Books

Review: Mossad

By Ahron Bregman, March 17, 2016

By Michael Bar-Zoharand Nissim Mishal

The Robson Press, £9.99

It is quite difficult to review, let alone write, books such as Mossad (sub-titled The Great Operations of Israel's Secret Service), as both authors and reviewers are often in the dark, confronted by a lack of information.

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Review: Groucho Marx:The Comedy of Existence

By Clive Sinclair, March 17, 2016

By Lee Siegel

Yale University Press, £16.99

Despite the fact that Groucho Marx appears in Yale's Jewish Lives series, it is far from being a conventional biography. If it's the facts you're after, the Das Kapital of Marxist studies remains Simon Louvish's Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers.

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Vital tours by Cooks

March 17, 2016

What makes ordinary people embark upon the extraordinary? While others stood by as the Nazis began their systematic extermination of the Jews, some decent individuals had the courage to do whatever they could to rescue those destined for the gas chambers.

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What really makes a book Jewish?

By Hugo Rifkind, March 10, 2016

What makes a book a Jewish book? Does it have to be a book by a Jew, or can it simply be about Jews? Does it have to be a book by one person, but with two opinions, and perhaps three cars? Or, could it be a fairly universal book, of equal interest to all, but merely with a Jew in it? Page 173: a door opens, enter a man in a yarmulke. Is that enough?

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Review: Final Solution

By Ben Barkow, March 10, 2016

By David Cesarani
Macmillan, £25

Can the content of a book be entirely untouched by the circumstances of its writing? Surely not, and Final Solution is poignant for being shot through with the sense of an ending - tragically, David Cesarani did not live to see its publication.

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Review: Their Promised Land

By Julia Neuberger, March 10, 2016

By Ian Buruma
Atlantic Books, £18.99

Ian Buruma's moving love letter to his grandparents' memory is evocative and absorbing. I can just remember his grandparents - friends of my grandparents, though half-a-generation younger, and a whole generation more English.

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Passionate, poignant, painful

By Anne Garvey, March 3, 2016

Maman, What Are We Called Now?
By Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar (Trans: Francine Yorke)
Persephone Books, £12

But You Did Not Come Back
Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Trans: Sandra Smith)
Faber & Faber, £12

Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's is an exquisite book, a dramatic snatch of history, written in the form of a diary - passionate, indignant and beautifully expressed.

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Three matching gems from a Nobel laureate's crown

By David Herman, March 3, 2016

After the Circus
By Patrick Modiano (Trans: Mark Polizzotti)
Yale University Press, £10.99

In the Café of Lost Youth
By Patrick Modiano (Trans: Euan Cameron)
MacLehose Press, £14.99

The Black Notebook
By Patrick Modiano (Trans: Mark Polizzotti)
MacLehose Press, £14.99

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You’ll be ongeshtupped

By Jonathan Margolis, February 25, 2016

I have been conducting exhaustive, and often exhausting, field research into New York delis for 35 years. The Carnegie was my first, and its Brobdingnagian chopped liver sandwiches sufficient for two Brits - perhaps one-and-a-half British Jews- were my introduction to noshing, US style.

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Review: The Extra

By Stoddard Martin, February 25, 2016

By A. B. Yehoshua
Halban, £12.99

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