Good Book – David Plotz

Bored during his cousin’s bar mitzvah service, “Proud, but not very observant” Plotz idly picked up and opened the Torah in front of him. It opened to Genesis, and Plotz began reading the story of the rape of Dinah. Her rapist, Sechem, son of “an idol-worshiping chieftain,” decides he’s in love with Dinah, and asks to marry her; Dinah’s father and brothers acquiesce, with a couple of conditions, then attack the chieftain’s tribe while its’ men are incapacitated. The story shocked Plotz -

The founding fathers of Israel lying, breaching a contract, encourage pagans to convert to Judaism, only to cripple them for slaughter, massacring defenseless innocents, enslaving woman and children, pillaging and profiteering, and then justifying it all with an appeal to their sister’s defiled honor? Not on the syllabus

For a while, the story of Dinah preoccupied Plotz – he talked about with women named Dinah, and found different versions of the story (maybe Dinah went willingly with Sechem) and varying interpretations of the lessons the story was intended to teach.
Plotz had thought he knew the Bible, at least broadly – in addition to Hebrew School he attended an Episcopalian high school that included religious education in the syllabus, and he’d had the usual popular culture exposure to Bible stories, from testaments Old and New. Reading this section of Genesis caused him to reconsider – what else had been edited out? He decided to read the Torah, or Old Testament, verse by verse, in order, noting his responses to each chapter as they were read. Good Book is those reflections, bound.
Amazon recommended Good Book when I added several of AJ Jacob’s accounts (reviews forthcoming) to my basket. I’ve long been intellectually interested in religion, which is what attracted me to both Jacob’s Year of Living Biblically and Good Book in the first place. In my youth I read the Bible cover to cover three times over a six- or nine-month period, though clearly not with the rigour of Plotz and, I suspect, quite a big of skimming, particularly over the begetting sections. I certainly didn’t make the connections Plotz did, and I’m impressed by his connection of events and people from one book with intersections and recurrences in subsequent sections.
What kept me reading, though, was Plotz himself. His writing is snarky, thoughtful, shocked, considered, and above all else intelligent. I made note of so many examples that my copy of Good Book is markedly thicker at the bottom (where I’ve turned over corners) than the top, and were I to cite even a quarter of them this review would be excessive. However it would be a disservice not to give at least a flavour of Plotz’s style.
Fittingly, I’ll start with Genesis, and the story of Abram (who becomes Abraham) and Sarai/Sarah, who flee famine and attempt to con first Pharaoh and then a king by pretending to be siblings instead of spouses; God sends a plague to the former for admiring Sarai’s beauty (which “seems unfair of the Almighty. It’s Abram and Sarai who tricked Pharaoh – why should the Egyptian get punished for ogling Sarai?”), and warns off a lecherous King Abimelech in a dream (“Not explained – why would Abimelech want to seduce Sarah, who is at that point nearly ninety years old?”)

God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising him “all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding.” God is a kind of celestial Donald Trump: He can’t go a chapter without a new real-estate deal. By my calculations, He promises land to Abraham at least four separate times, and each time the boundaries are different. (Promised land, indeed.)

I’m sure most people are familiar with the sacrifice of Isaac, where God tells Abraham to kill his beloved son on an altar to demonstrate his religious fidelity. Isaac is spared at the eleventh hour, but

As a father I find this nearly impossible to read. The repetition of “my son” is devastating. Abraham does not try to distance himself from Isaac, to separate himself from the child he must kill. Isaac remains “my son,” “my son.”… This is, of course, another story adopted and repurposed in the New Testament; but in the Christian version, God does sacrifice the son. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, so I’ll take the Genesis version, complete with deus ex machina and the saved child.

Chapter 23 gets the (natural) death of Sarah out of the way before using eighteen verses to discuss land negotiations, a theme common throughout the text, which Plotz points out is as relevant and consuming in that region now as it was 3,500-odd years ago. Chapter 25 causes him to reflect on why antediluvian people were so long lived, and even after the flood it is not uncommon for Bible characters to live for over a century, usually with little or no infirmity -

The obvious answer, and the one I believe, is “It’s not true, that’s why.” But I wonder why the authors of the Bible *believed it to be true. At the time Genesis was written down, 1,000 years after Abraham was supposed to have lived, the Israelites who drafted it had normal life spans. Why did they credit their ancestors with such superhuman health? Was their theory that man got weaker the farther he got from creation? Modern scholars of folklore would probably attribute [it] to the normal process of mythmaking… the heroes grow grander and grander. Their towers reached the sky; they fought giants and met angels; and they lived almost forever.

