News, Events & Sneak Previews
In this section we'll keep you up to date with the latest news.
Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.
And remember, feedback is always welcome.
NEWS
THE 2008 JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE
Shortlist
Secret by Philippe Grimbert
Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis
1967 by Tom Segev
Missing Kissinger by Etgar Keret
The Judges
Bernard Kops
Norman Lebrecht
Francine Stock
Janet Suzman
The winning book is:
Missing Kissinger, published by Chatto & Windus
 Commenting on the winning book Judge Francine Stock said:
“Judges of literary prizes always say the decision was hard. With the JQ Wingate Prize we had to choose between four outstanding books of distinct and frankly incomparable types. In the end, we made our choice according to the criteria of the prize. Etgar Keret's short stories are not only of literary merit, they do truly 'stimulate an awareness of and interest in themes of Jewish concern among the wider reading public.”
"Keret's stories are sudden, sharp, funny, upsetting and unforgettable. They take us inside the obsessions and neuroses of modern Israel and then swoop outside and prod them in a way that is both hilarious and painful.”
Etgar Keret, was awarded £4,000 prize money.
This is the only award in the UK to recognise a major work, by a Jewish or non-Jewish author, that stimulates an interest in and awareness of themes of Jewish concern among a wider reading public.
Previous winners were Howard Jacobson, Imre Kertesz, Amos Oz, David Bezmozgis, David Grossman, Amos Elon, Zadie Smith, WG Sebald and Sebastian Haffner.
The prize is sponsored by the Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation.
 This year the JCC ran a “Readers’ Prize” which ran in parallel with the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize and invited readers to take part in the judging process. The winner for 2008 is Philippe Grimbert for Secret.
Philippe Grimbert comments:
It is a great honour and a great joy for me to receive the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Readers’ Prize! The prizes that I have received before have all been readers’ prizes, prizes from the heart, you could say; they show me the extent to which the emotion that I felt while writing Secret has been discovered and shared by readers as they have turned the pages. I am so grateful to you and to those who have given me their vote: thanks to you, and thanks to them, the lovely adventure of my novel goes on!
Our 2008 speakers recommended
Once again, we will have a special table at the Book Fair with our speakers' recommendations. We only asked them to choose a book they particularly liked, it did not have to be Jewish or related to JBW. Enjoy!
Lisa Appignanesi
Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land is one of the great American novels of recent years, his Frank Boscombe, an aging Rabbit for our times. Every Ford sentence is a delight and the whole arc of the work wry, poignant and wise.
Shlomo Avineri
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Arguably, Oz's best book, it combines a searing autobiographical novel with some of the most dramatic moments in Jewish modern history and the emergence of Israel. The personal and the political are inextricably bound together in a seamless narrative. If you understand Oz, you understand Israel, with all its achievements, tribulations and unfinished agendas.
Judy Batalion
 Written before the glorious days of the Daily Show, Naked Pictures of Famous People, is a collection of comedy sketches, many of which satirize Jewish characters and themes. The only possible way to top Jon Stewart's 'historical' sketch about the Last Supper - a gaggle of complaining Jewish diners annoying the crap out of a waiter who can't wait to finish his shift, is with his piece about Hitler appearing on Larry King Live. Larry, as always, charms us and Hitler, and while eating bagels and using high-psychobabble, the two discuss Hitler's problematic 'addictions' and insecurities. Hitler even opens up about his childhood, revealing his unhappiness - the children used to make fun of him, calling him 'Shitler'.
Michael Berkowitz
 Milton Steinberg's novel, As a Driven Leaf, which first appeared in 1939. For non-specialists it is a tremendously enlightening and accessible work about the origins of Judaism, set mainly between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kochba rebellion.
Mordecai Richler's On Snooker, which also covers vital topics such as boxing and the Jewish Question.
Amy Bloom
Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems
and Wislawa Szymborska's Poems: New and Collected.
Poets are my best teachers.
