The Jew Store, by Stella Suberman

 The Jew Store, by Stella Suberman (1998)

 

This book is part-memoir, part-fiction.  The author her family’s life in a small rural Tennessee town where they were the only Jews.  She changed the name of the town and the names of some of the townspeople to protect their identities. Since much of the story occurred either before she was born, or before she was old enough to have a clear memory, had a clear memory, much is of the book is based on her imagination as to what actually happened.  The family lived in Tennessee from 1920 until 1933.  The author was barely 11 when her family moved away.

 

That said, this family memoir is probably not unlike the story of many Jews living in the rural south.  As she notes, many small southern towns had “Jew” stores – dry-goods stores run and operated by the town’s only Jews. 

 

Aaron and Rebe Bronson had both immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe/Russia.  Aaron was a self-described natural born salesman.  He set off for Nashville, Tennessee, where he had hoped to make his fortune.  He soon discovered that there were already many Jewish-run stores there; and was convinced to move to the small town of Concordia.  He and his young family arrived in Concordia in 1920 and were taken in by Miss Brookie, an eccentric agnostic who believed in being kind to others.

 

While Miss Brookie was understanding, none of the other townspeople had ever seen Jews before and were convinced they were a different species.  On the eve of the new store opening, Miss Brookie tells him that it will go well, provided the Klan approves.  The book goes into detail of the tensions between the towns people and the Bronson’s fears of anti-Semitism.  The book also describes the tensions between the white and Black population, often in terms that are very disarming.

 

Aaron named his store “Bronson’s Low-Priced Store”.  Once the store is open, however, most of the town comes to respect the Bronson’s.  Reba, however, fears for her children and wants them to grow up in a Jewish environment.  When the Depression came, Aaron fought to keep the town going, thereby winning the respect of most of the town.

 

I found this to be a charming story filled with humor.

 

Read:  January 23, 2021

 

4 Stars

 

In Our Hearts We Were Giants, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe ~ A Dwarf Family’s Survival of the Holocaust, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (2004)

 

This book is about the Ovitz family, a Jewish family from Transylvania.  In 1868, the patriarch of the family, Shimshon Eizik Ovitz.  He was born to normal-sized parents; however, he acquired a mutant gene, which made him a dwarf.  He married and his wife, who was of normal height, gave birth to two daughters, both of whom were also dwarfs.  Shortly after his wife died, Shimshon remarried a young woman, only a few years older than his oldest daughter.  Soon, their family grew.  Of Shimshon’s 10 children, seven were dwarfs.  The oldest child, Rozika, was born in 1886; the youngest, Perla, in 1921.

 

The family stuck together, with the normal-sized sibling caring for the other seven.  They built their own vaudeville troupe, known as the Lilliput Troupe, and entertained neighboring villages and cities with music, skits, jokes and other entertainment.  This made them well known and afforded them a means to survive.

 

Then the Holocaust came to their part of Transylvania.  All Jews of the area were transported to concentration camps.  The Ovitz family (minus one brother) were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The novelty of having seven little people in one family caught the eye of Joseph Mengele, and they were spared, along with their 3 normal-sized sibling.  They also convinced Mengele that several other townspeople were also family members.

 

This gave Mengele an opportunity to “experiment” on the entire extended family.  In exchange, the family was afforded certain “luxuries” not afforded the other prisoners.  They all lived in fear, however, never knowing what atrocities would be committed to their bodies.  Amazingly, despite the torture inflicted upon them, all of the members of the extended “family” survived the Holocaust.  They ultimately were able to immigrate to Israel, where they spent their remaining lives.

 

This is an important story and provides insight into the human experimentation conducted in the camps.  The book, however, jumps around too much, which interrupts the flow of the story.

 

Read:  January 21, 2021

 

3.5 Stars

 

 

 

 

 

Not Our Kind: A Novel

Not Our Kind, by Kitty Zeldis (2018)

Not Our Kind is a novel set in the late 1940s in New York City.  Young Eleanor Markowitz was in between jobs when the cab she literally bumped into Patricia Bellamy (their cabs crashed).  Eleanor had left her teaching job and was running late for an interview when the accident happened.  As fate would have it, Patricia had a 13-year old daughter, Margaux, who was recovering from polio and had just lost her tutor.  Margaux formed an instant bond with Eleanor.  Despite her misgivings, wealthy and WASPy Patricia decided to hire Eleanor, provided her friends don’t learn that Eleanor is Jewish.

The book started out with a bang, but lost steam as I continued reading.  I thought it was too cliche.  I got a feel for Eleanor and Margaux, but the other characters were too flat.  Eleanor met and was attracted to Tom, Patricia’s brother.  He was a rich playboy who had seduced at least one of Patricia’s friends in the past.  He still had a bohemian-life style.  What did Eleanor see in Tom?  The anti-Semitism was not really a main theme, other than making a point that Eleanor had to change her name from Moskowitz to Moss to get a job.  Neither she nor her mother, a hat maker, were especially observant.  Eleanor had, however, observed some of the Jewish rituals when her father was alive.  She had no problems eating shellfish and lobster in the beginning of the book, but later the point was made when treyfe was served at a party.  It was a fast and easy read, but not memorable.

Read:  December 9, 2020

3 Stars

The Lost Letter

The Lost Letter, by Jillian Cantor (2017)

This Holocaust novel alternates between Austria in 1938 and 1989 Los Angeles.  

