MAYA ARAD'S PAGE: HAPPY NEW YEARS; and THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas

HAPPY NEW YEARS
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, preorder now for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish new year to her old friends from a women's teaching college.

Comprising five decades of correspondence, the novel skillfully weaves together Leah's high hopes and deep disappointments as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs. Leah's relentless optimism and cheerfulness conceal disturbing truths behind her carefully crafted words. As her letters turn increasingly introspective, the secrets and shame that shaped her trajectory unravel.

This is the epistolary novel at its best, inviting the reader to play detective and probe between the lines of Leah's insistently rosy portrayal of her life. Gradually piecing together her true circumstances, we are charmed into forgiving her minor deceptions and richly rewarded with the profound insights that Leah's self-constructed narrative reveals.

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My Review: What does a lifetime of dissembling hide? What does a multi-decade one-sided relationship require of the one creating it? Leah, sixty years ago, made temporary friendships she mistook for real friendships (or tried to will into real friendships) in Israel before emigrating to the US. The reason she emigrated, like everything else in her life, is behind a scrim of what she wants these "friends" to see.

It's a common enough experience to commit to a relationship that the other party/s are not having, mostly in earlier life; but to continue to make the effort to inform these clearly indifferent people of what she wants them to think is her life...! The effort, the energy put into thinking of what it *should* be, this life she's crafted. I was slightly in awe at the artifice of the story as Author Arad told it.

But really now, is Leah doing anything most all of us do not do? Is the Story of Your Life the real story, or curated by memory to make your mistakes, cruelties, neglectful unkindnesses tolerable to the You doing the thinking? Leah is all of us, I think, at least those of us not doing ourselves the service of going into therapy.

I'm not all the way sure most people will bother to look past a narrative device, the epistolary novel, to look into a deeper crevice of Leah's commonality with us all: what stories is she telling herself to get through her life? Is it a life, or an existence, as she is experiencing it? And how are we all using these same means to be in any way satified by life as we live it? I'm guessing a lot of Leahs are just not ready or willing or able to stop writing their own letters, the literal scripts (in its multiple senses) of artifice and craftsmanship. The bulk of people are the Cleopatras of old, barging down Denial.

So it was that Leah won my sympathy as she lived the life she had to, and showed the life she wanted in letters to people who never cared much. Author Arad weaves the two together all the way through the story but it isn't obvious how until the ending. I know most of y'all wouldn't be bothered by a spoiler, but...well...the noisy ones would, so not this time.

I'll say this much: I was deeply satisfied, fulfilled even, by the resolution. That's saying a lot.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR HEBREW FICTION IN TRANSLATION (2024)

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are few things more fraught than women pursuing lives and careers of their own, not subordinate to, lesser than, or determined by, a man's life/career/convenience or a family's needs. Even in Israel, an aggressively egalitarian gender system's mothership, there are traditional religious practitioners who resist this facet of the Sabras' intent when setting the State of Israel up. Maya Arad, in these novellas, probes the roles, minds, and hearts of her "women of a certain age" whose courses in life were set to accomplish things for, well, for others but still for themselves.

What happens is a quiet-seeming, radical takedown of unquestioned, unquestioning, unquestionable "morality." It is a pity that Author Arad is not a household name in the US. Translator Cohen has made her art umistakable by exercising the translator's alchemy on it.

The Hebrew Teacher brings Ilana, whose Zionism stopped being examined in the 70s, into abrupt awareness of what younger assimilated US-raised Jews think and feel. Her new colleague at the college where she's taught Jewish Studies her entire adult life, is...not in sympathy...with her views, nor (to her startlement) is her US-born son.

The shock of realizing how much one has built and then benefited from a mountain of privilege is always existential. Ilana, in Author Arad's capable brain, discovers and processes how deep the divide in what has been her intellectual...and moral...fief for so long really runs.

