Today is the nonfiction reveal, and I definitely have some work to do to expand the nonfiction section. I’ve read one of these and have plans to review it, but I need to get on the others ASAP. Calling all guest reviewers – help me out!
I am really pleased to announce the reader picks in the “Best Overall Jewish Book” category.
I won’t tell you which books got the most votes, but I can share a few fun facts:
-BookishlyJewish has reviews up for five of them (links below)
-There’s an additional book I’ve read but still haven’t gotten around to reviewing
-Two are so high on my TBR I already own them. They stare at me balefully as I type this. (Can you guess which?)
-There’s a nice mix of fiction and nonfiction
-Three of these books were not on my radar, but now they are
-Our younger readers have participated! Plus some nostalgic grown ups! Love that we got some children’s literature on here.
Stay tuned as we release the results for individual categories throughout the week. There are a lot of fun and surprising picks. Your TBR is sure to grow.
Find the books:
All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen, nonfiction: Bookshop | Amazon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, speculative literary: Bookshop | Amazon
The Chosen by Chaim Potok, historical fiction: Bookshop | Amazon
written by: Ruth Horowitz with illustrations by: Jenny Meilhove
barefoot Books October 1, 2024
32 pages
Review by: E. Broderick
The best way for me to review children’s books, particularly picture books, is to read them to a child. So when I heard Ruth Horowitz had a new picture book coming out, I set about recruiting a child to participate in reading The Midnight Mitzvah with me. Luckily, most children enjoy being read to and this was not a difficult position to fill. Especially since the illustrations by Jenny Meilhove were particularly inviting.
Full disclosure – we read this on a computer so the full board book experience is not here, but I did read it out loud and the aforementioned toddler was very happy to snuggle up and listen. They even tried to touch the screen the same way they would turn the pages of a physical book. As this was 3-year-old, the full plot, which involves an important lesson about how charity is best performed in secret, may have flown over their head. It was, however, grasped by the older siblings who kept pretending they were not listening to the book. They commented on how this preserves the recipients dignity, with the oldest even mentioning they learned about this in the laws of tzedakah -charity – laid out by Moses Maimonides. They shared their thoughts on the topic and many text to self connections were made.
I mostly enjoyed how the featured chipmunk is a stand in for a respected Rabbi in a famous old Jewish tale. There’s nothing like involving the local wild life to make a story feel fresh.
The text is not heavy handed, and there is a tense moment in the forest at night before we learn that all is well. This provides just enough emotional tension to keep little listeners engaged.
But back to the three-year-old. This particular child was very excited to point out and name all the different animals as well as the moon which is drawn with a variety of facial expressions. When we finished The Midnight Mitzvah, there was a request asked for more books to be read. Which is a sure sign of success – the audience asked for an encore! How fortunate for us that Horowitz has more books for us to read together.
Note: BookishlyJewish received a free e-arc from the author after we expressed interest in one.
by: Sarah Kapit with illustrations by Genevieve Kote
June 18, 2024 Henry Holt & Co.
106 pages
Review by: E. Broderick
I’ve written before about how prayer has never been my particular form of connection to Judaism, but I’ve never touched on what it means to go to Synagogue. Synagogue is about more than just prayer. It’s a social gathering, a means of building community and catching up with friends. However, services can also be incredibly long which is rough on children. For that reason, my friends and I would sneak out and play “squares” on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, the protagonist of Sarah Kapit’s delightful new illustrated chapter book, Rachel Friedman Breaks The Rules, has no such recourse.
As my Bubbie would say, Rachel has no zitzfleish. She has ADHD and cannot sit still for services. She also struggles to follow the most basic rules laid out for her by her father, like not crossing the street alone. Sometimes her rule breaking pans out – putting peanut butter in challah dough is apparently delicious. Other times her impulsivity is a problem – eating snacks in the middle of services and disturbing the congregants is definitely not the way to go. Luckily, Rachel has some something I did not. A very supportive and engaged Rabbi who helps her work through this.
