One of the consistent challenges at Passover is bringing new perspectives to the texts and rituals that can too easily become rote. With the festival approaching, Steven Weitzman’s new book, “Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World,” is particularly welcome.

Our customary recitation of the 10 plagues at the seder table is notable for its minimalism. The lack of detail in the presentation of the plagues in the Book of Exodus makes them ripe for expansion and exploration.

Weitzman, who directs the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, takes an unconventional approach. Rather than simply offering a close reading of the Biblical text and its rabbinic interpretation, he ventures widely and explores how the plagues have been understood by Jews, Christians and Muslims over the centuries.

The book, published in February, devotes a chapter to each plague, with Weitzman selecting something “odd or puzzling” in the text to examine.

For the fourth plague, he focuses not on the disastrous invasion of flies but on the fact that the Israelites are protected by where they live: Goshen. This region in Egypt appears in Exodus only in connection with the plagues: “I will set apart in that day the land of Goshen, where my people are stationed, so that no swarm of flies will be there…”

Weitzman examines how Goshen is at once a land populated by slaves and a haven of sorts from the plague. “If Egypt is a symbol of oppression and brutality, and Canaan of freedom and independence,” he writes. “Goshen represented something in between, a realm situated within the heart of an oppressive landscape that nonetheless offered room to act with a measure of autonomy.”

I was particularly moved by his consideration of how African Americans regarded Goshen. Weitzman finds that while Egypt and Canaan carried enormous symbolic power in African American thought and expression, the idea of Goshen as a haven within the world of enslavement did not gain traction at first — perhaps because no corresponding haven existed for Black people in the United States during slavery. In 1900, however, Black essayist Kelly Miller wrote “The Modern Land of Goshen,” calling for Black people to work toward economic self-dependence.

Dozens of self-governed Black towns emerged in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Civil War, offering some degree of insulation from the surrounding racism. One such place was Eatonville, Florida, where author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was raised. Her book “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” which fictionalizes the Exodus story, offers a vision of Goshen as a sort of prison camp. But it was one where, as Weitzman puts it, “the oppressed find ways to evade the notice of their taskmasters and express themselves freely.”

The author approaches the fifth plague of cattle disease by asking whether attention was paid to the suffering of the animals themselves.

He finds that early Jewish and Christian interpreters appeared unbothered by the afflicted cattle, viewed as “mere implements” of God’s designs. Christian sermons from the 17th century onward, however, showed increased concern about animal welfare, and real-world recurrences of widespread cattle disease kept it in public consciousness.

Weitzman traces a line from this emerging empathy to new language in some contemporary haggadahs, in which “God‘s killing of animals during the exodus began to be experienced as a moral embarrassment by Jewish animal rights activists, vegetarians, and vegans.“

In discussing the sixth plague, Weitzman focuses not on the boils, but on the “shift that Exodus registers from a pharaoh who hardens his own heart to a pharaoh whose heart is hardened by God.” This is familiar territory to those who have studied Jewish commentary on Exodus, but I particularly appreciated Weitzman’s discussion of Christian thought.

Paul the apostle, writing in the Epistle to the Romans, took a deterministic approach, asserting that God created Pharaoh to be hardhearted. This view met resistance early on, with the third-century scholar Origen arguing that God endowed people with free will and that human beings always have choices concerning their behavior.

Tracing a path through Augustine, Erasmus, Luther and other thinkers, Weitzman notes that “Christians will turn again and again to the story of Pharaoh’s hardened heart to try to work out whether humans have self-determining power in a world controlled by an all-powerful and all-knowing God.“ 

The book’s afterword reveals that it was inspired by the feelings Weitzman experienced at the first seder during the pandemic lockdown, with the plagues taking on a sudden immediacy. Other chapters convey the sense that the plagues remain relevant today, in a world marked by war, disease and environmental catastrophe. 

For those interested in the Bible’s enduring influence or seeking fresh insight before this year’s seder, the book offers a challenging and satisfying journey.

“Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World” by Steven Weitzman (Princeton University Press, 328 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

We tend to reserve the word “inheritance” to refer to the physical possessions, or to the genetic properties, that get passed down to us. But for many people, the most significant (and often the most knotty) inheritance lies in our family’s culture and history.

British playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis’ “Always Carry Salt,” set for release on Jan. 6, is an endearing memoir about struggling to come to terms with a particularly complicated heritage.

Ellis was born in England in 1975 to Jewish refugees from Iraq. Her father had been airlifted to Israel as a boy in 1951 and eventually settled in London, where he met Ellis’ mother, who had departed Baghdad in 1971.

As a child, Ellis grew up amid stories, traditional foods and the colorful Judeo-Iraqi Arabic language in which her parents and their families conducted their private lives. However, upon becoming a mother, she realized with deep sadness that she was unequipped to pass this rich legacy to her son.

This brought Ellis into something of an existential crisis, to which she responded by immersing herself in an exploration of what it means to be an Iraqi Jew separated by time and place from a world that no longer exists.

Iraq was home to one of the oldest Jewish diaspora populations, tracing itself back to the first exile in the 6th century BCE. It became the Jewish world’s most significant center of scholarship, giving us the Babylonian Talmud. The community remained strong into the modern era. In the early 20th century, more than a third of Baghdad’s residents were Jewish. 

Conditions changed during a period of political turmoil, with incitements against Jews culminating in the horrendous episode in 1941 known as the Farhud, when a large number of Baghdadi Jews were slaughtered, raped or injured by their neighbors. With the establishment of the State of Israel, official persecution of Jews increased, with many suspected Zionists executed. By the early 1950s, the vast majority of the country’s Jews were gone, their property having been seized and their citizenship revoked. The community continued to dwindle, and today fewer than five Jews remain in the country.

Acknowledging her “homesickness for a place I’d never been,” Ellis sought to find her way into a deeper relationship with her origins. This involved both studying books and documenting her own parents’ and grandparents’ often painful experiences, marked by violence and imprisonment in Iraq, displacement as refugees, and discrimination and cultural erasure in Israel.

She did not want to pass on a legacy defined by suffering, though, and sought more celebratory means of sharing her family’s past. What came most naturally to her was cooking. She recreated in her home many of the dishes she grew up with, even attempting to obtain foods that had been part of her parents’ early lives, such as nabug, an elusive fruit (a kind of jujube) that can be found nowhere in England.

But most central to Ellis 一 fittingly for a woman who has made her living with words 一 was language.

Retaining linguistic elements that predate the Arab conquest of the 7th century, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is distinct from the Arabic spoken by the nation’s Muslims and Christians. For Ellis, it is most alive in its flavorful colloquial expressions, such as “chopping onions on my heart,” which was the book’s title when originally published earlier this year in the United Kingdom.

Not having truly learned her family’s language, she feels a sense of horror and guilt that she is passively witnessing its path to extinction. Gratified to discover an online course in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic hosted by the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, she enrolls, albeit sobered that she is likely not destined to become a fluent speaker.

Indeed, these efforts are often accompanied by a degree of angst and self-doubt. Ellis notes that “for a long time the weight of this made me feel like it was futile to even bother building my ark, let alone loading it with what I could save of my language or my culture. What was the point when we couldn’t go back? Why learn the words for things and places I would never see?”

Over the course of the book we witness Ellis finding a sense of balance, or compromise, and realizing that she cannot shoulder the responsibility for a culture that’s been so weakened by historical forces. She accepts that it can sometimes be enough to take pleasure in those parts that bring her meaning and to share those with her son.

For all of the heaviness in this subject matter, Ellis’ skill as a writer makes the journey delightful. The book is frequently humorous, and its intimacy and honesty make the author feel like a friend.

The book is also timely, coming out at a time when Jews with roots in the Arab world can find their identities challenged, especially amid the charged political rhetoric that has taken hold since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Ellis laments that the “Iraqi Jewish story was being denied and erased with more ferocity than usual because it didn’t fit into the narrative that all Israelis were white European settler-colonizers.”

By choosing to inhabit her identity proudly and fully, even when at odds with reductive narratives that have become increasingly prevalent, Ellis helps give voice to many Jews who struggle to make themselves visible.

“Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture” by Samantha Ellis (Pegasus Books, 288 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Marking the second anniversary of Oct. 7 this month offered a chance to reflect on how so many of us, even at a distance from Israel, feel that we are living in the shadow of the horrific day and of all that has occurred in its wake. It brought to my mind Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein’s 2018 book “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.”

The book not only chronicles the riots of April 1903 in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev, in which 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds more were raped or injured, but traces the powerful impact and afterlife of the horrors, which would, in Zipperstein’s words, “define for many Jews and others, too, the contour of Jewish fate in the half-century before the Holocaust.” Although vast differences separate Oct. 7 and Kishinev, among the similarities is that sense of reverberation.

Keeping that in mind, I’d like to share two new books of poetry that form a bridge to the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom and also speak to us today.

Published in 1904, Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” is often cited as the most influential Hebrew poem of the modern era. As a staple of the Israeli school curriculum, many Israelis turned to it in complicated ways in the aftermath of Oct. 7. The release this month of “On the Slaughter,” Peter Cole’s translation of selections of Bialik’s poetry, offers a new opportunity for English readers to engage with the poem, along with Bialik’s larger body of work.

The stunning poem has a compelling origin story. In 1903 Bialik was living in Odesa, where he had earned acclaim as an innovative Hebrew poet. Following the pogrom, he was given the assignment of traveling to Kishinev to survey the scene, conduct interviews with survivors and issue a report articulating his findings.

After five weeks in Kishinev and several months of writing, what emerged was not a report, but a long poem. In an eloquent voice explicitly incorporating Biblical language and structure, the poem portrays God commanding the prophet/poet/reader to go to the besieged neighborhoods of Kishinev to witness what has transpired. Bialik relates the carnage unflinchingly and responds with intensity, depicting Jewish existence at its lowest ebb and a deity who promises neither succor nor salvation.

The poem’s searing portrait of Jewish helplessness, and its rejection of religiosity as a means of deliverance, helped fuel the cause of Jewish nationalism and self-defense that captivated many Eastern European Jews in the early 20th century. The poem has also been criticized for its allegation that the men of Kishinev passively “looked on and did not stir” and prayed for their own welfare as women were being assaulted. We know from court records and Bialik’s own field notes that many Kishinev Jews did in fact exhibit forms of resistance.

Peter Cole is among the most sensitive and skilled translators of Hebrew verse in our era, and his work here offers a new opportunity to appreciate Bialik’s multifaceted craft, which laid the groundwork for Israeli poetry. Cole’s notes on the poems are especially helpful and identify some of the Biblical and rabbinic references Bialik employs.

One would not expect to find “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” mentioned after considering Bialik, but the notorious antisemitic forgery is also connected to Kishinev. Claiming to be the record of a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world domination, it was first issued in the fall of 1903 in a St. Petersburg newspaper owned by Kishinev-based publisher Pavel Krushevan, who is now believed to be at least partially responsible for its authorship. 

Krushevan also published “Bessarabets,” the Kishinev newspaper that regularly employed accusations of ritual murder and other canards to rally its readers against Jews in the months leading to the pogrom. Just months after the pogrom, Krushevan would produce a text whose long and influential life even he could not have predicted — if a book can have blood on its hands, this one does.

Erasure poetry is an uncommon modern poetic form in which an author develops a poem by removing words from preexisting source material. Portland-based poet and artist Daniela Naomi Molnar worked methodically with an edition of “Protocols” to create a new work through the process of erasure. She added no words to the existing text; the only liberty she gave herself was to alter where the words appear on the page.