David Cesarani
Wibke Bruhns, My Father’s Country. The Story of a German Family (Heinemann, March 2008) is a remarkable book in the mold of Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow (2003) and Katrin Himmler’s The Himmler Brothers (2007), books that blend biography,  autobiography,
and history in an attempt to explain how Germans in our time are still struggling to understand the acts of their parents and grandparents who were perpetrators or in Bruhn’s case both perpetrator and victim. Thanks to an astonishingly full collection of family documents she is able to tell in rich detail the story of the Klamroth family from its rise to bourgeois prosperity in the 18th century until its catastrophic entanglement in the Third Reich. She shows how Germans who were conservative and nationalistic in outlook initially found enough in common with the Nazis to embrace them only to realise, too late, that their goals and values were utterly different. Her father’s tragedy was that he felt committed to fight for the Reich while at the same time hoping for the Nazi regime to disappear. His ambivalence was mirrored in his complicated family life and at another level this is the story of a marriage that ran aground. Both the politics and the family story are set out in beautifully clean prose, with frequent but not intrusive reflections by the author who manages to be incisive while avoiding cod psychology. It is a gripping story at the personal and the political level and it has a gut-wrenching ending when Bruhn’s father goes to the gallows for his role in the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. A terrific read that makes you see Germans and Germany in a new light.
Philip Davis
 I would recommend Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. It is the story of a young wastrel, Frank Alpine, who helps carry out a masked robbery on a poor Jewish grocer, Morris Bober; but then in unspoken contrition and secret reparation turns up at the shop to help out as Morris’s poorly paid assistant. The only trouble is that no sooner does Frank go straight than he goes wrong once more, and begins stealing money from the grocer’s till. This is the story of second chances wasted again and again, until after the death of Morris, Frank takes over the store and finally converts to Judaism. For Malamud, the old virtues so often taken for granted or neglected – the values of morality and discipline and redemption – are beautiful when hard won, the second time round, by the ugly, the unfortunate, the strugglingly lowly.
The Assistant is available in paperback from Farrar Straus Giroux
Nicholas De Lange
Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. An astonishingly vivid evocation of Viennese life in  the early 20th century, it gives us (among other things) a little-known glimpse of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, as an all-powerful literary editor.
Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950--1492. Peter Cole's translations are original and highly accessible, and his introductions are well researched and a model of their kind. The book brings to life a brilliant period in the history of Hebrew creativity.
Rudolph Delson
 Analfabeto by Ellen Baxt (it's a book of poems published in 2007 by an independent British house called Shearsman).
It's the rare author whose smarts and whose tenderness never interfere with each other: Anne Carson comes to mind; and so does Nicholson Baker; and so does Ellen Baxt. "Analfabeto" is her first book of poems, a funny and sad collection about a sojourn in Brazil. In one, Baxt visits the oldest synagogue in the Americas; in many, she tries to meet girls and fails; in all of them, she lisps and puns and stutters her way through Anglo-Portuguese or Porto-English; and at the end, you adore her. If you have been meaning to read more poetry, here's where to begin.
Jonathan Freedland
Howard Jacobson says Kalooki Nights is the most Jewish book ever written - and he may just be right. But Kalooki Nights is also a masterpiece, grappling with each of the central questions that press in on the Jews, and doing so with wit, nostalgia, melancholy and deep, deep learning. What could be more Jewish than that?
Esther Freud
 I recommend The Blood of Flowers, by Anita Amirrezvani. It is set in 17th century Iran, in the ancient city of Isfahan, and is the brilliant, historically dazzling tale of a young girl, a poor carpet weaver, thrown on the mercy of rich relatives when her father dies. It is fascinating, sexy and utterly compelling.
Daniel Gavron
Kashua's lucid no-nonsense style, narrative flow, and sense of humour combine to make reading his books - Dancing Arabs and Let it be Morning - an enjoyable and informative experience. His specific point of view, as both an Israeli and a Palestinian, gives his writing a rare quality on the modern Israeli scene.
Dorota Glowacka
Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, by Joanna Beata Michlic (2006). The book is thematically related to the book we will be presenting (and its author is one of the contributors). The book offers an insightful analysis of the history of the perceptions of the Jewish Other in Poland. It gives and account of the genesis of the modern myth of the Jew as the threatening Other (as it was related to the emergence of the Polish national narrative in the end of the 19th century), followed by an outline of its transformations throughout the twentieth century, and ending with an insightful analysis of the current trends and directions, as they bear upon the present state of Polish Jewish relations. it is truly excellent!