This is only half of the extracts I’d like to cite, from Genesis alone; there is no way to include everything I’d like to without substantially breaching the Copyright Fair Reproduction Act! A few areas of note that I found particularly amusing, insightful or otherwise interesting – there are several instances where Plotz discovers that even things he knows he knows about the Bible are false (like the Ten Commandments); his discussion of why there are so may prostitutes is scattered through the text and insightful; there’s startling cruelty, violence and murder, much of it directed by a sadistic and often irrational God, particularly in Judges; and there’s the refrain of land – in the “morally repellent” Book of Judges
Jephthah tells the king, “Do you not hold what Chemosh your God gives you to possess? So we will hold on to everything the Lord our God has given us to possess.”

And there, my friends, you have practically the entire history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of planet Earth, in two short sentences. Your God says it’s yours. Our God says it’s ours. Meet you at nine AM on the battlefield.

Chapters 5 – 7 of the Book of 1 Kings:

A hilariously magnificent passage pays tribute to Solomon’s wisdom. It’s essentially a list of everyone he’s smarter than… He writes 3,000 proverbs and 1,000 songs. He’s a botanist, an ichthyologist, and an entomologist; a poet, a musician and a judge; a joker, a smoker, and a midnight toker.

In chapter 18 of the same book, there’s a showdown between the prophet Elijah and Jezebel’s priests. Elijah, by the way, is a forerunner of Christ, performing the same miracles of food from nothing (in his case oil and wheat), and resurrects a child from the dead. But back to the battle of the gods:

My god versus your god, for all the marbles. “How long will you keep hopping between two opinion? If the Lord is God, follow him; and of Baal, follow him. Elijah proposes an incineration contest. He’ll get one bull and 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah will get another,. Each side will call on its god or gods, and whichever wide can make the animal go up in flames worships the true Lord.
The rival priests go first. They shout to Baal all morning long, to no effect. Elijah interrupts their fruitless prayers with a ripsnorting insult-comic routine, a hilarious, sardonic attack on Baal and his silence. When noon comes, “Elijah mock[s] them, saying, ‘Shout louder! After all, he is a god! But he may be in conversation, he may be detained, or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up.’” Reading this, you can imagine exactly what kind of man Elijah was – brilliant, blunt and sarcastic. (Oh, and even better: “on a journey” is an ancient euphemism for “in the bathroom.” Baal is on the pot!)

Above all, Plotz highlights

how often the Bible shows its seams. My childish notion was that the Bible was a singularity, a unified whole, but the more I read it the more I see it wrestling with itself.

When I was an adolescent I saw this as evidence of an inconsistent and inconstant deity, and I viewed the insistence on paying homage (have no other gods but me, honour the Sabbath and keep if holy) as the hallmark of a jealous and insecure Lord. I wonder now how biblical literalists reconcile these discrepancies, but my point is that Plotz’s narrative illuminated the connection between these instructions and the survival of Judaism – following the letter of the Torah, engaging with the text, the Talmudic precepts and laws, have kept the Jews coherent, unassimilated and viable for over three millennia, and that’s not by accident.
It takes Plotz 184 pages to address the fact that, claims to the contrary, there’s no archaeological evidence for a long-lasting, significant Israelite civilisation in the Ancient world – far from the Bible accounts of “a mighty nation that destroyed Pharaoh, killed 185,000 Assyrians in a night, and exterminated every non-Jew in the Promised land, the physical evidence suggests that Israel-Judah was a tiny, short-lived nation. It existed for a few hundred deeply troubled years, buffeted by mightier surrounding civilizations.”
This is not a scholarly work, but it is considered, thoughtful, researched (increasingly, as Plotz delves deeper in to the Torah), and there's some additional information at the end of Good Book about his process and progress. Most of all I was interested in how reading the Torah from cover to cover, complete with reflection, discussion and context, affected his own belief system. If any of this sounds interesting to you, go forth and read! I've already loaned my copy to a friend. - Alex

