#JewishBookMonth Challenge 5784!

Shalom! I’m reprising a tradition from last year where I celebrate Jewish Book Month by talking about my year in Jewish reading!

…weeeell, technically Jewish Book Month ended just before Chanukah began, but I’d like to think I’m in the ballpark. 😛 I’m also staying in the past by re-using Erika Dreifus’s bingo board complete with, ahem, some creative responses to fill out as many spaces as possible.

Bingo! 😛

…I don’t think that over-pixelated image really gives a complete picture, heh. But I’ll put away my puns now, and provide below links to my GoodReads reviews. I read all of these books sometime in 2023, and look forward to fulfilling many of these prompts in the new secular year as well!

Holiday That Isn’t Hanukkah: REUBEN SACHS by Amy Levy. This slight, Victorian novel finds the time to witness an Anglo-Jewish community celebrating Yom Kippur! Or, as translated, the Day of Atonement.

Mizrachi Experience: AN EGYPTIAN NOVEL by Orly Castel-Bloom. The author resorts to “auto-fiction” in these vignettes about her family’s relationship to Israel’s kibbutz movement and later migration to Tel Aviv. My favorite parts were the most fictional, including a character forcibly converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, and another who lived as Cairo’s only Jew during the Arab Spring.

MG or YA: WE JUST WANT TO LIVE HERE by Sylke Tempel. I know this category is usually dominated by fiction, but in this nonfiction account, journalist Sylke Tempel facilitated a correspondence, in the early 2000s, between two teenagers: Jewish Israeli Odelia Ainbinder and Palestinian Israeli Amal Rifa’i.

Disability Rep: THE POMEGRANATE GATE by Ariel Kaplan. Not sure how much I’m twisting things with this one, but hear me out. 😛 In this fantasy novel based off of the Spanish Inquisition, protagonist Toba can’t move or speak easily. But yeah, it’s for magical reasons that are explored in the text.

Non-Holocaust Novel: JUVENTUD by Vanessa Blakeslee. In all honesty, this novel is mostly about Catholics in Colombia. But protagonist Mercedes’s mother is an American Jew, and she even follows her to the U.S. and Israel for a time. Gives a very unique perspective on inter-cultural heritage.

LGBT Rep: SARAHLAND by Sam Cohen. This short story collection features queer, predominately Jewish characters named Sarah, so I’d say that counts! One is even a biblical retelling, which re-imagines the relationship between the matriarch Sarah, her husband Abraham, and her servant, Hagar. There’s some trans elements at play, too.

Exile: DANIEL DERONDA by George Elliot. OK, I’m pretty proud of this one. 😛 Because famous, Victorian novelist George Elliot wrote a proto-Zionist character! Mordecai (and later Deronda) were responding to exile with thoughts of Jewish nationhood long before the idea entered public consciousness (see REUBEN SACHS above for a Victorian Jewish author’s baffled response to this novel.)

Sephardic Experience: THE DEBT OF TAMAR by Nicole Dweck. In the 16th century, a converso family flees Spain for Instanbul, where they hope they can come out again as Jews. Results are mixed, as they become closer to the Sultan and his people. Meanwhile, 500 years later descendants of the family and the Sultan meet up because there’s a debt to be paid.

Short Story Collection: OY CARAMBA! AN ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH STORIES FROM LATIN AMERICA by Ilan Stavans. A very wide-ranging collection from Jewish writers all across Latin American countries! I read this collection piecemeal on my BookTube channel, one short story per video. Was a bit disjointed, but fun!

Social Justice/Tikkun Olam: STANDING AGAIN AT SINAI by Judith Plaskow. Jewish feminist Judith Plaskow did much more than advocate for women to have more of a place in Jewish life. She also tackled scriptural texts, theology and ritual. It’s very much a thesis for a long-term project, which made it super interesting to read the book 30 years after its publication, heh.

Written by a Rabbi: DIRSHUNI: CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S MIDRASH edited by Tamar Biala. I’m stretching things just a liiiiitle bit, but I know at least one of these contributors holds the title or Rabbi! 😛 Creating Midrash is a practice almost as old as Judaism itself, where scholars extrapolate on the vagaries in the Torah and the Talmud. Unsurprisingly, most midrashim throughout history were written by men, leaving the Israeli women featured here to offer unique perspectives.