Lisa Goldman
The Brothers Ashkenazi, by IJ Singer (IB Singer's older brother). It's got a fabulously complex plot, and the description of Lodz's history is fascinating. But what I like about it most is that his description of Jewish life in Poland is completely stripped of sentimentality, a la Fiddler on the Roof. After reading this novel, one has a very clear understanding of why so many Jews emigrated from Poland and Russia from the end of the nineteenth century.
 A Simple Story, by SY Agnon. I've read it at least three times, and I still think it is simply a perfect novel. Agnon's portrait of Galician Jewish society between the wars is drawn in wonderful detail, but it's really just the setting for his insight into the human psyche.
Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman. The author's memoirs about growing up in the bosom of an eccentric Sephardic family in Alexandria during the 1950's and early 1960's, before Nasser nationalized their factory and expelled them from Egypt. Marvelous descriptions of his cosmopolitan, multi-lingual family, and of Alexandria, all informed by a deep knowledge of literature and music.
Last Waltz in Vienna, by George Clare. Born Georg Klaar in Vienna, the author and his
 parents emigrated in 1938 to England, when he was 17, and later served in the British Army during the Second World War. Clare describes his highly assimilated family's shtetl roots and rise to prominence in Austro-Hungarian society, his bourgeois childhood and the rise of the Nazi movement in Austria from a very personal perspective, with great psychological insight and historical perspective. His writing is humorous and decidedly unsentimental - which makes it all the more moving. I think it's one of the most important pieces of Holocaust literature. You'll find a review here. Actually, given that Clare is English (I'm not sure he's still alive), this might be the most appropriate choice.
Linda Grant
Reel, George Szirtes
The poetry of England written by an outsider, a country and a landscape seen through other eyes.
Sharman Kadish
American Synagogues by Samuel D. Gruber, photography by Paul Rocheleau (New York, Rizzoli 2003) and Synagogue Architecture in America by Henry & Daniel Stolzman (Australia, Mulgrave, Victoria, Images Publishing 2004)In the second half of the 20th century American Jews were commissioning top international architects including Erich Mendelson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Minoru Yamasaki to design synagogues and some of the resulting buildings have become icons of modernism. A selection of these are featured in high quality photographs in glossy art book format.
Linda Kelsey
The Descendants (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) is the humane and humorous first novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. Following a boating accident in his native Hawaii, Matt King’s wild, adventure-loving wife lies in a coma. His two daughters are out of control and he has no idea how to be a proper father. And then he finds out his dying wife is in love with another man. Poignant, quirky, terrific.
Bernard Kops
I recommend two massive books, almost too heavy for the hands to hold. But the mind will carry them forever. Both are unrelenting masterpieces.
Both are perhaps the most haunting and inspiring I ever encountered.
The first is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, published by Vintage Classics. This epic tale is a blow by blow account about the battle for Stalingrad. How one amazing human being witnessed the heart of darkness.
Yet it not just about death and despair, it is also about survival against all the odds. The author was in that war and survived, only to become yet another enemy of Stalin. The book has the scale of War and Peace but it is nowhere diminished by the comparison.
The second book is The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. This Jewish Cossack fought heroically and wrote about the many battles following the Russian Revolution. It is also about Odessa, beyond the pale; with tales of love and struggle and survival in that teeming world of the Stetyl . The great Maxim Gorki became Babel’s patron and called him one of the greatest writers that Russia ever produced. One on the same level as the great Checkov. This book also has heart and truth and is unputdownable.
Take a year off from your angst and find time and settle down to these two remarkable works.
Charlotte Mendelson
Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford: the ultimate brainy holiday read: a sharply-observed continental bildungsroman, full of beauty, tragedy, food and family life.
Rutu Modan
 Soul and Other Stories by Andrei Platonov, tanslated by John Berger and Robert Chandler
Platonov is honest tragic, funny, cruel, full of mercy. In short: human. He wrote in the first half of the 20th century in Russia, and was a witness to the communist revolution. His stories describe many aspects of his time, but it is not the political but the unique and clear way he see the incredible events around him, that makes this book mind-expending and heart-breaking.
