July 11, 2012 | 10:03 am

‘I always wondered when and how it was going to end’

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Philip L. Fradkin

A few months ago, I received an email from Philip L. Fradkin, who was alerting his friends and colleagues to the diagnosis of a fatal disease that seemed likely to end his life.  Like everything Philip has written — as a war correspondent, investigative journalist, environmental reporter, literary biographer, and historian — the prose in his email was lucid, impactful, elegant and even noble, all qualities that I associate with the man himself.

“I always wondered when and how it was going to end,” wrote Philip. “Now there is no more suspense. I am hoping there will be a relatively pain-free way to gracefully leave life. Until then, most of my time will be taken up with doctors, hospitals, medicines, friends, family, and eking a few more moments of joy from life, like getting out in the western landscapes that have always revived me.”

Today I read Philip’s obituary by Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times, and I am moved to salute him as one who was truly great.

I knew Philip as a reader before he kindly befriended me as a fellow writer.  He reported from the combat zones of both Vietnam and Watts, and he was one of the reporters honored with a Pulitzer for the coverage of the Watts Riots in the L.A. Times. I have reviewed several of his books in the Times and, more recently, in The Jewish Journal, including two of my own favorites, “The Left Coast: California on the Edge” (co-written with his son, Alex) and “Wallace Stegner and the American West.” Whether he was writing for the morning edition or for the ages, his work is marked by a devotion to finding the truth and a gift for rendering the truth in luminous prose.

“I tell stories; I don’t spin theories or outline ideas,” he wrote of himself. “I don’t believe there is any single truth, but rather differing versions of it. For my version I employ three goals: accuracy, fairness, readability. Along the way the following phrase from Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’ became my guideline: ‘All the facts of natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.’ I am interested in the blending of natural and human histories. That is why I call myself an environmental historian.”

I will remember Philip Fradkin as I last saw him — a tall, slender, handsome man with razor-sharp intelligence and relentless curiosity, but also a man full of compassion and grace. When I received his final email, I was moved to respond with a handwritten note that I mailed to the home in Point Reyes that he shared with his wife, Dianne.  Somehow I felt that a man whose life was devoted to the art and craft of writing deserved a hail and farewell in the form of ink on paper.  That’s why the most appropriate tribute, for me and for all of his readers, is to take one of his books off the shelf and read again the words that he put into print.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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June 26, 2012 | 11:51 am

Couscous, flags and ‘The Color Purple’

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

I don’t think Alice Walker really believes that the popular demand for a Hebrew-language edition of “The Color Purple” is so great that the government of Israel will evacuate the Jewish settlements in the West Bank in order to win her approval for its publication. But those of us who worry about the Jewish state ought to be concerned that a writer of Walker’s stature is lending her name to the cultural subsection of the BDS (Boycott Divest Sanction) movement.

“I would so like knowing my books are read by the people of your country, especially by the young and by the brave Israeli activists (Jewish and Palestinian) for justice and peace I have had the joy of working beside,” explained Walker. “I am hopeful that one day, maybe soon, this may happen. But now is not the time.”

One unhappy but mostly overlooked consequence of the BDS movement is that Israel is being erased, sometimes quite literally, from the cultural landscape in which we live. Thus, for example, when I recently tried to find a box of what I am accustomed to call Israeli couscous at Whole Foods, I discovered that the product is now called “pearled couscous.”  And when I pulled up behind a bus at a red light, I was able to study an advertisement for Santa Monica College that depicted the flags of the world — including those of several predominantly Muslim countries — but the Israeli flag was nowhere to be seen.

I am not suggesting that Whole Foods or Santa Monica College have joined Alice Walker in the BDS movement. But it is self-evident that even casual references to Israel are now seen as intolerably provocative by companies and institutions that seek to avoid controversy, which represents a victory by the BDS movement.  No matter where you stand on the settlements, the notion that the Jewish state cannot be safely included or even mentioned in the public conversation is not good for Israel.

Some activists, as I recently discovered, claim to be committed to opening a conversation rather than shutting it down. Even a writer as critical of the settlements as Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” and “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare,” sought a way to “boycott the Israeli economy,” as she puts it, “but not Israelis.”

“For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published ‘The Shock Doctrine,’ I wanted to respect the boycott,” she explains in an item posted at her website. “I contacted a small publisher called Andalus…, an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus’s work, and none to me.” Her plan, explains Klein, “required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically.”

