The Outside World
By Tova Mirvis
Knopf. 283 pages. $24.

Tova Mirvis’ lighthearted second novel, “The Outside World,” features young lovers who come together despite the differences in their backgrounds. This isn’t exactly “Jungle Fever” or “West Side Story,” though: Tzippy Goodman and Bryan Segal are both, after all, Orthodox Jews. It’s just that Tzippy was raised in a traditional Orthodox home, while Bryan grew up Modern Orthodox. This distinction is subtle but significant. Bryan’s father removes his yarmulke before entering the Manhattan law firm where he works, and expects his son to return from yeshiva in Israel ready for college. The family’s Modern Orthodox lifestyle can be summed up by Y.L. Gordon’s Enlightenment-era advice: “Be a man in the street and a Jew in your tent.” (more…)

The View from Stalin’s Head
By Aaron Hamburger
Random House. 245 pages. $12.95.

If recent literary fiction is any indication, Prague is giving Brooklyn a run for its money in terms of attracting young, disaffected American Jewish men. Gary Shteyngart’s “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” returns a post-Soviet Manhattanite slacker back not to the St. Petersburg of his birth, but to a thinly-veiled Prague, and Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the first draft of “Everything Is Illuminated” in an apartment there. Now another young American Jew, Aaron Hamburger, has published a collection of stories about the expatriate experience in the Czech Republic, in “The View From Stalin’s Head.” (more…)