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JewishLiFEbooks
Days of Yore
Great gifts for Chanukah: a photographic tour of Israel’s archaeological sites…a giant anthology of Jewish
myths…an illustrated Jewish Bible for kids… by Bonny V. Fetterman
Flights Into Biblical Archaeology by Duby Tal (aerial photography), Moni Haramati (piloting),
and Shimon Gibson (text)
(Albatross, 254 pp., $49 + shipping)
Tal and Haramati, two former helicopter pilots in the Israeli Air Force, now specialists in
aerial photography, teamed up with the Israel Antiquities Authority to produce this
stunning, full-color book of aerial and land photographs of Israel’s archaeological sites.
The photographs are arranged chronologically, depicting prehistoric times, the emergence
of the Israelites, the impact of the Greek and Roman worlds, Judaism and Christianity,
Islam and the Crusaders, and Ottoman Palestine. The text, by archaeologist Shimon
Gibson, provides background on the excavation of the sites. For armchair archaeologists
as well as the casual users of “Google Earth,” the aerial photographs are a treat, providing
a unique perspective from which to view the ancient landscapes. Published in Israel, it
can be ordered from online retailers.
Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism by Howard Schwartz, illustrated by Caren LoebelFried
(Oxford University Press, 618 pp., paperback $29.95)
Is there a Jewish mythology? If myth refers to “a people’s sacred stories about origins,
deities, ancestors, and heroes,” the answer is yes—and now we have access to it, thanks
to Judaism’s own answer to Joseph Campbell. With this unique anthology, Howard
Schwartz, the preeminent reteller of Jewish stories, has created a genre.
This vast compendium of 700 legends is organized by theme: God, Creation, Heaven,
Hell, Holy Word (Torah), Holy Time (Festivals), Holy People, Holy Land, Exile, and the
Messiah. Each story is followed by its source and Schwartz’s commentary. In many
cases, Schwartz weaves together a rendition of the myth from several sources, giving the
tale its fullest form. But the most exciting part is the range of sources that he has chosen
to include. In addition to biblical, rabbinic, mystical, and folkloric sources, Schwartz
delves into the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Jewish writings of the Second Temple
period that were left out of the Hebrew Bible. Summing up the range of topics, he writes:
“These stories describe events such as the transformation of Enoch into the angel
Metatron, the Giving of the Torah, the separation of God’s Bride from Her Spouse, the
chain of events that has so far prevented the coming of the Messiah, and the attempts of
Satan to gain inroads into the world of human beings.”
One selection, “Tree of Souls,” bears the same title as the book: “God has a tree of
flowering souls in Paradise…. When the souls grow ripe, they descend into the Treasury
of Souls, where they are stored until they are called upon to be born. From this we learn
that all souls are the fruit of the Holy One, blessed be He.” This parable seems to fit the
flowering of the Jewish mythic imagination as well.
The Children’s Illustrated Jewish Bible by Laaren Brown and Lenny Hort, illustrated by Eric
Thomas
(DK Publishing, 192 pp. with CD, $19.95) Ages 7–12
This completely revised edition of DK’s children’s Jewish Bible retells stories from the
Tanakh in an accessible way, while staying close to the language of the text. Each page is
embellished with colorful illustrations of the stories, maps of the ancient world, and
photographs of the landscape of Israel. Finally, there is an audio CD with readings of 16
of the 70 stories in this book. I particularly liked the fact that this children’s Bible extends
beyond the Five Books of Moses to the stories of the kings (Saul, David, Solomon),
prophets (Elijah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah), and post-exilic figures (Daniel, Esther, Ezra). Older
children will grasp some of the basic outlines of ancient Israel’s history.
The retellings are never pedantic and reflect a Jewish approach to learning Torah. “The
stories of the Bible are great stories—and one of the reasons they are so great is that they
can be understood in many different ways and on many different levels,” the authors
write in their Foreword. “We read the stories in the Torah over again each year, so that as
we grow up and change, we can see new questions in each story.”
Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.
For Discussion
The Union for Reform Judaism recommends two Significant Jewish Books each quarter for
individuals and book groups. Study and discussion guides are available at http://urj.org/books.
Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson
(Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, 212 pp., paperback $15.95)
On the surface, the Brickmans seem like an ordinary middle-class Jewish family living
in suburban New Jersey. But in Scott Nadelson’s stories, the Brickmans fracture into four
distinct individuals—Arthur, the calm, reliable father who is seldom there; Hannah, the
compulsively attentive mother; Jared, the chubby adolescent who becomes an obsessed
body builder in high school; and Daniel, the younger brother who, according to his
grandfather, “doesn’t know who he wants to be.” Dipping into their psyches at different
times, these stories reveal their separate inner worlds.
Saving Stanley, Nadelson’s first story collection, contains eight stories about the
Brickmans. In “Young Radicals,” Daniel is fascinated by his Russian-born grandfather
who witnessed the October revolution. But by the time Daniel is old enough to ask him
about his experiences, he sadly observes, “my grandfather lived almost exclusively in the
immediate present and the distant past.... His second wife, Rose, spent most of her time
trying to convince him of the things that had just happened to him.”
In “Kosher,” we meet Daniel again as a recent college graduate torn by doubts about his
future. He spends a year traveling in Europe, taking odd jobs and hoping to find his
direction before returning to live in his parents’ home. Meanwhile, his mother, a high
school French teacher, despairs about the son who seems so lost: “How could she tell the
teachers what her son was doing with his life? A smart Jewish boy who’d given up great
opportunities to become a bum.”
Nadelson, who won the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction in 2007 for his
subsequent story collection, The Cantor’s Daughter, comments: “Ordinary lives are
never so ordinary; they’re full of conflict and mystery.”
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Father’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New
World by Lucette Lagnado
(Ecco, 340 pp., $25.95)
Awarded the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Lucette Lagnado’s elegant
memoir (reviewed in RJ Spring 2008) recreates her family’s life in Cairo until they were
forced to flee Nasser’s regime in 1962. In her acceptance speech she described Old Cairo
as “a glamorous, intensely cosmopolitan city that was multicultural in the true meaning of
the term, a society in which Jews and Moslems and European Christians managed to coexist with a harmony that some in post-9/11 America may find hard to imagine.”
But after World War II, convulsive departures were under way. “One after the other,
Jewish communities in Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, and of
course, Egypt, dispersed,” she writes in her memoir. “Nearly one million Oriental Jews
scattered to the four winds.”
Her poignant immigration story focuses on her father, Leon, a sophisticated “man about
town” in Cairo who never recovers his cultural bearings in Paris or New York, the
foreign cities to which he has to adapt in late life. This once proud man is subjected to
demeaning treatment by social service agencies, and in old age is reduced to selling fake
designer ties on subways. When Lucette, his youngest and favorite child, develops
Hodgkin’s disease at age 16, he finds himself powerless to protect her, except through his
prayers from “the worn little red prayer book he carried in his pocket at all times.”
NEW BOOKS | URJ PRESS
A Faithful Spirit: Preparing for Chanukah
Rabbi Benjamin Levy’s study text to the medieval midrash M’gillat Antiochus—
traditionally read during Chanukah in Italian and Yemenite synagogues—explores the
midrash’s flexible approach to maintaining one’s Jewish identity while living in a nonJewish world.
Israel at 60 Songbook
Thirty-six selections encompass the most significant songs of Israel’s 60-year history.
Contact the URJ Press at 888-489-8242, www.URJBooksandMusic.com.