Blues in the Night - Rochelle Krich

Molly Blume is a freelance reporter in LA - her beat is crime, not Hollywood, and she moonlights with some success as a true crime writer. When reading the daily dispatches, her eye, and then her imagination, is caught by one fact in an otherwise unremarkable report - a woman in a nightgown was the victim of an hit-and-run. Intrigued by the nightgown - at two in the morning, on Laurel Canyon? - Molly decides to investigate a little further.
Between the trauma and surgery, Lenore Saunders doesn't remember the accident. Drugged on antidepressants to begin with, when Molly visits she's disoriented and confuses her with someone named Nina; Lenore is preoccupied by Robbie, who's angry with her even though she's sorry. Interest further piqued, Molly digs deeper, but before she gets anywhere Lenore is found dead in the hospital, apparently by her own hand. Molly, however, suspects foul play.
The first in what is evidently a series, Blues in the Night is well crafted - with only one appearance of Lenore in the flesh, she is primarily portrayed through the lenses of those who knew her, and Molly's psychological autopsy. Molly discovers Lenore's tragic past, the cause of her estrangement form the husband she loved, and an increasingly sinister picture emerges. But which Lenore is the right one - injured, damaged innocent, or conniving, predatory schemer?
This aspect of Blues in the Night is particularly compelling, in part because of its controversial subject - Lenore was charged with the murder of her infant son, and found not guilty because of post-natal psychosis, but the prosecutor believes she was faking, and suspects her therapists came to the same conclusion after he testified on Lenore's behalf. It's also fascinating to see the changing images of Lenore, as Molly works through new evidence, weighing the validity of disparate sources and slivers of information.
I was less impressed with Molly, however. I think this was in part because of the somewhat ponderous interweaving of her Judaism into the text. This surprised me, because I am very interested in Judaism, particularly the more Orthodox variety practiced by Molly, and some of my favourite authors have increased my interest and my knowledge of the topic through a similar marrying of characters of faith with mystery novels - Kellerman is a perfect example of this done seamlessly, so the faith and the character and the direction of the plot are inseparable. In Blues in the Night, however, many of the details seem forced, particularly the translations:

Bubbie G calls Edie a a bren (a dynamo) and Mindy, five-eight,a hoicheh (tall) and a kleiegeh (clever). Liora is a neshomeleh, a sweetheart. Judah is a lamden, an erudite person. Noah is a brillyant, a diamond, and Joey a mazik, a rascal... I'm a kochleffl, a busybody, as if you didn't know, but I'm also a lebedikeh, a lovely one. Ron is a choleryeh ( accent on the second syllable), which is the Yiddish for 'cholera."

In typing this I realise that part of my irritation is that it feels clunky and added on, but part is also that Krich is using these terms as characterisation for Molly's family - Ron is Molly's ex-husband and Bubbie G is her grandmother, while everyone else is a sibling, and the whole is a paragraph of tell don't show.
There's a surfeit of metaphor and analogy - "every time I thought I had it figured out, it fell apart in my head like a meringue" - and a paucity of detail in Molly's significant history. We know why she and her husband divorced, and we know her best friend was killed when Molly was a teen, causing her to lose her faith, but we know nothing about that time except her reaction, nor why she decided to embrace religion once more.
Renewing a romantic relationship with an ex-turned-rabbi, Molly is late for a dinner date, loses track of time, picks a fight, lies, and won't leave it alone. Instead of having any sympathy I found it all disrespectful (of Zack as a man, not a rabbi), and irritatingly inexplicable. This wasn't helped by the way the scene ended:

Romance is like a soufflé - delicate, light, magical. I'd poked a hole in it, and once collapsed, no amount of air would revive it.