Benny Morris
A book that I would highly recommend is Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, University. of California Press, just out (2008).
Hannah Naveh
Yoel Palgi: Into the Inferno: The Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper Behind Nazi Lines. Rutgers University Press. Introduction by David Engel. Afterword by Phyllis Palgi (2002)
Eshkol Nevo
I read The Plot Against America in one weekend, and I don’t remember anything from that
 weekend but the book. The twist in history that Philip Roth's book is based upon is simple, but crucial: instead of Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh – the popular pilot - wins the 1940 elections in America. After becoming president, Lindbergh blames the Jews for pushing America to an unnecessary war with Nazi Germany, discusses "friendly understandings" with Hitler, and turns the life of Jewish families all over the country into an ongoing nightmare of persecution.
The Plot Against America is a frightening book. But frightening in a good, provocative way. It reminds us how dark the human soul can get and how fragile the security of the minority is. Any minority.
Michael Oren
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It is the WWII version of War and Peace told from the perspective of Russian Families; many of them Jewish, caught up in the conflagration of Stalingrad and the Stalinist Purges; a 20th century classic.
Matt Rees
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander -- A moving and inventive book by the
 best young Jewish writer in America. Englander is a stylist to put the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer very much in the shade.
The best new mystery this coming year is The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri. It's the eighth in his series about Salvo Montalbano, a cult hero to Italians and a sort of Sicilian Inspector Morse. When he isn't obsessing about the crime at hand, Montalbano's nearing tears at the quality of the delicious food in his favorite trattoria and enjoying a tempestuous romance with his long-distance girlfriend. The heart of the book is the struggle by the aging Montalbano--after a lifetime waging war against the lawlessness and neglect of Sicily--to assert his own faith in the goodness of other human beings.
Jon Ronson
What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe
It’s just my favourite novel.... Funny, angry, eye-opening, exciting.... Made me want to write better.
Jacqueline Rose
In Lords of the Land - The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, Idith Zertal and Avikai Eldar have written the first substantial history of the settler movement. One of Israel's foremost new historians, Zertal has unearthed archives which,  alongside the investigations of pioneering journalist Eldar, demonstrate conclusively the involvement of the State in the development of a movement which, few would contest, stands so dramatically in the path of a resolution of the conflict.
I was brought to Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles via David
Grossman's See Under: Love which is in many ways a tribute to this remarkable writer. The dense and often hyper-real lyricism of this magical book provides a model, I think, for spinning redemptive fantasy out of the limits of a world on the verge of horror.
Peter Cole's wondrous anthology of Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain - The Dream of the Poem - is testament to the creativity of Hebrew writing at a time of dialogue and coexistence between the three great faiths. A historic moment whose spirit is one of the inspirations for Daniel Barenboim's West-East Divan Orchestra of Israeli and Arab musicians, which he co-founded with Edward Said.
Ricki Rosen
 I recommend a 30-year-old book which was very influential for me, Number Our Days by Barbara Myerhoff . She was a University of California anthropologist who received a grant to study "Ethnicity and Aging" & chose to focus on a group of elderly Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews in Los Angeles. The book is scholarly in an anthropological style, but also quite loving and personal. I was studying Anthropology & Religion at Princeton University at the time, although I was planning to be a photojournalist. The book convinced me that photojournalists, like anthropologists, could navigate between being both professionally objective & emotionally connected to their subjects. This is a perspective which has always been important to me in my work & I hope it can be seen in my photo book Transformations. The book was also the basis of a film which won the 1977 Academy Award for best short documentary. Unfortunately Myerhoff died of cancer in 1985.
David Rubinger
There is one book which has left an extremely deep impression on me: Amos Elon's "The Pity of it All". A documentary in fact, it fascinates more than any novel could. The tragedy of German Jewry, who were more and far better Germans than the Germans themselves, is poignant to the extreme.