Extending more than 80 pages, the resulting poem, titled “PROTOCOLS: An Erasure,” is a marvelous act of subversion. Molnar renders the original document unrecognizable, replacing it with a thoughtful and hopeful meditation whose spare text is arranged with intention and sometimes playfulness, reflecting an artist’s eye. The word “Jew” makes no appearance. Standing out instead is “power,” which recurs dozens of times and is given emphasis not only through its retention in this erasure, but in Molnar’s repeatedly embedding the word in parentheses, as if it is always present but stands apart. Power and powerlessness — political, personal, artistic — are at the center of this revision, perhaps most palpably in the author’s sheer chutzpah in vanquishing the antisemitic tract by robbing its ability to inspire violence.

The lengthy poem is followed by a moving autobiographical essay in which Molnar reflects on her own painful inheritance as the granddaughter of four survivors of Nazi concentration camps. 

When Molnar writes that “traumas live on like stars. Their effects continue to reach us long after their ends,” I’m reminded of how dwelling in the dogged afterlife of tragedy shapes us in fundamental ways. Molnar goes further to suggest provocatively that post-Holocaust Jewish culture is “intent on freezing its members in a state of haunting not only by disregarding the possibility of healing, but by actively obstructing it.” I have little insight into how we heal ourselves and each other, but I am left wondering whether transforming injury into poetry is one way we move in that direction.

“On the Slaughter” by Hayim Nahman Bialik, selected and translated by Peter Cole (New York Review Books, 152 pages)

 “PROTOCOLS: An Erasure” by Daniela Naomi Molnar (Ayin Press, 144 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

When studying history, I believe it’s essential to learn both the facts and the human stories behind them. 

Haley Cohen Gilliland offers both in “A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children.” The book, published in July, reconstructs the long journey of the women who bravely pursued the truth about what happened to their relatives during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

Gilliland, who leads the Yale Journalism Initiative and reported from Argentina for four years for the Economist, tells the story by concentrating on a single family, the Roisinblits. The child of Jewish immigrants, Rosa Roisinblit grew up in the agricultural colonies financed in the late 19th century by the European philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch to help settle Eastern European Jews in Argentina. Impatient with rural life, Rosa left for Buenos Aires at 15 and eventually became an obstetrician.

Rosa and her husband’s sole child, Patricia, came of age in a nation in the throes of enormous political unrest and violence. A medical student, Patricia Roisinblit became involved with a revolutionary leftist group. She married a fellow radical, José, and they had a child, Mariana.

After a new military dictatorship was established in 1976, Patricia and Jose largely put aside their activism, with Patricia focusing on her medical studies and Jose on his store. But the government, intent on eliminating all subversive elements, had quietly begun a campaign of mass abductions. In 1978 both Jose and Patricia were taken by armed men. Mariana, who witnessed her mother’s abduction, was left with relatives.

Rosa spent months attempting on her own to learn the whereabouts of her daughter and a grandchild she’d never met. Patricia had been eight months pregnant when she was abducted. Eventually, Rosa found a group of women in similar straits, desperate for news but stonewalled by the government.

The grandmother group, an outgrowth of the group of mothers who regularly assembled at Buenos Aires’ main city square to call attention to their missing children, dubbed themselves the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Gilliland relates compellingly how they came together; how they struggled to discover the truth about what was happening to their children and grandchildren; and how they eventually managed to reunite many of the grandchildren with their biological families. It was a daunting endeavor, and one that cost some of the grandparents their lives.

What they would eventually learn is that the hundreds of pregnant women who were among Argentina’s disappeared were brought to military compounds. Though often tortured there, they were allowed to live long enough to give birth. Once they bore their children, most of the women were drugged and loaded onto airplanes. The planes flew above the Atlantic Ocean, at which point the sedated prisoners were pushed out. Their offspring were given away, often to military families.

It took more than two years for the grandmothers to locate their first missing grandchild, but, through unrelenting efforts, they began to achieve successes.

Scientific discovery played a fortuitous role, with a Bay Area connection. 

Mary-Claire King, a graduate of and former professor at UC Berkeley, is a pioneering geneticist who is best known today for discovering the BRCA1 genetic marker linked to breast cancer. 

In 1984, when Argentina’s dictatorship was replaced by a democratic government with a functioning court system, King was asked by the grandmother group to use her groundbreaking research and her Berkeley lab to develop a system for identifying genetic connections between grandparents and the children who were believed to be the offspring of abducted parents.

Sympathetic to the cause, King created what she called the Index of Grandpaternity, which combined mitochondrial DNA analysis with circumstantial evidence to establish the probability of a biological connection between a child and a possible grandparent. Approved by Argentinean courts, this became the first practical implementation of genetic genealogy, which we now see used profusely. It resulted in more than 100 confirmed relationships between bereaved grandparents and the grandchildren they had never met.

Gilliland demonstrates how the ethical implications of these cases were rarely simple.

When Rosa Roisinblit’s grandson was finally identified, he was 21 years old. He felt such resentment about being turned against his adoptive parents (even though his adoptive father was abusive and worked on an air force base that had been the site of torture and murder) that he spoke out against the grandmothers. His perspective eventually changed, but it took years. 

Some of the adults who had raised the children of the disappeared and falsified birth documents were eventually held legally accountable, but the children were often ambivalent about how justice should be implemented.

The book’s Jewish dimension emerges through the saga of Rosa Roisinblit, who served for decades as the grandmother group’s vice president. Her experience reflects the reality that, although Jews accounted for 1% of the Argentine population, they constituted 12% of the approximately 30,000 Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the dictatorship.

One figure who makes an appearance is Rabbi Marshall Meyer, an American Conservative rabbi who served for decades in Buenos Aires and protested human rights abuses. In one instance, he wore a tuxedo when he stood at watch at the port of Buenos Aires to prevent one of the grandchildren from being smuggled to Uruguay. His son was getting married the following day, and he wanted to make sure he was dressed appropriately in case he needed to spend the entire night at the dock.

Gilliland’s account is extraordinarily well researched and assembled, and one wishes it didn’t feel nearly as relevant. It is difficult to read these accounts of masked men pulling people into unmarked cars, or of a dictator’s threats against those he considers subversive, without thinking of developments in our own country. 

As an embrace of authoritarianism is on the rise across the world, it is instructive to remember the scars that such regimes leave. 

“A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children” by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 512 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

The funny thing about “family history” is that the more we explore it, the more we appreciate that our relatives’ lives were often profoundly linked to world events.

English journalist Rachel Cockerell reached her 20s with only the vaguest knowledge of her paternal family’s background. Her book “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,” released in May, represents quite the corrective.

Cockerell resurrects the memory of her Kyiv-born great-grandfather David Jochelmann, whose painted portrait loomed in the old Edwardian in which Cockerell’s father grew up in northern London but whose story had been lost to the family. It turns out that more than a century ago, Jochelmann played a significant role through his association with Israel Zangwill, the tremendously popular London writer who became deeply involved with the quest for a Jewish homeland. 

Cockerell provides the backstory: In 1903, in response to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl’s efforts to rescue Russian Jews in increased physical danger, the British government offered a portion of its colonial land holdings in Kenya (misidentified as Uganda) for Jewish settlement. Herzl died in 1904 before the movement he founded had an opportunity to decide on the offer. 

At the seventh Zionist Conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1906, the delegates voted overwhelmingly to reject the proposal, opting to focus exclusively on Palestine as the site for Jewish nationhood. 

Zangwill had been a fervent proponent of the Uganda Proposal as an opportunity to provide immediate refuge to Russia’s Jews. Incensed by his fellow Zionists, he left the movement and was soon heading an alternative organization. The Jewish Territorialist Organization (known as ITO) sought to identify other locations suitable for large-scale settlement by Russian Jews. Zangwill wrote, “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy,” noting that “there must exist somewhere in the world, a healthy, empty, or thinly-populated territory, large and fertile enough to hold a population of many millions and not strong enough in its civilization to melt up the Jewish people into its shape.” 

As the ITO scoured the globe for potential destinations, Zangwill received a proposition from German-born New York banker Jacob Schiff. 

Disturbed by the growth of Manhattan’s impoverished Jewish ghetto, Schiff envisioned bringing Eastern European Jews to the United States through a southern port and sending the new immigrants into the American heartland, bypassing the densely populated cities of the Eastern Seaboard. He asked Zangwill whether the ITO might take charge of this effort. Zangwill was ambivalent, but Schiff’s argument that the plan would be an “immediately practicable” means of removing Jews from worsening conditions in Russia convinced him. 

With the port of Galveston, Texas, selected as the gateway, the next challenge was to convince Russian Jews to take this significantly longer route to the United States. To lead this effort, Zangwill appointed Jochelmann, a delegate at the Zionist Congress who was likewise distressed by the rejection of the African plan. Jochelmann became responsible for the effort across Russia to recruit Jews and set them on their way. It succeeded but only to a degree. The project ceased in 1914, with only around 10,000 Russian Jewish immigrants having entered through Galveston, far short of what had been envisioned. With his work concluded, Jochelmann settled in London at Zangwill’s suggestion. 

The book then moves to the next generation of Jochelmanns. One of David’s sons, Emmanuel, born in Vilna, came to New York, where he took the name Emjo Basshe and became a notable avant-garde playwright. David’s daughters Fanny and Sonia continued living in the home that David had purchased upon moving to London. Fanny married a gentile Englishman; the book’s author is one of their descendants. Sonia married an acolyte of fiery Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky; they moved their family to Jerusalem in 1951. 

Spanning from the end of the 19th century to the years immediately following World War II, “Melting Point” is remarkable for both the story that Cockerell tells and her means of telling it. Eschewing conventional narrative, the book is a patchwork composed of hundreds of excerpts from newspapers, diaries, letters and interviews. It’s almost as if narrated by a chorus, with voices as disparate as Henry James and Winston Churchill. 

The author herself has no voice at all, except through the formidable craft of assembly. 

The book’s second half includes recollections from elderly family members whom Cockerell was able to interview. For some, it will be a letdown to shift from the high stakes of history to a grandmother’s dreadful driving and cooking skills. But this reflects the essence of the project, as it is fundamentally a family story, though one that pays attention to the historical backdrop. 

The book feels particularly relevant. The urgency of the early Zionist endeavor grew in the context of violence against Jews, notably the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. As we dwell in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, we are witness to forceful debates about the Jewish future, including the viability of nationalism, that echo earlier ones.

Interestingly, Zangwill’s reputation in the United States was solidified by the success of his 1908 play, “The Melting Pot,” which launched a metaphor that became the standard way of describing our nation’s absorption of people from many lands and beliefs. 

The play’s plot, in which a Jewish survivor of the Kishinev pogrom comes to America and falls in love with a Russian Christian immigrant, was received by many as an endorsement of radical assimilation. Yet, at the same time, Zangwill was writing that the “salvation of the Jews cannot be achieved without a territory for the Jews” — essentially a call for ethnic nationalism. We see these conflicting impulses reflected in the Jochelmann home in London, in which one daughter embraces assimilation, and the other moves to Israel. 

Both in her bold choice of form and the springboard she provides for a thoughtful return to historical events, Cockerell has offered us a rewarding journey through time.

“Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land” by Rachel Cockerell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Amid the polarizing debates and activism around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is often lamented that there is insufficient space for nuance. Zeeva Bukai’s debut novel, “The Anatomy of Exile,” is very much a book devoted to that nuance, attentive to injuries experienced by all sides.

Beginning in 1967 in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, the novel is a family drama centering on Tel Aviv native Tamar Abadi. 

Tamar, of Ashkenazi descent, is married to Salim, who came from Syria as a youth. Their sense of relief following Israel’s unanticipated victory in the war is shattered by the news that Salim’s sister Hadas, who is also Tamar’s closest friend, has been shot to death and that her assailant then killed himself. 

Although the incident is reported as a terror attack, Tamar deduces (and keeps to herself) that it was, in fact, a murder-suicide committed by Daoud, the Palestinian Muslim man with whom Hadas, though married, had been having an affair with for years. Devastated by his loss, Salim decides to move the family — himself, Tamar and their three children — to the United States with the intention of returning after five years.

In the shadow of this loss and dislocation, the novel’s central drama emerges when the Abadis’ teenage daughter Ruby becomes involved with Faisal Mahmoudi, the American-born son of a Palestinian family that has moved into their New York City apartment building. Traumatized by the memory of her sister-in-law’s tragedy, Tamar seeks to put an end to the budding romance. But her course of action has far-reaching consequences.

Bukai’s sensitivity to her subject matter likely emerges from her own background. She was born in Israel to an Ashkenazi mother and a father who came from Syria. And, like the Abadis, her family immigrated to the United States.

Indeed, consciousness of their ethnic differences is one of the factors straining Tamar and Salim’s marriage. Salim proudly inhabits his Mizrahi identity while resenting the privilege that Tamar’s European origin bestows her in the pecking order of Israeli society. Salim at times exhibits more ease with his Muslim neighbors, the Mahmoudis, with whom he communicates in his native Arabic, than he does with his Ashkenazi wife. Likewise, Tamar sometimes feels like a stranger to her husband and carries a sense of inadequacy and insecurity.

The complicated relationships to place are reflected in the book’s title, which invites us to consider the different ways we might feel at home or in exile — and the complex nature of those feelings.

For example, when Tamar speaks to her neighbor Mr. Mahmoudi about Faisal and Ruby’s relationship, she notes, “This never would’ve happened if we were home. Lines are clearly drawn there, but here everything is so open.” She is not mindful that the Mahmoudis may understand the place she is calling “home” very differently. And indeed the lines that are so clearly drawn for Tamar are drawn differently for her own Mizrahi husband, who sometimes felt like an outsider in Israel: When she asks Salim what it was like to be an Arab Jew in an Arab land, he responds, “Somedays not much different from being an Arab Jew in a Jewish land.”

Perhaps the book’s most charged portrayal of place comes through the role of the (fictionalized) village of Kafr Ma’an, where Hadas is killed. 

During the early years of Israeli statehood, Hadas, Salim and the rest of their family lived among many newly arrived Mizrahi Jews who were settled there. 

But prior to 1948 the village had been inhabited by Arabs, including Hadas’ lover, Daoud. In fact, Daoud elegized the village in a book of poetry, eventually translated from Arabic to Hebrew. As the village gives way to modern development and is erased entirely, it remains only in memory and on the written page.

As readers, the post-Oct. 7 moment we continue to inhabit is a challenging time for this novel — published in January — to emerge. There are Jewish readers for whom the invitation to develop sympathies for Palestinian characters may be too much, and there are certainly many readers on the other side of the aisle who feel the same about Israeli characters. One of Bukai’s achievements is to challenge this binary thinking, offering a more complicated set of identities and relationships. 

In reflecting on hundreds of conversations I have had around the conflict, I’ve seen how a lack of empathy — and I include myself here — can form an impasse. I believe that the ability to hear differing narratives and to understand and acknowledge others’ pain is one of the most important keys we have if we are to move forward. “The Anatomy of Exile” is a welcome novel that helps guide us in that direction.

“The Anatomy of Exile” by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books, 312 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

This year’s National Jewish Book Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks, announced last month, went to a book focused on fare that one might not expect. 

Jordan Rosenblum’s wonderfully written “Forbidden: A 3,000 Year History of Jews and the Pig” offers a wide-reaching overview of the way the pig — whether as animal, metaphor or lunch — has had a major role in how Jews understand themselves and how others view Jews.

It is not simply that the pig is forbidden in the Torah, as Rosenblum, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose previous book was about “Rabbinic Drinking,” demonstrates with a personal anecdote: After his infant son received a lovely set of blocks adorned with animals and their Hebrew names, Rosenblum purchased a matching set in Italian to reflect his wife’s heritage. 

He then noticed that the sets were identical, except that, where the Hebrew version had a camel, the Italian version displayed a pig. The pig had apparently been deemed problematic for a Jewish child, but the substitution of an equally treyf (nonkosher) animal was acceptable. As Rosenblum writes: “If all we had was the Hebrew Bible, this would make absolutely no sense.”

In many ways, much of the book is an attempt to make it make sense, recording episodes over the millennia in which the pig has been given prominence and set apart, even from the voluminous menagerie of nonkosher animals.

There is no definitive starting point for this outsized role, but we know that the pig took on conspicuous meaning during the period of the Second Temple. This is reinforced by numerous accounts of martyrdom recorded in the Books of Maccabees, with Jews choosing death rather than submitting to their conquerors’ demand that they eat the flesh of pigs.

In classical rabbinic texts, the sages often went so far as to avoid using the word pig altogether, preferring euphemisms such as davar aher, meaning “another thing.” But Rosenblum invokes the wisdom of Professor Dumbledore of the Harry Potter books in asserting that “fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” By making the pig unmentionable, the rabbis only increased the animal’s power in the Jewish imagination.

The aversion took on new meaning as the rabbis of the period of Roman rule, through some interpretive turns, began equating the despised animal with Rome. The comparison took on a somewhat literal dimension in one rabbinic account of the destruction of the Second Temple, reporting that the chief of the Roman soldiers catapulted a pig’s head into the Temple — and that Jerusalem fell at the moment when the pig’s head landed on the altar.

As Rosenblum moves through history, we see how non-Jews grasped the pig’s symbolic importance and often used it as a vehicle for mockery and denigration. In medieval Europe, Christians, via a twisted logical jump, began to identify Jews with the pigs they refused to eat. The image of the Judensau (Jews’ sow) was popularized in Germany, and artistic representations of Jews suckling or engaging in obscene acts with an oversized sow proliferated.

Simultaneously, many Christians began to see eating pork as a means of distancing themselves from Jews. Rosenblum cites a song sung by Christians in Burgundy in the 17th century proclaiming that, because Jews disavow pork, “the more we eat the piglets, the better Catholics we become.”

Moving chronologically, the book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of Jewish diasporic history, focusing primarily on Europe and America. There was considerably less drama around pork in Muslim countries, given Islam’s ban on its consumption.

Of course, the Jewish relationship with pork is not defined exclusively by rejection of it. Rosenblum discusses many circumstances in which Jews have taken to eating pork, willingly or by necessity, reflecting their negotiation of their relationship with Jewish identity.

For Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity in the 15th century in order to avert persecution or expulsion, eating pork signaled their full embrace of their adopted religion — a behavior that would become all the more important once the Inquisition began using avoidance of pork as evidence that the convert was still secretly practicing Judaism.

For agrarian Jews on collective farms in the Soviet Union, raising swine was a signal of a full embrace of communism, with religious observance relegated to the past.

And for many Jews who have sought to distance themselves from their traditional upbringings, the first taste of pork has served as a sort of rite of independence.

Rosenblum brings the discussion to the present day, concluding with the recent refusal of the Orthodox Union’s kosher certification body to give its approval to the fake meat product Impossible Pork, despite the product’s absence of any animal-derived substances. The grounds are not legal, but, rather, very much about inheriting this fraught relationship with the pig.

In this way, Rosenblum’s book, a model of bringing religion, history, and contemporary experience together, shows how the decisions we make today often live in the shadow of those we have faced for centuries.

“Forbidden: A 3,000 Year History of Jews and the Pig” by Jordan Rosenbloom (New York University Press, 272 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Few novels available in English explore the experiences of Israeli Jews with backgrounds in the Middle East and North Africa. Helping to fill a void, Ayelet Tsabari’s debut novel “Songs for the Brokenhearted” provides an eloquent representation of the complexities of life within a Yemeni family in Israel.

The book begins in 1950 in a transit camp teeming with immigrants who have come en masse from Yemen to the newly established State of Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Against the backdrop of the tent city’s dreadful living conditions, a romance rapidly blossoms between two recent immigrants, Yaqub and Saida. But at 19, Saida is already married to a much older man and has a child, so her relationship with Yaqub cannot continue.

The novel then shifts to 1995, as Israelis are in the throes of polarization around the Oslo Accord (signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO negotiator Mahmoud Abbas) and frequent terrorist attacks.

Strikingly, it also shifts into the first-person voice, as the book unconventionally intersperses chapters recounted by an omniscient third-person narrator with chapters narrated in 1995 by Saida’s daughter Zohara, the novel’s protagonist. Zohara is a graduate student in New York whose marriage to an American Ashkenazi Jew has recently collapsed. When her mother dies unexpectedly, Zohara flies home to Israel for the funeral.

Zohara’s relationship with her mother had been a pronouncedly ambivalent one (she felt closer to her father, who had died years earlier), as was her relationship with the traditional Yemeni culture in which her mother had been immersed. Being sent to an elite and predominantly Ashkenazi boarding school as a teenager only compounded the shame and alienation Zohara felt regarding her family’s background. 

Her return home becomes an opportunity to understand the family members, friends and neighbors she left behind from a new vantage point.

They include her older and more traditional sister Lizzie, with whom she has long had a tense relationship, and Lizzie’s 17-year old son Yoni, who, distraught by the loss of his beloved grandmother, has turned to religious observance and is enticed into an anti-Rabin extremist group. 

But most of all, it is a repaired connection to her mother that Zohara seeks, whether consciously or unconsciously, and to the world from which Saida emerged.

An unexpected path appears when Zohara finds a box full of her mother’s cassette tapes, some of which are home-recorded, labeled only with dates. Upon inserting one into the cassette player, she is stunned to hear her mother singing traditional songs. Zohara recalls: “My mother’s distinct voice filled the room, unaccompanied, sounding deep and young and clear. My skin broke out in goosebumps. My dead mother was singing in Yemeni to me. What was she saying?”

Soon the very traditions Zohara had long avoided are making their way into her life, her mother’s songs becoming her own. “I sang in her kitchen, as I washed the dishes. I sang along with the radio. When I drove. When I cleaned … I could almost hear my mother’s voice accompanying me, harmonizing.”

A friend informs Zohara that Yemenite song is passed down from mother to daughter. And so it happens here, that Zohara inherits the tradition, albeit unconventionally. She is eventually invited to join a group of older Yemeni women who sing informally at a local community center.

As Zohara speaks with the adults of her parents’ generation, she is better able to grasp her parents’ lives, including secrets that were kept from her. And she more fully appreciates the pain her mother lived with — having been unable to pursue a life with her only true love, Yaqub, and having had her first child taken from her when she was in the immigrant camp. Zohara also comes to recognize her mother’s attempts to subvert the limitations on women’s agency within traditional culture in small ways. 

