Writer and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

ASKED how a journalist, versed in the here and now by the modern-day vogue of his profession, found himself wandering the byways of 18th and 19th century European-Jewish history, American radio broadcaster Michael Goldfarb speaks about “the story” – and the chase for it.

Eighteen months of research, that hallmark of great journalism, “was a big pleasure” for Goldfarb. “As a journalist, I felt as if I had a story nobody else had,” he says from London.

It was his enthusiasm for digging and discovering, which he sees as a trait common to both reporters and historians, that drove him to research and write Emancipation, the story of how liberating Europe’s Jews from almost 500 years cocooned in the ghettos led to revolution and renaissance.

Goldfarb’s 408-page tome, published by Scribe, traces the epic Jewish journey from the first stirrings of civic reformation in the Age of Reason, through the French Revolution, Napoleonic emancipation, integration and the Enlightenment, to the Holocaust.

It has brought the former London correspondent for US radio network, National Public Radio (NPR), to Australia to give lectures and to take part in two key writers festivals.
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Cesia and Abe Goldberg. Photo: AJN file

HOLOCAUST survivors Cesia and Abe Goldberg share insights into their inspiring 63-year love story in this extract from Jewish author SUZY ZAIL’S new book, Smitten, which profiles 12 different Australian couples.

Abe Goldberg shuffles into his lounge room clutching a silver box to his chest. Setting the metal case on a glass table, the silver-haired 83-year-old flips open the lid and pulls out a sheet of gold paper.

“It’s from the Queen, congratulating Cesia and I on our 60th wedding anniversary,” he smiles, laugh lines fissuring the pale skin around his eyes. He pulls out another. “This one’s from the Governor-General!”

He spills the contents of the chest onto the table and runs a spidery hand over the faded family photos, bundled birthday cards and newspaper clippings. Cesia and Abe Goldberg’s second-storey apartment is cluttered with fragments of their past: the walls are papered with framed photos of their children and the mahogany wall unit is crammed with travel mementos, graduation photos and their grandchildren’s artwork.
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Samantha Brett … tips on snaring a man. Photo: AJN file

CHANTAL ABITBOL

MEN may have long ago ditched wearing shaggy fur loincloths and arming themselves with rocks and cattle-bone clubs, but they’re still cavemen at heart. Or at least, that’s what dating columnist Samantha Brett believes.

And the quicker women accept this and indulge men’s cavemanish ways by submitting to the chase, she says, the better we’ll all be for it.

Sound old-fashioned? Perhaps. But in an age where there’s a “singles epidemic” going on, where single women outnumber men and are becoming increasingly desperate to snare a man, it’s one of the only tried and tested methods that gets the job done, Brett argues.

“It’s timeless. Men will always be the chasers,” the petite blonde, who has become known as something of a real-life Sex in the City Carrie Bradshaw Down Under, states unequivocally.

“The longer women can make them chase, and think that they’re the ‘catch’ and the ‘prize’,” she continues, “the happier they’ll be”.
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BOOK REVIEW: SHARON GIVONI
The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism. Edited by Danya Ruttenberg

THIS book strings together 18 essays by “intelligent thinkers” in the hope, states the editor Danya Ruttenberg, of finding “a new model of [Jewish religious] practice for the future”.

Why the need? According to the strong sentiment that comes through in the writings, the Torah needs to be re-interpreted to adapt to sexual needs of Jewish people in contemporary times.

Chapters explore “no-go” topics, such as Judaism’s approach to queer sexuality, female sexual empowerment, inter-religious coupling, prostitution and modesty.

Having said that, I don’t expect this book to stir up anywhere near the type of publicity that Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Sex (A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy) generated – having apparently been banned in some bookstores overseas or sold wrapped discreetly in brown paper.
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BOOK REVIEW: DON PERLGUT
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures of Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon, Fourth Estate, $32.95

AT 46 years old, Michael Chabon is no longer a young American-Jewish writer, but well and truly entering middle age –- although with progressive sympathies and his young and crazy memories still intact.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) has marked out an important place in American-Jewish literature. Equally comfortable in contemporary comic realism (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), alternate history (The Yiddish Policeman’s Union), young adult fantasy (Summerland) and short stories (A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth), the Berkeley, California-based Chabon has now turned his hand to a kind of memoir in Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures of Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.