Eva Salzman
 I recommend Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name, which might be subtitled: Everything You Don't Want to Know - But Should Know - About The American South. Tyson grew up among white supremacists. The book is balanced at a pivotal moment in history, its mix of memoir and history channelled through the eyes of the author's younger self - at a pivotal age himself - whose introduction to racism was first-hand.
The teenage Tyson was grappling with time-honoured, teen-angst questions to do with identity, truth, morality and humanity against a backdrop of mounting social conflict: race riots sparked by the murder of a black man. The adult Tyson recounts this in the context of the growing national Black Power movement's attack on an entrenched racist system and status quo which civil rights legislation of the 1950s and early 1960s had addressed in theory, if not yet in practice.
Tyson's strength is that he's both compelling story-teller and professional historian: reflective, rigorous, honest, self-questioning, and also witty and warm, especially in his character studies of friends and family, including his preacher father. This is my kind of book. It's informative, humanist, deeply moving and beautifully written. 
Howard Schwartz
The Angel of Forgetfulness by Steve Stern. I believe that Steve Stern is the Isaac Bashevis Singer of our generation, and The Angel of Forgetfulness is his masterpiece.
Colin Shindler
The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940-1949 by Joseph Heller, published by Frank Cass in 1995.
‘This is a brilliant, well-researched book that sweeps away the mythology about the genesis of the Israeli Right. The real Jabotinsky has been reclaimed and Begin and Stern are portrayed in their true ideological colours’.
Judith Summers
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (the author of 101 Dalmatians) First published in 1949, I Capture the Castle tells the story of two teenage sisters, living in a run-down castle in England with their wonderfully eccentric, but penniless, family. A coming-of-age novel that's charming, terribly funny and moving as well, it's a book I return to time and again.
Adam Thirlwell
I'd like to recommend Italo Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience: because it's the best description of how intricate our ideas of pleasure are – like the problems of giving up smoking, or finding a girlfriend: how cleverly triumphant we can be with our defeats.
Arnold Wesker
I choose Linda Grant's prize-winning book People on the Street, a brilliantly structured book of interviews with richly drawn, disparate characters, attempting to identify why Israeli Jews are different from Diaspora Jews; chosen because the narrative is seasoned with humour, pity, outrage, intelligence and honest self-searching; and because it's a book I'd like to have written!
Yermiyahu Yovel
Moshe Idel's book : Kabbalah -New Perspectives, Yale University Press.
Joanna Zylinska
 Polonsky, Antony and Joanna B. Michlic (eds) Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN 0691113068.
'This is a passionate and excellently researched collection on the specifics of the Jedwabne massacre, in which the Polish inhabitants of a small town of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours on 10 July 1941.
Focusing on the 'rediscovery' of this event in Polish national memory over the recent years, the book addresses the complexities of Polish-Jewish troubled history. It not only provides a wealth of historical and social analyses but also offers hope for forgiveness and reconciliation'.
A new Jewish book event in Paris!
The festival « Livres des mondes juifs et Diasporas en dialogue » was held on Saturday, 19 January 2008 from 8:30 pm to 10 :30 pm and Sunday 20 January from 11:00 am to 10:30 pm at the Lutétia Hotel, in St Germain des Près, Paris.
Among the guest speakers this year: AB Yehoshua, Elie Barnavi, Julia Kristéva, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Philippe Grimbert, Clémence Boulouque, Karine Tuil, Erri de Luca, Jerome Charyn, Sandrine Treiner, Jean Hatzfeld, Claude Lanzmann.
Each session was followed by questions and answers with the public and book signings. For more information: www.livresdesmondesjuifs.com It was a huge success. Long live this new festival Inspired by JBW!
Amos Oz receives the Prince of Asturias Prize for literature.
 Amos Oz was has been awarded the annual Prince of Asturias prize for literature Wednesday in recognition of his works denouncing extremism and advocating Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The jury said Oz had "contributed to turning the Hebrew language into a brilliant literary instrument while revealing certain truths about the most pressing and universal realities of our times, with as much attention to defending peace between different communities as denouncing all forms of extremism."
Oz, the author of 18 novels and numerous articles and essays, is a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"For 40 years now, I have been struggling for a historic compromise between Israel and Palestine, based on a two-state solution: Israel next door to Palestine in peace and mutual respect," Oz said upon receiving word that he had received the award.
