The Williamsburg Rebbe

Even more recent books (2011)

2011-05-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

#14.

Seamus Heaney's Human Chain is a book in which every word is at once a surprise and exactly the right word!

#15.

Edmund de Waal's memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes covers the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and takes the reader from the Ukraine to Vienna to Paris and to England via the Ephrussi banking family. It is gripping and surprising.

#16.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a very short novella, will reward anyone who has been to Mendoza and/or anyone who ever thinks about the relationship between reality and the reconstruction of reality in a work of art. It follows an actual German landscape painter's trip to Argentina in the nineteenth century and contains a roaring adventure.

#17.

If you ever had an interest in Isaac Bashevis Singer and the world of Polish Jewry out of which he emerged, as well as the very ambivalent relationship of non-Jewish Poles to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, read the fascinating Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland by Agata Tusynska.

#12 and #13

2010-11-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

I have learned an enormous amount about the Holocaust from two extraordinary books, Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office and Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. Browning provides us with the plight of Jewish slave laborers in one small Polish town, and argues strongly for the logic of the Jewish survival through labor policy. Wildt carefully studies a large number of officials in the Security Service - mostly trained in the humanities, law and social sciences and preparing for racial war since their radical student days - who get their opportunity in the East to solve the "Jewish question." We clearly see that what we call the Final Solution was primarily a series of operations spearheaded by the SS - far too many with PhDs - against Polish and Russian Jews.

2010-08-20T07:15:00.001-07:00

#11 - Perhaps the best novel I have read in a decade! Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall - scarily intelligent, psychologically acute, and simultaneously a brainteaser and a totally readable narrative, it has not a wasted word and, amazingly, the history is seamlessly folded into daily life.

2010-07-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

#10 Book recommendation
Beatrice and Virgil, an unusual Holocaust allegory by the celebrated author of Life of Pi, is well worth your time and money. A story within a story within a story, it opens up, slowly but with immense originality, numerous issues about the Holocaust rarely done so well in fiction. And it is very short!

Latest burger rankings

2010-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

If it were not for the price (double that of Ray's), the burger at Vidalia would tie the burger at Ray's with nearly a perfect score. But $7 vs $17 keeps Ray's on top, with a burger not only unsurpassed, but (aside from Vidalia) unrivaled in quality in NoVA, MD or DC.

2010-03-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

Burger Rankings Change
The former #3 burger is now #2, moving Black Market's excellent burger down one slot and moving Black's (Bethesda) to the slot behind the sensational Ray's Hell Burger. Black's (tasted twice) has fine meat cooked to perfection, fresh veggies and four choices of cheese, with a super bun. Don't miss the fries - they can rarely be beat.

2009-11-25T08:12:00.000-08:00

#9 Book Recommendation

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a short novel you will not be able to put down. Set in impoverished Ireland of the early 1950s (not 1850s), and centering around Ellis, a young woman we come to know well, its focus is partly on Ireland and Brooklyn of that period, but mostly on Ellis, and her point of view. Toibin's novels develop complicated feelings with the simplest of prose; his deep psychological realism grabs you, even without Irish nationalism and Catholicism in your background. The steerage voyage to Brooklyn is unforgettable, surely one of the most vivid on record. You will love it!

#8 Book Suggestion

2009-09-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov. My colleague in Russian literature calls this the most important Russian novel of the first half of the twentieth century, and while that may be arguable, that this is a sensational work is not. Three distinct narratives weave in and out, highlighted by the farcical and satirical Russia of the 1920s and 1930 (Stalin's terror) and a serious story of Pilate and Yeshua (=Jesus, stripped of all messianic attributes) with an amazing crucifixion scene. Note especially the clever ways the narrator/author connects these two stories set 1,900 years apart (e.g. weather, architecture, time frame).

2009-05-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Williamsburg Rebbe is now chairing a tasting panel dedicated to ranking burgers in the Metro DC area. As of late May, 2009, the panel has visited 14 burger joints, and evaluated the gourmet centerpiece in six categories (burger, cheese, additions, bun, price, size) worth 10 points each. #1, with 55 points, is Ray's Hell-Burger (Arlington VA), and #2, with 48 points, is Black Market (Garrett Park, MD). #3-14 are available on request.

2008-12-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

#7 - Liana Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau
I cannot believe I did not know until last month of this brilliant translation (in 1991) by the novelist and short-story writer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, of Millu's six essays on her experiences in Birkenau. You will cry, and you will be amazed at her elegance, in these astonishing stories which tell of the women who lived and suffered alongside her during her months at Birkenau in 1944. They are stories "of violence and tragedy, but also of resistance, of dreaming in the middle of a nightmare, and of the endurance of the human spirit." Primo Levi says that it is "one of the most powerful European testimonies to come form the women's lager at Auschwitz-Birkenau."

2008-12-27T13:04:00.000-08:00

Book Recommendation #6
Clive Sinclair, in his True Tales of the Wild West, claims that the hybrid work he has written could be called "creative realism," but he prefers the term "dodgy nonfiction." Either way, it is so much fun! Two Jewish cousins from Luton, England, Saltzman and Peppercorn, wander the west trying to write it up. Peppercorn is a photojournalist doing a piece on the Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park in So Dakota, but that is just an excuse for trying to find his inner cowboy. Saltzman is an American Studies professor from the University of St Albans and his adventures are more startling and even more fun (if that is possible). Much of this "cannot put it down" book is packed with details about actors and movies and scenes in movies: did you know that Mrs Wyatt Earp was of German Jewish ancestry? The dime-novel cover says it all (as you will see when you are done) and this is a clever, funny, slanted take on America, pop culture and much much else.

#5 to Recommend

2008-06-06T05:56:00.000-07:00

Those of your who were present for the discussion of the stories of Tevye and his daughters from the superb collection by the same name, heard me suggest that you now read THE ADVENTURES OF MOTTEL THE CANTOR'S SON, a hilarious Sholom Aleichem novel (his only one) about the Jewish immigrant experience from eastern Europe. And those of you who were not present will enjoy its comedy and its intelligence, both integrated into a little book you cannot put down. It may no longer be in print, but copies abound from used book sellers.

Book #4 to Recommend

2008-04-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

Amy Bloom's Away is a literary triumph, despite the simplicity of a 1926 transcontinental shlep by an immigrant Jewish seamstress as the basis of the plot. You will not be able to put it down.

Book #3 to recommend

2008-03-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

This one is really extraordinary: Ehud Havazelet, Bearing the Body. Some of you may know his exceptional short stories, but this is his first novel. It is rich and unforgettable on most every page.

2008-01-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

I wish to recommend a second book: The Mascot by Mark Kurzen. You will not want to put it down.

A sensational book to recommend

2007-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

You should all read Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife - a book about a zookeeping couple in Warsaw in the 1930s and 1940s. You will especially find powerful the relationship of this non-Jewish couple to the Jews in the ghetto.