The characters in the books are diverse. Rachel’s father is a single Dad trying to figure out how to raise two kids on his own since their mother passed away. Her best friend has two moms and the congregants in her Synagogue come from many different backgrounds. Plus, the Rabbi that helps Rachel and her dad sort through their rule breaking issues is a woman.
Rachel is a likeable character that I’m sure many children in the target age group will relate to. She’s also Jewish, and the star of a whole new series of chapter books that includes spunky illustrations. While she may have a bigger personality than me, and practices a different variety of Judaism than I did, I think my child self would have been delighted to know she was out there. Maybe even encounter her in a regular library instead of one exclusive to the community and stocking only books from independent Jewish publishing presses.
I’m sure Rachel’s further adventures will prove just as exciting as Rachel Friedman Breaks The Rules. I’m hoping they also incorporate themes of Jewish leaning just like this first book did. Watching Rachel claim her Jewish identity as part and parcel of her personality- which some may see as a problem until the Rabbi teacher them otherwise- was a powerful moment. Young readers everywhere, both Jewish and not, are sure to relate.
Note: BookishlyJewish received a free copy of this book from the publisher
There have been tons of “Top 100” Lists floating around recently. Here at BookishlyJewish we don’t rank our books because we love ALL the Jewish books, realize we cannot possibly have read them all, and are feverishly trying to support as many as we can. However, we are always curious what our readers are loving! So we thought it would be fun to have a little unofficial readers poll.
Feel free to vote for a book in as many categories as it fits and to skip a category that doesn’t speak to you. Torah commentaries are fine, but please don’t vote for the actual Torah (ie: Guide To The perplexed is fair game but Leviticus is not.)
You have to sign in to google to vote, but it won’t collect your email. It’s just to limit it to one response per account. Because apparently even when there are no prizes planned, people still try to game the system on these things.
Voting remains open until August 1. CLICK HERE to vote.
A while ago, during a late night at work, my co-workers and I began chatting about the lottery. People started listing the expensive purchases and life changes they would make if they hit it big. A large portion would quit their jobs, but I wasn’t so sure. I said I wouldn’t change my lifestyle enough for the win to be noticeable. One of the other team members agreed- stating that he would not even switch his apartment. Instead, he would simply buy a second, secret, apartment where he could enjoy cool stuff without anyone hitting him up for money. You see, he and I both knew that winning the lottery is not always all it’s cracked up to be. The Jacobson siblings in Elyssa Friedland’s novel Jackpot Summer would have benefited significantly if they had a similar conversation.
While there are four Jacobson siblings – Matthew, Laura, Sophia, and Noah – only three of them go in on lottery tickets together. Matthew, the oldest and richest of them all pre-lotto, follows his wife Beth’s advice and opts out. Boy does he learn to regret it.
His siblings quickly discover that money does not solve all problems. Laura tries to use cash to fix her broken marriage and convince her kids to come home more, but nobody likes being controlled by their purse strings. Sophie uses the money to quit her day job and create art – only to find she’s so in her head over the win she can no longer paint. Noah, the baby, who was floating around aimlessly performing tech repair before the win now has a million people calling him for money and can’t seem to find anyone interested in him for something other than a check.
Pile onto that the fact that the siblings are dealing with the fallout of three of them becoming millionaires while the fourth must still work a job he hates, and you can see how the family dynamics are strained. Plus, the matriarch who used to keep the peace passed away a year ago and their father is all but absentee parenting as her retires to Boca and whiles away his days playing pickle ball.
I found myself finding some of the financials in the book extremely dubious. We are given a realistic picture of what would actually be left for each sibling after taxes (spoiler alert – way less than the advertised jackpot) and while it is still a nice chunk of change, I find it difficult to believe it would be enough for the lifestyles described. This is especially true in the case of Laura, who buys a multi million dollar home and then sets off and numerous luxury vacations all while spoiling her college aged daughters whose tuition’s she’s paying. Ironically it is Matthew’s wife Beth, the one who refused to buy a ticket, who points out that the Jacobson’s were rich before they ever won the lottery. They had a second home on the Jersey shore growing up. They participated in extracurricular activities and their parents through neighborhood parties and charity events. Beth’s speech pointing out the privilege in all of that was one of the best parts of the book and made me forgive the wonky real estate and travel spending that should have eaten through that lotto money within months.
