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BOOK PROFILE “CURB” COUPLE MEMOIRS By Jaclyn Trop Show your enthusiasm for the real Jeff and Susie's soul-baring memoirs on living the comedic life. Susie Essman Simon & Schuster, 2009. 256 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1439150177 Jeff Garlin Simon & Schuster, 2010. 256 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1439150108 WHAT WOULD SUSIE SAY?: BULLSH*T WISDOM ABOUT LOVE, LIFE AND COMEDY MY FOOTPRINT: CARRYING THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD out his life with the fate of his fellow prisoners, most of whom were brutally murdered in Mikhailowka, and with the aftermath of the war. He testified and his works were inserted as evidence in trials that took place in the decades following. Rather bizarrely, he established contact with several of his captors, excerpts of whose letters to Daghani and depositions for a war crime investigation prompted by the publication in 1960 of a German translation of his diary are included. Essays dealing with the Daghanis’ lives after the war, “mapping” his testimony with others of the same time and place, plus the color illustrations of his work make this much more than a diary/memoir of the Holocaust. “Roll- Call: Memorial List of those who Perished in Mikhailowka” is particularly chilling. The editors, Schultz and Timms, write in non-academic style so the text is readable and absorbing. The ultimate home of Daghani’s works is the University of Sussex, which is committed to the collection as an important historical and artistic record, and to promoting its continued availability for scholarly research. Some of Daghani’s paintings 54 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010 are in Yad Vashem and at YIVO in New York City. Sadly, although offered, neither Yad Vashem nor the Israel Museum would accept his complete works. Bibliography, illustrations, index. EN THE DEATH OF THE SHTETL Yehuda Bauer Yale University Press, 2010. 207 pp. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-15209-8 For many Jews and non-Jews alike, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is considered the world’s foremost expert on the Shoah. In his latest book, The One of HBO’s most colorful couples bare their souls—and the love, fear, and drama underlying a life in comedy—in a pair of first-person accounts. Jeff Garlin and Susie Essman of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” starring the semi-real exploits of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, may seem one-sided and self-obsessed, but their real-life musings are deep. Jeff Garlin, the irascible roly-poly who plays Larry David’s manager and cohort Jeff Greene, embarks upon his own journey to lose weight while going green. Neither serious nor lighthearted (no pun intended), this daily journal outlines his struggles in earnest as he searches for the strength to overcome overeating. Whether helping himself to food reserved for a strangers’ wedding, visiting Krispy Kreme, or decrying the Jamba Juice-toting woman who attended an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, Garlin maintains a sense of humor about his food addiction. Meanwhile, he takes the bus, greens his house, and argues with his wife over replacing their windows. The real treat is the behind-the-scenes gander Garlin, who also serves as co-producer, shares of the Curb set, including a bit involving Jerry Seinfeld and a chocolate milkshake. Susie Essman has penned an autobiographical glimpse into the life of a stand up comedienne—replete with hopelessness and despair before catching her big break as the acerbic wife of Jeff Greene on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Life lessons accrued along the way touch upon relationships, gay men as the new soccer moms, and the travails of menopause. Especially useful is the stirring eight-page letter Essman writes to her four stepchildren: “Frequently when our hearts are broken, obsession takes over, but obsession is never about what we think it’s about.” Essman’s words and hard-won success inspire as only someone once plagued by severe self-doubt can. Though it is easy—and a delight—to imagine the story delivered in the shrill staccato Essman uses to call Jeff a fat **** or order Larry to get the **** out of her house, her message is heartfelt. There are few punch lines, but wisdom abounds. Jaclyn Trop is a business reporter for The Detroit News and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Death of the Shtetl, Bauer provides a penetrating analysis of the destruction, between September 1939 and