Free Space: THIS DARK DESCENT by Kalyn Josephson. YA fantasy for the win! In this start to a new series, Kalyn Josephson imagines a secondary world of enchanted horse races, where a reviled religious group *cough cough* practices illegal “golem” magic. Two main characters are drawn into a dangerous race that might change the course of history in this elaborately imagined setting.

Frum Rep: ABOMINATION by Ashley Goldberg. A Hasidic school teacher is accused of sexual assault, leading to his small Melbourne community closing ranks to defend him. Twenty years later, two former best friends from the school, one who left the community and one who remained, revisit their relationship and grapple with the past.

Set Before 1900: A MULTITUDE OF DREAMS by Mara Rutherford. Probably my biggest cheat of all, cos this is a fantasy story. *ducks head* But the vaguely realized world is clearly based on medieval Europe, complete with “Jews” being forced to live in “ghettos” and facing persecution. The plague that turns into vampires thing is just a little extra. 😛

Israeli History: STRANGERS WITH THE SAME DREAM by Alison Pick. A group of pioneering Jews move to 1921 Palestine set out to live the utopian dream of creating a kibbutz in a land where they can be free of persecution. Through following three main characters, however, Allison Pick shows where reality doesn’t always live up to the dream.

Translated Book: JERUSALEM BEACH: STORIES by Iddo Geffen, translated by Daniella Zamir. Recent winner of the Sami Rohr Prize, this collection features both realism and surrealism when it comes to Jewish characters living in Israel. Iddo Gefen is also a PhD student in cognitive psychology at Columbia University, so maybe his writing days are behind him. But a translation of his novel should be published next year, so. 😀

American Experience (Set Outside of NYC): THISTLEFOOT by GennaRose Nethercott. There’s no way this can’t count, because the house—and ergo the plot—literally traverses the country on chicken legs! :0 So even if they stop in New York, it can’t be for long, heh. In this folkloric fantasy tale, GennaRose Nethercott makes the Baba Yaga into a Jewish grandmotherly figure from the early 20th century, bequeathing her house on chicken legs to two modern-day descendants looking for a place in the world. In general, this is a haunting rumination on Ashkenazi history and trauma.

Written by a Jew of Choice: PEOPLE OF THE BOOK by Geraldine Brooks. I’m not always up on who is a Jew by Choice vs by birth, but I do know that famous journalist and writer, Geraldine Brooks, converted when she married her late husband. This, arguably, is her most Jewish novel, which imagines a very specific history, told in vignettes by fictional characters, about a very real illuminated manuscript. The Sarajevo Passover Haggadah (Seder text) is in fact dated back to 14th century Barcelona!

Poetry: TODAY IN THE TAXI: POEMS by Sean Singer. These prose poems are Sean Singer’s ruminations from taxi driving, some more realist than others. His religious fare includes references to golems, ancient rabbis and biblical prophets. This was the National Jewish Book Award poetry winner last year.

Written by a Jew of Color: THE SASSOONS: THE GREAT, GLOBAL MERCHANTS AND THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE by Joseph Sassoon. Possibly my most controversial pick? In the U.S., we have very specific ideas about who fits under this umbrella, and it involves layers of marginalization. I decided to go for Joseph Sassoon, writing about his Jewish family’s rise to global prominence in the 19th century, because they were originally from Iraq and also established roots in India and China before setting their sights on the UK proper. They’re known as Sephardi Jews, though I wonder if the ethnic realities are fluid enough that they also might be seen as Miazrahi.

Diaspora Experience (outside of the US): AND AFTER THE FIRE by Lauren Belfer. A liiiiittle bit of a cheat, because plenty of the modern-day storyline takes place in the US, with characters trying to trace down the history of a fictional Bach cantata. Of course, this means the historical parts take place in Prussia and Germany, dating back to the 18th century. This includes some real-life people, like Bach’s real son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, giving the fake cantata to his real student, Sara Levy, which ultimately ended up in the care of her real great-niece and composer Fanny Mendelsohn. The novel touches upon Bach’s greatness as a composer, and also the reality that in small part he dealt in disseminating anti-Jewish texts for Lutheran church services.