Each Jacobson story is unique and they all have their own lessons to learn, but together the reader comes away feeling fulfilled. I found myself sucked in to the family saga, especially as it is told with humor. My favorite part related to a certain piece of jewelry and the revelations about their deceased mother that come at the end. Because really, we all mess up from time to time, but the point is to at least try. When the siblings realize this they are able to move forward together.
Note: BookishlyJewish received an e-arc of this book from the publisher.
It feels oddly like a provocative act to review a novel about present day Israel, as to even breathe the name of that country is so fraught with opposed opinions these days. On Her Own, a novel by Lihi Lapid, translated from the original Hebrew, is about an Israel beneath and apart from the headlines, written before October 7, a smaller picture in already small country. Told primarily through the eyes of its female characters, it’s a story of ordinary people living in a most non-ordinary country.
At the center is rebellious teenager Nina, who takes up with an older married man with an unsavory criminal reputation, much to the consternation of her single mother, Irina, an immigrant from Kiev, still Russia when she emigrated. It’s the Persephene-Demeter tale from Greek mythology, as Irina wistfully recalls how her daughter, now missing, has changed:
She remembers…the bond they had, and thinks about how much has changed this year since she shot up and started watching what she eats and her cheeks aren’t like two jelly doughnuts anymore, and the admiring way she always looked at Irina dropped away along with her baby fat.
Finding herself in a dangerous situation – we aren’t told the exact details – Nina escapes the dark world of her boyfriend, and lands, disoriented and disheveled, in the doorway of a Tel Aviv apartment building. There she meets Carmela, an elderly woman living alone. In the fog of dementia, Carmela mistakes Nina for the granddaughter she longs to see, the child of her son, Itamar, who left for America many years ago.
As Nina decides to go along with this confusion of identity, she develops a sweetly caring relationship for Carmela, who is clearly in dire need of companionship and basic care. Needing to buy supplies, she meets Eitan, a young man who works at the nearby mini-mart. Eitan quickly catches on to Nina’s deception, but as he is increasingly romantically captivated by her, does not let on that he knows something is amiss.
Like a tossed rock making ever wider ripples in a pond, the story expands to include a wider circle of characters At times, the hopscotching from person to person becomes disorienting, keeping the Israeli names straight, and who is what in relation to whom. But it is an engaging human story; a mother missing a daughter who has gone astray, the grandmother who likely knows in some part of her brain that she is being deceived, but enjoys the attention of the stranger taking care of her, and Nina, the young woman who discovers a sense of self-worth at last.
At its heart, it’s a distillation of the anomie and disruption that is a common feature of contemporary life. Millions across the world are now refugees for reasons of conflict or economic hardship, and young digital nomads who move about simply because they can. The fallout from such global movement is a breakdown of family structure which had before provided stability and a support system.
It is through the eyes of Carmela’s son, Itamar, who deserted his home country for greater opportunity, that this modern dislocation is reflected upon:
Is something really wrong with Mom, or is it him, with his feelings of guilt for what he did? He, the deserter. The traitor. The coward. The sellout. How many times had he heard his parents say those words about their friends’ children who had left the country. Words used by Israelis of their generation who built the country and saw their children leaving it, trickling out. His generation gives it a different label. Relocation, they call it. Fulfilling themselves, realizing their potential somewhere in Silicon Valley, in the London Stock exchange…But at the end of all that globalness, he thinks, is an old woman who’s been left alone on the other side of the ocean.
Ironically – the country of Israel, as conceived by its idealistic founders, was conceived as a place of communal living structures, like the kibbutz, where social and cultural life is a shared experience. So all the more striking in the contrast.
