Hanukkah for Grownups

In all of the hubbub of the season, one oft-overlooked demographic is the Hanukkah-celebrating adult, which is really tragic as there are so many wonderful gift ideas out there!

Just released this fall, Songs For The Butcher's Daughter is an extremely well-researched novel, chock full of subtle clues that Peter Manseau not only loves his subject matter, but also really knows what he's talking about. Manseau ably demonstrates his knowledge of the canon of Jewish-American literature, at one point essentially recreating an iconic scene from Abraham Cahan's Yekl, crafted in such a way as to be a knowing nod to his literary predecessors rather than a cheap imitation. Having known several people over the years who have worked at the real-life National Yiddish Book Center (as did Manseau), Songs also bears the slightly dusty patina of true experience. While this novel will be enjoyed by anyone, those with any background in Jewish literature, the NYBC, or even just Jewish geography will be aware of an entirely different and subtly witty story. And for all you teachers and students of the literary canon out there, it will raise all sorts of interesting questions about the fate of the Jewish novel when one so well-crafted and poised to be a classic in its own right was in fact penned by a Catholic.
Songs is a most excellent companion read to Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History, an account of how Lansky first began the organization that turned into the National Yiddish Book Center - an account deliberately echoed in dramatic book-rescue scenes in Songs. Lansky, who deserves to be called one of the greatest cultural adventurers of our time, writes a gripping chronicle that travels from New York to Moscow to Cuba on a quest to save the world's Yiddish books from the rubbish bin. Along the way with him, you'll want to laugh, cry, and try smuggling books across the border!



Reference works are always a good choice for gifts, and a couple titles stand out this year. Edited by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, the newly-revised edition of Jewish Literacy is the ultimate one-volume everything Jewish reference book, with hundreds of short, cyclopedic, cross-referenced entries from Torah to modern Jewish thought and everything in between. If Bible is your thing, the Jewish Publication Society has recently released a pocket-sized edition of their translation of the Hebrew Bible. I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that I've been waiting for a nice portable all-English edition of the Bible for years! They've even made it available in a variety of covers (white gift edition, denim like a jeans back-pocket, moss, and rose) to suit anybody on your gift list...



Two collections of short stories also deserve special mention - Nathan Englander's For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, and Shira Nayman's Awake In The Dark. Englander's are beautifully sublime stories on some of the most difficult topics, told with the ineffable aura of truth only fables posses. The writing is nearly unbearable itself, so heartbreakingly dense and beautiful that I had to read the stories like I would eat dark chocolate - slowly, in small pieces, and with a bit of a break in between tastes. Nayman's stories are no less dark and wonderful and difficult to read, as she weaves beautiful, terrible, dreamily surreal stories of loss and discovery.