Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.”
All I knew about Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions when I agreed to review it was its title. The discovery that it is a work of “historiographic metafiction” about life in the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland prompted a small groan. In recent years, I’ve found solace in conventional novels about social and domestic life by authors like Anne Tyler and Jo Baker. Fiction that treats the uneventful lives of ordinary people, especially women, as worthy subjects has brought comfort in unsettled and unsettling times. I feared The Requisitions would be too abstruse — more concerned with the technical aspects of warfare and death camps than with human experiences.
One of the chief pleasures of Moshe Zvi Marvit’s sweeping family saga Nothing Vast is the way it transports you to places and times that feel soothingly distant from here and now. His characters move from Morocco and Poland to France, America, and Israel, and we meet them at various times between 1932 and 1973. Here is the sweet, foamy tea of 1935 Casablanca, poured from high above the table to keep the sand out; there, the “grimy” port city of 1956 Marseille and the boiling America of 1965, where “workers were rising up against fat business owners called pigs and taking over the factories.” Being immersed in these worlds and periods, however turbulent, is a pleasure, even though part of the point is that they aren’t really so distant after all.