His new book is a selection of 39 short pieces, each running around eight pages long (making it particularly easy to read), and presents a mixed bag of topics.

There is lots about his family (he is married to the Jewish-American author Ayelet Waldman, and they have four children together), some of which approaches sappiness at times.

He is capable of analysing the recent history of American feminism, male friendship, the love of a father-in-law, early sexual experiences, the process of writing itself and classic literature.
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J.D. Salinger, author of “Catcher in the Rye,” recluse and grandson of a rabbi, has died at 91.

Salinger, whose signature novel became an American classic and remains required reading at high schools and colleges across the United States, reportedly died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in New Hampshire after more than five decades of reclusiveness.

Despite his disappearance from the public stage — some would say because of it — Salinger has remained an object of fascination and enigma in the world of American letters.

The author was born in New York in 1919 to an assimilated Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother of Irish descent. Salinger’s father, Sol, was the son of a rabbi. He worked as an importer of ham and tried to get his son into the business, according to The New York Times, but the younger Salinger instead became a writer.

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AJN STAFF

HERE are some of the books by Jewish authors or with a Jewish flavour being released during 2010.

* Saul Friedlander, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, will release an abridged edition of his definitive two-volume history of the Holocaust: The Years of Persecution and The Years of Extermination. The new edition, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, is being released this month by Orion.

* Shira Nayman, who grew up in Melbourne, will release her novel The Listener in February. Published by Simon & Schuster, the novel is set against the backdrop of war and explores the havoc historical trauma plays with the pysche.

* With 12 stories of enduring love, Melbourne writer Suzy Zail’s book Smitten will be released in February to coincide with Valentine’s Day. Published by Five Mile Press, it includes the love story of Holocaust survivors Abe and Cesia Goldberg.

* Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser is based partly on her diaries, which she has kept since October 1968. It is a memoir chronicling her relationship with the acclaimed Jewish playwright from August 1975 until his death 33 years later in 2008. It is being released by Orion this month.

* Natasha Solomons’ novel Mr Rosenblum’s List explores a Jewish man’s struggle to fit in and find a place he can call home. The novel, which will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in March, was inspired by the author’s grandparents, who were evacuated from Berlin before the war.
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LEXI LANDSMAN asks prominent members of the Jewish community to discuss the best three books of the past year that they have read.

ANDREW HARRIS

Freelance photojournalist

ROBERT Mugabe elegises over an empty coffin at a state funeral; bee-keeping in Bosnia helps to explain the meaning of an old man’s life; a son makes sense of his father’s role in the old South Africa – three of my literary highlights for 2009: one shattering novel and two outstanding collections of short fiction.

Shaun Johnson’s incredible postcolonial account of his father’s life on the racial seam of apartheid South Africa, as a liberal-minded civil servant in The Native Commissioner, captures the heartbreaking futility of attempting to affect social change from inside the machinery of an essentially malevolent state.
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WHAT were the top-selling Jewish books for 2009? We asked two leading bookshops — Golds World of Judaica of Bondi and Balaclava, and Sunflower Bookshop of Elsternwick -– for their Top 10 lists. And it makes fascinating reading!

What was your favourite book of 2009? Write us a short review -– no more than 50 words -– and you could be a winner!

One Melbourne reader will win a $100 voucher from Sunflower Bookshop; and two readers (one in Melbourne and one in Sydney) will win a $50 voucher from Golds. Click here to enter. Competition entries close on Friday, January 29 at noon.
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Michael Gawenda. Photo: AJN file

BOOK REVIEW: PETER KOHN
Rocky And Gawenda: The Story Of A Man And His Mutt
By Michael Gawenda, Victory Books, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99

WITH his trusty canine Rocky as his muse, esteemed Australian journalist Michael Gawenda has kept Crikey readers entertained from February to November this year through his blog, Rocky and Gawenda.

It has been a baby-boomer’s project -– even the title seems an allusion to that classic 1960s TV cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The veteran former Age and Time editor now lectures in journalism and finally has enough hours on his hands for the introspective writing many journos yearn to create.

Gawenda’s blogs usually begin with his daily pre-dawn ritual of walking with Rocky along the St Kilda foreshore to watch the sunrise.
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