Anne seBBA, writer I have read this magisterial book, A Tale of Love and Darkness, twice now and I know I will return to it again. It is a rich plum pudding of a book containing sustaining food for many different tastes. Not only does Amos Oz tell the story of the creation of Israel, he


also tells of his own struggles to become a writer and, with enormous compassion, tries to understand his mother’s suicide and the difficult relationship he endured with this father. He writes courageously about sex, human relations and kibbutz life and does not hide the many dark thoughts he has about the future of the country he cares so deeply about. This is not simply a tale of love and darkness or love and loss – but loss cushioned by memory and the creative use a writer can make of memory.Above all I love this book for its humanity interlaced at every stage with the history as it was lived.


gerAlDine D’AMico, Director of Jewish Book Week My favourite book of the last 10 years has to be TheWinter Vault by Anne Michaels. I fell in love with the book from the wonderfully sensual and poetic opening pages in which a man paints a landscape on his


wife’s back and then erases it. It reminds me of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, probably my favourite book of all times. Michaels’s book is set in Egypt, Canada and Poland. I won’t attempt to tell the story and spoil it. I usually only remember I loved a book (or not), whereas TheWinter Vault is vivid in my mind; I can visualise whole scenes as if I had seen a film rather than read a book. It has the most beautiful pages on memory, the passage of time, the impossibility of rebuilding what’s gone, whether it is a destroyed village or lost love. It is above all one of those extremely rare novels that do not have one word too many, where you want to read and reread each sentence because it’s so perfect and achieved.


DAviD herMAn, freelance writer There are two reasons for choosing The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. First, Krauss is part of a terrific new generation of young JewishAmerican writers. Just when we thought the golden age of Bellow and Roth was over, along came a new group of Jewish writers with a distinctive new voice. Second, because fromthe opening paragraph, The History of Love is a delight: smart, desperately sad, funny and deeply moving. Krauss not only creates a cast of unforgettable characters, she somehow


books


manages to get inside their heads. Altogether, the novel has three narrators, involves four writers, and centres on the story of a lostmanuscript. Thismaymake it sound dry and bookish, but it is full of life: fromrefugees’ stories of loss after the Holocaust to a teenage girl trying to solve a strangemystery in present-day NewYork. Best of all is the writing, which announced a new Jewish literary star.


MAureen kenDler, Jewish educator The Lost:Asearch for 6 of the 6million by DanielMendelsohn (Harper Perennial, 2008) combines two elements of Jewish thinking with a beautiful creativity – on the one hand Mendelsohn takes on the seemingly insurmountable task of tracing six of his familymembers who died in the Shoah – six of the sixmillion. This search takes himto Australia, Israel and Eastern Europe, to uncover the truth. The narrative is interwoven with hismore tentative steps into Jewish learning, into Torah through the eyes of Rashi andmodern commentators.As


Mendelsohn’s learning landscape expands, his physical journey narrows, until he is finally able to locate the precise spot that marks the execution of the sixth ‘lost’ family member. The discovery of this exact location is dramatic and cathartic. It hinges on the misunderstanding of a single word which has sentMendelsohn onmany false and frustrating trails. It seems significant that his parallel journey within Torah also involves the closest reading of words towards an inner clarity and truth. The book’s honesty and touches of wry humour, the burning urgency tomemorialise the Shoah, together with the joy of traditional Torah learning, effortlesslymixes worlds, genres and perspectives. Forme this book injected new life into the idea of memoir and storytelling and ismy highlight for its beauty, inspiration and sense of dedication.


MArge clouts, teacher of creative writing


The Great Sea, Allan Lane, 2011 DavidAbulafia took the title for his exhilarating human history of the Mediterranean fromits Hebrew name,YamGadol. The author is the Cambridge Professor of Mediterranean History and has dedicated this erudite tome, about one of the great centres of world civilisation, to thememory of his ancestors, who criss-crossed theMed fromSpain in 1492 to Safed, Tiberias, Smyrna, Italy andmany other destinations. AlthoughAbulafia’s ancestors (one a 17th- century Sephardi rabbi in Hebron, and another a founder of TelAviv in 1909)may well have been his inspirational springboard, the particular value of his wide-ranging scholarship, covering trade, piracy, wars, port cities and vivid characters, is that the intriguing Jewish elements blend into the history of ‘Great Sea’peoples and places, and are better understood because of that wider context.What a delight it has been to discover the breadth of this diverse network – it transcends national boundaries and makes sparkling, insightful connections.


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JeWish renAissAnce octoBer 2011


h i g h l i g h t s


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