The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books

February '25: Issue #63 --- Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher

POETRY, PHILOSOPHY AND A GAMBLING RABBI:

A colorful history of Venice’s Jewish ghetto, by Rich Tenorio

In ‘Shylock’s Venice,’ UK author Harry Freedman paints a vibrant picture of an oft-overlooked side of Jewish history that goes far deeper than the famous Shakespeare character.

When British author Harry Freedman asks audiences to name a historical Jew from Venice, one name almost always comes up: Shylock.

The moneylender who sought a pound of flesh for a transaction gone wrong in “The Merchant of Venice” is one of Shakespeare’s best-known characters. He’s also fictional. This has not prevented Shylock from capturing the popular imagination, even as the real-life inhabitants of Venice’s Jewish ghetto over the centuries remain largely forgotten today. This paradox stayed in Freedman’s mind as he penned his most recent book, “Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto.”

ADAPTATION OF A CHAPTER FROM A NOVEL:

The pet rabbit and the year that Rabin died, by Ephrat Huss

Moshe refuses to bring the pet rabbit onto the plane from Israel to America. They argue about this. He says that with all the problems of taxes and tickets and visas and vaccinations, he cannot also deal with Sara’s rabbit and with her transitional rabbity heart.

With the adrenaline of moving, that last night in their village in the south of Israel, in their beige semi-detached house, Moshe shouts, which happens seldomly, and then turns away to begin the rhythmic movement of cleaning the stone floor, buckets of water and rag squeezing out, his face closing off, startling Sara into uncharacteristic silence, as he mops by the fridge, then squeezing out the dark water in strangling movements, followed by another round until the floor shines.

My name is Ephrat Huss and I chair an MA in Art in Social Work at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. I have written academic papers and books about arts in social work. My last book was “Using arts to transform society” (Routledge 2022). Over the Corona years I completed an MA in creative writing at Bar Ilan University and so have at the age of 64 moved from writing “about” arts to my own arts. This story is an adaptation of a chapter of a just completed novel called “Feet in the Sea of Galilee”.

NOVEL: The Last Dekreptizer, by Howard Langer

A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.

The last survivor of a small Jewish sect comes to America after World War II to live in a Black community in Mississippi in Langer’s novel.

Long ago, Reb Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher (also called Sam Lightup) was born in Dekrepitz, a small Polish shtetl. Shmuel, the grandson of the Rebbe (Rabbi), knows little of the outside world. At the outset of World War II, a Russian officer witnesses Shmuel’s fiddle playing and sends him to a conservatory in Moscow. Shmuel survives the war, but everyone who remained in Dekreptiz, including his young wife and baby, is gone. Somehow, he ends up in Naples, and some Black American soldiers he’d been playing music with smuggle him aboard their ship. In America, at the home of his new friend, everyone wonders what this strange man, who doesn’t speak English, is doing in Leesboro, Mississippi. Shmuel knows how to raise and slaughter chickens, so they set him up with a place in the woods to do just that. A local woman, Lula Curtin, comes by to help him learn English and becomes interested in his religion. Shmuel, now known as Sam Lightup, begins talking like a Mississippi bluesman (“Ain’t no Dekrepitzers since the war”). Sam and Lula eventually marry, but, as an interracial couple, they face danger in Mississippi. Langer’s musical protagonist travels between worlds in a tremendously authentic way—the cross-cultural story is as at home in Europe as it is in the Mississippi Delta. The connections made, whether personal or musical (such as the relationship of Jewish vocal music to American blues), illustrate the commonalities between survivors in hostile environments. Perhaps the affinity portrayed between dispossessed Jews and American Blacks is a bit optimistic here, but the rural southern setting makes the story work.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

National Jewish Book Award Winner:

Fam­i­ly Book Club Award in Mem­o­ry of Helen Dunn Wein­stein and June Keit Miller: The Last Dekrepitzer (Cresheim Press)

Howard Langer has had a career as a lawyer on behalf of the vulnerable and teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania. He won numerous awards years ago for his short stories while an undergraduate at CCNY where he had the opportunity to work with William Gaddis among others. He is the author of a treatise on antitrust law, now in its fourth edition, and has published non-fiction in Tablet, among other places. He was inspired to write The Last Dekrepitzer by a presentation by George Saunders in which he stressed that you had to stop talking and thinking about writing and had to sit down and write, that you had to remember the goal was to get the reader to turn the page, and that there is no end to revision.

