Suddenly, we are in the midst of summer. There is more time for reading. But what books?
“The trick is finding which [novel], among the millions now accessible, fits that bill. For you, that is. And that, as Virginia Woolf told us, is something no one can tell you. Or, if they do, ignore them,” writes John Sutherland, a professor of modern English literature at University College in London, England.
What is meat for one is poison for another. We must discover our own books and make our own spiritual friendships.
However, I feel comfortable in suggesting some older books that have attained the patina of widespread popularity and acceptance. If you haven’t read them, they remain new.
Perhaps in the dim past you have read some of the familiar volumes I suggest. But they cry out for rereading. Now, older and wiser, you can bring to them mature insights, keener understanding and enhanced appreciation.
What follows is a list of 10 well-known titles of Jewish interest.
1. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
An account of a complex character who becomes embroiled in a series of exotic escapades. This is a brilliant, penetrating narrative of an entire era and its major concerns and foibles. (Also: Mr. Sammler’s Planet).
2. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
War is presented as a form of institutional madness in this funny, but often deadly serious novel. After flying 48 missions in World War II, the protagonist wants to go home. But first, caught in the twisted logic of the war machine, he must prove he is insane. This frenetic satire on the excesses of bureaucracy has been canonized as a cult classic.
3. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
This suspenseful and alarming narrative answers the question – what might have happened if aviator Charles Lindbergh had been elected president of the United States in 1940? The author renders his premise plausible with a masterly interweaving of personal detail and public events. (Also: Patrimony and The Human Stain)
4. The Assistant, Bernard Malamud
In a small, grocery store in Brooklyn, N.Y., a Jewish family struggles to eke out a modest living. Ultimately, their gentile assistant makes a startling decision that transforms him and those around him. (Also: The Magic Barrel and Other Stories).
5. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, G. Bassani
Set in the Italian Fascist era of the 1920s and ’30s, a wealthy, cultured Jewish family sees their world shrink to the size of a small beloved garden.
6. Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler
This is a thinly disguised take off on the early years of the Bronfman family. It includes Jewish characters exploring 19th-century Arctic regions and confronting anti-Semitism in Quebec. (Also: St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now).
7. Collected Stories, I.B. Singer
The best known and most successful Yiddish writer of our day combined the occult and erotic with a narrative style that disguises a complex and disturbing vision. (Also: Satan in Goray and Gimpel the Fool).
8. Badenheim 1939, Aharon Applefield
Translated from the Hebrew, this haunting story chronicles the final season in an Austrian summer resort where worldly acculturated Jews “pooh-pooh” the notion that Hitler is a threat.
9. Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel
Before he was murdered by Stalin, Babel served in the ranks of Marshall Budyonny’s anti-Semitic Cossack division in the Russo-Polish war of 1921-22. This book is a series of unforgettable vignettes – an early form of war reportage – by a writer of singular power.
10. The Second Scroll, A.M. Klein
Klein was one of Canada’s outstanding poets. In this, his only novel, he describes a fellow poet who is sent to Israel to fashion an anthology of modern Hebrew verse. His task is intertwined with the search for a heroic relative who epitomizes the historic spirit of the Jewish people.