A. Knopf / 2014, pp. 579, $35
Queen of Thieves: The True Story of “Marm” Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York by J. North Conway / Skyhorse Publishing / 2014, pp. 240, $24.95
Babel in Zion:Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 by Liora R. Halperin / Yale University Press / 2014, pp. 328, $40
THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis // Alfred A. Knopf // 2014 // pp. 306
Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.
French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.