Of course, both Walker and Klein are assuming that the cultural BDS movement will have some influence on Israel, but it’s hard to imagine that the Netanyahu government will change its policy on the settlements in order to court public opinion in America or anywhere else in the world. Nothing in recent history suggests that world public opinion matters much in the decisions that governments make; certainly, it did nothing at all to stop the German government from murdering Jews by the millions during World War II.  And, ironically, the cultural boycott of Israel only strengthens the conviction of the hawks, both here and in the Jewish state, that the world is already so hostile toward Israel that nothing they might do on the ground would put the Israeli flag back on bus advertisements.

For that reason alone, Alice Walker may wish to reconsider her decision and to follow the example of Naomi Klein, who is no less opposed to the settlements but found a way to engage with her Israeli readership rather than to punish them.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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June 6, 2012 | 11:38 am

Himmler’s Brain

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Not long ago, I reviewed Peter Longerich’s benchmark biography of Heinrich Himmler in these pages—a work of meticulous and compelling scholarship about the master architect of the Final Solution, a mostly ordinary human being whose claim on history is that he succeeded in putting Hitler’s apocalyptic fantasies about mass murder into operation on an industrial scale.

Himmler’s second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, figures importantly in the Longerich biography, and so I read with special interest the much-talked-about novel by Laurent Binet, “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: $26), translated from the French by Sam Taylor. Indeed, the title of the book is an acronym for the German phrase “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich” (translation: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”) that was used to describe the crucial relationship between these two men, each one a monster in his own way and, together, the executors of the Final Solution.

What intrigued Binet, as he readily confesses, were the dramatic possibilities of the incident that ended Heydrich’s life. Two commandos, one Czech and one Slovak, were parachuted into occupied Czechoslovakia with the mission of assassinating Heydrich. They succeeded in causing his death—Heydrich was only wounded in the attack but later died of an infection—but only at the cost of their own lives and the lives of hundreds of wholly innocent victims of the revenge campaign that the Nazis carried out, including the entire population of the town of Lidice.

As a novelist, Binet decided to present the story under the guise of fiction. But he is also mindful of the moral dangers of fictionalizing the events of the Shoah, and so he breaks the narrative frame to address the reader with the bitter realities that lay just beneath the surface: “I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story,” he writes, “you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.”

But the frankness can be unsettling. He confesses that his research methods included leaving the TV set on the History Channel, and that he didn’t bother to consult the memoir that Heydrich’s wife wrote about the war. At one point, Binet makes much of his assertion that a character in Charlie Chaplin’s famous allegory of Nazi Germany, “The Great Dictator,” is actually a depiction of Heydrich. A few pages later, he announces: “I just said that one of the characters in Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator was based on Heydrich, but it’s not true.”

The juxtaposition between artifacts of popular culture and authentic historical research make for strange bedfellows in the pages of “HHhH.” For example, he muses on “Conspiracy,” an HBO dramatization of the Wannsee Conference—the planning session for the Final Solution over which Heydrich presided—and expresses admiration for Kenneth Branagh’s performance, which depicts Heydrich as capable of both affability and authoritarianism. “I don’t know how accurate it is,” the author quickly confesses. “I have not read anywhere that the real Heydrich knew how to show kindness, whether real or faked.”

The same color commentary runs throughout “HHhH,” which narrates the life of Heydrich in fits and starts but is decorated and enlivened by Binet’s interior monologue, his candid announcements to the reader and his blunt confessions about his own problems with the book itself. “You’ll have gathered by now that I am fascinated by this story,” he confesses, on page 47. “But at the same time I think it’s getting to me.”

Indeed, he is perfectly willing to accuse himself of breaking faith with the heroes who are the focus of his book. He depicts a decisive moment in the life of one of the two commandos, Jozef Gabčík, and then he acknowledges his crime against history and identity: “How impudent of me to turn a man into a puppet—a man who’s been dead a long time, who cannot defend himself,” writes Binet. “To make him drink tea, when it might turn out that he liked only coffee.”

What Binet has done here deserves attention and even admiration, and it is provocative from beginning to end, but it comes with a caution and a risk. Binet is a novelist rather than a historian, and “HHhH” is neither a work of history nor a work of fiction in any pure sense. Rather, I would characterize the book—which I could not put down—as the troubled musings of an imaginative author on a subject that beggars the imagination.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. His next book is “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan,” which will be published under the Liveright imprint of W.W. Norton to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Kirsch can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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April 7, 2012 | 11:29 am

Why Is Peter Beinart’s Book About Israel Different From All Other Books?

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Of Peter Beinart’s much-attacked book, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books, $26), I am compelled to ask: Why is this book different from all other books about the politics of Israel and the Zionist movement?

Beinart’s book has been ably covered in these pages by several of my colleagues at The Jewish Journal, but the book is so compelling that, frankly, I am sufficiently provoked by the book itself to have my say, too.