"If I have to say in one word what my entire literary work is all about, I would say families. If I had two words, I would say unhappy families. If I had more than two words, you would have to read my works," he said.
Oz, 68, was born in Jerusalem and has lived in the town of Arad since 1986. Much of his fiction is centered on the Jerusalem house where he grew up. Oz spent over 30 years living on a kibbutz in central Israel and later criticized the kibbutz lifestyle in his essays. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.
Each year, eight Prince of Asturias prizes are awarded to Spaniards and foreigners in categories including arts, sports, humanities and science. The prize is named after Spain's crown prince, Felipe.
The awards are announced throughout the year and presented in a ceremony in the fall in Oviedo. Winners receive $67,000 and a reproduction of a statue by sculptor Joan Miro.
AMANDA RIVKINThe Associated Press
Red House Children's Books Awards
Andy Stanton for You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum!
 
The Red House awards are the only national book award to be decided entirely by a children's vote. This year 165,000 votes were cast through the Federation of Children's Book Groups. The awards have a record of being the first to spot the future big names in children's writing - it was the first major award to be won by Roald Dahl (1983), Jacqueline Wilson (1996) and JK Rowling (1998).
The prize was announced at the Hay Festival and in the Guardian.
THE JEWISH QUARTERLY HH WINGATE LITERARY AWARD WINNER
Howard Jacobson for Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape)
 
The shortlisted titles for this year’s Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction were revealed at Jewish Book Week.
This is the only award in the UK to recognise a major work, by a Jewish or non-Jewish author, that stimulates an interest in and awareness of themes of Jewish concern among a wider reading public.
Previous winners were Imre Kertesz, Amos Oz, David Bezmozgis, David Grossman, Amos Elon, Zadie Smith, WG Sebald and Sebastian Haffner.
The prize is sponsored by the Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation.
Shortlist:
Carmen Callil, Bad Faith, Jonathan Cape
Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights, Jonathan Cape
Adam Lebor, City of Oranges, Bloomsbury
Andrew Miller,The Earl of Petticoat Lane, Heinemann
Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française, Chatto & Windus
AB Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem, Halban Publishers
“Howard Jacobson’s verbal dexterity is brilliant. He is the authentic Anglo-Jewish voice of literature and speaks about the here and now”
said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown chair of the judges
Rachel Lasserson becomes the new editor of the Jewish Quarterly.
At the JQ WIngate Award ceremony, a special tribute was paid to Natasha Lehrer and to Matthew Reisz, editor of the JQ for the last 9 years, who now writes for the Times Higher Education Supplement .
Rachel Lasserson is a respected writer, journalist and critic. She comes from a broad arts background of music and theatre.
Under her editorship the JQ has gone into vibrant colour and has already gathered an impressive rosta of contributors, including Amos Oz, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Freedland, Adam Thirlwell, Amy Bloom to name a few.
Her recent book, The Adam Anthology, was published by Vallentine Mitchell.
A new feature at JBW 07 was a table with books
recommended by our guests.
Martin Amis: Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors
Samir El-Youssef: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation. It's not only a beautifully written book but, with the spread of books on celebrities lives, it give the art of autobiography some of its lost value.
Lost in Translation shows that autobiography writing is not about subscribing to the prevailing culture of gossip but a journey of discovery for the writer himself as much for the reader. This is a great book.
Martin Gilbert: Esther Goldberg's Holocaust Memoir Digest, ideally all three volumes (volume three was published in September 2006). This is a powerful learning vehicle for both students and teachers, which also gives the general reader a sensitive insight into the experiences of survivors. Published by Vallentine Mitchell.
Victoria Glendinning: Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise
 Henry Goodman: Joshua Heschel’s Maimonides (Image Books ISBN 0385419619) is superb. It gives a fully rounded picture of the Rambam in context of his era.I was especially iompressed with detail of how Moslem extremists (Karites)and other phiolosophers (Aristotle &Averroes etc) and his families flight from Cordoba in 11th Century...and the death of his brother at sea affected his work and ideas. I am working on a theatre piece about him. Remarkable world changing man .
