If you are confined to home with coronavirus, how should you spend your time? If your internet crashes and you’re left without Netflix or BBC iPlayer, what will you do?
What better way to spend the time than to read those great Jewish books you always meant to get round to? But which ones? Here’s my top ten.
First, how about some books to cheer you up? Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was Philip Roth’s breakthrough novel, hilarious and high energy, but it might put you off liver for life.
Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) is a wisecracking account about the break-up of her marriage by the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally (‘I’ll have what she’s having’), Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, complete with some terrific recipes.
Then there’s Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Mighty Walzer (1999), the story of Jewish tennis table players coming of age in Manchester (my own favourite Jacobson is Coming from Behind (1983), a sort of Jewish Lucky Jim but much funnier, but each to their own).
Or do you need consoling? How about some books which will make you realise things could be so much worse?
An obvious choice would be Kafka. After all, a dry cough, sweats and fevers may feel bad but at least you haven’t been turned into a cockroach. So perhaps Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, or his greatest short story, The Judgment?
But you may prefer something less well known: there is Clive Sinclair’s brilliantly and moving description of what he went through in the 1990s in A Soap Opera from Hell (1998), a sort of modern version of Job.
Or there are Isaac Babel’s famous short stories, Red Cavalry (I recommend the Penguin edition with David McDuff’s translation). Ideally, read it with Babel’s 1920 Diary, the notebooks which were the source of Babel’s stories, even more violent and terrible than the fiction. Just when the Jews thought it couldn’t be worse after the Poles and Ukrainians came through their villages, then suddenly the Cossacks. They then leave and the Poles and Ukrainians return.
Or perhaps this is the time to tackle big books on big subjects?
Simon Schama’s Citizens (1989) is beautifully written and changed the way a generation thought about the French Revolution. And there is Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece about war and peace under Stalin, Life and Fate (1985).
Or, finally, three really smart, interesting books about Jewish refugees which you can read and re-read for weeks: Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010) (do get the hardback Illustrated Edition), Philippe Sands, East West Street (2016) and Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005).
They are all newish, published in the last 15 years, full of twists and turns, family dramas full of mystery, set against the dark history of the Holocaust. As soon as you have finished them you will want to start again.
Happy reading.
David Herman is a regular book reviewer for the JC
