Read to learn, to escape

CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Summer provides a great opportunity to spend some quality time with a good book. Here are a few titles to help you escape from your daily tensions. If facing reality is more your style, there's a book that looks at raising children in an increasingly chaotic world and there are a couple of publications that will help you to better understand the situation in the Middle East.

Sunday Jews by Hortense Calisher (Harcourt Inc., 2002) is the story of a family that is very close, yet divided. The matriarch of the family is Zipporah-Zoe, who describes herself as a "lace curtain" Jew, "still morally Jewish, though we don't go to synagogue more than once a year." She is married to Peter, a lapsed Catholic, and they have six children who are each more different than the other. The buried history of the Duffy family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as his wife a woman who had been in the family circle years ago, but then vanished without a word.

Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories (Red Deer Press, 2001) features fiction from the early 1900s to 2000. In his introduction, editor Norman Ravvin hopes that the selections portray "the variety" and "unpredictability" of the Jewish short story. To give you a taste of what that means, some of the authors included in the collection are Matt Cohen, Rochl Korn (translated from Yiddish), Elaine Kalman Naves and Mordecai Richler.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (Picador USA, 2000) tells of the adventures of Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who also knows the Houdini-esque art of escape. Kavalier escapes from Nazi-invaded Prague and makes his way to New York, where he and his cousin, Sammy Klay, get into the comic book business, creating such characters as the Escapist and Luna Moth. There's a love angle, too, of course.

Leaving the fictional realm, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Dr. Wendy Mogel (Penguin USA, 2002) explores the guidance that Judaism can provide to parents in raising their kids. One of the Chassidic teachings she focuses on is "If your child has a talent to be a baker, don't tell him to be a doctor" – parents should not expect their children to be anyone other than who they are. In Judaism, writes Mogel, she has found "an approach that respects children's uniqueness while accepting them in all their ordinary glory."

Turning to the larger world, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by the eminent authority on Middle Eastern history Prof. Bernard Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2002) traces the historical relationship between the Middle East and Europe. For many centuries, the world of Islam was the foremost power in the world, but the West overtook its preeminence. Lewis examines this transformation and the reaction of the Islamic world to it.

Published a couple of years ago, Gershom Gorenberg's The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press, 2000) provides insight into the current situation in the Middle East and the American-led fight against terrorism. Extreme members of the world's three monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all hold that the Temple Mount is the key to salvation as they await the end of the world. According to Gorenberg, this belief in the apocalypse is why a lasting peace in the Middle East is unlikely – but not impossible.

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