Sam Astrachan was only 21 when his first novel appeared, in 1956; everyone, including his professor Lionel Trilling and his editor Robert Giroux, thought he would be the great American Jewish novelist. To learn what happened, read my essay on Astrachan, which appeared today on Nextbook.org.

Ludwig Lewisohn doesn’t get much press these days, but he was the most famous Jewish writer in America before WWII, and his books were praised not just by literary heavyweights like Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann, but also by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Take a look at my appreciation of this master over at Nextbook.org.

Today Nextbook.org published an essay I wrote about the neglected African-American novelist John Oliver Killens, in whose blistering novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963), a Jew teams up with some disaffected African-American soldiers to wage bloody war on the racist U.S. military at the end of WWII. It’s a bizarre and almost entirely forgotten moment in the strange and often tragic history of black-Jewish relations in American literature. Please take a look over at Nextbook.

Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life
By Yehoshue Perle
Translated by Meier Deshell and Margaret Birstein
Yale University Press, $38.

One of the fascinating things about nostalgia is how well it ages. While science fiction can turn to kitsch in as little as a decade, personal histories often grow richer, and more valuable, with the passage of time.

Take, for example, Yehoshue Perle’s autobiographical Yiddish novel, Yidn fun a gants yor. When the book – which was recently translated into English as Everyday Jews – first appeared in Warsaw back in 1935, it already bore a subtitle reflecting its focus on the past, its more or less Proustian recherche du temps perdu. (more…)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
By Michael Chabon
HarperCollins. 432 pages. $26.95.

There’s no better way to describe Michael Chabon – who’s most famous for his monumental, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – than as a literary superhero. He may not have X-ray vision or the ability to bend iron bars with his hands, but his gifts as a wordsmith are no less extraordinary or exuberant. In a new book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon flexes his hypertrophied storytelling muscles once again, and puts on a dazzling show. (more…)

The Ministry of Special Cases
By Nathan Englander
352 pages. Knopf. $25.

In an extraordinary debut collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander demonstrated a knack for cooking up narrative premises, whether realistic or fantastic, that were spiced with symbolic or religious intensity. “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” for one example, concerns a non-Jew, Charles, who suddenly, inexplicably, realizes that he is “the bearer of a Jewish soul.” Englander handles this supernatural conceit adroitly, keeping it firmly grounded in the tactile details of Charles’ life (should he, or should he not, eat the creamed chicken?), so that ultimately the story manages to speak to the thorniest dilemmas of Jewish identity in our time. What, after all, does it mean to possess a Jewish soul?

Given his previous works’ settings, it may surprise Englander’s fans that his highly anticipated first novel takes place not among the Hasids of New York or Jerusalem, but during Argentina’s Dirty War, when thousands of activists and students were “disappeared”—abducted, tortured, and often killed by a brutal government, without legal process or justification. (more…)

Everyman
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin. 182 pages. $24.

Half a century ago, when he was all of 21 years old, Philip Roth was already thinking seriously about death. In 1954, he published a short story called “The Day It Snowed,” about a small boy, Sydney, who is disturbed to discover that first his aunt, then his uncle, and finally his stepfather have all “disappeared.” So his mother tells him, at least, hoping to spare him grief; in each case, while the family heads to the cemetery, Sydney’s left home alone. Confused, the boy takes to the streets, hoping to locate the missing persons on his own, and before long he receives a brutal education as to the nature of mortality.

The story is no masterpiece—Roth, barely out of college, had not yet developed the uncanny confidence of Goodbye, Columbus—but already, in embryonic form, it enacts a central principle of the author’s mature work. In two dozen or so extraordinary novels he has written since, Roth has often employed much the same tactic: he has sought out innocence, uncovered naivety, and laid bare the truth, no matter how much it hurts. (more…)

East River
By Sholem Asch
444 pages. Kessinger. $36.95.

Every movement needs a slogan, and the Jewish Enlightenment—the idea, simply put, that Jewish traditions and modern western culture can coexist harmoniously—finds its tersest expression in Y. L. Gordon’s pithy 1863 advice: “Be a man on the street and a Jew in your tent.” The problem with this prescription, of course, is that while Jews are out there in the street being men, they tend to encounter women. One thing leads to another, a man invites a woman back to his tent for a nightcap, she agrees—and all of a sudden, Cinderella-like, the man transforms back into a Jew and the woman into a dreaded shiksa. Much hand-wringing, and occasional violence, ensues. (more…)

Absurdistan
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House. 333 pages. $32.95.

Memoirs of a Muse
By Lara Vapnyar
Random House. 212 pages. $32.95.

The end of the Cold War may have been neither as sudden nor as gruesome as the end of the Second World War, but for the conflict’s losers, and particularly residents of the former Soviet Union, it was no picnic. Some found themselves stuck at home, disempowered by oligarchs and jeopardized by civil unrest, while others — many of them Jewish — optimistically hopped planes to places like Newark or Toronto, only to discover that mechanical engineering degrees and intimacy with Pushkin entitled them to nothing better in North America than driving a taxi. New novels by Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar, young writers born in the Soviet Union and now based in New York City, offer guided tours of the fleeting exuberance and enduring frustrations of such post-Soviet adventures. (more…)

Like her prize-winning debut novel, “In the Image” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), Dara Horn’s remarkable second work spans generations, continents and languages. “The World To Come,” which will be published in January 2006 by W.W. Norton, centers on former child prodigy Ben Ziskind and his twin sister, Sara, who live, love, mourn and steal art in contemporary New York. Tracing the mysterious provenance of a Marc Chagall painting, the book also relates the real-life tragedy of the Yiddish writer known as Der Nister (the Hidden One), who was murdered by the Soviets before completing his masterpiece. Horn recently discussed the new book with Josh Lambert, who reviews contemporary Jewish fiction for such publications as the Forward, the San Francisco Chronicle and Canada’s Globe and Mail, among others. (more…)