When I Lived in Modern Times

By Linda Grant

“Scratch a Jew and you’ve got a story,” Evelyn Sert tells us on the opening page of her own story, When I Lived in Modern Times.

The time is April 1946, when “victory hung like a veil in the air, disguising where we might be headed next.” The place is Palestine.

Evelyn herself is two generations away from a Latvian shtetl. Her late mother was the mistress of a Zionist businessman. When Evelyn’s mother dies, he sells the hairdressing salon Evelyn’s mother managed and gives Evelyn the proceeds to go to Palestine.

In the Image

by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's Jewish-themed book is lush with images and paradoxes.

Reading In the Image is like walking on a beach. If you focus on the details, you see shells and cabochons of surf-blasted glass. You smell the salty tang of the breeze ruffling your hair. You feel the sand scouring your feet. If you take the long view, you see the pulse of tides and blue-green water that touches every inch of shoreline on every continent. The vast connectedness of it humbles you.

Horn’s many-layered story ripples out from the lives of William Landsmann and Leora, his late granddaughter’s best friend. (The granddaughter, Naomi, was killed in a hit-and run accident in the New Jersey suburbs.) The book looks at Landsmann’s past – and Leora’s present.