reviews - Jewish Book Council

entourage. He pursues Hope, an aptly named
American woman living in his building, but
first he must deal with his past. In daring and
unflinching portrayals, Winger puts us face to
face with the innocents who inherited the
legacy of the Holocaust. SLS
YOM KIPPUR
IN AMSTERDAM:
STORIES
Maxim D. Shrayer
Syracuse University Press, 2009. 141 pp. $24.95
ISBN: 978-0815609186
In Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, Maxim Shrayer
explores the complex and often difficult
adjustments of Russian-Jewish immigrants to
American life. Shrayer himself was born in
Moscow in 1967 and spent nine years as a
refusenik before emigrating to the United
States in 1987.
In the title story, Russian-born Jake Glaz
flees his home in Baltimore after a painful
break-up with a Catholic girlfriend who is
unable to convert to Judaism. After a restorative
week on the Riviera, he finds himself in
the seedy, red-light alleyways of Amsterdam
just hours before the eve of Yom Kippur.
In “Sonatchka,” two old friends reunite in
suburban Connecticut and reminisce about
their early lives in Moscow. As the day wanes,
painful truths emerge about their current circumstance.
“The Afterlove,” set entirely in Russia, is a
bittersweet coming-of-age tale. Set first at a
glittering dinner party of the Moscow intelligentsia
in the early 1980’s, it travels back in
he finds himself in the seedy, red-light
alleyways of Amsterdam just hours
before the eve of Yom Kippur.
time to 1945. Young Pavel Lidin and Fyodor
Shtock are selected to spend a summer at an
experimental government-run post-World
War II summer camp. Throughout, the writing
is soulful, evocative, and deeply detailed.
Maxim Shrayer, chairman of the department
of Slavic and Eastern Languages at
Boston College, has published a memoir,
Waiting for America, and several books on
Jewish-Russian literature. JuF
www.jewishbookcouncil.org
HISTORY
DANCING IN THE
DARK: A CULTURAL
HISTORY OF THE
GREAT DEPRESSION
Morris Dickstein
W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 576 pp. $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-393-07225-9
In this magisterial study of American culture
in the 1930’s, Morris Dickstein examines
a vast range of material, from serious fiction
and poetry to potboilers, popular songs,
gangster films, and Busby Berkeley musicals.
He selects his case studies with assured care
and analyzes them deftly and astutely. What
emerges is a convincing mosaic of an era
devoted to the cult of liveliness, a metaphor
for life itself.
As his title suggests, Dickstein sees the
popular culture of the era not so much as a
form of escapism or wish-fulfilment, but as
an assertion of the importance of motion in
an age when so much was shutting down. In
the cross-country trek of the Joads in The
Grapes of Wrath, the upward social mobility of
Rico in Little Caesar and his partners in celluloid
crime, the fascinating rhythms of George
Gershwin, the furious pace of screwball comedy,
and the nimble tread of the feet of Fred
Astaire, we see a nation raging, in its uniquely
graceful way, against the dying of the light. BB
SCREENING
A LYNCHING:
THE LEO FRANK
CASE ON FILM
AND TELEVISION
Matthew H. Bernstein
University of Georgia Press, 2009. 348 pp. $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3239-0
Bernstein examines how the Leo Frank
case was treated in four different screen
productions: the 1936 film Murder in Harlem
by the African-American auteur Oscar
Micheaux; the 1937 Warner Brothers feature
They Won’t Forget; a 1964 episode of the TV
History
REVIEWS
series Profiles in Courage; and the 1988 NBC
miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan.
While Bernstein’s discussions of the four
productions are valuable and interesting, as a
whole the study falls short, mostly because of
the limited and disparate nature of the material
Bernstein treats. Micheaux’s work took
the basic facts of the Frank case as a framework
on which to hang a wholly fictional
story that examined social issues largely unrelated
to those in the actual Frank case. They
Won’t Forget was a powerful but similarly fictionalized
Hollywood treatment of the case
that also soft-pedaled significant issues (for
example, in neither of these films was the
Frank character depicted as Jewish). The Profiles
in Courage episode focused almost exclusively
on the Georgia governor whose commutation
of Frank’s death sentence
precipitated his lynching. Only The Murder of
Mary Phagan aimed at a comprehensive treatment
of the case.
A study of how the Frank case has been
treated by journalists, historians, and purveyors
of popular culture would be a fascinating
piece of social and cultural history, but choosing
to examine any phenomenon through a
window as narrow as this necessarily limits
how much light may be shed on it. BB
THE TEN LOST TRIBES:
A WORLD HISTORY
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Oxford University Press, 2009. 226 pp. $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-19-530733-7
Ever since Assyria conquered the northern
kingdom of Israel some 2700 years ago,
the destiny of the exiled Ten Tribes has captivated
the imagination of Jews and non-Jews.
Think of the excitement when researcher
Tudor Parfitt recently found a genetic link
between the Jewish priestly class of Kohanim
and the Lemba tribe of southern Africa, or
the controversy when the Chief Rabbinate of
Israel in 2005 recognized an ethnic group living
in East Asia as “descendants of Jews” from
the Biblical half-tribe of Menasseh.
The archeological record confirms the
Biblical account in 2 Kings that the Israelites
were deported to distant lands in the Assyrian
Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 51