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The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books LLC |
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Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher |
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Visit our partners - the Jewish Literary Journal and the Jewish Storyteller Press by clicking on their logos below.
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JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES:
Jewish Vietnamese
"I never heard of the Holocaust, or Judaism, until my junior year of college.
I didn’t know a Jewish person until I met my now-husband of twenty-plus years.
It might be astounding for a Jew to hear of someone who would be unaware of the existence of the Holocaust. In one part of my memoir, Soles of a Survivor, I share the story of how a clueless teenager adopted into a Christian household in the South relishes being Jewitnamese nowadays.
While I was growing up in Vietnam after the Vietnam-American War, the Communist government did not allow its citizens to listen to any foreign news. We would be arrested if we were accused of listening to news other than what the Communist Party allowed. My days were filled with information about how great Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party were, and how horrible the Americans were for occupying Vietnam. There was not much diversity in my beloved country. Practicing religion and listening to the news about the outside world were prohibited — some of the reasons I never heard of the Holocaust."
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Here’s what Matt Sutherland, Editor-in-Chief, Foreword Reviews had to say: “Setting aside the Great Depression of the 1930s, there are two unforgettable decades that stand out in American consciousness over the past one hundred years: the Roaring twenties and the sixties—and if you’re left wondering what all the hubbub is about, you can’t do better than to check out some of the great books based on those periods: The Great Gatsby, say, or The Sun Also Rises; and for the sixties, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Helter-Skelter, and Slaughterhouse Five would be a nice start.
"In Jacobo’s Rainbow, David Hirshberg is making a bid to join the short list of very special novels about the tumultuous sixties—a time of reckoning as the US finally began to confront systemic racism, poverty, its aggressive use of military force, and other societal ills. Today’s headlines betray a country still engaged in that reckoning fifty-plus years later.”
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CHAPTER FROM A NOVEL: by Henry Saltzman
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The Teacher Is A Goy
"On this particular day, the focus of the lesson was geography. The textbook, The Geography of the United States, with a special section on New York State, was still being used in 1952 by New York City’s elementary school children in the middle grades. This surprised him because he too had suffered through the very same text in Public School 84 back in 1939. It was a large, squarish book, an odd size as textbooks went in those days. The covers were a dark, lush green, like the glowing color of the leaves of high summer. It was a maturely and well-written book. Its vocabulary was uncompromisingly precise and scientific, challenging its young readers with many technical terms. It was illustrated with black and white photographs, pastel-colored maps and a multitude of charts and bar graphs. It made little compromise to the young, immature readers who were commanded by higher educational authorities to absorb the geography, economy, and natural history of their state by means of this formidable guide."
"I was born and bred in Brooklyn and taught English for ten years in the Borough’s junior and senior high schools as well as in a number of yeshivas. In 1959, I joined the Ford Foundation as advisor on urban education."
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EXCERPT FROM A NOVEL:
Proles, by Barry Bergman
"It was this sad-sack cracker, Renfroe, who gave me my mining handle. The crew just coming off graveyard, drinking our breakfast at the company-owned watering hole. From then on I was Philly. That or Bussbaum, the name I was born with. For Philadelphia Jew. Something he’d picked up from our foreman, a retired army cracker who’d returned to civilian life strutting his sergeant stripes, same as a dozen other gum-popping flunkies too low in the pecking order to merit a plastic hardhat. The grunt didn’t mean anything by it. The crew called him Special Ed because he’d left part of his skull in Nam. To his face it was Renfroe or just plain Ed, a given name Mr. and Mrs. Renfroe would likely have come to regret, had they known, along with their other, deeper regrets. Odds are he hadn’t crossed paths with a Jew this side of Da Nang, or wherever it was he got shelled. It didn’t bother me. We had a slag skimmer who went by Dago and a craneman called Chief. This was the way of things. Plus I wasn’t much of a Jew. And I’d never set foot in Philly."
Barry Bergman is an ex-New Yorker and a lapsed newspaper reporter, magazine writer and editor, and communications professional. He spent much of the pandemic rewriting Proles, his first completed novel, at his home in the S.F. Bay Area, which he shares with his journalist wife and two cats.
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BROWSE THROUGH THE REST OF THE
FIG TREE BOOKS LIBRARY
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MY JEWISH YEAR: Chapter 8 - Simchat Torah, by Abigail Pogrebin
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I am determined to meet Simchat Torah head-on: dancing wildly with the scrolled law, holding it like a dance partner. But I’m nervous about boogieing alone. So I ask my family as the holiday hour approaches: “Anyone want to come dance with the Torah with me?”
Blank stares.
Daughter: “I have so much homework, Mom.”
Husband: “You’re seriously going to dance with strangers?”
Son: “I love you, but you’re on your own.”
Me: “Fine. Abandon me.”
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Jewish Interest Films
The Gold Coast International Film Festival is taking place from October 10 to 17, 2021, Long Island, New York. The Festival will once again bring the best in new and independent films to audiences throughout the region. Over the past year, thousands have logged on to Gold Coast’s virtual films and filmmaker Q&As. Gold Coast, which recently marked its 25th anniversary, is now thrilled to welcome audiences back into the theater for a full slate of the type of award-winning feature length and short films that audiences have come to expect. Independent, documentary and foreign films will all be showcased at Manhasset Cinemas throughout the Festival week. Films and filmmaker Q&As will also be available virtually on GCIFF’s digital platform enabling the Festival to engage with audiences at home and living beyond our region. Additionally, the Festival will feature a great selection of outdoor film screenings and events.
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BLOG: With commentary and Guest Blogs on culture & current events, plus mini-reviews of books not published by Fig Tree Books
CLICK on the BLOG image to READ, REPLY to what we've written, COMPOSE something on your own about the state of literature (Jewish or otherwise), book publishing in general, culture & current events, or a specific book that you want to let others know about. And to SIGN UP, so you don't have to wait to read our blogs once a month when Fig Tree Lit is published.
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