Books like The Lowlife — picked by fans

This is a little book I bought second-hand. Published in 1896 by the Religious Tract Society, each chapter is based on the author’s visit to different Christian churches and missions in East London. It’s full of lovely illustrations as well as incredible detail about the different communities and ways of life in this part of London. 

Krakowski's Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers not only offers a sophisticated critique of scholarship on medieval kinship arrangements, but also casts light on the social agency of young women during the few years between the age of their formal maturity and their matrimonial engagement.

Krakowski's wonderful achievement is made possible thanks to her exceptional familiarity with the documents of the Cairo Geniza and her ability to take a step back and observe the broad social picture they reflect.

This moving story awakened new empathy in me for my extended Canadian family as they waited for news of us for so many years. It gave me a new understanding of the effects of war on families, even at such great distances. 

A daughter and granddaughter tells the story of her family’s escape from the holocaust in 1939. Safely in Canada, the country we left for Germany, in the same year, they fear for their family in Lithuania as telegrams of desperation arrive and news of events in Germany become known. 

As a result of vast outpouring of important Jewish writing over the last century, it is difficult to navigate what is important and what should be included in the mainstream of Jewish life.

This is a curated collection of some of the most important writing and documentation of the period. I found it personally helpful to know what I should be reading and what I should be aware of. It also provides a helpful blueprint for those of us who are educators—what should be teaching in the years ahead to raise literate Jews of this generation, as well as those of other faith communities who may be interested in the trajectory of Jewish intellectual and religious life of this period.

Bryan has been a long-time friend and an academic colleague. His research unearthed material that was virtually unknown. The Holocaust could never be studied and presented in the same way after his book was published, and I had a small part in his research.

It’s important to be open-minded as you’re reading this book and understand that it is reality blended with mysticism and spirituality, which means you will need to suspend disbelief. Throughout the novel I enjoyed the interweaving of Ganesha’s commentary with the main narrative, as it kept me wondering how and when he might show himself to Esther and what role he fills in the story. It lent some mystery and edginess to the plotline. Esther is unconventional, especially when it comes to her mothering, and some readers might be put off by this, but her survival instinct is admirable, in my opinion. Teitelman does a fantastic job setting up Esther’s fastidious dedication to quality and perfection, which plays into that survival instinct.

Michener’s fifty-year-old novel focuses on a natural spring that becomes a tell – one civilization stacked on top of another from the beginning of time. It is the spring that makes life. If it is life that creates civilization and then destroys it and then comes back to the water to create yet another. The eternal and lasting thing is the water. Michener makes a beautiful story of the civilizations that come and go and stack on top of one another. 

The town is a new civilization created, the founder believes, from wilderness. But it is not so. The spot he choose was previously occupied by indigenous natives and they took it from the natives there before them. How could I not love Michener’s story? It is the same as mine just 5,000 years earlier.

Ainsztein’s book heavily influenced me but also honored my parents’ otryad, the Kruk-Max Group, by describing their fighting force (pp. 353-360). He should be more well-known, and his book should be reprinted in paperback to make it more available to a wider audience.

While his opening chapter is a historical survey of the Jews as fighters and soldiers in the Diaspora, most of the book details the rise of partisans and soldiers in the Polish and Soviet armed forces during the Holocaust 1941-1944.

It is extensive and comprehensive, at nearly 980 pages. But that should not deter the reader, especially the lover of military history—Ainsztein writes beautifully. Like Penslar, he addresses the myth of Jewish pacifism and reluctance to fight militarily. 

I have been for years intrigued by the character of Nachman Krochmal, the Jewish Hegelian scholar of the eighteenth century who wrote in Hebrew, but I was never able to find a coherent analysis of the man, his works, and his times that made satisfying sense—until I read Harris’s study.

A classic, The Carp in the Bath Tub, became one of my favorite books over fifty years ago. It speaks to me of the deep compassion children have for animals and how tradition/society is often in conflict with young sensibilities. I feel this book is not only good, but important, for it deals with big issues in a seemingly simple story.

Cohen writes the story as memoir, telling of her youth in New York in the 1930s and how she and her brother try to save the life of the carp that her mother buys a week before Passover, keeping it alive in the family bathtub, as was the tradition, in order to cook gefilte fish. She relates the realistic outcome without moralizing. That’s another reason I love this book. Today’s children and parents would have much to enjoy and much to discuss in reading “Carp”.