Everything Is Illuminated,\” Jonathan Safran Foer\’s tragi-comic tale of a young American Jew\’s journey through Ukraine in search of his grandfather\’s roots, is the first winner of JBooks.com\’s People\’s Choice Award for the decade\’s best work of Jewish fiction at the Koret International Jewish Book Awards ceremony in San Francisco.
Third season of \”Numb3rs\”
One should read Israeli writers, of course — Agnon, Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret. But the more appropriate template may come from fellow Americans, writers who, by exploring the Diaspora Jew\’s relationship to Israel, have gone down this road before.
Why are there so many young, hip Jews writing fiction that irreverently pokes fun at their heritage?
While there are no statistics to prove it, the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Typing \”Jewish romance novel\” into Google calls up dozens of bodice rippers featuring Jewish themes or characters, and not all published by small presses.
Narrated in the first person, present tense (always risky), \”Love With Noodles\” follows Gelder\’s canoodling with a string of women who enter his life just as he emerges from mourning his late beshert, Ellen. Gelder lives alone. His grown son, Eric, faces financial ruin. What\’s worse, Eric is planning to marry a non-Jew.
If Jacob Green sounds like every teenager who\’s hated mandatory Shabbat dinners, he\’s also the protagonist of Joshua Braff\’s viciously witty and poignant new novel.
In this collection of linked stories, the three figures at the center are a mother, father and son who leave Riga, Latvia, for Toronto, Canada. The stories are told from the point of view of the son, Mark Berman, who observes everything and helps interpret the New World for his parents.
It\’s official. American Jews are now the People of the Book Festival.
Nowadays, literature in general — and Jewish literature in particular — have become much more public entertainments.
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