Raised in a Yemeni family in Petah Tikva, Tsabari made a splash in 2015 when she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her collection of stories, “The Best Place on Earth,” which focused on Mizrahi characters. The book was also notable for having been written in English, Tsabari’s second language, during a long period of living as an expatriate in Canada. Although Tsabari moved back to Israel in 2019, she continues to write in English.

There is much thematically in “Songs for the Brokenhearted” that is recognizable from Tsabari’s short stories and her follow-up 2019 memoir, “The Art of Leaving.” But the form of the novel allows her a welcome sort of freedom and the ability to go deeper with her characters, who are fully drawn. 

The narrative can occasionally feel weighted by the need to explain and interpret historical and social issues. But that’s also the cost of introducing a great number of topics that will likely be unfamiliar to the majority of the novel’s readers.

And these are indeed topics that are important for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of Israeli society. I find it maddening that, amid the widespread pillorying of Israel in recent times, one sometimes hears Israeli Jews being inappropriately characterized as “white.” The erasure of Mizrahi Jews, who constitute nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population, though not new, is always upsetting. And it is additionally important to acknowledge the complexity of their experiences, which have included discrimination and injustices. Writing lyrically and empathetically, Tsabari evokes many of these issues in a novel that manages simultaneously to be both educational and moving.

“Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel” by Ayelet Tsabari (Random House, 352 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

A number of excellent works of fiction by Israeli writers have been published in English this year. Yet it’s been jarring at times to read portraits of a world that differs so sharply from our present reality defined by Oct. 7 and its reverberations.

One of these writers is Lihi Lapid, a celebrated journalist and fiction author who may still be best known as the wife of Yair Lapid, the former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader. Her latest novel, “On Her Own,” a bestseller when it was published in Hebrew in 2021, is now available in a fine translation by Sandra Silverston. It is the first of Lapid’s books released by an U.S. publishing house, although the timing of its March launch could hardly have been worse, given the long shadow of Oct. 7 and a generally cold reception for Israeli authors in the international literary world right now.

The novel’s complicated plot centers around Nina, an Israeli teen nearing high school graduation who is desperate for a life more exciting than her town promises. Ignoring her mother’s pleas, she becomes involved romantically with Shmueli, a small-time criminal years older than Nina and already married. Nina is sucked into an unanticipated darkness, and the book begins immediately after she has been sexually assaulted and has witnessed a murder.

Escaping Shmueli and his thug companions, she takes refuge in a Tel Aviv apartment stairwell, where she is discovered by an elderly resident. The woman, a widow named Carmela, mistakes Nina for her granddaughter Dana, who now lives in the U.S., and invites her in.

Nina quickly pieces together that Carmela has dementia. Although Nina worries that Carmela will come out of her fog, the risk of being found by Shmueli carries much harsher consequences. Nina actively embraces her identity as the granddaughter and begins taking care of Carmela, who lives alone and has been grievously neglected. 

The neighbors realize that something is amiss, but they are pleased to see Carmela finally receive the attention she needs.

The omniscient narrative shifts freely among characters. We witness Nina’s mother, an emigre from the former Soviet Union, desperately searching for her daughter. We watch the detestable Shmueli as he realizes he is in growing legal danger. And we follow the police as they prepare to snare Shmueli.

But an essential subplot takes place in the U.S., as Carmela’s son Itamar and his wife, Naama, assess their future in a country that was meant to be a temporary stop, but has been too alluring to leave. Now in their seventh year as ex-pats, with Itamar having recently been promoted to a key role in his tech company, Naama embraces their identity as “citizens of the world.” But Itamar, who is pained that his children respond in English when spoken to in Hebrew, is ambivalent about putting down roots in America.

Itamar decides to visit Israel for Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, to support his mother as they visit the grave of Itamar’s older brother, Uri, killed years ago while serving in the military.

Meanwhile, Nina and Carmela are living out a convenient fiction as Carmela is getting the benefit of an enhanced quality of life and of an alternative reality superior to the truth — that the actual Dana has no desire to visit her grandmother. And Nina is recovering her self-respect as she discovers a newfound sense of purpose.

This may read a bit like a soap opera, but the large cast of characters are enriched by Lapid’s emphatic attention to them. And in this novel, written foremost for Israelis, the characters also reflect areas of challenge in Israeli society. The issues that play out within these families mirror issues in the country at large, applying both to those who have come to Israel, and to those who have departed Israel, in search of a better life.

Indeed, the growing Israeli diaspora looms large. Although Lapid avoids polemic, it’s hard not to read Itamar’s neglect of his mother as inseparable from his neglect of his motherland. This is where the novel can feel like eavesdropping on a tension in many geographically dispersed Israeli families. The vast majority of Israelis in the U.S. are profoundly engaged with their Israeli identity but unlikely to return to their native country to live. It’s a dilemma and often a source of anguish that most American Jews are spared.

Another pronounced Israeli theme in the book is the pervasive shadow of loss. The novel’s action is set not simply in Jewish time but in Israeli time, taking place between Passover and Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day. The book’s real climax revolves around Yom HaZikaron, which barely registers in most American Jews’ consciousness. But from the perspective of the thousands of Israeli families who have lost loved ones to conflict — the day’s commemorations were expanded in recent decades to include victims of terrorism — it is a profound day of coming together in brokenness. 

In this regard, the novel feels very much relevant both before and after the atrocities of Oct. 7. As Lapid told the Times of Israel, “Women have reached out to me. One sadly said, ‘When I read your book I felt bad for that poor Carmela. Now I am this Carmela.’”

“On Her Own”

By Lihi Lapid (HarperVia, 336 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Most of us tend to avoid talking or reading about death. So it was a surprise to me that a book of reflections on this uncomfortable subject by a French rabbi would become an international bestseller.

Delphine Horvilleur’s “Living with Our Dead” is a series of 11 short and deeply personal essays that draw both from her years of conducting funerals and from the wisdom of Jewish thought and practice. The book has been released in languages ranging from Romanian to Korean before emerging in English in May in a fine translation by Lisa Appignanesi.

Horvilleur is one of a handful of female rabbis in France and a leader in the country’s Liberal Jewish movement. Her book is not only emphatically Jewish but also written in a particularly French context, offering the American Jewish reader a balance of the familiar and unfamiliar.

One chapter is devoted to eulogizing Elsa Cayat, a Jewish psychologist killed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, an event that looms large in French memory but has largely evaporated from the American consciousness. Another chapter focuses on the passing a year apart of French feminist political leader Simone Veil and writer and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens, whose long friendship commenced when they were imprisoned in Birkenau.

A particularly powerful section focuses on Sarah, a Holocaust survivor whose son is the only person attending her funeral. Horvilleur connects Sarah’s experience to that of her own grandmother Sarah, also a survivor of Auschwitz and part of a vanishing generation that endured so much.

The book’s final segment brings Horvilleur to the Westhoffen Jewish cemetery in Alsace, where more than 100 gravestones were toppled or defaced with swastikas in 2019. It was only then that Horvilleur learned the desecrated cemetery was the eternal home of her ancestors. Upon visiting their graves for the first time, she shares memorable insights about an extinguished community — a different sort of dying.

That the book’s title begins with the word “living” reflects Horvilleur’s most fundamental message. Judaism places emphasis foremost on life, most famously captured in the injunction in Deuteronomy, “I have put before you life and death. … Choose life.” 

Reflecting on the Hebrew euphemism “beit chaim” (“house of life” or “house of the living”) for a cemetery, she notes, “This isn’t an attempt to deny death or conjure it away by erasing it. On the contrary: it’s an attempt to send a clear message to death by placing it outside language. It’s a way of making death know that for all its obvious presence in this place, it is not victorious; even here it will not have the last word.”

We like to think that the walls are impenetrable, that life and death are hermetically separated, and that the living and the dead need never cross paths.

Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur

But the ability to keep death at a distance, or to establish such firm dichotomies, is illusory. As she writes, “We like to think that the walls are impenetrable, that life and death are hermetically separated, and that the living and the dead need never cross paths. But what if, in reality, that’s all they ever do?”

At these crossroads, Horvilleur turns to stories to make meaning — both stories of the deceased that she has absorbed in her role as rabbinic officiant, and also the tales from within the Biblical and rabbinic traditions that resonate. She writes, “I stand by the side of women and men who, at turning points in their lives, need stories…These sacred stories open up a path between the living and the dead. The role of a storyteller is to stand by the gate to ensure that it stays open.”

I hear these words without the benefit of academic distance, and particularly as I write this, as this first week of July witnessed the deaths of two people in my life, as well as the first yahrzeit of my dear niece. 

I’m certain that the vast majority of us live with a similarly intimate relationship to loss, even if we rarely speak of it. I look for solace where I can find it, and I find a degree of it in Horvilleur’s strong belief in the “power of stories that leave indelible traces in us, that offer a prolongation of the dead within the living.”

Consciousness of this prolonged presence finds expression in one of the book’s most affecting chapters, in which Horvilleur recounts the challenge of being both rabbi and companion to her close friend Ariane as she was dying of cancer. Horvilleur recalls friends gathered at Ariane’s deathbed reciting the Shema, as tradition asks of those who are in the presence of the dying to do. Horvilleur digs into the words interpretively, asserting that they “say to the dying, ‘Child of Israel, listen to what parts of you will carry on living within us, linked to us forever.’”

The book is a collection of related reflections rather than a systematic argument, and I appreciate the modesty of what it sets out to do. As Horvilleur recalls explaining to a boy who had lost his brother, “I owed him honesty. I needed to tell him that rabbis don’t have more answers than anyone else. Sometimes, they just have a few more questions.”

“Living with Our Dead” by Delphine Horvilleur (Europa Editions, 160 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

A few years ago, San Francisco writer Jason K. Friedman and his husband decided to buy a second home in Friedman’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia.

The real estate listing for the flat they bought advertised the 1875 building as the Solomon Cohen House, which piqued Friedman’s interest sufficiently to begin researching the Cohen family.

Born in 1802, Solomon Cohen was the grandson of a Sephardic rabbi who had made his way from London to South Carolina in 1749. Solomon moved to Savannah and became a lawyer, businessman, civic leader and, in 1865, the first Jew in Georgia to be elected to Congress. His wife, Miriam, had been raised in Philadelphia by her aunt Rebecca Gratz, one of the most important American Jews of the 19th century due to her philanthropic leadership and for pioneering the model of Sunday school education.

Solomon and Miriam’s son, Gratz, was the first Jewish student to enroll at the University of Virginia. But he died at the age of 20 from a bullet wound received while serving as an aide-de-camp for a Confederate general just weeks before the South surrendered in the Civil War.

Friedman’s new nonfiction book, “Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War,” focuses on Gratz’s life but works on many levels. It is a tragic family drama, a record of Jewish socioeconomic mobility in the antebellum South and a portrait of a young man whose life would otherwise be largely forgotten or subsumed in the pat valorization of the war dead.

The book also reflects on living in the shadow of history, particularly as Friedman attempts to come to terms with slavery in a way he wasn’t forced to do in the “blindered” education of his Southern boyhood.

I recently spoke on Zoom with Friedman, who divides his time between San Francisco and Savannah. Our conversation has been lightly edited.

J.: Can you talk about your own personal history with Savannah?

Jason K. Friedman: I grew up in Savannah and fled for college — it’s an old story. It’s not because it was an antisemitic place. There have been Jews there since 1734, and it’s a pretty good place for Jews. But it’s a small town, so I got out of there and didn’t really look back over the years.

