Fun, poetic or serious

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The world seems to be in a constant state of chaos – war, terrorism, poverty, disease – and then there are the smaller challenges we each must overcome to get through the day. Books can offer solace in at least a couple of ways. They can provide a break from the turmoil or give us a better understanding of events. The offerings this holiday season lean toward the latter type, but there are a few respites from reality, and this is where the Bulletin's Chanukah book roundup begins.

Escape with fiction

From best-selling author Herman Wouk comes A Hole in Texas (Little, Brown and Company, www.twbookmark.com). No, this isn't a novel about George W. Bush, but it does have to do with politics. The politics of particle physics.

Guy Carpenter works at NASA. Years ago, he worked on the Superconducting Super Collider (the "hole" in Texas), a hugely expensive government project dedicated to detecting a tiny, elusive particle called the Higgs boson. Congress shut the project down in its early stages, but now the Chinese – supposedly so far behind the United States in technology – claim to have found the boson. With this news begin the questions. Why was the collider closed down? How did the Chinese surpass American science? What about the threat of a Boson Bomb?

A Hole in Texas is not a serious book. It's a fun satire, with Carpenter at the centre of the action. Happily married and gainfully employed, the boson events bring into Carpenter's life an old flame (a Chinese female physicist), the possibility of a new romance with a congresswoman, as well as slick reporters, CIA agents and Hollywood scouts. The humor is sometimes silly, but the writing is energetic, playful and thoughtful.

Also well written is Jonathan Rosen's Joy Comes in the Morning (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, www.fsgbooks.com), about Deborah Green, a rabbi whose core duties include performing weddings, funerals and ministering to the sick. We meet her when these tasks are beginning to wear on her, but also when her life is about to become more meaningful.

On a hospital visit, she meets Henry Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who has suffered a stroke and whose diminished health has driven him to attempt suicide. She also meets his family, most importantly his son, Lev, a science writer who is skeptical of religion, and who recently ran out on his own wedding. The relationship that develops between Deborah and Lev helps both of them become more complete people, secure in their faith, accepting of themselves and their place in the world.

Joy Comes in the Morning will resonate more with Jewish readers than others, but it is such an intelligently written book that it deserves a wider audience.

Poet of a certain age

Writing for some four decades now, Irving Feldman is one of the most accomplished American poets of this generation. A "glimpse" (more than 400 pages) of his vast body of work can be found in Irving Feldman: Collected Poems, 1954-2004 (Schocken Books, www.schocken.com).

There is no doubt that Feldman is a master of language, from the biblical to the literary to the colloquial. He can also capture any number of moods – the solemnity due the Holocaust, the sentimentality of relationships, the pragmatism of politics. And he writes about everything – his experiences growing up, war, art, mythology and myriad other topics. But his writing will not appeal to everyone. His wide vocabulary and his cultural, historical, literary and geographic references are not readily accessible; he often uses violent imagery or coarse words. A few of the poems – particularly those that rhyme, for some reason – may take readers back to their high school English class when they had to analyze centuries-old poetry that eventually, once understood, "spoke" to them. But others will readily evoke a knowing nodd; "When the Lion Dies," for example:

"When the lion dies, rabbits roar. / So within their littleness they hear / resound the murmur of the breath / they dared not breathe before his death. / Valorous with vanity now, / They raise aloft impudent ears." Ah, yes, when the weak become powerful, they are not necessarily more compassionate than their predecessors.

Historical revelations

Local author Arthur Wolak has put together an impressive work on a period in history that has particular relevance in today's world in which anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have been on the rise since the Palestinians began the intifada against Israel in 2000. Forced Out: The Fate of Polish Jewry in Communist Poland (Fenestra Books, www.fenestrabooks.com) identifies and examines the influences that resulted in the 1967-'68 anti-Zionist campaign that targeted Poland's Jewish population for state-sanctioned harassment, ultimately forcing many Jews to leave the country.

Wolak asks, Why did the leadership of a nation that professed equality among all peoples suddenly drive Jews into exile? In his search for the answer, Wolak offers important lessons about political opportunism and the evils of totalitarianism. He does so in a clear, textbook style that traces the Jewish experience in Poland from the reign of Poland's kings to the present day. Forced Out illustrates the dangers of violating the basic rights of freedom of speech and press, as well as diminishing the protection of minorities, for national "security" concerns – dangers we should be especially aware of in this post-9/11 era.

In more of a storytelling fashion, Masha Gessen also explores the struggles of living under a totalitarian regime. Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Dial Books, www.randomhouse.ca) begins in the 1930s and follows the lives of two young Jewish women, Gessen's grandmothers.

Ester, from Bialystok, Poland, was determined to live with pride and defiance even though virtually the entire Jewish community was ultimately sent to Hitler's concentration camps. Ruzya, on the other hand, was a Russian-born intellectual who, under duress, eventually became a high-level censor under Stalin's regime. After the war, they met in Moscow and became good friends. Their children – Ester's son and Ruzya's daughter – grew up, fell in love and had two children of their own: Gessen and her younger brother.

Ester and Ruzya takes readers through the women's lives and how they navigated the line between conscience and compromise during an important period in history. It is both a family chronicle and an historical account, making it a fascinating read.

Another good read in this vein is Outrage 2000 (Gefen Publishing House, www.israelbooks.com). While Levie Kanes' book is a more awkward melding of storytelling and historical fact than Gessen's, it is a compelling tale.

Kanes was an infant during the Holocaust and spent the Second World War in the care of a gentile foster family in Veghel, Holland. In addition to being a biography, Outrage 2000 documents the collaboration of Dutch state institutions in carrying out Hitler's plan, as well as the many extraordinary people who made sure that Kanes and hundreds of other Jewish children remained safe throughout the war. It also recounts the tragedy of Kanes' father and the torturous experiences of his mother, who survived the experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz.

Kanes was inspired to write Outrage 2000 because of the libel suit by David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt in January 2000. The trial required Lipstadt to prove that the Holocaust and gas chambers actually existed. Kanes wanted to make his own contribution to the preservation of the truth and protect "future attempts by Holocaust deniers, such as Irving, to distort and rewrite history."

But not all distortions of history have negative consequences. At least that's the premise of The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, which was first published in 1979 and reissued by Gefen Publishing House this year.

The Fugu Plan is a mix of storytelling and history, relating how the Japanese, allies of the Nazis, nonetheless allowed thousands of European Jewish refugees to enter Shanghai and Kobe. It explores a bizarre twist on the anti-Semitic lies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Japanese had had almost no exposure to Jews and were introduced to Protocols in 1919 by the White Russians, alongside whom they fought against the communists. Supposedly, the Japanese studied the book, believed its propaganda and formulated a plan – the Fugu Plan – to encourage Jewish settlement and investment into Manchuria; the logic being that people with such wealth and power could greatly benefit Japan.

If the Fugu Plan had succeeded – and Tokayer and Swartz explain why it failed – it is estimated that a million Jews might have been saved from death and the war between Japan and the United States could have been prevented.

Of a less shocking nature, but still unique and interesting, is another Gefen publication, Out of the Limelight: Events, Operations, Missions and Personalities in Israeli History by Eliyahu Sacharov, who was one of the determined people who helped bring the fledgling state of Israel into existence. Though not particularly well written, the subject matter makes Out of the Limelight worth reading. It provides an insider's view of a crucial time in Jewish history and relates some of the stories of the men and women who laid the foundation for the future security of Israel.

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