 

In 1938, young Kristoff, an orphan who had no family life, finds himself an apprentice to Frederick Faber, a Jewish engraver who specialized in making stamps.  Faber was a famous for his engraved stamps.  As an apprentice, Kristoff lives and dines with the family.  Although not a Jew himself, he finds himself attracted to the Shabbat rituals and prayers.  He also has a crush on Faber’s 17-year-old daughter, Elena.

 

In Los Angeles in 1989, Kate Nelson is struggling through a painful divorce and a father suffering from dementia.  She has just placed her father in a nursing home and is going through his belongings.  He had been a stamp collector and Kate had wonderful memories as a child going with her father as he sought out his “gems”.  She takes his stamp collection to be appraised, thinking that there might be something of value that can be sold to help defray the costs of his medical care.

 

She takes the stamps to Benjamin Grossman, a philatelist, for his appraisal.  He discovered among the collection an unopened letter with a unique Austrian stamp.  It was the picture of an Austrian church with a small unauthorized edelweiss on its steeple.  The letter was addressed to one of Faber’s daughters, and the stamp appears to have been a Faber design, but seemed to have been issued after his apparent death.

 

Still thinking that the stamp might be of value, Benjamin and Kate locate Fraulein Faber in hopes of discovering the mystery of the edelweiss on the stamp.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

 

Read:  October. 27, 2020

 

4.5 Stars

 

 

The Last Kings of Shanghai, by Jonathan Kaufman

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China, by Jonathan Kaufman (2020)

This book is about the Sassoon family and the Kadoorie family, both from Baghdad, Iraq, who built tremendous business empires in Shanghai, China.  They arrived in Shanghai at a time when was becoming an international city.  Europeans were beginning their colonization of the city.

 The Sassoons were a wealthy business family in Iraq, but due to political influences in the early 1880s moved their enterprise, first to India, and then to China.  They increased they wealth in the Opium Wars.  This book gave a clear explanation of the origins of the Opium War, and how the Western world help to feed and exploit the opium trade in China.

 The Kadoorie family arrived in Shanghai a few decades after the Sassoons.  They built their empire from the ground up.  They opened up lavish hotels and began one of the largest electric companies in the country.

 During World War II, the Kadoories build shelter and fed numerous Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany.  China was one of the very few countries open to Jews during this period.  The city also came under Japanese occupation during the War.  The families survived through this occupation and then sided with Chiang Kai-Shek as the Nationalist and Communist faced each other.  Ultimately, Communism won and the two families lost virtually everything.

 It was an interesting slice of history.  I wish this book had been published a few years earlier and I could have read it prior to my visit to Shanghai.

 Read:  September 17, 2020

 3.5 Stars

The Guest Book, by Sarah Blake

The Guest Book, by Sarah Blake (2019)

The Miltons were an old WASP family to whom the word “summer” was a verb.  One summer afternoon in 1936, while sailing in Penobscot Bay, Ogden Milton and his wife Kitty decided on a whim to buy Crockett’s Island.  This Island became the family’s rock and anchor for the next several decades.  The novel follows three generations of Ogden women, and the story goes back and forth between Kitty the matriarch, her daughter Joan, and granddaughter Evie.

A year earlier, the Milton’s had lost their 5-year old son when he fell from a window.  Thus, when Elsa, a German Jew who was an acquaintance of Ogden’s, asked Kitty if she would take care of her young son to protect him from the War, Kitty declined.

The Milton’s were known for hosting elaborate parties on their summer island, but the guest were all old money.  The next generation began mixing with people who were NOKD (not our kind, dear).

Ogden was head of a family investment firm and all his employees were of moneyed families.  When he hired Len Levy, a Jew, everyone was wary of him and the stereotypes of Jews and money was not far from their minds.  Len was assigned a somewhat menial task of reviewing documents.  In the process, he uncovered the firm’s investment with Nazis.

The surviving Milton son, Moss, was expected to join the firm and take over from his father.  Moss, however, was artistic and wasn’t interested in his family’s firm.  He befriended Reg Pauling, an African-American writer.  On a whim, he off-handedly invited both Reg and Len to his family’s island.  When they decided to take him up on the offer, the Milton’s were caught off guard.

Kitty spent the rest of her life trying to atone for the decisions she made in her life.

I felt this book tried to take on too much by mixing race and religious stereotypes into this novel.

It was a fast read.

Read:  August 7, 2020

3 Stars

 

Oreo, by Fran Ross (1974)

 

What’s not to love about a novel that, within its first few pages contains the following: 

 

"There is no weather per se in this book.  …  Assume whatever season you like throughout.  Summer makes the most sense …  That way pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats."

 

This novel is a very funny novel about relations between African-Americans and Jews.  Fran Ross (1935 ~ 1985) was the daughter of a Jewish father and an African-American mother.  She had also been a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, hence, her humor in this book.

 

The heroine of the novel is also the daughter of a Jewish father and Black mother.  Although her given name was Christine Clark, she was known by family and friends as Oreo.  Ostensibly, it was because her grandmother called her Oriole after the bird.  But, of course, this is a nod to the fact that the name is also a racial slur.

 

Her parent’s marriage causes concern on both sides of the family.  Oreo is raised by her maternal grandmother after her father deserts the family, but not before he leaves his legacy of Yiddish words and phrases, and her mother travels with a theater troupe.

 

When she reaches of age, Oreo sets off for New York City to find her father and his new family.  This book is hard to describe, as it is written in such a humorous manner, complete with graphs, tables and mathematical equations.  It addresses heavy issues on race relations and is quite relevant in todays atmosphere.

 

Read:  August 3, 2020

 

5 Stars