And you were drawn back to the city in middle age?

I feel like I changed some, but I think the city changed as well. It was a port city and always at least believed itself to be rather cosmopolitan. But it actually did become a much more open, interesting and equitable kind of place, like a little big city. I think that the power, in terms of city government, shifted from the dominant white machine, and it just became a different and more interesting place for me. And my parents were getting older, and I wanted to have a place that was near them where I could relate to them as an adult.

Solomon Cohen was not only a slaveholder but a vocal defender of the institution of slavery. In the book you note your surprise that Jews owned slaves.

I didn’t know that Jews owned slaves, nor did most Jews I talk about this book with. So why didn’t we know that? It must be the fact that our liberation story is so central to the Jewish religion. That’s certainly the reason that I was surprised. But Solomon Cohen would have thought of “How could Jews own slaves?” as a naive question. And I saw that there was institutional support for slavery all over the place — primarily from Christian churches, but also from some Jewish pulpits.

I found a pamphlet by a very prominent New York rabbi, Morris Raphall, on the Biblical view of slavery that just sort of laid it out there, saying, “Have you never read the Bible? There are explicit rules for how to treat your slaves.” And he felt the solution is just to follow the laws in the Bible for treating your slaves in a way that he believed humanized them. And of course there were also rabbis who thought that it was ridiculous for Jews to support slavery in that day and age, and that, of course, Jews should oppose slavery.

But ultimately I learned that white people who could afford slaves owned slaves, and that doing so for certain ethnic groups who might not have been considered white off the bat — such as Italians, Irish, Greeks and Jews — was often a way of trying to assimilate. It was sort of a way into the dominant culture by acting like your neighbors, and that included owning slaves. Jews owned slaves proportionately to their wealth, just the way non-Jews did. It shouldn’t have been so surprising, but it was.

Can you tell me at what point you started to take a special interest in Gratz Cohen, and what it was about him that initially stood out to you?

Well, the house was billed as the Solomon Cohen House, so in a way it was just doing my due diligence to figure out who Solomon Cohen was. He was a very important figure, but he wasn’t to me an especially sympathetic one. I knew that his son Gratz’s journal was in the Georgia Historical Society just a few minutes’ walk from our new flat, and so I went and I read the diary.

In the few places that he’s written about, Gratz is just sort of considered a Confederate war hero, but when I was actually reading his journal, in which he confides his deepest feelings, I felt a real connection to him. He was unlike his by-the-book businessman father. He was much more sensitive, and he was a poet and intellectual. He went away to get schooled and kind of become himself. He was also very attracted to other men, and he idealized male-male relationships.

And I guess the weirdest part of this whole story was how attached he felt to his enslaved valet, Louis, and how he rhapsodized on their relationship. He felt extremely close to him and talked about him with various pet names and in passionate terms, so that when I started to read these diary entries and poems, I thought, “Wow, this is different, and I want to know more.”

Can you discuss Gratz’s experience as the first Jewish student at the University of Virginia?

I came at this story as a story of difference, and so I was on the trail of antisemitism. But the more I dug into the story, I saw that Gratz was actually more alike than different. I mean, these were the sons of the South’s top families, and he was an elite in the way they were, and he seemed to be comfortable there.

However, I also found letters and diary entries where I could feel his loneliness there. He’s not the type of person to say, “Oh, I’ve been a victim of antisemitism” — he would never have talked like that. But there were entries when he’s writing on a Sunday when everybody else is at church, and there was a kind of a melancholy to it. And it gave him a space to think and write about being a Jew.

Going away to school for him, and also for me, was a way of discovering yourself or creating a self, and I think that he actually became in touch with his Jewishness up there in a very interesting way.

“Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War” by Jason K. Friedman (University of South Carolina Press, 288 pages). Friedman will give a book talk at the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29.

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Because the vast majority of contemporary Hebrew novels go untranslated, it is something of an event for Israeli writers when their work is published in English. It offers the opportunity to be discovered and appreciated beyond the relatively small universe of Hebrew readers. So I write about Noa Yedlin’s “Stockholm” with sympathy for its author, imagining the difficulty of releasing a novel — and particularly a funny one — in the midst of the terrible moment ushered in on Oct. 7. The appetite to read a dark comedy is lessened when one is in darkness.

Yedlin is a major novelist in Israel and a previous recipient of the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. Although it is the first of her works to be translated into English (and it is done so ably by the masterful Jessica Cohen), “Stockholm” is not a new book. It was originally published in Israel in 2016 and was the basis for a popular Israeli television series, adapted by Yedlin herself.

The novel revolves around 69-year-old Tel Aviv University professor Avishay Sar-Shalom, who is seen as a chief contender for the forthcoming Nobel Prize in Economics. The problem, as we learn in the opening pages, is that Avishay has died, of apparently natural causes, eight days before the prize recipients are to be announced.

It is his close friend and occasional bedmate Zohara who finds Avishay lifeless in his bachelor apartment. She alerts the other three members of their small circle of longtime friends, who convene and come to a decision: They will conceal Avishay’s condition until the winner is made public, since the rules state that the laureate must be alive at the time of the announcement.

A sort of comedy of errors ensues, as the group assumes the task of hiding Avishay’​​s death from everyone else in his life — a task made more difficult by perturbing messages arriving on Avishay’s phone. The web of lies Avishay’s friends inexpertly weave becomes increasingly flimsy, and their efforts to deal with his actual body are memorably inept (and not for the squeamish).

However, the essence of the book lies not in its comedy, but in its excavation of its characters’ inner lives. The narration cycles through the perspectives of each of the four friends who are in on the conspiracy. And the reader learns quickly that their impulse to keep Avishay in suspended animation is not as simple or pure as the initially stated desire to see their friend receive the greatest honor in his field. Rather, there are other motivations for participating in this subterfuge.

Yehuda, Avishay’s best friend since childhood, has achieved great wealth as a consequence of inventing a widely used bag opener. He is soon to publish an autobiographical book that, while not particularly good, will include a foreword reluctantly penned by Avishay, and Yehuda is cognizant of the gravitas the Nobel Prize will bring to this endorsement.

Zohara eyes the purse that comes with the Nobel Prize as a possible inheritance for herself as Avishay’s common-law wife. However, that status is limited to her own perception, as nobody else thinks of Avishay and Zohara as an item, let alone a functionally married couple. And as Zohara goes so far as to reconfigure Avishay’s apartment to reflect the fiction of her residing there, it appears that she has a difficult time convincing even herself.

Amos, a fellow economist, agrees to the conspiracy begrudgingly, partly out of fear that opposing it will bring to light his jealousy. He has long resented Avishay’s celebrity, and he also dreams of winning the Nobel Prize himself.

And then there’s Nili, who has never truly felt included in this inner circle of friends. She senses that she still needs “to pass a test whose nature she could only guess at” and hopes that her usefulness in dealing with a corpse — she’s a retired doctor — will bring a feeling of acceptance and belonging that has long evaded her.

The competing agendas, reemerging decades-old resentments, and sheer difficulty of maintaining the complicated ruse all take a toll on the relationships. Fittingly, the theory that had made Avishay famous was the​ “Class King” mod­el of changes in the distribution of power within groups, and his friends seem to be enacting a test case.

The story could easily be translated to another cultural setting, but the characters are quintessentially Israeli, and there is no shortage of pokes at them, as well as some barbed recognition of the group’s privileged status within Israeli society. For example, as the friends consider the possibility that they will be accused of having killed Avishay, Nili notes, “I know it’s not PC, so it’s a good thing nobody can hear us, but yes, we are a group of white professionals, and if we say that our friend died of a heart attack, then he died of a heart attack.”

But Yedlin is also a sympathetic observer. It becomes clear that often underlying the characters’ selfish streaks and foibles are insecurity, unfulfillment and the fear of what growing old promises — the demise of their bodies and the inching toward death.

Indeed, by keeping Avishay alive, they can postpone the act of mourning their good friend. And their collective act of denial is surely also about their own mortality, which has suddenly become more concrete. It is to Yedlin’s great credit that she manages to approach it all in a manner that is simultaneously humorous and deadly serious.

“Stockholm” by Noa Yedlin (HarperVia, 384 pages)

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Attending a Biblical history scholar’s lecture at a Conservative synagogue years ago, I was struck by the attendees’ vocal resistance to insights gleaned from archaeologists over the past decades — some of which cast doubt on the historicity of parts of the Hebrew Bible.

I think this pronounced discomfort with evidence-based Biblical study, at least when it doesn’t confirm the text’s veracity, surfaces not because Jews are religious fundamentalists. Instead, it’s because this feels like a threat to our identity, which is deeply intertwined with our collective narrative. The Bible is the story we tell about ourselves.

I thought of that experience while reading “Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins.” This is Jacob Wright’s ambitious presentation of how the Hebrew Bible, which consists of the Torah, Prophets and Writings, came to be and what purposes it served.

Wright, who teaches Hebrew Bible at Emory University, relies heavily on archaeological research in reconstructing the world that created the Bible and freely acknowledges the discrepancies between the Biblical account and the archaeological record. But his response to that disconnect is not the impulse to dismiss portions of the Bible as fiction, but, rather, is a sense of awe at the particular process that resulted in the unique text we have inherited.

Wright is confident that the ancient Israelites, whose existence in the land of Canaan is confirmed as early as 1207 BCE by the inscription of Merneptah, would not initially have conceived of themselves as the descendants of the 12 children of Jacob. Rather, much of what we consider to be our ancestral story, as recorded in Genesis and Exodus, was added later.

Wright observes that “as readers, we follow the biblical story from the evolution of a family to the emergence of two kingdoms. But as historians, we begin with these two kingdoms and work backwards, examining how the biblical writers imagined a common past that long antedates these kingdoms.”

The two kingdoms in question are the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the more populous Northern Kingdom of Israel. In the Biblical account, the two separate nations emerge when a single kingdom gives way to civil war during the reign of King Solomon’s son and successor, Rehoboam. However, Wright questions whether that united kingdom ever existed. Rather, he posits that the Bible’s narrative represents a later effort to consolidate the two separate kingdoms post facto through a shared memory of a golden age of unity under David and Solomon — with the goal of creating a single people.

Wright identifies two narrative strands that were essential to the Bible’s formation. What he calls the “Palace History,” composed in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, dominates the books of Samuel and Kings, extolling David and his descendants as the divinely appointed leaders of Israel, with Jerusalem as the nation’s political and religious center.

Meanwhile, what Wright terms the “People’s History,” attached to the Northern Kingdom, was unconcerned with royalty, focusing instead on the Israelites’ relationship to God. It sought to unify the people not through political formulation, but through a shared family tree and religious code.

It was after the defeats of both kingdoms — the Northern Kingdom at the hands of the Assyrians, and the Southern Kingdom subsequently at the hands of the Babylonians — that Southern scribes wove texts reflecting numerous traditions into a larger unified narrative, albeit one with seams occasionally showing.

It is of great significance to Wright that it was only after both kingdoms had been defeated that the Bible began to take its recognizable form. For Wright, this experience of loss and dislocation was a central impetus for the creation of the Bible, which was shaped from the “vantage point of the vanquished.”

Indeed, the Bible’s final segment, referred to as Ketuvim, or Writings, addresses the defeat and its aftermath directly. Wright pays particular attention to the Book of Lamentations and other texts that offer strategies for persevering in the face of devastation. For example, he highlights how the books of Daniel and Esther specifically address the experience of exile.

