Published: 29 September 2023
Last updated: 28 March 2024
Künstlers in Paradise - Cathleen Schine (Henry Holt & Co)
Described as a comic novel about exile, Künstlers in Paradise tells the story of Viennese-born Mamie Kunstler who, in 1939 at the age of 11, escapes with her Jewish family to the sanctuary of Hollywood. Mamie’s father is a composer and her mother a writer, and they have been sponsored (saved) to come and work in the movies.
Mamie’s “new world” is one of emigres from Germany and Eastern Europe, and she rubs shoulders with many of the famous names of the time: she learns tennis with Arnold Schoenberg, goes to Thomas Mann’s parties, is befriended by Greta Garbo, and the family buys Christopher Isherwood’s old car.
Fast forward to 2020, and Mamie is now a feisty 93, living in Los Angeles with her housemaid Agatha, and her dog, Prince Jan. She’s recuperating from a fractured wrist, when her grandson, Julian, a bright but aimless 24 year-old, is sent to help out.
He has just faced the triple whammy of finding himself homeless, jobless and dumped by his girlfriend. This visit could be good for both of them. But Covid hits after Julian arrives and he’s forced to stay on with the two old women.
Author Cathleen Schine has been called “the modern day Jewish Jane Austen”. It’s an apt title.
Over their nightly routine of martinis, the dour Agatha of indeterminate age and background, is a foil to the witty and acerbic Mamie, who makes such insightful comments as “one’s trauma becomes banal when it’s trotted out too many times”. This is a delightful book with a big heart.
Sam - Allegra Goodman (The Dial Press)
Jewish writer Allegra Goodman was just seven years old when she wrote and illustrated her first novel. Needless to say that she has penned many fine pieces of fiction since then. Interestingly, the eponymous protagonist of her most recent book, Sam, is aged seven when we first meet her. She lives with her single mother, Courtney, and her two-year-old brother Noah, from a different father.
Courtney, a hairdresser, works two jobs to look after her kids, determined that they will get an education and have better lives than her. She has to navigate child rearing with two virtually absent dads. Sam’s father, Mitchell, is loving but totally unreliable, dropping in and out of her life without warning. Sam hankers after his presence.
It is Mitchell who introduces Sam to the sport of climbing, which becomes her driving passion in life, sustaining her through the tough years of growing up. As she hones her skills and improves her performance, we watch Sam blossom into a self-reliant teenager who is going to make a success of herself.
This is a beautifully spare coming-of-age story, written in a deceptively simple style, as if the words were penned by a young girl.
The Best Minds: A story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions - Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Random House)
When Jonathan Rosen was 10, his family moved to New Rochelle, NY state where he became best friends with neighbour Michael Laudor. They were two bright Jewish boys whose lives seemed to parallel the other. Both were children of college professors, both worked on the school paper, won prestigious school placements, and were accepted to Yale.
They differed in one significant respect: Michael had schizophrenia. In 1998, during a psychotic episode, Michael killed his fiancée.
Rosen, as both a long-time intimate of Michael’s and a professional journalist, is uniquely placed to write this memoir, which has been described by The New York Times as “an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph”.
Michael’s story is set against the backdrop of cultural and institutional history. Rosen recreates a sense of the time when postmodernist philosophers considered madness a social construct and mental institutions were often deemed to be the problem. Many people suffering mental health issues were forced onto the streets and into prisons.
Before he self-destructed, Michael was labelled “the most famous schizophrenic in America”. He had a book and movie deal for his story. But Michael’s brilliant mind was not enough to save him. His supporters had mistaken his intelligence for sanity.
As Rosen relates, schizophrenia is one of the most catastrophic ways the mind can go awry.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride (Penguin Random House)
James McBride’s new novel starts in 1972 with a skeleton discovered at the bottom of a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Who was it and how did they get there?
The answer lies back in time and has been a long-held secret of the residents of Chicken Hill, a run-down neighbourhood where Black and Jewish immigrants live side-by-side and enjoy a sense of community. Chicken Hill is home to Chona Ludlow, who runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and her husband Moshe, who runs an integrated theatre.
It is through the efforts of Chona and Nate, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theatre, that a deaf boy is kept hidden and safe from the authorities who want to take him away and lock him in an institution.
McBride says the impetus for the book came from a life-changing experience he had in the 1970s when he was at college. He worked in a camp just outside Philadelphia run by a Jewish guy “and we took care of and learnt from disabled children.” He says he is interested in people whose religious faith “inspires them to kindness because those things last.”
McBride, who has a Jewish mother and African-American father, enjoys writing about communities. “My characters are driven by love and the need for justice. I want to read a book that makes me feel good about being alive.”
Jerusalem Beach - Iddo Gefen (Astra House)
The short story collection, Jerusalem Beach, is the 2023 winner of the Sami Rohr Prize, awarded in association with the National Library of Israel to an outstanding literary work of Jewish interest by an emerging writer.
Gefen is a neurocognitive researcher, and his fiction is a perfect blend of his “day job”, working with the brain, and the universal human yearning to understand how we think and what makes us tick. In these stories the reader encounters a company offering a procedure for people to share their memories; a radio that can be tuned to pick up the thoughts of those in its vicinity; and an app to read dreams.
There’s lots of humour here, too. In a story about a young man who has put his university studies on hold by going hitchhiking ... through the galaxy, his grandmother wants to know why he hasn’t swung by Earth to visit her, and we learn that Israelis insist on wearing sandals even in the inhospitable climes of space travel.
A strong sense of Israel runs throughout, perhaps most evident in the opening story about three generations of men who are trying to deal with their misfortunes: the son who hasn’t settled since his army service; the father whose wife has left him; and the grandfather whose wife has died.
The grandfather is coping best, having decided to enlist in a geriatric platoon, where the soldiers are given exemptions from standing on sentry duty and are allowed to nap or desert their post for a toilet break.
The stories are enjoyable to read in their own right but it’s hard not to see some of them as metaphors for the country itself.
The Terrible Event - David Cohen (Transit Lounge)
Closer to home, another collection of short stories comes from Brisbane writer David Cohen, who is a previous winner of the Russell Prize for Humour Writing presented by the State Library of NSW.
Cohen’s humour is dry and strange.
His protagonists are all ineffectual nebbishes, trying to create a sense of purpose within their limited circumstances - unfortunately, without success, and sometimes with dire consequences. Their lives are mundane, and they work in bureaucratic or “back room” admin jobs.
The short story which lends its title to the book is about a memorial being established to commemorate a terrible event. We never discover what that event is because no one wants to cause offence by naming it. The flurry of emails and surveys about correct procedure and woke politics will resonate with anyone who has worked in an office. Ultimately, the piece shows that appeasing irate virtue-signallers on the periphery comes at the expense of the real victims.
In other stories we learn about a couple of social activists engaged in a game of one-upmanship who boast about their actions on home-printed T-shirts; an outpouring of community affection and bonding over a fictional Facebook character; and a lonely customer service employee who develops an obsession with his off-site job-share colleague with whom he has never communicated.
But let the last word on this book come from its cover blurb: “The Terrible Event delivers not just one terrible event, but many events of varying terrible-ness. Death, destruction, disappearance, decline, defeat - it has something for everyone.”