Chapter forty-one opens with Molly reflecting on the difficulty of dealing with real life in comparison with writing crime fiction:
you can go back before the book's in print and change things you don't like, things that don't work. You made a character to old, too nasty, or too nice?Change it. You don't like the dialogue on page 127, or the facts of a case, or a clue you planted, or the way characters behave or interact or dress? Change it. You can change it all. It's just words on a computer screen or paper.
But I wasn't writing crime fiction, I was writing about real events and real people whose actions and words were inconsistent. And I couldn't go back and change anything. Not words I'd heard from those who had no reason to lie, but words in court transcripts. I was writing true crime and was stuck with characters who wouldn't ring true. My editor wouldn't buy them. I didn't buy them either.
Molly then points out the inconsistencies between various characters' actions and their personalities, but for me this section served only to underscore that this is a novel, wholly created. And while this section is pivotal to Molly uncovering the truth about Lenore, it's the self-conscious metafictional aspect that stayed with me. While I enjoy this when well done (I thoroughly enjoyed the film Stranger Than Fiction, and was absorbed by my first encounter with metafiction, Calvino's renown If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), this was just coy and clumsy.
Surprisingly, this is not to say I didn't enjoy Blues in the Night - multiply published prior to this 2002 release, the novel feels simultaneously like the work of a developing writer (the rough edges, clunky patches, exposition and telling) and an established one (primarily the complicated and rewarding mystery). I'm interested in where Molly (and Zach) is going, and interested to see if the cultural and religious elements are more deftly incorporated in the rest of the series, of which Blues in the Night is the first. - Alex

This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper

Judd Foxman learned of his father’s death from his sister Wendy, who delivered the news casually; it was almost appropriate, given Mort’s repression of emotion, a trait held by the family as a whole. After eighteen months treating metastatic cancer, his death was less surprising than Mort’s instruction, despite his long-held atheism, that the family sit shiva for him. Wendy brings her financial big shot husband, Barry, and her three small and boisterous children; older brother Paul brings his wife, Alice, who desperately wants o become pregnant; and wild child baby brother Phillip, after some tension about whether or not he’d make it all, meets his life coach/therapist/fiancée Tracy at the family home after the service. Judd goes alone – he and his wife separated after he found her, on her birthday, in bed with his boss. And, as Judd finalises his packing for the drive to the family home, Jen breaks the news that she’s pregnant to Wade – news especially distressing because their baby died three weeks before the due date.
Like the recently-reviewed Tropper novel How to Talk to a Widower, This is Where I Leave You deals with grief, loss and renewal. In this case, however, there's a wider cast and a broader palette - it's also a masterful study of family dynamics, interpersonal tensions, change, the presence of the past, and love and relationships of all kinds.
As Judd deals with his wife in the present he revisits the evolution of their relationship, from their first meeting on campus to his discovery of her in flagrante on her birthday, and the fallout. The shiva requirement that the family sit together every day for a week forces them to spend more time together than they have since their teens, bringing old allegiances, tensions, guilt and hostility up from the depths. Though markedly different from my own family, so many of the Foxman’s interactions and tensions resonated with me, a fact I suspect lies less with our similarities than with Tropper’s skill. Seen through the filter of Judd's gaze, we view a family that, despite matriarch and celebrity therapist Hillary's (who Mort so often responded "Jesus, Hill," to that Judd thought that was Jesus' full name) best efforts to have total honesty and openness, is full of secrets, chaotic, flawed and real.
The product of an over-sharing mother, many of the scenes featuring Hill struck a chord with me. But then there are so many wonderful lines and vignettes that I imagine readers from wholly different backgrounds would find things with which to relate, too - “You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone.”
I've become more aware, since the weddings of my siblings, of the massive differences there are in family cultures, something I was already aware of thanks to the very different dynamics of my maternal and paternal grandparents, but which I see differently encountering them as an adult. So I was struck by the apposite response of Judd and his family to an attempt at interveneing in a fraternal fight:

"We all stare at Tracy as if she just started jabbering in ancient tongues. We've always been a family of fighters and spectators. Intervening with reason and consideration demonstrates a dangerous cultural ignorance."

And of the long-winded passage sung by a cantor, his “slow, operatic tenor makes you want to prostrate yourself on the spot and accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” I read Tropper's second novel, The Book of Joe, not long after it was published, before beginning this blog. Like This is Where I Leave You it was funny, observant, raw, real, and poignant, though less accomplished. I'd like to revisit it, but I also think that, having read two of his novels in the space of a couple of weeks, I should probably take a break for the time being. - Alex

How to Talk to a Widower - Jonathan Tropper

When Doug Parker married Hailey - beautiful, smart and ten years older - he left his carefree Manhattan lie behind to live with her and her teenage son, Russ, in a quiet Westchester community. Three years later, Hailey has been dead for a year, and Doug - a widower at twenty-nine - just wants to drown himself in self-pity and Jack Daniels. But his family has other ideas...