In On her Own, we are shown a picture of life in Israel that is radically different from that vision. It is one where criminal activity and corruption have become common, and while military activity is never far from daily life – Carmela had another son who was killed in an army operation many years before – the novel takes place in a period of relative peace in Israel and of course, relative is the key word here, as it has always been when speaking about Israel and the Middle East, in general.
On Her Own is a book of modest wisdom about mothers and daughters, which pulls the reader into its web of connections and provides an unusual window into Israeli society. This book, translated by Sondra Silverston, is the first by the author to be translated into English.
Reviewer bio: Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker residing in coastal Connecticut. Her documentary films were shown in Berlin Film Festival, Doc.London, Sundance Festival and others. Recent writing was published in Atticus Review, Asymptote Journal, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, NewVerseNews. Her art book Dark Pools: Historic Swimming Pools of Berlin is distributed by PrintedMatter.
My writing is strictly in the genre categories. As such, I have learned that if I do not blow up a space ship or have some kind of meet cute within the first few chapters no agent or editor is letting me even get my foot in the door. “Quiet” fiction is discouraged by trad genre pub, whether overtly or tacitly. Some of this is about sales, some is about perceived reader expectations, but it always shocks me when I pull something from the “literary” shelf and see how little these conventions mater in that arena.
In James McBride’s literary novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store there is a prologue in which a corpse is discovered in a low income neighborhood of Pottstown Pennsylvania populated by immigrants. The main interviewee is an old Jew and the narrative voice is from the local black community. If this was genre fiction I would expect the story to shift towards detective, mystery, or thriller plot beats. Some heavy action and possible introduction of a love interest and/or villain should follow. Instead, the book forgets all about the murder for a good 350 pages and shifts towards a study of character, community, and relationships.
The titular grocery store is run by Chona, a Jewish woman who is very progressive for the 1970’s. Chona requires a special shoe due to a lower limb issue, extends so much credit to her neighbors she seems to be running a charity instead of a grocery store, and cares nothing about the color of anyone’s skin. She is a joy to everyone that knows her and seems to get away with the most outrageous things – from correcting the cantor in Synagogue to calling out the town physician as a member of the KKK. She is the beating heart of the story and her inability to have a child upon whom to lavish some of her love and generosity is felt keenly by the reader.
Which is why nobody is surprised when Chona agrees to hide a young black boy named Dodo who lost his hearing due to an accident. Dodo is a bright and engaging boy, much loved by his Aunt and Uncle, who the state wants to institutionalize due to his lack of hearing. Given this book takes place in the 70’s, “special school” does not mean increased resources for the hearing impaired. It means shutting away anyone even mildly different, anyone that rich white society does not understand, in deplorable conditions. The things that go on behind those “school” walls made my stomach churn. Which is why Dodo’s relatives and Chona both work together to shield him from such a fate.
The story is indeed suspenseful, but it is not laid out so cleanly as I have done so here. There are myriad digressions and viewpoints delving back into the establishment of the community, the back history of even minor characters, and how they all mesh together. The actual murder thrown out like a baited line in the prologue is almost an afterthought, and I did not feel like the individual plot lines actually came together to a single resolution. If I submitted such a thing as a genre work I would likely receive a form rejection. However, the plot is not really the point here. It is the relationships, the interconnected-ness of everything, that matters. This isn’t a mystery or a thriller. It’s a study in community.
I was particularly struck by the relationship between Dodo and Monkey Pants, a young boy with cerebral palsy who is also sent to an institution by a society that does not understand that a body that functions differently does not say anything about the brain living in it. His physical needs are barely being met to our current standards, and his psychological ones are not even acknowledged to exist. The connection these boys form is moving and really stuck with me long after I finished reading. Indeed, many characters in the book feel designed to have the reader critically reflect on differences in ability and our viewpoints on this subject. Chona needs a special shoe. So does the individual in the book who is arguably the villain. They might have this similarity in their bodies, but they could not be more different in terms of their souls. Each viewpoint we meet is given a through and intriguing treatment even if we only meet them for a single chapter. Because we are all worthy of consideration and empathy.