Linda Grant: The invisible Collection by Stefan Zweig. This little book contains two short stories, ‘The Invisible Collection’ and ‘Buchmendel’. It is the second which is my favourite story of all time, about a Jewish book dealer who sets up shop in a café in Vienna and the impact of the Great War on his life. It seems to see into the future to what lies beyond. One of the most moving and tragic works I have read – all in a few word.
Michele Hanson: Heartburn by Nora Ephron. This is clearly the best way for a wronged woman to take revenge: in a 'thinly disguised' novel, a few years after the event and with jokes. And what brilliant jokes. Nora Ephron is clearly the Queen of bitterness-speak.
Eva Hoffman: Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century -- David M. Black, ed. Routledge. This thought-provoking collection includes several essays specifically on the links between psychoanalysis -- with its own strong Jewish antecedents -- and Judaism. But at a time when we urgently need to understand the nature of religious impulse and belief altogether, these psychoanalytic interpretations of practices and texts provide an an unexected and illuminating perspective on such matters. The varied analogies between psychoanalytic ideas and religious concepts explored in this book suggest often unacknowledged bridges between secular and religious sensibilities, via the understanding of human subjectivity.
Howard Jacobson: Joseph Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night (Saint Martin’s Press).
Gabriel Josipovici: Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai, translated by Dalya Bilu, Duckworth; The Healer by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M.Green, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990; and Poems of Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai, Carcanet bilingual edition.
Etgar Keret: Two books that come to mind (both by young American Jewish writers) are: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender and The Task of This Translator by Todd Hasak-Lowy. Both books are real wonderful collections of short stories.
Irma Kurtz: Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise a work of beauty and intelligence written, as so many books have been written by Jewish authors, in the very shadow of imminent disaster. Also, it is a work of glowing human understanding written in the throes of modern history's most inhumane persecution.
Peter Lantos: The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart. By placing the Holocaust into a historical perspective Schwarz-Bart has written a moving and poetic story of the destruction of European Jewry by following the fate of the Last Just Man from the pyre of medieval York to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Norman Lebrecht: Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, written under Nazi occupation and recently unearthed, is the least discreet account of the uncharming French bourgeoisie since Flaubert.
 Jonathan Maitland: The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth. A fascinatingly plausible ‘’what – if’’ novel, shot through with hefty dollops of non fiction. It shows what might have happened to the USA if the charismatic aviator Charles Lindbergh – a devout anti Semite – had become President of the USA.There is no hysteria here – the tale is told soberly, and the horror of what is happening creeps up on you by degrees.This bloke can tell a story, believe me.
Andrew Miller:
Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman. Published a while ago but reissued last year. A mesmeric family history, set mostly in Alexandria, which tells the Sephardi version of the Jewish exile story: less familiar than the Ashkenazi experience, and with better food.
Julia Neuberger: The catalogue from the Simeon Solomon exhibition at Birmingham and then the Ben Uri, which was a revelation and made me feel so sad because he
came to such a poor end, dying in the workhouse, partly at least because he was gay, and the community- and his fmaily- could not cope. So some things have got better, if not best. Or L'Oreal Stole My House, by Monica Waitzfelder, published by Arcadia, which has given me much pause for thought about stolen property and doubtful provenances of all sorts of
things.
Benjamin Pogrund: Auschwitz by Laurence Rees
 Dina Rabinovitch: My Grandmother's Stories by Adele Geras, which is not just engaging and mind-opening, but also full of the kind of stories Madonna plundered and rewrote so badly in her series of children's books, so not only will children love this one, but celebrities out hunting for material will find this extremely rich indeed.
One in Three by Adam Wishart. Not sure if Wishart is Jewish or not, but the relationship revealed in this book between him and his father will strike many a chord with Jewish readers, as will his analytical approach to cancer.
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier
David Schneider: Jean Molla's Sobibor - because it's the sort of book that you can't help but swallow in one sitting and, even though it's aimed at a younger market, is absorbing, incredibly moving and a very contemporary twist on the Holocaust and the Second World War.
Nava Semel: Jorge Semprun's incredible piece of art Literature or Life. Viking ISBN-10: 0670872881
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