Dear friends,
I was lucky enough to spend some time with my father last week, and he mentioned that he’d like to spend more time reading. With Father’s Day coming up, I thought I’d recommend books that feature memorable fathers or grandfathers.
Speaking of my father, if you’ve read The Book of Jeremiah, you might remember that Jeremiah is dressed as a shochet (ritual slaughter) for Purim in the first scene. The costume (but not the character) was inspired by my father. (In fact, you can see a picture of my father dressed as “Reb Chaim der Shochet” on the Fun Stuff page of my website). And obviously I’m not objective, but given the number of men who have mentioned to me that they see a lot of themselves and/or their relatives in Jeremiah, I think it makes a great Father’s Day gift!
The following reviews have appeared in my newsletter over the last two years:
About Grace by Anthony Doerr - Doerr’s first novel, published back in 2004, contains beautiful, lyric language and speaks to his immense writing talent. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, David Winkler can see glimpses of the future - a man who will be hit by a bus, how he’ll meet his future wife - but when he dreams that his baby daughter Grace will drown, he flees. For a quarter of a century he lives in the Caribbean, unsure if his daughter survived or if his wife will forgive him. As Publisher’s Weekly put it: “The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation—all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift.”
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen - What can I say? Jonathan Franzen is a modern-day master. His characters are so richly developed that it feels like we can spot even the tiniest speck of grime in their fingernails. Crossroads follows the Hildebrandt family - patriarch and associate pastor Russ, his not-so-happy wife Marion, and their four children - through a Christmas season that threatens to upend everything in their lives. The novel deals with big issues like religion, drugs, Vietnam, and social responsibility, but where it really shines is in the interpersonal relationships and the interiority of the characters. As the reviewer in Vogue put it: "[A] pleasure bomb of a novel . . . New prospects are what keep [Crossroads] so engrossing, each section expanding on and deepening the poignancy of what has come before . . . . Few [writers] can take human contradiction and make it half as entertaining and intimate as Franzen does .” Apparently this is the first in a trilogy, hooray!
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara - To Paradise is a terrific accomplishment (equally brilliant but very different from the author’s A Little Life). This three-part novel spans three different centuries with an alternative version of the American experiment, in which “profound questions of family, inheritance, sovereignty, identity and, above all, the meaning of freedom, are dazzlingly held up to the light,” as the Financial Times puts it. The book can be likened to a symphony, with recurring themes and notes that hold the past, present and future sections together, including a townhouse in Washington Square Park; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; race; the definition of family, and more. We meet (adult) children trying to find their own way in the world with grandfathers trying to protect them. If you’re up for a long book (700-pages!) that is a tour de force, I highly recommend this one!
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead - Another propulsive read (or listen, in my case). Ray Carney is a furniture salesman trying to make a decent life for himself and his family in Harlem, circa 1960s, but he can’t seem rid himself of his ne’er-do-well cousin, Freddie. Freddie is always dragging Ray into his schemes and getting him entangled with shady cops, vicious local gangsters, and other lowlifes. As the description put it: “It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.” The writer in me appreciated many aspects of this novel, in particular the research and the detail that went into the knowledge of furniture and the way Whitehead captures Ray’s voice.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers - I listened to this heartrending story, which has been longlisted for several awards. If you’ve read The Overstory, you know Richard Powers cares deeply about the fate of our planet. In Bewilderment, Theo Byrne is an widowed astrobiologist searching for life throughout the cosmos while single-parenting his nine-year-old son Robin. Robin is sensitive, gifted, and inquisitive, an unusual kid who may or may not be on the spectrum. As one review in the Boston Globe put it, “In a year of unprecedented worldwide drought, fire, and flooding, [Bewilderment] couldn’t be timelier.... Whether concerning family or nature, this heart-rending tale warns us to take nothing for granted."
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry - If you’re looking for dark and funny, try this tragicomic novel, featuring two aging Irishmen sitting in a sketchy ferry terminal in Spain. They’re hardened criminals trying to locate the estranged daughter of one of the men. The language is beautiful and haunting, and as the story unfolds we learn of betrayals, violence, and romance. As one reviewer put it, Barry is “a writer of inspired prose, a funny and perceptive artist who can imbue a small story with tremendous depth. . . A sad, lyrical beauty of a novel.” I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author. A thoroughly satisfying listen (read)!
