Stories of survival, success

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Strong personalities run through the books reviewed by the Jewish Independent this year. On the fiction side, there are immigrants creating a new life for themselves and women looking for love. In nonfiction, a writer and a survivor make sure an important story gets told and a Jew becomes the prime minister of England. You may not laugh or cry, but you will learn something from every one of these books.

The fiction spectrum

The German Bride by Joanna Hershon (Ballantine Books) begins in Berlin, 1865. Eva Frank and her sister, Henriette, are daughters of a banker and, therefore, lead comfortable lives, materially, anyway. Their mother spends much time at Karlsbad, where she takes "endless baths meant to have restorative healing powers." Their parents come from different backgrounds – father religious, mother secular – and the relationship doesn't appear warm. But Eva's life takes a downturn as a result of her own actions, no one else's.

The 18-year-old has an affair with an artist who was hired to paint her and Henriette's portraits. This mistake has tragic consequences and, in an attempt to escape her pain, Eva hastily marries Abraham Shein, a merchant visiting his homeland Germany from the American West, where he has lived for many years. Eva crosses the Atlantic and the harsh, open terrain of America, eventually landing in Sante Fe, N.M., where life only gets rougher and more dangerous for Eva – Abraham is not a nice man, nor a particularly good businessman.

Hershon's novel is an exciting story about a part of the Jewish immigrant experience that is not often portrayed – frontier life. She doesn't sugarcoat the situations in which Eva finds herself but, despite the gravity of the book, there is humor. In introducing readers to the Frank family, for example, Hershon writes:

"A few years before, Father had insisted on hiring extra servants for Passover but Mother had refused, claiming she could only trust Rahel. But when Father prevailed and Mother compromised (agreeing to hire extra servants but only Rahel's relations), unflappable Rahel – having already told Eva that she had only brothers – produced several sisters, one after the other, all of whom looked nothing like her."

By the end of The German Bride, the title no longer applies to Eva: she has transformed. By necessity, she has become stronger and more independent. As with other novels about the American West, readers will wonder how America ever developed into the relatively peaceful, law-abiding, democratic nation it is today. Its origins were certainly violent and harsh – though fun to read about.

In another work of fiction focusing on the immigrant experience, there is Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka. A new translation by Mark Harman, a professor of German and English at Elizabeth College in Elizabeth, Penn., has just been published by Schocken Books.

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in 1924. Only a few of his writings were published when he was alive; most appeared posthumously, edited by his friend and literary executor Max Brod. However, over the last 30 years, an international team of scholars has been working on Kafka's writings, going back to the original manuscripts and notes, correcting transcription errors and removing Brod's stylistic changes. Harman's translation is based on this work.

Kafka died before he finished Der Verschollene (The Missing Person), which Brod named Amerika. Kafka began writing the novel in 1912 and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914. This leaves incomplete the story of 17-year-old Karl Rossmann, banished to America by his parents after he is seduced by a 35-year-old servant, who then bears his child. Kafka did write several chapters of Rossmann's adventures in his new land and, as in many of his writings, there is humor and there are silly situations, as well as social commentary and themes of alienation. Though readers will never know how Kafka wanted to end the novel, Harman's translation offers a couple of options from material that Kafka did write down.

For those looking for a lighter read – a much, much lighter read – The Shiksa Syndrome by Laurie Graff (Broadway Books) falls into the chick lit category. If you need any more proof of that, in addition to the title and the book's cover, Kim Cattrall of Sex in the City fame makes a cameo appearance in the story.

The Shiksa Syndrome was actually a better read than anticipated. There is some witty writing and there are touching moments. There is even an ultimately uplifting moral about the importance of being true to oneself.

It alls starts at a Christmas party, where Manhattan publicist Aimee Albert is watching her non-Jewish boyfriend, Peter, carve the ham. She gets admonished for suggesting a game of dreidel and a dessert of latkes after dinner: "'It's enough you brought bagels,' says Peter, looking at the mixed dozen strategically placed between the green bean casserole, marshmallow sweet potatoes and his grandmother's pumpkin pie.

"'Well you told me to bring bread.' A publicist, I always know a good spin."

Peter breaks up with Aimee at that dinner and she decides she should find a Jewish boyfriend. This is hard though, because, in the novel, Jewish men are only interested in non-Jewish women, which is why Aimee pretends to be one when she meets Josh. Aimee gets lost in her plan and, ultimately, loses the relationship – but don't worry, she comes out the better for it in the end.

The plot is quite absurd but, if you can overlook that, and the depressing, even insulting, notion that Jewish men only like non-Jewish women, then there is fun to be had reading The Shiksa Syndrome.

Schindler and Disraeli

Searching for Schindler by Tom Keneally (Doubleday) is a memoir of how Keneally first heard about Oskar Schindler – from someone Schindler saved – and Keneally's subsequent journey around the world to discover Schindler's complete story; first to turn it into an award-winning book then into an award-winning film.

In Searching for Schindler, Keneally not only provides great detail about the research process, but also reflects on his own writing career and how the book changed his life. These aspects are reasonably interesting, however, Searching for Schindler includes much irrelevant personal/family information and some of the Schindler-related material comes across more like name-dropping or grievance-vetting than storytelling. Despite being an accomplished writer, Keneally seems to be looking for affirmation.

If you really loved either the book or the movie, then you will enjoy most of Searching for Schindler. Otherwise, best to pick up something else this holiday.

A much more fascinating read is Benjamin Disraeli by Adam Kirsch, which is the 10th book in the Schocken Books/Nextbook Jewish Encounters series. The Independent has reviewed several books of the series, including Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein and Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor.

There have been many biographies of Disraeli, who was a best-selling novelist, as well as prime minister of England twice – he led a short-lived minority government in 1868, then held power from 1874-1880. What makes this bio somewhat different is that Kirsch theorizes on how Disraeli's view of himself as a Jew (though he was baptized) influenced his political machinations. Kirsch explores Jewish history, Disraeli's Jewish heritage specifically, as well as how Jews and Judaism were depicted in the literature of the time, including Disraeli's own works.

As the book's promotional material explains, Disraeli's "flirtation with proto-Zionism, his ideas about power and empire, and his fantasies about the Middle East remain prophetically relevant today. How a man who was born a Jew – and who remained in the eyes of his countrymen a member of a despised minority – managed to become prime minister of England seems even today nothing short of miraculous." Just a few reasons why Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli is worth reading.

^TOP