Over the last year or so, I have reviewed three other books whose authors, like Beinart, courageously ask questions about the challenges that Israel is facing, both in its own democracy and in dealing with the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs. None of them attracted a fraction of the attention that Beinart now commands.

All of the other authors — J-Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami in “A New Voice for Israel,” Hirsh Goodman in “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival” and Gershom Gorenberg in “The Unmaking of Israel” — asked the same tough questions that are so concerning to Beinart and came up with many of the same unsettling answers.  Only Peter Beinart, however, has sparked such a firestorm in the media and the Jewish community.

One reason is that Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, seems to know how to make himself heard.  He trailed his coat provocatively in the pages of The New York Review of Books in 2010 and thus prompted his critics to attack the ideas in his book long before you could actually buy and read a copy.

Above all, however, Beinart did something that none of the others dared to do — he openly calls for American Jews to participate in a boycott aimed at Jewish enterprises located in the West Bank.  The so-called “Zionist B.D.S.” — the acronym refers to “boycott, divest, sanction” — is meant to pressure Israel into ending Jewish settlement in the occupied territories by resorting to the same economic weapon that the United States is deploying to pressure Iran into ending its nuclear weapons program.

Even his sympathetic readers cannot quite endorse Beinart’s book, although they are willing to credit him for a certain measure of courage in speaking his ideas aloud.

“Although I doubt a ‘Zionist boycott’ is the right tactic, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ is a remarkably articulate and compelling statement about what has gone haywire in Israeli politics and at the top of some American Jewish organizational leadership,” writes Don Futterman in Haaretz. “Refusing to accept the settler map, calling for an honest debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, about the occupation, and demanding accountability of ourselves - these are Jewish and Zionist acts of the highest order, the acts of ‘free people’ who have left the slave mentality of bondage behind.”

Beinart certainly knows that a call for a Jewish boycott is a poke in the eye, not just to the settler movement in Israel but to the Jewish people around the world.  To be sure, Israel is now forced to confront one of the fundamental flaws in the Zionist idea — Palestine was never “a people without a land for a land without a people,” and no one has a good solution to the problem of Arab-Jewish co-existence. But Beinart is far too smart to believe that any significant number of Jews in America will use the checkbook as a weapon against their fellow Jews in Israel.

Indeed, Jews who live in security and prosperity in the United States are — or should be — reluctant to dictate to Jews who live under the threat of annihilation in Israel how they should deal with the dangers that beset them.  We may share Beinart’s conviction that the occupation of the West Bank is ultimately an existential threat to Israeli democracy — it is also Goodman’s belief, and Gorenberg’s, and Ben-Ami’s — but, after all, the rockets are falling on Ashdod, Beersheba and Eilat rather than Dupont Circle, Union Square or Westwood Village.

Israel will survive Beinart’s book, which suggests that all of the anxiety directed at his book is overstated.  A more subtle point is also true — Beinart only subverts himself by calling on American Jews to boycott Israel.  He may sell more copies by charging his book with such an explosive idea, but he is unlikely to convert even his like-minded readers to his own way of thinking.

Of course, I think he knew it all along.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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April 1, 2012 | 9:14 am

“The Last Romanov” Debuts at Fairfax and Third

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Dora Levy Mossanen

For fans of Dora Levy Mossanen, author of the provocative historical novels “Harem” and “Courtesan,” a much-anticipated day has finally arrived — the official publication date of “The Last Romanov” (Sourcebooks, $14.99), yet another example of her gift at conjuring up the enchantments of the past.

My review of “The Last Romanov” will run later this week in The Jewish Journal, but I can tell you now where I will be at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 3, 2012. That’s when Dora will unveil her new book at the Barnes & Noble in The Grove at Farmers Market, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90036.

As the title of her new book suggests, “The Last Romanov” is set in the court of the last Tsar of All Russia — a place of opulence, decadence and historical consequence — but the story that unfolds in its pages actually shifts back and forth across the span of the 20th century.  We may think we know how the story of the Romanovs ended, but Dora works her characteristic magic to dazzle and amaze us.

“A master story teller at the height of her game,” enthuses another historical novelist of my acquaintance, Robin Maxwell, author of “The Secret Dairy of Anne Boleyn.” “Dora Levy Mossanen weaves history and magic into a riveting page-turner.”

Light refreshments and lively conversion are promised for the book launch at Barnes & Noble.  Readers of The Jewish Journal, of course, already know that Dora is a literate and discerning book reviewer. Readers of her novels know that she is a beguiling story-teller.  And those who have been privileged to meet the author in person know that she is an elegant and arresting speaker, too.

See you soon at the corner of Fairfax and Third!

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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