“Read widely in your genre” is common advice given to writers to help them understand the market. It is good advice, but it is not complete. I find that making a foray out of my particular genre adds nuance and complexity to my work. I still could not submit something like this to a strictly sci fi audience, but my characters will be more thought out and developed for having read this kind of work. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store may have a slower pace than I’m used to, but I needed the extra time to digest all the complex thematic work. It reinforced my resolve to diversify my reading across genres, themes, and authors. It makes me a better writer, but I hope also a better human.
One of the things I love about middle grade books is that they allow kids to go new places, experience new things, and meet new people even if their family cannot afford travel or after school activities. In Ana On The Edge by A.J. Sass, we meet Ana, a young lady engaged in an activity I never dreamed of as a kid – competitive figure skating – and who is discovering for herself that she may not be a boy or a girl.
Interestingly enough, Ana has the same reason I do for not figure skating – her family doesn’t have the money to pay the exorbitant expenses associated with the sport. However, Ana learned to skate during a less expensive skate school, along with her wealthier best friend, and she showed such exceptional talent that her coaches and her single mother have found a way to make it work. She’s acutely conscious of the cost her training represents to her mother, and cannot afford all the extras her peers can, but she is never resentful and it does not hold her back. It was refreshing to read a book in which a kid does not have the financial resources of everyone else around them and is still joyful. As a kid who sometimes did feel resentful (though my situation was not nearly to the level of Ana’s) I would have really enjoyed reading that.
In Ana’s world – the world of figure skating – the delineation between boy and girl is stark. Her choreographer requires her to wear a skirt which she finds very uncomfortable, she skates as an intermediate “lady”, and her new program involves pretending to be a princess. All of this gives her a stark amount of discomfort for reasons she cannot explain. Plus, the choreographer and the costume cost thousands of dollars that Ana knows cannot be so easily replaced.
When Ana meets a boy at skate school, and overhears that he used to use girl pronouns, she is intrigued but also confused as to why this means so much to her. Then, when he mistakes her for a boy she doesn’t correct him. This still doesn’t make her feel “right,” and not only because she’s nervous about lying to a friend. Neither boy nor girl feels correct to Ana and it is only much later that she discovers what nonbinary means and that it might apply to her (she still uses she/her pronouns at the end of the book with most people, which is why I use them here).
There’s a large amount of panic right now that exposure to a queer child might lead other children to “turn queer.” Yet in Ana on the Edge, we can see that Ana’s dysphoria – her feelings of wrongness in a skirt or when performing her princess program – predate her exposure to any transgender individuals. Instead, meeting a trans child simply helps her find the words the express what she is feeling internally so that the adults in her life can help her sort through what it means. I think that is closer to actual real life experience.
At end of the book, Ana is still sorting things out – what to call her bat mitzvah, what division she wants to skate in, what pronouns she will use – and that too is reflective of life. Not everything comes easily for everyone, nor can it be expected to come all at once. As the author so poignantly states in the afterword, there’s no one right way to be nonbinary and Ana is still finding hers. Hopefully she gives some kids the words to express what is going on inside themselves, or a better frame of reference to understand their friends.
In case my review was not enough, I will remind readers that I absolutely adored Dahlia Adler’s YA contemporary Cool For the Summer. It was the first review I wrote for BookishlyJewish and as such has a special place in my heart. However, I readily admit that it also tore me to shreds in a way that might not have been one hundred percent healthy for me at the time. This was not the books fault, it’s a romance with a happy ending and no trauma at all. I’m not sure why it had that effect. It just did, and it is not the first or last book to have that effect on me. Which is why I delayed about a year before picking up Going Bicoastal, Adler’s third YA romcom with Wednesday Books and the second with Jewish rep. We can call reading it now a Pride gift to myself.