March 1943, of thousands of small Jewish towns and villages that composed the eastern part of the prewar Polish Republic. These shtetlach, which comprised the “center of traditional prewar Jwish existence” were home to over 1.3 million Jews. Drawing heavily on survivor testimonies collected after the war at Yad Vashem, important survivor memoirs, and the latest Israeli, German, British, and American scholarship Bauer concludes that the two percent of Jews (26,000) from the Kresy (northeastern Poland, Volhynia, and East Galicia) who survived the war owed much to simply pure “chance and luck.” The Death of the Shtetl tells the story of nine representative shtetlach and surveys dozens of other similar communities. At the same time, Bauer focuses on major questions that have preoccupied historians for the past 65 years: the role played by the Judenrate in the destruction of 1.3 million Jews, the efforts of a few hundred young Zionists (left and right) to organize resistance www.jewishbookcouncil.org
groups, the attitudes and actions of Soviet partisans who eventually liberated the survivors, and finally the role played by the non-Jewish neighbors (i.e., the Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians) in the murder of one-fifth of all the victims of the Holocaust. CJR Reinhard R. Dorries Enigma Book, 2009. 330 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1-929631-77-3 HITLER’S INTELLI- GENCE CHIEF: WALTER SHELLENBERG: THE MAN WHO KEPT GERMANY’S SECRETS This is a thoroughly researched, scholarly text. Its audience is the serious student or researcher; the casual student of Holocaust history would find this book overwhelming, albeit informative. But, one can always learn. Hitler’s Intelligence Chief gives the reader an opportunity to examine the workings of the Nazi government machine and the political “games” played in the name of “getting ahead in the Nazi party.” If little else, it reinforces the atmosphere of distrust in all ranks of the Nazi party, and explores some of the unexpected alliances and activities of those in power, e.g., Shellenbergs’ collaboration with Count Bernadotte to save Jews in the waning months of the war. This is a good book, but not what we would call a good read. It benefits from careful reading and rereading, as well as a discussion partner. Abbreviations, appendices, bibliography, editors comment, glossary, index, introduction, preface. NDK HUMOR I DRINKFOR A REASON David Cross Grand Central Publishing, 2009. 236 pp. $23.99 ISBN: 978-0-446-57948-3 www.jewishbookcouncil.org Fans of David Cross’ stand-up comedy won’t be disappointed by his new book, I Drink for a Reason. Much of the book is written in the persona that Cross assumes onstage: personal, ranting, profane, political, often antagonistic and hyperbolic, and enlivened with an engaging and imaginative silliness. The book comprises dozens of short chapters, most roughly five pages long. Some of them read like stand-up routines set on the page; others are elaborations on material that has earned Cross his reputation as a fearless polemicist. Many are essentially concerned with language, marking Cross as a potential heir to George Carlin, the language-obsessed and consistently hilarious lapsed Catholic comedian. Cross explains that he was raised Jewish and now considers himself an atheist. He fits into that category of atheist Jews whose Jewishness informs their outlook without touching their ethics or spirituality. The basic polemic posture Cross strikes—the sardonic critic attacking established assumptions and popular misconceptions with sarcastic and impassioned commentary—sounds recognizably Jewish. Organized religion is among Cross’ favorite targets and, since he would identify himself as (at most) culturally Jewish, organized Judaism and its adherents come under the hammer frequently in I Drink for a Reason. Cross’ self-criticism, which he points out is not self-loathing, is representative of the opinionated secular modernity that Judaism’s tradition of argument has helped create. This may be the ultimate Jewish joke: After everything we’ve done to shape this free and modern world, this is the thanks we get? JDE ISRAEL STUDIES ISRAEL VS. UTOPIA Joel Schalit Akashic Books, 2009. 253 pp. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-933354-87-3 Israel vs. Utopia is a left-wing Israeli-American Jew’s attempt to parse out some subtle distinctions about the Israeli-Arab conflict. Schalit, who openly aspires to depth of analy- Israel Studies REVIEWS sis, believes that too much dialogue on the subject in the diaspora, both from the right and left, deals with a fantasy Israel, rather than the one Israeli Jews and Arabs, and Palestinians deal with daily. Schalit, a former editor of Tikkun magazine, feels that Israel’s ties to the U.S. have been very much to Israel’s detriment and longs for Europe’s embrace. While he regrets that France and England parted ways with Israel as punishment for the Six Day War, he thinks of their having done so as “enlightened.” The Israelis act like “colonial subjects of America” in his view. Despite the withdrawal from Gaza, which one would think he would have approved, he believes that there was a “lack of meaningful progress” during the Bush years. In perhaps his most provocative chapter, he writes extensively on the rise of the word “apartheid” in left-wing circles to describe the situation in Israel, which he deplores as an inaccurate and obfuscating use of the word. It slowly becomes clear, however, that Schalit believes that word actually obscures the ‘fact’ that Israel has “devised a strategy for maintaining power over the Palestinians that’s more insidious than the South African model...” and “in some instances transcending, in terms of its cruelty... ‘apartheid.’” So much for subtlety. For someone intent on using accurate language, Schalit frequently falls back on inaccurate and hyperbolic metaphors for a complex and unique reality, such as describing Israel as an “extremely brutal Colonial occupation.” His most telling (and damning) sentence comes toward the end of the book, however. “I am not sentimental about its (Israel’s) political existence the way I am, for example, about its cuisine.” The book is not without the occasional intriguing insight, but it is not a coherent whole. It is more a meandering pastiche of political analysis and a subjective expression of Schalit’s contradictory feelings about Israel’s situation, derived from his status as a “progressive” Israeli-American. His anguish is palpably sincere, and he himself is troubled by what he perceives as genuine anti-Semitism on the left, but his own bias is simply not subtle: America and Israel are invariably in the wrong, and not once does he suggest that the Arab nations or the Palestinians themselves may be even in small part responsible for the Palestinians’ plight. Just about every time Schalit says something somewhat interesting and not typically left-wing, he doubles back to reveal that, in fact, he really is to the left of most, and tiresomely so. EA Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 55
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Spring 5770/2010 Vol. 28, Number 1
Page 5 and 6: Now available from the Jewish Book
Page 7 and 8: JEWISHBOOKAWARDS The following syno
Page 9 and 10: ANTHOLOGIES AND COLLECTIONS Winner:
Page 11 and 12: out whom they can trust. In additio
Page 13 and 14: 59 TH NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS P
Page 15 and 16: Finalists: THE WARSAW GHETTO: A GUI
Page 17 and 18: JBW 28.1_JBW 28.1 1/29/10 12:26 PM
Page 19 and 20: SCHOLARSHIP Nahum M. Sarna Memorial
Page 21 and 22: WOMEN’S STUDIES Barbara Dobkin Aw
Page 23 and 24: JUDGING PANELISTS We wish to public
Page 25 and 26: O Israel... In a perfect—perhaps
Page 27 and 28: A Conversation with David Sax By La
Page 29 and 30: New from Jewish Lights Publishing I
Page 31 and 32: Save the Dates Jewish Book Authors
Page 33 and 34: Sutton presents a brief synopsis of
Page 35 and 36: ook’s style, there is no question
Page 37 and 38: choice of which of their two daught
Page 39 and 40: funds and the stock markets in gene
Page 41 and 42: and imagined). This memoir could be
Page 43 and 44: JEWISH SLOW COOKER RECIPES Laura Fr
Page 45 and 46: JUDAISM: A WAY OF BEING David Geler
Page 47 and 48: TOOLBOX FOR TEACHERS AND MENTORS: M
Page 49 and 50: children, and the congregation he l
Page 51 and 52: Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats, a sel
Page 53 and 54: entourage. He pursues Hope, an aptl
Page 55: always with his hands up, are so ap
Page 59 and 60: of five characteristics: Israel’s
Page 61 and 62: ecause of religious persecution car
Page 63 and 64: Tobi Kahn for ritual and meditative
Page 65 and 66: Monika Schroder Front Street, 2009.
Page 67 and 68: efuge in Cuba. This book uses poetr
Page 69 and 70: A CHAT WITH ZACHARYSHAPIRO By Barba
Page 71 and 72: Please note that all book descripti
Page 73 and 74: THE LIFE WORTH LIVING: FAITH IN ACT
Page 75 and 76: in the United States against Swiss
Page 77 and 78: THE BOOK OF PSALMS: A TRANSLATION W
Page 79 and 80: SHELLY FEIT (SF) has an M.L.S. and
Page 81 and 82: An index of all titles included in
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