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas - Set over the course of three time periods, this novel (winner of the Sami Rohr Prize) tells the tale of the al-Raqb family, watchmen of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue. The modern-day protagonist is the American son of an Egyptian-born Jewish woman and Muslim father. The family’s story is interlaced with the efforts (by Solomon Schechter and others) to recover sacred fragments from the synagogue (aka the Cairo Geniza). It’s a delightful novel!
Educated by Tara Westover - Wow, wow, wow, I kept saying as I listened to Westover’s highly-acclaimed memoir. It’s easy to see how this made “all” the “Best of” lists the year it was published. Raised in a strict Mormon family in Idaho, Westover was not allowed to attend school and spent her childhood working in her father’s junkyard and helping with her mother’s herb business. The book chronicles her journey from “uneducated” to receiving a PhD from Cambridge, and the price she has paid for her education. Highly recommended!
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - It took me a little while to figure out what was going on in this book, especially listening to the audio version, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Saunders is a creative genius, and I highly recommend his story collections. Here, he’s taken the tragic death of young Willie Lincoln in 1862, one year into the Civil War, and turned it into story of “familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.” The audiobook features 166 (!!) different narrators, including David Sedaris, Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham and the author himself. If I was doing this again, I’d do the Whisper-sync thing to follow along in the Kindle while listening.
Asylum by Judy Bolton-Fasman: This is a fantastic memoir by Judy Bolton-Fasman that follows her quest to understand her parents and their marriage. The daughter of a Yale-educated Naval officer and a Cuban woman 17 years his junior, Judy’s detective skills serve her well as she seeks to uncover their secrets. This reader was rooting for Judy and her siblings, caught between their father’s Ashkenazic, patriotic American family and their mother’s colorful Cuban Jewish side. I really enjoyed this well-written and moving account of her journey.
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen - This is a brilliantly-executed fictional account of (as the novel’s subtitle calls it) “An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.” Before the world knew the names of Yoni Netanyahu, a national hero, and Bibi Netanyahu, their father Benzion was a minor historian and a proponent of Revisionist Zionism. Inspired by a true story of Benzion showing up to a college interview with his family in tow, in the fictionalized version the visit wreaks havoc for our protagonist, Ruben Blum, who, as the college’s only Jewish professor, has been asked to host Benzion. If you’re like me, you’ll find many cringeworthy scenes and characters, but you’ll also find the novel hilarious and rather serious. I think Taffy Brodesser-Akner nailed it in the first paragraph of her New York Times review when she called The Netanyahus “a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.”
Father Guards the Sheep by Sari Rosenblatt: This is a terrific story collection that’s full of wit and grace, characters who are “humane, sympathetic and lovably askew” as Wally Lamb put it. There are daughters finding their way in the world under the shadow of abrasive but familiar Jewish fathers, a nursing mother grappling with her husband’s renewed friendship with a college friend, young women at dead-end jobs, an adult daughter trying to hire an aide for her difficult father. In the words of one reviewer: “Each story is complete in itself, but their connection is almost novelistic in its revelation of one family in particular, and of an entire community, as well. I haven’t come across a voice this original in a very long time…” Many of the stories take place in Connecticut, so that was an extra bonus for me. I felt like I knew these characters intimately, and thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in their worlds.
Other People’s Pets by R.L. Maizes, is exactly the book you want to read this summer! It follows La La, an animal empath (meaning she can feel what animals are feeling) as she is forced to drop out of vet school to pay the legal bills for her petty burglar father. Though handling weighty themes -- crime, abandonment, wrong choices -- Maizes manages a perfect balance of comic and tragic.
Happy Father’s Day on Sunday, and happy reading every day! See you in a few weeks with new book recommendations and more…
Julie
Julie Zuckerman's debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, was published in May 2019 by Press 53. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in CRAFT, Tikkun, Jewish Women’s Archives, Crab Orchard Review, The Coil, The SFWP Quarterly, Ellipsis, MoonPark Review, Sixfold, and The MacGuffin, among others. A native of Connecticut, she lives in Israel with her husband and four children. www.juliezuckerman.com
Great recommendations, thanks!