The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books

April '25: Issue #65 --- Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher

JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: Meet 4 Black Jewish leaders

While learning about the significant contributions of Black and Brown people is important year-round, Black History month is a great time to honor the impact Black Americans have made while acknowledging the adversity and systemic oppression they continue to face. According to the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative, 10-15% of North American Jews are Jews of Color and one in seven Jewish families include at least one Person of Color. Black Jews continue to help shape our society, emerging as social justice leaders, writers, chefs, actors, and more. I hope you'll enjoy learning about these Black Jewish influencers whose intersectional identities have influenced their work.

NOVEL: Counting Backwards, by Jackie Friedland

Back in 1995, when I was a high school senior, my history teacher assigned a project requiring each student to choose any Supreme Court case from the early 1900s and write a big research paper about it. As I searched through old cases, nothing jumped out at me. But then I stumbled upon the 1924 case of Buck v. Bell, where the Court considered whether eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck should be subject to a sterilization procedure against her wishes.

Carrie Buck had been deemed “intellectually disabled”, mainly because she’d had a child out of wedlock. Virginia’s lawyers argued that Carrie’s existing baby was intellectually disabled and that any additional offspring Carrie produced would likely be disabled as well. Medical providers in Virginia were hoping that a court of law would uphold Viriginia’s new sterilization law, allowing doctors to perform salpingectomies (surgical removal of the fallopian tubes) on people with “undesirable hereditary traits”. All they needed was a test case. Doctors at the Lynchburg Colony saw Carrie as the perfect sample subject because her mother was also institutionalized and her infant daughter, like any infant, could easily be cast as “feebleminded.” The facility hired a lawyer to represent Carrie who was in cahoots with the doctors at the Colony all along. It is worth noting that subsequent writings about the case show clearly that the three females mentioned in the case were not disabled and possessed adequate cognitive ability to be considered intellectually average.

So many aspects of the case stayed with me after I finished the project, but it wasn’t until eighteen years later that I was thumbing through a fashion magazine and noticed a headline reading, the “Uterus Collector” that I thought of writing about Carrie. The article in the magazine said inmates at an immigration detention center in Georgia were claiming a doctor there had been performing unneeded gynecological procedures on them, removing their reproductive organs without their prior knowledge or consent. In 2020! I immediately thought of Carrie Buck and the shocking connections that can still be made between past and present.



In a time where women’s reproductive rights have once again taken center stage in the news, I thought it was important to show that there are surprising ways female reproductive rights can still be exploited. Whether by private facilities seeking inflated insurance payments, those chasing power, or other personal interests, women’s rights to bodily autonomy are still very much at risk. This revelation propelled me forward to create Counting Backwards.

Jacqueline Friedland holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from NYU Law School. She practiced as an attorney in New York before returning to school to receive her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York with her husband, four children, and a tiny dog.

Other books by Jackie Friedland

NOVEL: The Trade Off, by Samantha Greene Woodruff

A brilliant and ambitious young woman strives to find her place amid the promise and tumult of 1920s Wall Street in a captivating historical novel by the author of The Lobotomist’s Wife.

Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market’s stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she’s determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don’t just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.

It’s easier for her golden-boy twin brother, Jake, who longs to reclaim all their parents lost after fleeing the pogroms in Russia to come to America. Well intentioned but undisciplined, Jake has a charm that can carry him only so far on Wall Street. So Bea devises a plan. They’ll be a secret team, and she’ll be the brains behind the broker. As Jake’s reputation, his heedless ego, and the family fortune soar, Bea foresees catastrophe: an impending crash that could destroy everything if she doesn’t finally take control.

Inspired by the true story of a pioneering investment legend, The Trade Off is a powerful novel about identity, sacrifice, family loyalties, and the complex morality of money.

Another book by Samantha Greene Woodruff

Samantha Greene Woodruff has a BA in history from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. She became a novelist by accident and cannot believe her luck. Sam spent fifteen years putting her MBA to decent use at Viacom’s Nickelodeon, before leaving corporate life to become a full-time mom. In her newfound “free” time, she tried her hand at fiction writing at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. It was here that she found her true calling as a historical fiction author, a job that she believes perfectly combines her multifaceted background with her wild imagination and passion for history, reading, and writing. Sam’s debut novel, The Lobotomist’s Wife, was an #1 Amazon bestseller and First Reads pick. Sam lives in southern Connecticut with her husband, two children, two dogs and a small reptile zoo.

MEMOIR: Under A Red Sky, by Haya Molnar

Eva Zimmermann is eight years old, and she has just discovered she is Jewish. Such is the life of an only child living in postwar Bucharest, a city that is changing in ever more frightening ways. Eva's family, full of eccentric and opinionated adults, will do absolutely anything to keep her safe―even if it means hiding her identity from her. With razor-sharp depictions of her animated relatives, Haya Leah Molnar's memoir of her childhood captures with touching precocity the very adult realities of living behind the iron curtain.

Haya Molnar was born in Bucharest, Romania under Communist rule. Her parents were Holocaust survivors who hid her Jewish identity to protect her from anti-Semitism. When she discovered that she was Jewish, Haya’s life and her self-identity changed forever. Haya’s family emigrated to the US when she was thirteen. Even while struggling to learn English, Haya loved to write. As an adult, she became a copywriter and creative director at global advertising agencies, winning over 25 industry awards. Haya’s first book, Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania, about growing up and escaping Communism, was published by Farrar Straus Giroux and won the National Jewish Book Award.

SHORT STORY: A Game of War, by Douglas Chait

I climbed the hill behind our house that afternoon instead of retreating to my usual sanctuary - the woods with their bright streams curling over mossy rocks. After the game of war had ended so abruptly, I chose a different path.

From here, our neighborhood spread out below me like a model train set: standard ranch houses on identical lots, each tweaked just enough to maintain the illusion of uniqueness. Shady streets framed by oaks and dogwoods created a tableau of well-born permanence that the development hadn't quite earned. Just below, a vacant lot divided our property from the neighbors' – a dull field of tall weeds clawing deep into the hard red Georgian clay.

Dusk had settled in. As the birds had stopped singing, houselights and streetlamps flicked on in the slow fading light. Galaxies, Cutlasses, and Impalas, returning from work, made their weary way home, garage doors hummed open and clanged shut. The neighborhood was tucking itself in for the night. 

Douglas Chait is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is working on a novel about the biblical story of Abraham.

BOOK: One Little Goat, by Dara Horn

Emi­ly Schnei­der spoke with acclaimed author Dara Horn about her new graph­ic nov­el, One Lit­tle Goat: A Passover Cat­a­stro­phe. Illus­trat­ed by Theo Ellsworth, this fan­tas­tic tale begins when a child mis­places the afiko­man, set­ting in motion a voy­age through Jew­ish his­to­ry and one family’s past.

Emi­ly Schnei­der: Dara, I’m going to start by ask­ing you what may be an obvi­ous ques­tion. You have a very suc­cess­ful and acclaimed career as a nov­el­ist and a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al writ­ing about a range of sub­jects. What moti­vat­ed you to write One Lit­tle Goat, a graph­ic nov­el of inter­est and con­cern to both chil­dren and adults?