Book Reviews

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread

By
Maria Balinska
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Who would think that a history of the Jews could be written through the story of the bagel? This cogent little book delivers the taste and texture of the Jewish experience through the bread that has traveled with Ashkenazi Jews over time. Maria Balinska, a BBC journalist of Polish Jewish

The Book of Fathers

By
Miklós Vámos, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
For twelve generations in the Csillig family, the firstborn son would record his memories in a journal called “the book of fathers” and pass it down to his own son—beginning with Kornél Csillig, who started the journal to record his life’s events from the time he returned to Hungary from

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

By
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Rebecca Goldstein’s novel plunks itself into the center of the current debate between God-believers and atheists, offering a new perspective on the heated controversy. “It often seems that people on one side can’t begin to grasp what the world is like, what it feels like, for those on the other

The Frozen Rabbi

By
Steve Stern
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Master of Jewish magical realism Steve Stern begins his latest novel with this strange scene: Bernie Karp, an adolescent in suburban Memphis, discovers an old man frozen in a block of ice in his parents’ basement food freezer. When he asks his parents about the frozen man, his mother replies

Gratitude: A Novel

By
Joseph Kertes
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction, this novel reflects the situation of Hungarian Jews, the last Jewish community in Europe left standing in 1944, through the stories of a single family. The members of the Beck family—wealthy, cultured Hungarian Jews—are completely unprepared for how their lives are

Devotion: A Memoir

By
Dani Shapiro
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
As a child, Dani Shapiro loved to watch her father say the morning prayers in the den of their New Jersey home. “When my father wore the tefillin, closed his eyes, and davened, he was doing what he could to protect himself and those he loved,” she writes. In this

Wherever You Go: A Novel

By
Joan Leegant
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Politics is front and center in Joan Leegant’s novel about American Jews in Israel—three strangers who arrive with different agendas and whose paths intersect in Jerusalem. Yona Stern has come from New York to make peace with her older sister, Dena Ben-Tzion, who lives on a settlement over the Green

Homesick: A Novel

By
Eshkol Nevo, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Eshkol Nevo’s debut novel presents a distinctively young and fresh image of contemporary Israel.

Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends

By
Tom Segev
Review by
Bonny V. Fetterman
Within days of his liberation from Mauthausen, Simon Wiesenthal gathered the names of more than 150 Nazi criminals he knew must be brought to justice. Over the next five decades, Wiesenthal became the most famous Nazi hunter in the world—the man who located Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish