I recently received a few books in the mail from publishers wanting to get free publicity on Jewlicious my feedback. Below are reviews of the first two books I’ve read.
Schlepping Through the Alps : My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd by Sam Apple
Sam, a typically neurotic Jewish writer, meets Hans, a Yiddish singing Austrian shepherd while the latter is in New York singing his songs. Hans’ father is a Jew and his mother is a gentile Austrian who was tortured by the Gestapo for being a communist. A year after their initial meeting, Sam heads off to Austria in order to follow Hans and his sheep around as an apprentice shepherd and chronicle his life. This book is both funny and heavy at the same time. The heaviness comes from the obvious themes dealing with the holocaust and prejudice – hello! A book that discusses both sheep and dead Jews, hello! Obvious much? But the book is funny too – Hans is definitely eccentric, Sam writes poetically about being knee deep in sheep poop, and several other whimsical passage make for a riveting and original work.
Sam also spends his time in post-Jorg Haider Austria looking for remnants of the deeply ingrained anti-semitism that allowed the Austrian people to greet Hitler like a returning hero. Indeed, the Holocaust seems constantly present in this book. Schlepping is like a combination of Jonathan Safran Foer and Tom Robbins and contains multiple divergent dualities: introspective and instructive as well as deeply tragic yet often whimsical.
I totally enjoyed reading and thinking about Schlepping. The theme that stuck with me, the one that seems to be a common element of many Judaically themed works of fiction, is that of memory. Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated talked about memory being the 6th sense of all Jews and he may have something there:
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing…memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to the other prinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from strokiung his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abhaham tested the knife point to be sure Issac would feel no pain – that the Jew was able to know why it hurts.
Think about what this means and get back to me!
The J. A. P. Chronicles by Isabel Rose
In this debut novel by Isabel Rose we meet seven well-to-do Jewish New York women who were once bunk mates at a prestigious summer camp. The seven get together at a camp reunion 10 years later. We meet Ali, a documentary filmmaker who was a tortured outsider, but attends the reunion in order to film a documentary about the camp. Ali is a hipster who lives on the Lower East Side with her Irish Catholic boyfriend. She has purple hair, a ring on her rhinoplasty-free nose and is pregnant. At the reunion, Ali decides to do a documentary featuring her bunkmates in order to find out what her former tormentors have been up to.
We then meet Dafna who seems to be on a perennial quest to get married, while her best friend Beth is planning the perfect wedding to a man she pretty much dislikes. Arden is a semi-homeless drugged up floozie who is in and out of rehab and strange men’s beds. Jessica is an actress who seems stuck doing summer stock. Laura is a powerful talent agent secretly fighting breast cancer and Wendy, who seems to have an idyllic life in a wealthy suburb with her perfect husband and lovely children is actually (gasp!) having an affair with her former female head counsellor.
Sprinkled throughout the book are references to shopping, fashion, popular mood altering prescription drugs, lots of sex with sheygetzes, derisive references to shiksas, sexual abuser Rabbis, gang rape, girl campers gone wild etc., in other words ideal summer chick reading material. The popular girls chronicled here get their comeuppance one way or another and all the sympathetic characters live happily ever after.
To whatever extent this book is an accurate description of the lives of next generation of wealthy, influential Upper East Side Jews, well… what can I say, we’re in trouble. But if this sort of thing interests you and you want to relish a sometimes funny story of vengeance set in New York, get it. Truly an ideal summer book.
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Hey! It’s not as if I wrote the book.
I believe you’re looking for a different thread from a previous post. Sorry, no sheep. Especially after a date at Chili’s. You pervert.
Oh. I was hoping you would write something about the sheep.
Sex? These are books about Jews. You want sex? Read about someone else.
Um, Conserva-Girl, you forgot the hot sex.
Oh, no. More books about Jewish stereotypes. I think I have a way to make them more interesting, though.
“Japping through the Alps”. Seven well-to-do Jewish women find themselves in the company of a Yiddish-singing Austrian shepherd who convinces them, in his broken English, that he can get them Prada, cheap. What he has actually told them is that he has a lot of sheep, They follow him through the mountains on a quest for designer bags and learn an important lesson about animal husbandry.
“Shlepping through Bloomingdales”. Sam, a typically neurotic Jewish writer finds himself lost in the shoe department of Bloomies in Manhattan. Although skeptical at first, he follows Hans, a seasoned shoe salesman around as an apprentice and chronicles his life in the mountainous shoebox stacks.
The concept of national memory fascinates me, like collective unconscious. I know it’s inherently unprovable, but I feel it to be true. Impossible to know, in the media age, how much of my memory is true and primal, and how much is forged by images I’ve seen in books and on TV. But I do experience moments of transcendent memory, and feel more connected to the national consciousness as a result.
The JAP Chronicles has seven protagonists? Seems like too many for me. Plus they’re all living nightmare lives: everyone’s unhappy. Throw in debtor’s prison, and you’ve got Dickens. But I guess as long as the popular chicks get their comeuppance(s), I’m down with this book.
ck, if you don’t want to keep your copy, I’ll take it off your hands in NY.