JEWDAR
JASON DIAMOND’S debut novel is made up of two parallel storylines. The first concerns Elijah Mendes, a 30-something schlemiel, forced to move back in with his mother in Chicago after his Silicon Valley start-up dreams go bust. He then discovers a rabbi is trying to cajole his mother into selling a large piece of property, bought by his grandfather, that he never even knew their family owned: a Jewish cemetery. The second storyline tracks the life of Mendes’s grandfather, Yitz Kaplan, who arrives in di goldene me- FICTION / FAMILY SAGA Of gangsters and graveyards
dina as a child fleeing pogroms and scrabbles up Chicago’s criminal un- derworld into the midwestern mid- dle class. Between these two narrative threads, Diamond seems poised to fall into a long tradition of writers that in-
KAPLAN’S PLOT
LITERARY FICTION A new telling of a very ancient story
Jason Diamond Flatiron Books September 16
cludes the likes of Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer: Jewish men whose stories are filled with sharply funny dark humour, and characters plagued by nervous conditions, unachieved potential, and intergenerational angst. Zachary Kauffman
IN HIS FIRST novel in over a decade, John Irving returns to char- acters from The Cider House Rules with a story that spans gen- erations and centres on Rachel—known to those closest to her as “Queen Esther.” Raised in a Jewish orphanage and trained as an obstetrician, Rachel’s life unfolds against the backdrop of
twentieth-century American upheaval, touch- ing on themes of identity, survival, and cho- sen family. True to form, Irving weaves faith, fate, and fierce independence into a novel as sprawling as it is intimate. Alex Rose
QUEEN ESTHER John Irving Simon & Schuster November 4
NON-FICTION / BIOGRAPHY A life on canvas
BASED IN WASHINGTON DC , Celeste Marcus, who’s also managing editor of the journal Liberties, has been at work at this first-ever full-length biography of the Minsk- born painter. Soutine was part of the Par- is Jewish artists’ colony in the 1920s and 30s, along with the likes of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. He fled the city during the Nazi invasion and eventually died at their hands. Known for his obsessive, eccentric approach, Marcus attempts to chronicle his life while also showing how his work reverberates through to contemporary painters and techniques. Jonathan Rothman
CHAIM SOUTINE: GENIUS, OBSESSION, AND A DRAMATIC LIFE IN ART Celeste Marcus Public Affairs October 28
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