Books like Yiddish for Pirates — picked by fans

We often feel alone when we experience change and transitions, but Saunders’s book reminds me that we’re all on the journey of life together.

President Lincoln can’t let go of his young son, Willie, when the boy dies of typhoid fever. Willie, too, is holding on: lingering in the after-death world, he’s convinced his parents are going to come get him. He’s surrounded by people who are also in bardo (the state between death and rebirth), trapped in denial and attachment. When they accept the reality of their situation, the characters are liberated from their suffering.

This book has deepened my understanding of how—both individually and collectively—we struggle against loss, but it’s possible to let go and move forward. 

This book gave me shivers, both from the monsters and the evil that humans are capable of.

This novella from P. Djeli Clark manages to be action-packed while still dealing with heavy topics like racism and slavery. It’s the 1920s, and Maryse Boudreaux is a Black woman living in the deep south of the United States. Maryse and her friends have formed a militia to fight the ‘Ku Kluxes,’ monsters who take the form of Ku Klux Klan members to spread hate further.

There are points in this book where it seems like all is lost, which makes it all the more satisfying when the heroes rally. 

Early in this book, a character uses his kitchen oven to dry out some psychedelic mushrooms harvested from the rooftop garden at his flat in World War II London. Dosing the characters (and somehow the reader) with Amanita Muscaria is an appropriate way to set the tone of this book.

Mushroom experiences are fun and giggly and clever, at times, but they can also open the mind to the evils mankind is capable of and the intricate conspiracies seemingly hiding in plain sight. Which is what I love about Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon’s writing is hilarious, but then he’ll hit you with a gut punch so poignant it will linger in your mind for decades. 

When I came across this book, I was on the point of giving up reading modern novels. Everything I had read recently was such a let-down at the end that sometimes I threw the book across the room in reader rage.

At last, in Rushdie, I found someone who did not disappoint. As I approached the end, I became breathless, worrying that the story was going to sink like a soufflé, but it didn’t. It just kept on rising.

Once upon a time in Fairgrounds, there was a contraption called the Hammer and Bell. It was a test of strength to see if you could make the bell ring. Most couldn’t. Most got the marker some way up the calibrated column only to see it hesitate, then begin its descent. Midnight’s Children made it to the top.

What makes a good ending? For me, it is some transcendent statement of… show more.

Among the wonders of medieval Spain is the appearance of the first Hebrew secular poetry since Biblical times. In this masterful and unparalleled set of translations by Peter Cole, we witness the profound, pious, chauvinistic, and indeed, sensual traditions of secular poetry over centuries. A fusion of Arabic and Hebrew traditions, in and of themselves, these poems stand as a metaphor for the Jewish community itself as well as its dynamism and endurance under Muslim and then, Christian rule. 

Focus was the sole novel written by acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller. And while Miller would go on to be known primarily as a dramatist, Focus is an exceptional novel with a timely and engaging premise. 

The protagonist is a somewhat introverted man (Lawrence Newman) who is moderately successful in his field, working in New York City, while residing in Queens. Set in 1945, Focus is set during a particular time of unrest, especially in New York City, where many are resentful of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII. This resentment comes to a head when Lawrence needs to be fitted for glasses due to his developing near-sightedness. 

Yet as a result of how he looks with his glasses, people start to assume that he is Jewish, even though he is not. This misidentification not only leads to him being the unwilling recipient of anti-semitism but also leads to his own resentment… show more.

This book is a luminously honest, unflinching, and brave memoir by the marvelous Dani Shapiro, whose most recent memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, caused a sensation when it was published in 2019. 

When Slow Motion begins, Dani is in her early 20s, adrift, rebelling against her Jewish heritage, dabbling in acting and modeling, involved in a dead-end affair with a married man. 

Then one night, a phone call changes everything- her parents have been in a dreadful car accident. Her father dies a few weeks later, and her mother requires months of intensive rehab.

Dani's tragic loss of the father she idolized and adored prompts a reckoning with her choices and a reevaluation of her life. Slow Motion is beautifully written, wrenching, and unwaveringly candid.

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.

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”.

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.