NEW BOOK RELEASE FROM FIG TREE BOOKS:

It Takes Two to Torah,

by Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer

WINNER - 2025 Independent Press Award

She is a journalist and former president of a leading Reform synagogue in New York, Central, who some years ago published a book on her personal journey through the festival calendar, My Jewish Year. He is president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, which lies at the modern end of the Modern Orthodox family.

It Takes Two to Torah is based on their discussions, five to six pages each, on the weekly Torah portion. They met at a Jewish conference called the Conversation 15 years ago - “we started talking and haven’t stopped”, said Pogrebin. From 2018 to 2020 they did a podcast on the parashah for the Tablet magazine, an audio equivalent of chavruta, the time-honoured Jewish method of studying texts with a partner. The book is the print version of the podcast.

ABIGAIL POGREBIN is the author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew—a National Jewish Book Award finalist—and Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. She’s written for the Atlantic, the Forward, and Tablet, and moderates conversations for the Streicker Center and the Jewish Broadcasting Service. 

RABBI DOV LINZER is the President and Rosh HaYeshiva (Rabbinic Head) of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, an Orthodox rabbinical school and Torah center, which promotes a more open and inclusive Orthodoxy. He has written for the Forward, Tablet and the New York Times, published widely, and hosted highly popular Torah podcasts.

SHORT STORY: The Walker, by Haya Molnar

“Does it hurt?” Was the first question she asked the mohel.

“It’s going to hurt you more than the baby,” the mohel assured her, his eyes smiling.

“I’m going to give him a little Manischewitz to suck on. He’ll be happy having his first taste of Jewish wine. The whole procedure only takes a few minutes. We’ll say a Brucha and your little guy will enter the covenant. He will officially be a Jew.”

“I though he’s already Jewish,” Zoe said.

Haya Molnar's award-winning memoir:

I  was born in Bucharest, Romania under Communist rule. By the time I was six years old I was writing poetry and reciting it in front of my classmates, family and friends. Writing has been central in my life ever since.

My parents were Holocaust survivors and hid my Jewish identity from me in order to protect me from anti-Semitism. At age seven and a half I found out that I'm Jewish — and my life changed forever. "Under a Red Sky" is a memoir about this time period and how my family escaped Communism.

I came to America at the age of thirteen.

NOVEL: Adam Unrehearsed, by Don Futterman

Don is the founding director of the Israel Center for Educational Innovation (ICEI), Israel's leading non-profit organization for turning around underperforming elementary schools serving low income Jewish and Arab communities, and the director of the Moriah Fund in Israel, a foundation which works to strengthen Israel's liberal democracy and advance civil and human rights. Don grew up in Flushing and has lived in Israel since 1994.

ESSAY: The New Jewish Question at CCNY, By Michael Gold

The kid, a new grad student, had written a story for our CCNY creative writing class about an Israeli-born doctor living in New York who had gotten cancer and moved back to his grandfather’s abandoned apartment in Tel Aviv to die. 

Another student in class, who told us they are non-binary, queer and from Minnesota (not necessarily in that order) at our first session, attacked the story because it didn’t mention Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

I was stunned. But I also didn’t stand up for the girl who had written the story. I didn’t want to get into the whole Jew thing. It’s beyond minefield status. It’s a minefield contained in a maze enclosed with a pit of vipers, with no way out except to get poisoned or blown up.

Michael Gold has published articles in The New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, the Hartford Courant and other newspapers, as well as The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary publication. He published an essay, “The Heat Is Always On,” in “Thoreau’s Legacy – American Stories about Global Warming,” published by Penguin Press and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is the author of Horror House Detective, a fantasy novel, published by Silverthought Press.

JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: Kelly Lynch, GEN Z

I grew up Catholic, had my baptism, communion, and all of that, went to Sunday school. Then I got to college, and I wasn’t too sure what I believed in terms of religion. I know I didn’t really like Catholicism, but I wasn’t really sure what really spoke to me. And then I met Emma, who is super into Judaism and wants to be a rabbi. I knew that Judaism was really important to her, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. So, I was like, ‘OK, I know this is important to you, let me go to a Shabbat service and see what all of this is about.’ And I went, and I loved it; I was obsessed with it.