If there is a hero in Wright’s version of this history, it is the anonymous scribes, who over centuries formed the texts that would provide a means of sustaining their communities despite losing self-governance and even their own land. The vehicle they developed was at the time revolutionary, since theirs was not a highly literate culture: “In grappling with the consequences of defeat, these thinkers resorted to something no army could conquer: language and the power of the written word.”

We recognize this innovation in the transformative moment, whether real or embellished, captured in the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, when throngs of people assembled in Jerusalem call upon Ezra the scribe to read aloud for the first time from the Torah scroll he has brought back from Babylon. The sudden centrality of the scroll in the life of the community is a sign of what is to come, as the Jewish experience becomes increasingly defined by our relationship to our written texts, transcending geography and political rule.

Although “Why the Bible Began” is fairly dense with information, Wright’s presentation is clear and pleasantly devoid of academic jargon. And as we reel from current events and attempt to find our own bearings in the present moment, I find a degree of hopefulness in Wright’s understanding of the Bible as an extraordinary act of reinvention in the wake of disaster.

“Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins” by Jacob Wright (Cambridge University Press, 300 pages). Wright will give a virtual book talk hosted by the Jewish Community Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 28. Free, registration required.

A perpetually lousy science student, I never got much out of chemistry until I read Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table” — the Jewish Community Library’s One Bay One Book selection eight years ago.

A chemist during Italy’s fascist regime and a Holocaust survivor, Levi used the chemical elements as a lens through which to process much of what he had experienced in life, including 11 months in Auschwitz.

So I took it as a good omen that Rosa Lowinger’s soon-to-be-published “Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair” begins with these words from Levi’s memoir: “Understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves.”

Born in Cuba and now living chiefly in Los Angeles, Lowinger is a leading art and architecture conservator. In chapters named for the materials she works with in her private practice — such as Marble, Limestone, Paint, Terrazzo, Glass and Plastics  — she tells the story of her life, with particular attention to her Jewish family: how they came to Cuba, how they fled after the revolution, and what happened after they settled in Miami.

Guiding her investigation is “the first essential principle” she learned for her vocation: that “conservation is a mix of art, science, and hand skills, but it is fundamentally the art of understanding damage. You can’t repair what you don’t comprehend.”

And so, she sets out to comprehend.

Lowinger’s grandparents were Jews from Eastern Europe who ended up in Cuba due to circumstance. They intended to continue on to the United States, but, thwarted by America’s tightening of its immigration policies in the early 1920s, resigned themselves to remaining on the tropical island.

Lowinger’s parents were both born in Havana, but came from different sides of the tracks. Her father, Lindy, grew up in a family that had managed to make it into the city’s upper-middle class. Her mother, Hilda, had lost her own mother during childbirth and spent much of her youth in an orphanage for Jewish children. Lindy and Hilda met as teens and eventually married despite strong protestations from Lindy’s parents. Lindy had a successful career, and the couple’s daughter Rosa, the book’s author, was born in 1956, three years after the Cuban Revolution had begun.

Along with most of Cuba’s Jews, the Lowingers left Havana in the aftermath of the Jan. 1, 1959 victory of the revolutionary forces. In 1961 they joined the exodus to Miami, starting anew with few resources and with the initial expectation that they would be returning following Castro’s overthrow.

The trauma of dislocation took a great toll, and Hilda frequently engaged in abusive behavior toward Rosa that continued throughout her childhood. Rosa was in a hurry to leave home, both to exit the often painful environment of her nuclear family, and to leave behind the Cuban expatriate community with its nostalgia and bitterness.

Lowinger’s interest in art eventually landed her in a pioneering art conservation program at New York University, where she was initially in over her head but eventually found her passion. During the following decades, she found herself traveling the globe, most often on missions to restore materials that were scarred by time, climate, neglect, vandalism or war. Noting that “inadvertently, I had stumbled upon the best profession in the world for remaining far away from my family,” she founded what grew to be a successful business and took on a wide variety of conservation work.

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The renewed role that Cuba came to play in her life was against all expectations. When college had offered her an escape route from Miami, she applied exclusively to schools in Boston and New York, “where my grandfathers had hoped to land when they’d first left Transylvania and Bessarabia.”

This would be a sort of corrective, as “Cuba had been just an accidental stopping point for our family.” However, after spontaneously deciding to participate in a 1992 conference on conservation and restoration in Havana, Lowinger became “a born-again Cuban” (her friend’s words), and began returning as often as she could — something her parents never did.

In Cuba she reconnected with a part of herself, and developed a better understanding of her parents’ lives. When she visited her first home in an apartment building her father had designed when he was young, she encountered people who still remembered her grandparents, her parents and even her. And nearby was the Patronato, Havana’s still-extant main synagogue, which her grandfather had helped found.

Amid Cuba’s decaying infrastructure, there was no shortage of projects for a conservator. She found “so much wreckage mixed with so much beauty,” and although she made little money doing so, she began taking on projects in her native land.

It is remarkable to follow Lowinger’s account of her path, which includes efforts to heal her relationship with her parents through the prism of her work. As she writes in the acknowledgments, her book, which will be published Oct. 10, “is a love story to conservation, a profession that honors change over time and the beauty within damaged things.” (The book’s title emerges from that work: in conservation, “dwell time” refers to how long it takes for a chemical to react with a material that is being treated.)

The crash-course in conservation that unfolds in the book functions in two ways. One is offering the sheer pleasure of gaining a better understanding of the material world in which we dwell, and appreciating how buildings and objects fall to decay and damage (often due to the essential nature of the materials of which they are made).

The second, and more salient, point is the application of these properties of the physical world to human relationships. For example, when Lowinger explains how reinforced concrete gets its strength, but how it is inherently vulnerable to corrosion, she draws a comparison to how marriages collapse. And because many of her relationships suffer significant damage, the principles of conservation offer a compelling model for examining a life, and for engaging in repair.

“Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair” by Rosa Lowinger (Row House Publishing, 360 pages)

With the passing of Meir Shalev this year and A.B. Yehoshua last year, few stellar writers remain from the generations that created and grew up alongside the State of Israel and formed Israeli literature as we know it.

For those of us who engage with Israel largely through its culture, it’s important to know the literary landscape as it stands today, beyond the shadow cast by the nation’s formative authors.

Among the most prominent contemporary writers is Eshkol Nevo, born in 1971, and named after his grandfather, former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. His 2004 debut, “Homesick,” may be my favorite Israeli novel of the 21st century, signaling Nevo’s propensity for psychological insight through the exploration of everyday lives.

Nevo’s most recent book, “Inside Information,” is structured unconventionally, as a novel composed of three novellas. These novellas are linked by small plot intersections, but much more by their larger themes of yearning, betrayal and the complexities of both romantic and familial relationships.

In “Death Road,” recently divorced percussionist Omri is spending time in Bolivia when he comes across a couple of fellow Israelis, who are on their honeymoon. Omri experiences an unexpectedly intimate moment with the woman, and their entanglement becomes increasingly complicated in the aftermath of her husband’s fatal bicycle accident.

In “Family History” an accomplished physician, Dr. Caro, has taken it upon himself to serve as a source of support to Liat Ben Abu, a young doctor doing her residency at his hospital. Their relationship ends abruptly when a seemingly inadvertent action is interpreted as sexual misconduct. Suddenly at the center of intrigue, Dr. Caro must convince others, as well as himself, that his closeness with Dr. Ben Abu was motivated by paternal and professional instincts, rather than sexual desire.

In “A Man Walks into an Orchard,” Chelli, an Argentinean-born mother of two, has spent months searching for her husband Ofer, who disappeared without a trace during one of their weekly rural walks. Resisting the conclusion that Ofer is dead, she follows every lead in hopes of determining his whereabouts. This quest includes discovering parts of his life that were hidden from her, as well as attempting to decipher the 99 short writings he left on his blog, each composed of 100 words.

This is one way Nevo is pushing us to think about storytelling differently: It’s not simply a case of ‘unreliable’ narrators, but of narrators being very human.

This final story explicitly references a well-known but strikingly brief account in the Talmud of four great rabbis who ventured into pardes (meaning both “orchard” and “paradise”), with each of them experiencing a radically different consequence.

Each of these sections is related in the first person, and the reader learns quickly to be attentive to the narrators themselves — Omri, Dr. Caro, and Chelli — and the emotional baggage they bring to their situations. Each has experienced the loss of a life partner, one to divorce, one to death, one to mysterious disappearance. And Dr. Caro has suffered an additional loss, as both of his adult children have chosen to live abroad. Their depictions of the dramas in which they find themselves enmeshed are informed by the experiences that have brought them to this moment. I think this is one way Nevo is pushing us to think about storytelling differently: It’s not simply a case of “unreliable” narrators, but of narrators being very human.

The book begins with the line, “My lawyer said that even if we decide to lie in court, we should be sure about the truth.” What follows teaches us that we cannot be sure of much. What we see and report as true is often determined by what we need to be true, according to our circumstances.

Given that all three novellas involve events with legal implications, it is striking that there is little conventional resolution offered. We as readers tend to like to see things repaired — or, if not, at least to know exactly what happened (as when Hercule Poirot offers his explanation at the conclusion of an Agatha Christie novel). But Nevo appears intent not to solve the cases he presents but, rather, to sustain the mystery in them. This can perhaps be less satisfying when putting the book down, but more satisfying when thinking about our own lives, which don’t often conform to tidy plotlines.

If the issues in the novel are universal in nature, the setting is specifically Israeli. Place, background (a number of characters have left their Orthodox upbringing), and music figure prominently, as Nevo is writing primarily for Israelis, with a shared cultural language that can sometimes leave the non-Israeli reader at a disadvantage.

For example, we get multiple references to a verse of a David Broza song, with an assurance from the narrator of the final story that the chorus “would be dangerous for me to hear now.” While the Israeli reader may be expected to know the words of the chorus, the average American reader has no clue.

But that’s the inevitable bit of loss in reading across culture — missing some of the “inside information.” In this sense, although the original Hebrew title was “A Man Enters an Orchard,” the title of the English version is fitting. And just as it’s hard to read across national boundaries as an outsider, we are not necessarily any better at reading the people sitting across the table from us.

How much do we really know about their internal worlds, and how well do we understand ourselves as actors in their lives? Nevo gives few answers, but he helps us ask the questions.

“Inside Information” by Eshkol Nevo (368 pages, Other Press)

Set in San Francisco, “The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants” by Orlando Ortega-Medina is striking because the author manages to pack so many elements into a novel that is part thriller, part psychological study.

The narrator, Marc Mendes, is an attorney in his early 30s in a small San Francisco law firm that specializes in workplace discrimination and harassment cases. He lives in a high-rise apartment building with his longtime lover, Isaac Perez, and Isaac’s mother, Miriam, both of whom are immigrants from El Salvador.

Marc is feeling strained. Sorely overworked, he feels his sense of purpose conflicts with the direction that senior partner Ed Haddad is taking their firm. Marc is also estranged from his Cuba-born parents, Jews with Syrian roots who now live in Los Angeles. And despite long being clean, he is ever conscious that the stresses in his life increase the risk of relapsing into the drug addiction that plagued his earlier adult years.

