I read 250 books for the JC - these are the best - The Jewish Chronicle

I wrote my first article for the Jewish Chronicle almost 40 years ago, and since then have reviewed 250 books. It’s quite a landmark, and one which gives me the opportunity to look back, pick out some favourites and survey the state of Jewish literature.
That first article was commissioned by the then books editor, Clive Sinclair, one of the finest Anglo-Jewish writers of his generation. Over the past 25 years I have written for the current literary editor Gerald Jacobs and I owe him enormous thanks for all his kindness and support.
For me the joy of reviewing for the JC is that I was introduced to a whole new literary landscape, above all, the extraordinary range of modern Jewish writing: the great classics of interwar central and east European writers from Joseph Roth and Antal Szerb to Stefan Zweig; outstanding Soviet Jewish writers like Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman, one murdered by Stalin, the other censored by the Communist apparatchiks; a new generation of Jewish-American writers who came after Bellow and Roth, such as Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander; major Israeli writers from Aharon Appelfeld and AB Yehoshua, David Grossman and Amos Oz to younger writers like Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Etgar Keret; and Anglo-Jewish writers from neglected post-war writers like Alec Baron, Roland Camberton and Gerald Kersh to a later generation of writers such as Howard Jacobson, Clive Sinclair and Gabriel Josipovici.

nathan englander c. Joshua Meier

Nathan Englander (Photo:Joshua Meier)

I have also learned the importance of small independent publishers like Peter Owen, Pushkin Books, Scribe, Quartet and Fitzcarraldo; how many fine, even great Jewish writers have been unfairly neglected; and the importance of translators who have introduced British readers to such great writers as Babel and Grossman, Vogel and Szerb and the Nobel Prize-winning French author, Patrick Modiano.
Finally, I have learned, above all, don’t trust the insular world of British newspapers. They are not interested in most Jewish writers and they don’t care about some of the greatest non-English-speaking writers until they become fashionable. The JC under Clive and then Gerald opened up its books pages to writers who deserved to be better known and sought to open up the canon to new names and new voices.
Of course, I have my favourite books and writers. The first book I reviewed for the JC was a masterpiece. It was love at first sight and ever since I have considered it one of the greatest books of the 20th century. Most of us have heard of Isaac Babel’s book of short stories, Red Cavalry. But in 1997, Yale University Press translated Babel’s 1920 Diary, the diary Babel kept as he rode with the Cossacks during the brutal Polish-Soviet war of 1920. This diary later became the basis for Red Cavalry.
It is one of the great books about modern war but perhaps best of all, it is one of the great books about the violence and hatred of antisemitism in east Europe. Babel was a Jewish socialist, riding with the Jew-hating Cossacks, and watching in despair as they destroyed the synagogues, homes and shops of countless small Jewish villages. Then they moved on. More rape and pillage. And then, sometimes, they would return, after the Poles had also wreaked havoc. Jews would ask Babel if there was any hope for them under the new Communist order and he lied to them, knowing there was none, not for them.
Six years later, I reviewed my first Yiddish masterpiece for the JC: The World According to Itzik, selected poetry and prose by the poet Itzik Manger, a Jewish refugee writer, born in Czernowitz, who came to London via Romania, Warsaw and Paris, and wrote about biblical themes and the world of east Europe. In order to improve his English, Manger tried translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Yiddish. On a late summer’s night in 1943, a friend came across Manger at Edgware Road tube station in London seeking refuge from the Blitz. Manger was “hunched over his small leather suitcase”, his friend wrote later. He carried this suitcase with him wherever he went, it contained all his worldly possessions — his manuscripts. He sat on the escalator with “a fantastically thick English-German dictionary, printed in very small type. The exercise was to find a German equivalent to the English word, and then to find from memory a Yiddish equivalent to the German.” “No one is as lonely as a Yiddish poet,” Manger would say.
Aharon Appelfeld, like Manger, was from Bukovina. He became one of the great Israeli post-war writers. Grossman and Oz are more famous, Appelfeld is closer to my heart. Badenheim 1939 and The Age of Wonders (both translated at the beginning of the 1980s) were his breakthrough books. But the first book of his I reviewed is still my favourite, The Story of a Life. He was nine when the Romanian soldiers arrived and killed his mother and grandmother. He was deported with his father to a concentration camp, escaped and hid in the forests and fields for three years, hiding from the soldiers and the local peasants. There is a scene in The Story of a Life about blind orphans. It is one of the greatest pieces of writing about the Holocaust.