Costs are exacted. Life's inexorable moving, too-often-wilfully ignored, never ever ceases. 4*

A Visit (Scenes) has family communication at its heart. It is fragmented, as the title suggests; Miriam is, possibly, suppressing or possibly simply ignoring (as we all do in older years) what comes between the moments limned clearly here.

Yoram's deeply estranged relationship to Mother Miriam is not close to unusual for immigrant parents to assimilated/assimilating children. Is Miriam the woman he's made in his mind, one he does not want his son Yonatan in close contact with, or is she simply bearing the brunt of his dissatisfaction?

In the end, this set of interrelated vignettes was not emotionally resonant with me, for no reason I can articulate at all well. 3.5*

Make New Friends is a mantra for immigrant mom Efrat to her socially awkward daughter Libby. I can understand why, since Efrat comes across as someone who never quite belonged; but more than that, Libby is in a new world that's never existed before of internet-mediated socialization and socializing that befuddles, scares, leaves behind most people older than twenty-five.

Immigrant moms are at the most unnervingly invisible-to-them disadvantage: The natural, inevitable rejection of an adolescent for a parent's wisdom and experience is exacerbated by a real cultural gap. Efrat can not possibly know what Libby faces online. It was not part of her life at that time of life, and is not part of her life now.

How does one guide a foreigner one gave birth to? Is it even possible? or is offering love and unquestioning support enough?

Extremely relevant questions in 2025's societal landscape. 4*

THE WARNER BROTHERS, the Jewish immigrants who created modern Hollywood

THE WARNER BROTHERS
CHRIS YOGERST
The University Press of Kentucky (Screen Classics series)
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars.

These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it.

In The Warner Brothers, Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat—and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat.

Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Four driven Jewish immigrants left Poland poor nobodies and became the architects of an entire multi-billion dollar empire...and multi-trillion dollar industry.

They didn't play nice all the time. They didn't hesitate to call out hypocrisy while practicing it. But they, for better or worse, made the modern celebrity/entertainment culture we all live in from their savviest business instincts and their unrelenting drive to be Safe in their new homeland. They were charitable with their money and made a big difference in many lives, for the better.

Their studio acquiesced to the Production Code, as they had to in order to stay in business, but produced subversively messaged anti-Nazi and anti-Klan movies. They innovated technologically (The Jazz Singer's sound was an invention of Sam Warner, who died before its premiere...one of the brothers' many personal tragedies). They created and massaged and changed advertising paradigms, distribution methods, audience metrics...and how to make a mess of your life. Jack Warner, a horrible man, comes out of this biographical book looking like Iago's mentor. He was awful to actresses, he was awful to his brothers, he was horrible to his son. No one that terrible should've made the amazing films he made.

Loads of black and white images make this a handy reference for studio publicity photo lovers, and enrich the general reader's experience of the story. It is told as a story, albeit not in the most exciting narrative voice. The author definitely wants you to know that he's done the research, thought through the implications of the Warner Brothers's effect on film as an art and an industry. He's not ignoring the personal details of their Shakespearan family saga. He just doesn't give it to you in punchy, quip-laden sentences.

Author Yogerst is telling us the story of an Institution, The Warner Brothers, a family of immigrant Jews in an anti-semitic world, who created the institution Warner Bros., whose thousands of films we've all watched our entire lives...pure Hollywood, that story. That will appeal to your film-buff giftee as well as your Jewish studies maven. The Warner Brothers are well-served by The Warner Brothers.

WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY, multi-award and -honor winner, as well as anti-semitism fighter

WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY
SACHA LAMB
Levine Querido
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Young Adult book!

2023 Stonewall Book Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature

2023 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

2023 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Young Adult

The Publisher Says: A queer immigrant fairytale about individual purpose, the fluid nature of identity, and the power of love to change and endure.

Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.

Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Multiple awards and honors and nominations later, it's very clear that the Industry recognized this story as one that has a lot to say, and a very winning way of saying it. The publisher tells us it's got a very Good Omens vibe...true enough, but don't expect Aziraphael and Crowley's intimate dynamic here. Like Good Omens there is an omniscient narrator, well used to keep us on the track of our angel and demon as they set about trying to right the wrongs "their" humans, the ones from the shtetl they've adopted as their home, endure.

Here I pause to mention something that could impact your readerly pleasure. There is a lot of Yiddish used in the story, which for the time and place is absolutely correct. It isn't translated, and at times the word or concept isn't entirely obvious from context only. I recommend that you have the browser open on some device, if you're reading a tree-book, to look up the words you don't think you've got right in your mind's eye. Ebooks usually have adequate dictionary access to tell you what you need to know if it isn't in the provided glossary. I myownself wasn't thrown by this but as anyone who's not here for the first time knows, I'm weird.

Rose is our main human character, a young woman just coming to terms with her lesbian identity. The early twentieth century was a lousy time to be a woman, let alone one who loved other women! Her best friend and love object has just gone away to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to marry a man, as is expected of any frum young woman in that place and time. Our supernatural entities are, for a contrast to everyone else, utterly unfazed by Rose's love for Dinah. They know their purpose is to help Rose (among others) get to the New World and take her shot with Dinah...if it can work out, as she's got this impending marriage thing....

Assisting a dead rabbi's ghost in finding his daughter so she can mourn him properly and thus prevent him fom entering awful dybbukhood, dispensing social justice to exploitive sweatshop owners, not to mention greedy steerage-selling profiteers gouging their fellow Jews out of the last tiny hint of savings, the evil christian supernaturals posing as immigration doctors to prevent Jews from entering the US...all this and more must be taken into righteousness before our supernatural duo can go back to Torah study and peace in Shtetl.

I genuinely think the playfulness of Author Lamb's imagination makes the difficult and unfair nature of the issues to be surmounted less unhappy than it would be in less amusing hands. I know the entire time Rose shows a brave face to the world, where we-the-readers know she's completely terrified but too outraged to let whatever it is pass unchallenged is the kind of message I want to send to all young women. Especially young Jewish women in the rising anti-semitic culture we've allowed to metastasize. It's a good read as a fantasy novel for adults, too; the Mythopoeic Society doesn't pass out their accolades with a shovel.

I can't go with a perfect rating because there are points towards the end that just go on too long. The pace overall is never breakneck, or really even brisk. The aforementioned Yiddish-language heavy text does wear on the Anglophone inner ear after a while. All that said, I still think this is a great Booksgiving choice for your thirteen-and-up nieces who enjoyed Good Omens.

And yourownselves, of course, why should those little pishers have all the fun?

BURNING GIRLS by Veronica Schanoes, as concetrated and as powerful as any ancient fairy tale

BURNING GIRLS
VERONICA SCHANOES
Tor.com
Free Kindle download

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Burning Girls by Veronica Schanoes is a fascinating dark fantasy novella about a Jewish girl educated by her grandmother as a healer and witch growing up in an increasingly hostile environment in Poland in the late nineteenth century. In addition to the natural danger of destruction by Cossacks, she must deal with a demon plaguing her family.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

My Review: Most fairy tales, myths, folk stories, and the like have gone through the lapidary process of retelling and refining to fit the mouths of many generations, each with its own set of prejudices and needs. Writers building on this huge pile of glittering gems are able to take shortcuts and make vague gestures, sure that wide swathes of their audience will catch the nuances and those that don't won't care too much.

It was doubly welcome, then, that Schanoes made it her business to avoid the lazy and (I don't doubt) tempting "look! look! I got this idea here!" gestures. Instead she uses the fine word-instruments with sharp points that create the facets in a fiery gem of story. Her retelling of a long-beloved folk tale will surprise you, so I won't give away its source. What I will say is, when the big reveal came, I was dreading and expecting it, the story had taken its final switchback turn of inevitability, and I was just hanging on to the hope that, by some miracle of authorial will, that last, smallest chink of light wouldn't...

...but you know, stories have their own gravity, they obey a physics that won't be denied, and Fate simply Is.