His ability to hold his life together frays when several unfortunate events coincide to bring him to the edge. Ed dumps a case on Marc that sparks accusations of treachery from members of the gay community. Isaac’s beloved mother — and his only family member who survived El Salvador’s civil war — dies unexpectedly. And Isaac receives a letter from the government threatening him with deportation.

Against this backdrop is the persistent presence of Alejandro Silva, an ethically slippery client who becomes especially insistent about becoming Marc’s lover after their professional relationship ends. Offering feeble resistance to Alejandro, Marc permits himself to be drawn into a pattern of lies and risky behavior that threatens his relationship with the anchor of his life, Isaac.

The novel at times has elements of a thriller, with Alejandro’s stalking behavior recalling the dynamics of “Fatal Attraction.” It is also part courtroom procedural, with the preparation of Isaac’s asylum case and his immigration hearing recounted in some detail. But what I found most compelling in the novel is its psychological portrait of someone whose inability to address his inner issues threatens to upend the stable romantic relationship and professional career he has built.

One of these issues is Marc’s relationship, or lack thereof, with his parents — and particularly with his father, an Orthodox rabbi who previously hoped Marc would follow him into the rabbinate. Marc’s former drug addiction is a source of shame, as is his sexual orientation. He’s never had the nerve to come out as gay to his parents.

Staying away from them allows Marc to evade honest communication. At one point, he resigns himself to accepting their invitation to a seder after an eight-year absence. He decides to bring Isaac and tells him, “I can’t even imagine what it’s going to feel like sitting around the dinner table, everyone staring at me, judging me.” What he doesn’t grasp is what he eventually experiences — that his parents care about him deeply and that his traditionalist father is much more upset about Marc’s cutting them out of his life than about his homosexuality.

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There is another element fueling Marc’s self-sabotaging behavior. He is haunted by the circumstances in which his first boyfriend, whom he spent time with both in L.A. and Israel, died tragically. Frequent flashbacks to their time in Israel indicate its centrality in his emotional life, but it is a secret that he has guarded closely and that has kept him feeling guilty and tortured.

The action in “The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants” takes place pronouncedly against the backdrop of the Bay Area. The specificity of the locations is such that I pity the Chicagoan trying to make sense of the dozens of geographic references — or perhaps envy the reader who can apply her imagination to the task.

But more significant than the place is the time. The novel is set in 1997, which is 18 years before the national recognition of same-sex marriage. While immigrants could be protected from deportation through marriage to a U.S. citizen, such options were not available to people in same-sex partnerships. As a direct result of both the immigration and marriage policies, Marc is faced with the possibility of having to become an immigrant himself if he is to remain in a union with the man he loves. As his immigrant father pines, “It never ends: our ancestors, my grandfather, my father, me, and now my son.”

This is Ortega’s fourth book of fiction. His first, a book of short stories called “Jerusalem Ablaze: Sto­ries of Love and Oth­er Obsessions,” likewise reflects his interest in exploring themes around Judaism and Israel.

His latest book is made more poignant by the reality of the author’s own life. Ortega-Medina, who is Sephardic, shares Marc’s Cuban/Syrian Jewish background and also practiced law in San Francisco in the 1990s. He notes in the acknowledgments that he and his life partner, an immigrant, left the United States in 1999, “having been ejected from the country of my birth due to marriage inequality.”

They settled first in Canada and then in London, where they still reside. While we might now take the right to marry in the United States for granted, it’s important to recall how recent a development it remains and how high the cost of its denial can be.

Although few books would dare introduce as many issues as “The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants,” the novel is nevertheless a compelling page-turner. I particularly appreciate Ortega-Medina’s deft handling of its pronouncedly imperfect protagonist, who, though tasked with narrating his own story, has much to learn about himself.

“The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants” by Orlando Ortega-Medina (335 pages, Amble Press)

“The World and All That It Holds” is surely one of the more audacious titles of any book I’ve read. But Aleksandar Hemon’s sprawling novel, which traces the long and tragic journey of refugees displaced by conflicts that stained the first half of the 20th century, has an epic quality that justifies the title.

The novel’s central character is Rafael Pinto, a Sarajevan Jew with a penchant for poetry and opium. He feels distanced from the traditional Judaism in which he has been steeped, and his alienation is compounded by the fact that, while his family attempts to find him an appropriate bride, he is sexually attracted to other men.

Rafael has returned to his native city from Vienna, where he studied the latest advances in pharmacology. Taking over his recently deceased father’s apothecary and replacing ancient herbal remedies with modern medicines, he is enthused about living in “a brand-new century, progress was everywhere to behold, the future was endless like the sea — nobody could see the end of it.”

And then, in the vicinity of his shop, Rafael witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The ensuing eruption of war ends life as he knows it. Drafted into the military, he soon finds himself in the trenches of Galicia defending the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the Russian forces approaching from the east while also defending himself from his fellow soldiers’ antisemitism. The horrors of bigotry and war are softened by the love he develops for a fellow conscript from Sarajevo, a Muslim named Osman. The two clandestinely share a bunk and form a deep romantic bond.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Brusilov Offensive — the powerful Russian assault that decimated much of the Austro-Hungarian army — Rafael and Osman are brought to Uzbekistan as prisoners of war. Eventually finding freedom, they take shelter in a Jewish home in Tashkent, and the pragmatic Osman begins working for the newly ascendant Bolsheviks as they seek to establish control in the Soviet hinterlands. When this situation begins to unravel, they flee eastward with their landlord’s pregnant daughter, Klara, seeking refuge in a more stable place.

The constant in Rafael’s decades of wandering is the surfeit of violence that surrounds him.

During their meandering through China, Rafael and Osman are separated and Rafael becomes the sole guardian of Klara’s daughter, Rahela, following Klara’s death in childbirth. Rafael and Rahela eventually reach Shanghai, and their long stay in the city spans two humanitarian crises: Japan’s assaults on the city in the 1930s and the civil war that accompanied the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution.

The constant in Rafael’s decades of wandering is the surfeit of violence that surrounds him. But set against this backdrop of bloodshed is tremendous love. Rafael is animated by his affection for Osman, for his stories and songs, for his appearance and scent and for the strength he inspires in him in desperate moments. Even long after the two are parted, Rafael is sustained by the hope of reunion and continues to hear Osman’s voice inside his head offering him guidance (a phenomenon abetted by his enduring addiction to opiates). Indeed, Rafael’s protective care of Rahela as they move from one dangerous place to the next derives partly from his confidence that Osman is her biological father, making Rahela the child they share.

Questions of home and exile loom large throughout the novel. Rafael recalls that “Sarajevo Sepharadim liked to say that a Jew is always on his way home, but never makes it there.” Intending to return to Sarajevo, Rafael and Osman find themselves instead moving thousands of miles in the opposite direction. There are no easy paths for them, both because they are stateless and without papers and because the world around them is in constant flux; virtually every land Rafael finds himself in following his conscription is in political turmoil. Further complicating the characters’ dreams of homecoming is the dawning knowledge that in the aftermath of World War II, Sarajevo’s Jewish community may no longer exist.

The evocation of Sarajevo’s Jewish community adds an interesting dimension to the book. Sarajevo was a significant Sephardic center, but most of the city’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Despite his ambivalence about his traditionalist upbringing, Rafael carries with him the Jewish songs, sayings, and memories of his youth, as well as religious teachings that are evoked repeatedly as he tries to make sense of his life.

The many proverbs and lyrics recounted in Judeo-Spanish (referred to in the book as “Spanjol”) reflect the novel’s idiosyncratic use of language. The English text frequently yields to Judeo-Spanish, German, Bosnian, French and other languages. Sometimes that text is translated into English, but often it is not, which can frustrate a reader. Nevertheless, this technique helps establish the polyglot universe that is the consequence of being a refugee. Notably, Rahela and Rafael have their own language, “a mixture of Bosnian and Spanjol and German, with many words they had picked up along the way from Tajik and Kyrgyz and Uighur, and the nameless languages and dialects they had absorbed while following various caravans — they spoke a language that no one in the world spoke other than the two of them, because no one had gone through the things they had.”

Hemon, who is not Jewish, writes with personal knowledge of geographic and linguistic displacement. A native of Sarajevo, he happened to be traveling in the United States when war broke out in Bosnia in 1992. He ended up not only staying, but becoming a widely recognized English-language writer. (His historical novel “The Lazarus Project,” whose chief character is also a Jew, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.) What Hemon has created in this difficult and sometimes maddening novel is a powerful statement both on the stupendous brutality of a world that creates widows, orphans and refugees, and on the love, hope and will to survive that make us endure in spite of it all.

“The World and All That It Holds” by Aleksandar Hemon (Macmillan, 352 pages)

Poland’s relationship to Jewishness remains a fraught issue that stimulates much debate. (I know, having witnessed some of those heated arguments.)

In “Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival,” Geneviève Zubrzycki, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and a faculty member at the school’s Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, provides deep insights into the contemporary picture, drawing from a decade of fieldwork and close study.

The backdrop is a stark and horrific reality. Prior to World War II, Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews, constituting the largest Jewish population of any European country. By the time of the 2011 census, only 7,000 Polish residents identified themselves as Jewish.

In spite of that small number, Jewishness has been a hot topic throughout Poland in its post-Communist era.

There have been great efforts to center the historical presence of Jews in the country’s consciousness, most prominently through Warsaw’s Polin Museum and Krakow’s Jewish Music Festival.

But it is also seen in dozens of local Jewish-themed museums and festivals, and in the attempts by artists and activists to memorialize the erased Jewish presence in Poland’s landscape in creative ways. And while there is no shortage of misguided appropriation of the Jewish past, there is a startling number of serious efforts to present and understand Jewish culture, practices, and language (including the development of Jewish studies departments in Polish universities, with classes taught and attended primarily by non-Jews).

Zubrzycki attaches some of this “Jewish turn” to what she terms “magical philosemitism,” and helps situate it within the country’s internal tensions and struggle for identity. Central is the reality that today’s Poland is a remarkably homogeneous society. In the 1930s, ethnic Poles composed around 65% of the nation’s population, with Jews representing 10%, and Germans, Ukrainians and other European groups forming the remaining 25%. Following World War II, ethnic Poles were 96% of the populace, with the country also transforming from 65% Catholic to 95% Catholic — a uniformity that continues through the present day.

Because this homogeneity is perceived as an obstacle for those wishing to see the nation develop into a secular and multicultural society, many Poles have turned to the Jewish past as an emblem of Poland’s former diversity.

Zubrzycki notes that, through activities like learning Yiddish, preparing Jewish foods and performing Jewish dances, “ordinary citizens participate in a broadly understood Jewish revival that undermines the dominant view of Poland as essentially, primordially ethno-Catholic. Jewish presence — whether in its historical or contemporary incarnation — is invoked to trump Poland‘s ethnoreligious homogeneity.”

Zubrzycki notes that this magical philosemitism has its counterpart in a magical antisemitism adopted by some reactionary Poles.

​“As Jewishness has become a symbol of a liberal, plural, and secular Poland,” she writes, “Poland is claimed by the Catholic Right to be ruled by ‘Jews ’ — symbolic Jews — who must be stopped.”

Whereas liberals imagine a reintroduction of Jewishness as an opportunity to build a healthier society, rightists equate Jews with a dangerous cosmopolitanism that threatens Polish Catholic hegemony.