Michael Chabon credit Ulf Andersen Getty Images

Michael Chabon (Photo: Ulf Andersen/ Getty Images)

Then I was lucky enough to review the best Jewish American writers. Michael Chabon’s masterpiece, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a detective story set in an alternative history in which Jewish refugees end up in Alaska in 1941. Saul Bellow’s Letters. John Cheever asks Bellow to read some page proofs. Bellow writes back, “Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy?” Bellow writes to the young Philip Roth, “I knew when I… read your stories that you were the real thing. When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.” Then Nathan Englander’s stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The title story is perhaps the best thing Englander’s ever written, just as the last chapter of Nicole Krauss’s novel, Great House, is perhaps the best thing she ever wrote, at least since the opening chapter of The History of Love.

Nicole Krauss GettyImages-115598576

Nicole Krauss (Photo: Getty Images)

Cynthia Ozick alamy 2F9R1PT

Cynthia Ozick (Photo: Alamy)

The most recent Jewish-American writer I reviewed was Cynthia Ozick, now 93, whose novel Antiquities is a dark and melancholy set of reflections about Jews, antisemitism and ancient Egypt, that twists and turns through the life of the central character and Jewish history.
I have just reviewed my sixth book by Howard Jacobson. I have always loved Coming from Behind and The Mighty Walzer, but I have a soft spot for Shylock is my Name, not least because other critics neglected it.
It begins with two Jews in a graveyard. Simon Strulovich, “a rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist”, is visiting his mother’s grave. The other is Shylock, who has come to speak with his dead wife, Leah. The best chapters in the book turn around conversations between the two Jews, both mourning their wives and worrying about their uncontrollable daughters. As the men talk, they range through time, and they argue about Jews and mercy, Christian antisemitism, in defence of circumcision, Jews and the law, Christianity as a mere interregnum in the long war between Jews and pagans.
These debates are full of passion and intelligence. And, always, Jacobson has a keen eye for the Jew-haters. He reminds you how these ideas can still shock and burn. How visceral they are. How they hurt more than four hundred years after Shakespeare.

Jacobson, Howard 2014-®Keke Keukelaar

Howard Jacobson -(Photo: Keke Keukelaar)

Then there are the Jewish literary critics. George Steiner, of course, Adam Kirsch, Steve Zipperstein on Bellow’s friend Isaac Rosenfeld. And the fourth of this great quartet, Gabriel Josipovici, whose most recent book, 100 Days, is one of his best. When I interviewed him for the JC a few years ago, it was in the most English setting imaginable, a country pub on the Sussex Downs, a long way from Vichy France where he was born or from post-war Egypt where he spent his childhood. Uprooted twice, he arrived at Oxford for an interview to study English. He tells a wonderful story about this interview which says a lot about his new life: “They kept asking me what English novelist I most admired and I kept saying Dostoevsky and they kept saying English novelist, Mr Josipovici, and I kept saying Dostoevsky, vaguely aware that something was profoundly wrong but unable, in the heat of the moment, to put my finger on it.”
A few years after Josipovici arrived in Egypt and Jacobson was born near Manchester, Alec Baron published his first novel. He’s no longer a household name but his war novel, From the City, From the Plough, sold half a million copies when it was first published in 1948. The Guardian called him, “the greatest British novelist of the last war and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period.”
Baron’s publisher Jonathan Cape asked him to change his name from Bernstein to Baron. From Babel and Grossman to Baron, Jacobson and Josipovici’s Egypt, antisemitism is never far away. That’s the other thing I have learned reviewing Jewish writers for the Jewish Chronicle.

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