The story (or stories!) follows Natalya who has been presented with a choice. Spend the summer in familiar NYC with her father or travel to LA and spend it with her estranged mother. Instead of watching Natalya make a choice – we watch her make both choices and then read two alternate love stories unfold on either coast. At first, I was wondering how Adler would explain showing both stories – was it a cosmic time loop or something? – but I quickly learned that she wouldn’t. She simply gives us one chapter in which Natalya makes a choice and then follows it with another chapter in which Natalya makes the opposite choice. We then alternate chapters in which Natalya falls in love with a boy and a girl respectively. At the end we are given a choose your own adventure style question and allowed to read a last chapter depending on which romance we are rooting for more. I actually liked them equally, so I read both.
Suffice it to say, Going Bicoastal, is extremely bisexual on the page and I would call it higher heat for a YA but around medium to light for adult. The major sex scenes fade to black after significant foreplay on the page.
The good news is that aside from a brief moment of anxiety when in the first chapter Natalya says Pride is one of the best thing about summer in NYC (mostly because I have never been, and likely will never be, able to go myself) I did not experience any of the soul crushing feelings I felt with Cool. Reading was still ego-dystonic for me simply because Natalya and I are very different people – she’s an extrovert who thinks limonana tastes like grass – but I enjoyed seeing how a person very different from myself moved through the world. In addition, as with Cool, I saw an adolescent experience that is extremely different from anything that is familiar to me. I suspect this is how many teens grow up now, but I have come to realize that the difference for me is not just because I was raised in a different community, but also because my brain works very differently from theirs. Which means that this time around the experience was actually more validating for me than not.
The Jewish rep is really excellent – with both non-Jewish love interests showing a great deal of respect for how Natalya observes Shabbat and some rules of Kashrut. In fact, their ability to accept her religion is part of what cements these relationships and there are many lovely Shabbat dinner dates. Plus, while Natalya identifies as a Conservative Jew, I am sure Jews of various identities can relate to her mental debate about whether or not to explain her observance to others. It really would be easier to just say she’s allergic to shellfish, but she goes ahead and explains anyway and is rewarded for it.
Which brings me to the last thing I’d like to mention – the acknowledgements. I was one hundred percent mortified to see right there in the last line a beautiful shout out to all the bloggers and book coverage specifically for Cool’s Sapphic Jewish rep and how this positive response influenced the writing of Going Bicoastal. I am but a tiny blog in a sea of much larger media outlets covering such books, but I am very proud of my coverage for Cool and extremely embarrassed that it took me a year to read Going Bicoastal when that thank you was sitting right there in the comments and the author has always been so supportive of BookishlyJewish. I should have shown up for this book sooner, but that acknowledgement helped me gain a little insight into what I was afraid of, maybe even why Cool ripped me up so much inside.
It is one thing to throw a book out in the world and get rejections from agents, editors, or readers. It is quite another to worry that your very own community will reject you and your writing. So yes, I completely understand why Adler felt the need to send a thank you to people who were simply doing our jobs. Cool For the Summer contained a storyline that I just was completely mentally unprepared for. Reviewer responses are never guaranteed, and I imagine this representation made the book even more terrifying to publish. It was a book of bravery and pushing boundaries. Going Bicoastal though, is a book of acceptance – not just once, but twice! Loving acceptance of ourselves is literally baked into the plot. There was never a right or wrong choice for Natalya to make. Simply two different choices that each turns out okay and shows that no matter what happens along the way, we all end up where we’re meant to be.
There is more Sapphic Jewish rep out there now than when I started this blog, but it’s not nearly as much as there could be, especially from larger publishing houses. While I’ve been successful with short fiction, Trad publishing has pretty much told me “no” repeatedly for my long form work. I’m extremely happy that there are books like Adler’s to pave the way. It gives me the patience and the strength to keep going and try again. Which means I really should not have waited the year to read it. I’ll try and get to the next one faster.
Note: Bookishlyjewish received a free copy of the book from the author