I initially picked by How to talk to a Widower because of the title, while I was at a secondhand bookshop one day looking for something to tide me over if the only book I had with me ran out before I got home. I was sold by the blurb above; not only is the general premise interesting, but the opening scene captured me - submerged in grief, Doug is dragged from his date with bourbon to receive temporary custody of his stoned unofficial step-son from a state trooper.
Tropper manages to beautifully articulate the consuming, wave-like nature of grief, which leaves you feeling as though equilibrium has be regained only to avalanche over you with no warning, the expectations of others that it's time to reinvest in your own life (or, more often, express interest in their lives) though grief still has you in her clutches, the way shared loss can be uniting or divisive, the seductively painful conjurings of 'what if' and the irrationality of hating the happiness of others.
In this case that last is the new love between Doug's sister Debbie, who met his friend Mike while the family were sitting Shiva, deepening their meeting in the den and now getting ready to marry. Had it not been for Hailey's death they never would have met, and Doug cannot countenance anything good coming from something so terrible. He also holds on to his grief with both hands, feeling as though mourning less wholly will be a betrayal of Hailey.
A writer before Hailey's death, Doug articulates his pain in columns about his grief, columns that are attracting an increasing audience. Though the idea of profiting from Hailey's death sickens him, Doug's agent is brokering a book deal.
There are so many well crafted elements here - there's a very strong secondary plot about Doug's twin sister Claire, estranged from her husband and accidentally pregnant. There's pressure from his mother to date again, her conviction that a year is long enough at war with Doug's conviction that eternity is too brief a period to mourn yet anticipating the time when his relationship with Hailey will be a faded fragment of his past, that

one day, an older version of me will tell his children how he's been married once, before he ever met their mother, but that his wife had died, and Hailey will be not a person to them but a small, intangible, biographical blip, a sad thing that happened to their father on the way to happy ever after. And worse, maybe that's how I'll see it too.
And I don't need you to tell me that this will happen, that it's inevitable. I'm not fooling myself. But just because something's true, it doesn't mean I'm ready to face it today...

And contrasting with the instant, unexpected death of Hailey in a plane crash is the gradual, insidious death of his father from Alzheimer's, and doug's lack of a monopoly on grief. As his mother says,

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heart breaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don't even get to mourn.

And the tragedy of dementia, of course, is the brief returns to lucidity that are unpredictable and as heart-breaking as the total lack of recognition of those who were once deeply loved.
How to talk to a Widower is powerful, compelling and engrossing. The writing is invisibly crafted, carrying the reader without effort through turbulence and rapids, a stunningly clear portrayal of grief and loss and hope and love. - Alex

The Gates of Zion - Bodie Thoene

American Ellie Warne is still finding Palestine overwhelming - she's hoping that her work for her archaeologist uncle will lead to a professional career in photography, and is enjoying a flirtation with her uncle's assistant Moshe, despite his disinterest in wider global issues. And they're hard to avoid, because it's 1947: the aftermath of the Second World War is still settling, Jews are being forbidden entry to Britain, and the British army - spearheaded by its politicians - is closing its eyes to egregious acts from the increasingly militant Muslim population in Palestine. Fomented by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the previous harmony between Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the ancient city is being torn apart. For those wise and astute, the coming Partition Resolution, dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arabic states, is not a cause for celebration of the creation of Zion but the trigger for what would become civil war.
Ellie is unaware of any of these tensions, and is instead focused on opportunities for career-making photographs. The first of these is a scroll, brought to her uncle's home by an elderly Bedouin tribesman and his grandson. Though she suspects the antikas are not particularly valuable, she is somehow drawn to the ancient writings and the story that the boy found them in clay pots in a cave while herding goats in the desert. She convinces the men to leave the scroll with her for a few days, and photographs them carefully - an act that contributes to her being embroiled in people smuggling, arms smuggling, and at the forefront of seething political unrest.
I hadn't previously heard of Thoene or her husband and researcher Brock. Though not at all New Agey, I did feel as though I was lead to reading something Judaic, as my eyes fell in quick succession on several Jewish-themed novels at the library, before landing on the Zion Chronicles, of which this is the first. And it includes several elements that I am drawn to, including the era, theology, comparative religion in general, Judaism in particular, the opportunity to learn more about Islamic beliefs and practices, and the impact of the Second World War of American feminism.
The Gates of Zion is necessarily complicated - the setting is convoluted to begin with, and Thoene has done a capable job of combining historical events with a fictional narrative that includes real people, places and events. The work is clearly well sited and researched. But I found reading The Gates of Zion a real slog, for two reasons. The first was that the writing tilted strongly to the hyperbolic, with overwrought portrayals of emotion - crumpling into silent sobs, uneasiness transforming into brutal awareness, fighting off feelings of horror, That, I realise as I write this, is indicative of a larger issue I had: the writing style is a little heavy on telling over showing, which I found undermined the emotional impact many of the scenes would have otherwise had.
The second problem for me was the heaviness of the religious themes. The Gates of Zion is clearly, in retrospect, a strongly Christian Message text, which I didn't realise when I began reading it. There is a very hefty dose of unsubtle theological preaching at alongside the larger plot, and a strong sprinkling of deus ex machina-like coincidences that I might have been prepared to suspend disbelief for in the absence of other glaring flaws.
With one exception, a high-profile rabbi who collaborates with the enemy, the Jewish characters come out well, including the rather large percentage of neo-Christian Jews who believe Jesus was the Messiah but his message has been co-opted by Christianity:

"I am Moshe Sachar, and I am a Jew who believes that the one we call Yeshua is the Messiah. In this I hope with a hope that knows the truth; He will come again to my people and they will know Him for who He is and find pardon and the joy of knowing Him as a loving and merciful Savior. And for you, dear Ellie, I hope that you will reach out to Him. For I know He cares so much for you." His face was full of emotion as he stepped toward Ellie and wrapped his arms around her.
"What do I do, Moshe? How can I know Him too and have hope?"
He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. "Just talk to Him, my love. Just ask Him to make you everything you can be. Give Him your heart."
"But it's broken, Moshe; my heart is broken." She buried her face against him.
"He knows all about broken hearts, Ellie. And our King David writes that your broken heart is just the kind of sacrifice He will accept."

Muslims, on the other hand, are uniformly treacherous, malevolent, unreasonable and sadistic. They are also portrayed without depth or other motivation, and I found this weakened their impact, making them cardboard villains.
It's not just religion that determines personality, though - race, too, plays a strong part. Brits (or Britishers, in the text) are biased, myopic and anti-Semitic, while Americans are either sympathetic and intelligent but often naive, or anti-Semitic and cruel. This simplification of a really complex issue does little to serve the book or engage the reader.
And that's a real shame, because the era and the story are fascinating. A glossary would also have been useful, rather than having to try to infer meaning from context alone, and a brief overview of actual events in which this was set would also have been useful for readers unfamiliar with the history and consequence of these events.As I wrote at the beginning, there are many elements in The Gates of Zion that appeal to me, not least of which is a mildly distorted version of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But, thought this is the first in a series of five (followed by the six-part Zion Legacy series), I doubt I'll be returning to the Thoene fold any time soon. - Alex

