Rachel Biale & Nehemia Stern on Israel’s Utopian Experiments JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 8, Number 4 Winter 2018 $10.45 Hillel Halkin Thinking with Amichai: Pinecones & Poems Ruby Namdar The Ruined House (An Exclusive Excerpt) Sarah Rindner Dara Horn’s New Novel Adam Kirsch White Fire on Black Fire PLUS Simon Gordon Balfour at 100 Editor JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Last chance. Allan Arkush Please join us! Art Director a few tickets are still available! Betsy Klarfeld Sunday, January 14, 2018 Managing Editor Amy Newman Smith rd Our 3 Annual Conference Editorial Assistant Kate Elinsky with Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein Publisher Eric Cohen Advancement Officer Ruth R. 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JEWISH REVIEW Register: www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event OF BOOKS JEWISH REVIEW Volume 8, Number 4 Winter 2018 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Rome and Jerusalem (and Cardinal Newman), Singer and Rabbi Dessler (and an fMRI Study), Levinas and Lear, and More FEATURES 5 Hillel Halkin A Complex Network of Pipes You couldn’t know Yehuda Amichai without being struck by the casual way in which original and sometimes startling metaphors dropped from him in ordinary conversation. It wasn’t done for effect. It was just the way his mind worked. One thing made him think of another and what it made him think of was generally something that would not have occurred to anyone else. 8 Simon Gordon 100 Years of Solicitude: Commemorating Balfour The controversies over how (and whether) Great Britain should celebrate the recent centenary of the Balfour Declaration were revealing. Anglo-Israel relations have rarely been uncomplicated, but they could soon be much worse. REVIEWS 10 Adam Kirsch Black Fire on White Fire The Jewish Bible: A Material History by David Stern 12 Stuart Schoffman In Praise of Humility The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age by Steven Weitzman 15 Sarah Rindner Rachel and Her Children Eternal Life: A Novel by Dara Horn 17 Bernard Wasserstein The Family Heretic What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home by Mark Mazower 20 Matti Friedman Ritchie's Boys and the Men from Zion Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler by Bruce Henderson • Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler by Rick Richman 22 Benjamin Balint The Many Dybbuks of Romain Gary The Kites by Romain Gary, translated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot Promise at Dawn: A Memoir by Romain Gary, translated by John Markham Beach 25 Zalman Rothschild Succession, Secession! Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America by Samuel C. Heilman 28 Rachel Biale History of a Passé Future We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz by Yael Neeman, translated by Sondra Silverston 31 Nehemia Stern Life on a Hilltop City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement by Sara Yael Hirschhorn 34 Matthue Roth The Last Bedtime Story: Roz Chast's Sort-of Tour Guide Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast 36 Allan Arkush A Tale of Two Stories The Story of the Jews, Volume Two: Belonging, 1492–1900 by Simon Schama • Et Hadashah (A New Age: Eighteenth-Century European Jewry, 1700–1750) by Shmuel Feiner READING 40 Joseph Epstein Joseph Roth: Grieving for a Lost Empire Always in flight, one of the world’s permanent transients, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was a one-man diaspora. A drunk and a fantasist, he was also a marvelous writer whose work was bedizened with metaphor, laced with simile. THE ARTS 44 Ruby Namdar The Ruined House An exclusive excerpt from the new novel. 47 Diane Cole Ink and Blood Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art curated by Debra Schmidt Bach • Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art edited by Irvin Ungar EXCHANGE 49 Andrew N. Koss "The Point of Free Will": A Response to Abraham Socher 50 Abraham Socher Always Messy: A Rejoinder to Andrew N. Koss LAST WORD 51 Jake Marmer Babel's Transcendent Mistakes On the cover: Pinecones and Poems by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Inky Seas Elsewhere Book. It tempts one into longings and imaginings, to a deep thing I remembered Emmanuel Levinas After reading Sarah Rindner’s excellent review of but just to thwart it one recites the Psalms. In saying about fatherhood in Ethics and Infinity: “it is Ilana Kurshan’s new memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink the morning it wants to sleep till nine, but one a relationship in which the other is radically other, (“Swimming in an Inky Sea,” Fall 2017), I was re- awakens it at daybreak. What this enemy within and where nevertheless it is in some way me,” and minded of the Qur’an’s use of the same simile: hates most of all is a cold ritual bath. But there is that it is “as if my being . exceeded the possibilities a little spot in the brain that has the final word, of a being.” Were the sea ink for the words of my Lord, the and when it commands the feet to go, they go, be When I went back to my old paperback copy of sea would surely fail before the words of my the water cold as ice. In time opposing this lusting those interviews with Philippe Nemo, I had no idea Lord fail. (Sura 18, verse 109) creature becomes a habit. One bends it, gags it, or what Levinas meant in the sentences that came after else one lets it babble on without answering. that (this happens in Levinas, and modern French Were the trees that are in the earth pens, were philosophers generally, at least with me), something the sea ink with seven more seas to swell its tide, about an “upheaval of the ontological condition.” the words of God would not be spent. (Sura 31, Still the first bit about what Levinas called the “future verse 27) beyond my own being” seems to be getting at what Millman lays out so clearly from Cordelia’s point of Whether the conceit appeared in (and for) rab- view: “I cannot love you all, not even for the best of the binic literature first is an interesting question. kingdom, because the kingdom is worthless if I can- Ben Rich not inherit it, because there is no ‘I’ to do so.” Bravo! Norwalk, CT Jacob Levy Montreal, Canada Rome and Jerusalem (and Cardinal Newman) Noah Millman Responds: To seek Michael Solomon Alexander’s importance, I’m so glad that my little essay prompted you to as the late Elliott Horowitz does in his learned re- watch performances of the Lear online. It is extraor- view of Todd Endelman’s book on meshumadim dinary to live in a time when performances such as (apostates) in the Jewish world (“Straying from the those of Ian McKellen and Romola Garai, Laurence Fold?” Fall 2017), is to look for it in the wrong place. Olivier and Anna Calder-Marshall, are available in That place is the history of Anglicanism and the loss a few keyboard strokes. of its great imperial intellect, John Henry Newman, I am regrettably unconversant with the Levinas to the Church of Rome. The Jerusalem bishopric essay in question, but I am humbled to think that I scheme of 1841, conceived by Germans and pro- Thenekudat ha-bechirah of Rav Dessler and Singer’s was able to shed light on such a luminary’s think- moted by evangelicals within the Church of Eng- description of Itche Nokhum’s ability to overcome ing.