reviews - Jewish Book Council

59 TH NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
Sara Houghteling
Knopf
Born to an art dealer and his pianist
wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden to
enter the family business for reasons he
cannot understand. He reluctantly attends
medical school, reserving his true passion
for his father’s beautiful and brilliant
gallery assistant, Rose Clément. When
Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive
in hiding. They return in 1944 to find
that their priceless collection has vanished: gone are the Matisses, the
Picassos, and a singular Manet of mysterious importance. Madly driven
to recover his father’s paintings, Max navigates a torn city of corrupt
art dealers, black marketers, Résistants, and collaborators. His
quest will reveal the tragic disappearance of his closest friend, the heroism
of his lost love, and the truth behind a devastating family secret.
Written with tense drama and a historian’s eye for detail,
Houghteling’s novel draws on the real-life stories of France’s preeminent
art-dealing familes and the forgotten biography of the only
French woman to work as a double agent inside the
Nazis’ looted art stronghold. Pictures at an Exhibition
conjures the vanished collections, the lives of the
artists and their dealers, the exquisite romance, and
the shattering loss of a singular era. It is a work of
astonishing ambition and beauty from an immensely
gifted new novelist.
POLYGLOT: STORIES
OF THE WEST’S WET EDGE
Wendy Marcus
Beth Am Press
The lovingly crafted stories in Polyglot
chronicle lives between Washington
state and Vancouver, British Columbia, the
wet edge of North America. The stories,
linked by the advice of a gay Gypsy columnist,
reflect Wendy Marcus’
years in the Northwest
musical, newspaper,
and Jewish communities. Her wry and poignant perspectives
on the denizens of this drizzly region include
sprinklings from ten different languages, a reality of
the increasingly diverse Northwest.
www.jewishbookcouncil.org
Jonathan Sprague
THE LEGEND OF COSMO
AND THE ARCHANGEL
Joseph Kaufman
French Creek Press
Ahigh school pact extends over decades
in this epic novel of spiritual quest, selfdiscovery,
and evolving friendships. As high
school students in Pittsfield, Massachusetts,
Cosmo was their small group’s “charm”
while Nick was its “conscience.” In an LSDinduced
haze at Woodstock, the friends
pledge a covenant of loyalty. But when
Cosmo goes AWOL from the Army and
Nick betrays another member of their group, both Nick and Cosmo
embark on odysseys to find themselves. In Nick’s case, it’s an attempt to
resurrect his standing as the “Archangel,” the golden
boy who would sacrifice himself for his friends.
Cosmo’s quest pursues booze, drugs, revenge, fame,
and, eventually, a different sort of spiritual enlightenment.
Throughout their choices and wanderings, which
stretch across continents, their youthful indiscretions
and expectations haunt their abilities to move forward.
HISTORY
Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award
Winner:
FAMILY PROPERTIES: RACE, REAL
ESTATE, AND THE EXPLOITATION
OF BLACK URBAN AMERICA
Beryl Satter
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company)
Beryl Satter has written a singular book
in Family Properties. It is at once a
memoir, a family history, and a social history,
all united by the larger-than-life presence
of the author’s father, Mark Satter. A
crusader against housing discrimination in
Chicago during the 1950’s and 1960’s,
when that city was possibly the most segregated in America, Satter literally
worked himself to death when Beryl was just six years old. Her
quest as daughter to rediscover his life fuses in this book with her mission
as a historian to chronicle the bigoted and exploitative practices
of real estate agents in Chicago, who played on black aspiration and
white fear to flip entire neighborhoods from stable places to slums
within a matter of years. As a work of American Jewish history, Family
Properties finds Jews prominently on both sides of
the battles—as advocates of social justice and also as
slumlords and real-estate sharks. Mark Satter, it turns
out, himself owned several buildings in what became
one of Chicago’s black ghettos. So this is a book not
only on moral vision but supple thinking, one that
stirs the conscience but resists easy answers.
Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 11
Rachel Eliza Griffiths