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – Harry Kemelman

Lifelong friends Ben Schwartz and Abe Reich have fallen out, and as their disagreement becomes more entrenched both are less willing to budge. When the enmity threatens to disrupt the congregation, Jacob Wasserman turns to their rabbi, David Small, to intervene. Not everyone’s choice for rabbi, Small is young and more focused on Talmudic scholarship than assimilation and glad-handing. He decides to hold a Din Torah, akin to a rabbinic hearing, to resolve the problem, and turns to the general principles derived from centuries of analysis and debate of cases in the Talmud. Though he successfully resolves the matter, the board of directors is reluctant to renew Small’s appointment.
When the body of a murdered gentile woman is found on the temple grounds, suspicion is first cast on the rabbi – he was in his study around the time of the murder, and the victim’s handbag was found in his car. But Barnard’s Crossing police chief Hugh Lanigan quickly eliminates Small as a suspect. Against a background of in-fighting, fears of anti-Semitic ill-feeling, and debate over his usefulness to his congregation, the new rabbi tries to uncover the truth about the life and death of a young nanny.
The first in a highly successful series, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late is an engaging and very readable novel that combines Jewish culture and lore with a mystery. Unavoidably dated – it was originally published in 1964 – I was less surprised by the different emphasis on material possessions than by the level of ignorance about Judaism Small’s congregation has. In his introduction the late author explains that the novel arose out of his interest in the gap between the expectations of culturally Jewish second- and third-generation Americans and their new rabbi. This disconnect between experiences of Judaism as upbringing and ritual on the one hand, and adherence to and study of Jewish tenets on the other, was fascinating. I also enjoyed the contrast between life on the cusp of the twenty-first century’s second decade and small town America on the verge of the revolutionary sixties. There’s something about the sensibilities imbuing this novel that have a greater resonance on that level than a film, television series or retrospectively sited novel.
I seem lately to be coming across a seam of similar themes, and could not help but contrast this novel with the recently seen A Serious Man – also set in an early sixties American small town Jewish community. I found the comfort of religion in the novel, the tightness of the plot and the multi-dimensionality of the characters far more accessible and interesting than the dystopic film (however strongly acted and beautifully shot), and thoroughly enjoyed the use of discussions between Small and Lanigan as plot devices for contrasting Judaism with Christianity.
I did enjoy this kinder, gentler – despite the murder – novel and look forward to reading more. Sadly my library does not have the next two novels in Kemelman’s series, but I hope my parents do, and have vague memories of seeing the novels in the family library when I was younger. Watch this spot - Alex

A Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights - Faye Kellerman

The title story is a purpose written tale involving Kellerman's chief protagonist, detective Peter Decker, his wife Rina Lazarus, gardening and a mystery - the mystery is very much less the focus of the story than the relationship between these much loved and long-lasting characters, and also plays second fiddle to the plants.
This short story collection also includes a mystery involving Decker's daughter Cindy, newly graduated from the police academy, a mystery unrelated to the Decker/Lazarus family, and two autobiographical vignettes in its seventeen-item quiver that has a uniting theme of family.
Some of the work is certainly darker than Kellerman's usual fare, with two particularly uncomfortable pieces - "Mummy and Jack" about an intertwined, interdependent, dysfunctional mother/son relationship, and "Bonding," which combines teen prostitution, quasi-consensual incest and murder.
Although husband Jonathan is better known, I've always enjoyed Faye's novels more, partly because of the stronger domestic aspect but also because of the way she weaves Judaism through both the text and the plot. Her novels combine character development with the mystery plot, adding layers of depth to each new installment.
I was therefore disappointed by the thinner, less intricate and less surprising plots in this collection. Even allowing for the shorter, and therefore less complex nature of the writing, I found both the ideas and the execution somewhat pedestrian. This may in part be because some of the entries were co-written with Kellerman's children, including novelist Jesse, or perhaps just because I was in the wrong frame of mind at the time of reading. In any case I think I'll stick to Kellerman's novels from here on in. - Alex

Certain Girls - Jennifer Weiner

Joy Shapiro-Krushelevansky's about to turn 13, and that means a bat mitzvah. It also means changes in her relationship with her best friends (twins Todd and Tamsin), and a new tension with her mother. Everything about her mother is wrong - her huge bust, her over protectiveness, her weird family, the way she won't let Joy grow up and do things normal girls do... all Joy wants to be is normal.
Thirteen years ago Cannie Shapiro could never have seen that her life would be so perfect - she has an amazing husband, who loves her even though she's fat and he's a fat doctor ("bariatric physician!"), a fabulous home, a relatively good relationship with her out and proud mother and with her irresponsible baby sister, a career she enjoys (pseudonomously writing a FSF series), a negotiated peace with the father of her perfect daughter... all Cannie wants is for Joy to be safe and happy.
This sequel to Weiner's debut novel Good in Bed captures many of the elements that made the original a succes, without retracing old ground. The novel alternates between Cannie and Joy's perspectives, and Weiner has done a great job of capturing the angst of adolescence, the differences perspective makes (Cannie sees her younger sister as feckless and irresponsible, Joy sees her as fun and daring), and the tensions between mothers and daughters that don't go way just because the daughter's an adult too.
Strong, powerful, warm, complex and with a devastating ending, Certain Girls is a must-read for anyone who enjoyed Good in Bed but would also be rewarding for those new to Weiner's work. - Alex