One of the achievements of the rightist Law and Justice party that currently holds power was the 2018 law making it a criminal offense to lay blame on Poland for crimes during the Holocaust. This legislation had its roots in the controversy following the publication of Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Gross’ 2000 book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland,” which documented the killing of Jews by ethnic Poles during World War II.

Because the national narrative had portrayed Poles solely as victims and heroes, casting them also as perpetrators provoked a firestorm. And many Poles responded by doubling down on the exculpatory narrative and sometimes resorting to raw antisemitic rhetoric.

And meanwhile, what of Poland’s actual Jews? While Jewish numbers are in decline in most diaspora countries, in Poland they have been increasing. And that is due to the significant number of people who have begun to identify openly as Jewish, often upon the revelation of Jewish heritage on at least one side of their family.

There have been many incentives for Poles of Jewish descent to conceal their heritage. Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust often found an uneasy, and sometimes violent, homecoming. And the late 1960s saw the expression of official antisemitism, with at least 13,000 Jews — around half of the country’s Jewish population —  being expelled in 1968. Particularly since the Communist regime suppressed religious expression, there was little to be gained, and plenty to be lost, by being Jewish.

Jews who are embracing their identity in Poland today have to contend with many challenges. Issues that Zubrzycki observed, both within Polish institutions and in accompanying young Polish Jews on a Birthright trip to Israel, include a lack of Jewish education and lived religious observance; a sense of disrespect from the rest of the Jewish world, which tends to regard Poland as a Jewish graveyard; and a dearth of native Polish rabbis and educators, leading Polish Jews to feel as if they are being molded by Americans and Israelis.

Extensively researched and clearly presented, Zubrzyzcki’s book is unique in awarding attention to issues of Jewishness in today’s Poland through the perspectives of both non-Jews and Jews, and as filtered through the agendas both of Catholic nationalists and of those who seek to build a more diverse and inclusive society. Particularly for those who have visited Poland and wish to make sense of the complicated landscape, this is a valuable resource.

“Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival” by Geneviève Zubrzycki (Princeton University Press, 288 pages)

For those of us whose primary encounter with the text of the Torah is reading along in synagogue with the aid of English translations, we are missing a key dimension of traditional Jewish engagement with the sacred text.

The Torah has long been studied alongside commentaries that have enabled us to deepen our understanding — and two newly published books add some valuable perspectives to the mix.

Raised in Oakland, Rabbi David Kasher is known in the Bay Area for having co-founded Kevah, a project that helped bring the study of classical Jewish texts to many learners. A former J. Torah columnist and currently an associate rabbi at Ikar in Los Angeles, Kasher has recently published “ParshaNut,” a book recording his excursions in Torah study.

Kasher is an exuberant teacher who wants to bring us into the experience of reading the Torah through a multiplicity of perspectives. His companion is the “Mikraot Gedolot,” a marvel of early Hebrew printing, in which the Biblical text is surrounded on the page by commentaries from a wide variety of rabbis from the medieval and Renaissance eras, including those Kasher dubs the “Big Three” from the Middle Ages: Rashi, Ibn Ezra and the Ramban (Nachmanides). The “Mikraot Gedolot” reminds us that reading the Torah is a communal project across time — we don’t read these texts alone.

For each Torah portion, Kasher poses a question occasioned by something unresolved in the Biblical text and begins a conversation that may extend from the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud to those of Europe a millennium later. Looking for satisfying answers, he usually gets one. And in the process, we have the opportunity to experience the close reading, wordplay and imaginative invention of the interpreters.

There are also occasions when Kasher does not find an answer. Hoping to put himself at greater ease with a disturbing incident in Leviticus where a man is condemned to death by stoning for cursing God’s name, Kasher instead finds “no consolation.”

“ParshaNut” — the Hebrew word refers to the tradition of biblical interpretation, but is here also a pun referring to someone who is nutty about the weekly Torah portion — is not meant to be a systematic companion to the weekly reading. For me, rather, it is an opportunity to look over the shoulder of a brilliant seeker as he goes deep into the Jewish interpretive tradition. It succeeds in modeling the active encounter with text and assuring the reader that this sort of wrestling is exactly what the tradition is encouraging us to do. And the very fact that the rabbis are often in pronounced disagreement with one another is permission for us to bring our own eyes and voices to this endeavor.

These classic Torah commentators, whose words have spanned centuries and nations, happen to have one thing in common: They were all male. A corrective to this pattern, “Dirshuni” is a compilation of midrashic writings by Israeli women, edited by Jerusalem scholar and teacher Tamar Biala.

For this English edition, each short midrash is followed by a commentary explaining its context (including some of the Hebrew wordplay, which inevitably suffers in translation) and suggesting its meaning.

Tamar Kadari’s introduction sets the stage well, introducing the reader to the tradition of midrash — which she defines literally as “searching out and exploring sacred scripture” — and the extensive “tool kit” that midrashists use, working inventively with words and stories to address problems or gaps in the Biblical text. She also traces the resurgence of midrash as a contemporary practice, emerging initially in the United States in the 1970s as many Jewish feminists looked at their tradition anew. Israeli women’s adoption of the discipline was occasioned in part by the development of more opportunities for Modern Orthodox women in Israel to engage in intensive Talmudic study — something that had been the exclusive domain of men — and the translation of the Talmud from Aramaic to modern Hebrew, making the rabbinic tradition more accessible to those without a yeshiva education. And something that distinguishes Israelis’ midrash is a much more intimate relationship with the Hebrew language; the words used in the Bible are those used in their daily lives..

The result is powerful. As Kadari, a professor of midrash at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem,  tells it, “The phenomenon of women forging midrash is a kind of historical repair and recreates the revelation at Sinai anew, this time with women’s meaningful participation.”

I first encountered “Dirshuni” when Rabbi Dorothy Richman led a text study on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. She asked where Sarah was during the binding of Isaac. Among the sources she explored were two excerpts from “Dirshuni.” One of the explanations was haunting: Sarah’s silence during the episode “was her mistake. For the Holy Blessed One had told Abraham Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice (Genesis 21:12), but He had not said those words to her.” Sarah could have stopped the incident from happening, but she was unaware of her power to do so.

Many of these writings give greater voice or agency to characters who are insufficiently developed in the Biblical text or not awarded sufficient interest by the rabbis. And quite a few address women’s oppression both within the stories and within the larger tradition.

As an example, in one story authored by Biala, a pious woman listening to the chanting of the Ten Commandments in the synagogue is desperately saddened by the realization that the gendered Hebrew formation of two of the commandments implies that they are given only to men. Her despair reaches the Holy One, who explains that this was a problem of transmission — of Moses incorrectly transcribing God’s word because his own sensibilities had been limited by ensconcing himself solely among men. And the Holy One adds, “Any beit midrash that has no women — My word will not emerge from there whole.”

Given that batei midrash (Jewish houses of study) have been an exclusively male domain, this poses an enormous challenge to Jewish tradition. But, although many of the contributors are themselves deeply observant Jews, this is not a collection that shies away from such challenges. I hope that the writings in this collection will be part of our conversation, and that we will be better able to “listen to her voice.”

“ParshaNut: 54 Journeys into the World of Torah Commentary” by David Kasher (Quid Pro Books, 318 pages)

“Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash” edited by Tamar Biala (Brandeis University Press, 304 pages)

Unspooling long-held family secrets has become a specialty of Dani Shapiro’s. She has hosted the popular “Family Secrets” podcast for several years, and her five published memoirs have often explored suppressed knowledge within her own family. With “Signal Fires,” Shapiro returns to fiction for the first time in 15 years, but she has not strayed far in terms of subject matter. Her new novel probes the long-term cost of secrets, as viewed through the Wilfs, a nonobservant Jewish family in a New York suburb.

The book begins with a sense of foreboding, as the reader recognizes that little good is likely to come from three teenagers on a late-night joyride, particularly when drunk 17-year-old Sarah Wilf tells her 15-year-old brother, Theo, to take the wheel. And within a couple of pages, a tragic accident occurs. In its aftermath, Sarah claims to have been driving, which will be the official story, despite the entire family knowing it to be untrue. “It will become the deepest kind of family secret, one so dangerous that it will never be spoken,” Shapiro writes.

I’ve offered what may feel like a spoiler, only because it’s not much of one.

“Signal Fires” is not about the crash, but about the consequences of unaddressed trauma. We are offered a window on the Wilfs as over the course of decades they contend with the aftershocks of this tragic moment.

The novel jumps a quarter century ahead from that terrible night in 1985. Mimi, the family’s matriarch, now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is living in a memory care facility. Her husband, Ben, a retired physician, is packing up their belongings and vacating their house to be near her. Sarah lives in Los Angeles, where she has become an accomplished film producer, and also an alcoholic. Theo is a celebrated chef in Brooklyn after years spent living overseas, during which he was out of contact with his family. He pours all his energies into the two acclaimed restaurants he runs, where “his patrons — his regulars — are his family.”

The accident has figured prominently in all of the Wilfs’ lives, as has their silence about it: “Sarah sometimes wonders whether talking would have been better. Silence didn’t make it go away but instead drove the events of that night more deeply into each of them.” And her parents’ communication has not been any better. When Ben tells his wife, “Mimi, we should talk,” she responds, “We don’t have to talk, Ben … Let’s not talk.” Unable to face their shared trauma, they instead live damaged lives, incapable of moving forward as a family.

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An interconnected plotline is set in motion when Ben begins a friendship with Waldo, a brilliant 10-year-old boy who lives across the street. Waldo, who may be on the autism spectrum, is focused on the stars in the sky and on a computer program that traces the constellations across time, and he draws Ben into his interest. Ben comes to understand, as does the reader, that Waldo thirsts for the warm embrace that Waldo’s father is unable to offer.

Waldo’s father, referred to as Shenkman, is frustrated with the course of his life. Constantly feeling inferior to his more successful peers, he has pinned his hopes on his son. However, Waldo has not turned out to be the sort of son his father dreamed of raising, and Shenkman’s immense disappointment is all too often expressed in anger. After losing his temper and punishing Waldo unreasonably one evening, Shenkman apologetically enters his son’s bedroom late that night in a haunting portrait of an ineffectual father: “He takes a couple of steps toward Waldo’s bed. He wants to touch the soft curve of his cheek. I’m sorry is on the tip of his tongue. He won’t say it, but maybe Waldo will feel it.”

Though cognizant of his own shortcomings, Shenkman cannot turn that awareness into action, and the only time he can come close to displaying affection to Waldo is when his son is asleep. Ironically, Waldo turns out not to be in his bed and Shenkman’s earlier outburst is the cause of his son’s disappearance.

The novel’s structure can be a bit challenging, both because it is told from multiple points of view and, more significantly, because the narrative leaps back and forth over a 50-year period, resisting linear storytelling. But looking anew at the passage of time seems to be one of Shapiro’s intentions.

The novel concludes in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is interesting to see how this moment we are still living in is portrayed. For Theo, it offers an opportunity for redemption. With his destination restaurants suddenly irrelevant in a lockdown, he shutters them and, with a newfound sense of purpose, begins using his gift for cooking to help care for his community. Some other characters will experience a sort of healing.

Shapiro is a highly skilled writer who crafts her characters expertly, giving them lives that are complex and fully developed within a rather short novel. I could have done without some of the narrator’s occasional metaphysical assertions, but this novel offers much to appreciate and reflect on, resonating for anyone who has experienced the long-term reverberations of painful events.

“Signal Fires: A Novel” by Dani Shapiro (Knopf, 240 pages)