Satisfying New Reads from Literary Veterans

For her latest book, novelist and playwright E.M. Broner ventured in a new direction, with The Red Squad (Pantheon), a novel that looks back to the 1960s. The main character is not Jewish, but a Greek-American woman named Anka. Taking on a new religion to inhabit her character was fascinating, Broner said in an interview. “I was worshiping from a different pew.”

“I think we can be true to other people’s history if we are true to our own,” she says. “I am very sympathetic to other religions, even though I don’t agree. That’s a stance that comes from being religious myself. It’s still a very Jewish book in the end. It had to be.”

Broner is the author of 10 previous books, including A Weave of Women, a novel that combines Jewish and feminist themes; The Women’s Haggadah; and a memoir, The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony. In The Red Squad, she shifts back and forth in time to create a rich narrative set in a Midwestern university during the Vietnam War, when a group of politically involved graduate students—a soon-to-be ex-priest, a Jewish fellow named Bernstein who yearns for Israel, a gay poet and others—hang out in the “bullpen” of the English department. Anka begins looking back at those days when an unsolicited Freedom of Information Act file arrives, documenting their activities. Over 40 years, the group has scattered; one has became a spy, another a fugitive. Broner captures this eccentric gang with humor and compassion.

Broner, who has long been active in the civil rights, anti-war and women’s movements, describes the novel as historical rather than autobiographical, although there are parallels with her life. She, too, taught at a Midwestern university and has taught around the world throughout her long writing career.

Eva Hoffman also returns to an early chapter in her life as inspiration for her new novel, Appassionata (Other Press). She has said the book is about, among other things, the path she didn’t take.

While growing up in Krakow, Poland, as described in her remarkable memoir Lost in Translation, Hoffman studied music, but at age 14, she fled the country with her family because of anti-Semitism. In Appassionata, Hoffman’s main character is a concert pianist of international stature who plays with great intensity. Music is part of her stance, her movements, with intimations of Schumann and Beethoven “always just below the surface of her mind and the tips of her fingers, ready to emerge. She’s trailing a comet’s tail of music, a repertory of beauty and shaped feeling and strenuous human effort.”

In beautiful prose, Hoffman, whose other books include Exit Into History, After Such Knowledge and The Secret, captures the rhythms and motifs of music, the power of sound—a challenging literary feat. The novel is also a love story, as the pianist meets a Chechen political exile while on a European concert tour. They are deeply drawn to each other, to shared passions, and he pulls her into violent and troubling events, setting off a creative crisis for her.

Anita Diamant has written six books about Jewish life, a collection of essays and three novels, and is perhaps best known for her first novel, The Red Tent. That bestselling novel has inspired the growth of a genre of fiction with sources in the Bible and midrash. Her newest novel, Day After Night (Simon & Schuster), is an intriguing tale, with roots in the true story of a group of young women from different backgrounds, all survivors of the Holocaust who escape Nazi Europe. The women were interred in Atlit, a prison north of Haifa and rescued in 1945. Diamant visited Atlit and interviewed Israelis who lived through that experience. This is a story of friendship, memory and new beginnings.

Binnie Kirshenbaum’s newest novel follows a European road trip. The travelers in The Scenic Route (Harper Perennial) are a divorced American woman who heads to Italy after losing her job and a married American expatriate she meets there. Shifting between past and present, history and memory, the novel is full of wit and meaning. A professor at Columbia University where she chairs the graduate writing program, Kirshenbaum is the author of An Almost Perfect Moment and Hester Among the Ruins as well as other novels.

Maggie Anton, whose novels are based on reimagining forgotten Jewish figures, has just published the third book in her trilogy, Rashi’s Daughters, Book III: Rachel: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France (Plume). Set in 11th century France against a background of Jewish history and a foreground of family life and scholarship, the novel portrays Rachel, the youngest and favorite daughter, as a woman of strength, intelligence and loyalty. (Fans of this series may want to turn to Rashi by Elie Wiesel, the newest book in the Nextbook series of biographies, published by Schocken. The Nobel laureate is a descendant of Rashi.)

Sandee Brawarsky, book critic of The New York Jewish Week, is author of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.