Posted by Naomi Firestone
Remember back in November when we told you about David Plotz’s Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible (
http://jewishbooks.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/32/)? Well the publication date is finally upon us (March). Check out his Publisher’s Weekly Interview: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6640229.html?nid=2287&rid=1748526167&source=link.
And stay tuned for a review of this title in the Summer issue of Jewish Book World.
Zoe Heller’s new book, The Believers, which tells the story of a liberal Jewish family living in Greenwich Village, will be published this week by HarperCollins. The New York Times published a profile of Heller yesterday. To read the profile, visit 
Seven hundred and fifty Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and founded the agricultural settlement of Sosua in the Dominican Republic. Why did dictator General Rafael Trugillo admit these desperate refugees when so few nations would accept those fleeing fascism? In a new book out next month, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosua, Allen Wells, a noted historian of Latin American, and also the son of one of the original Sosua colonists, examines the story of the Jews of Sosua, combining vivid narratives about the founding of Sosua, the original settlers and their families, and the geopolitical relationships that led to the colony’s founding. Wells also explores FDR’s role in the colony and how his support strengthened U.S. relations with Latin America.
About a year ago, Marion A. Kaplan also came out with a book on the Sosua colony called Dominican Haven; The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Jewish Book Awards in Holocaust Studies. Her title expands our understanding of the challenges, opportunities and barriers to refugee settlement anywhere in the world and begins to answer many questions about this most peculiar case of refugee migration. The Dominican Haven is a companion volume to an exhibit that was open last year at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Two examples of photographs from the book and exhibit are below:
Your Yiddish online needs have been heard by the National Yiddish Book Center! As a result of an alliance between the Yiddish Book Center and the Internet Archive of San Francisco, the full texts of over 10,000 works of modern Yiddish literature, comprising the National Yiddish Book Center’s Ste3ven Spielberg Digital Library, can now be read, downloaded, and printed in popular formats, FREE (YES–FREE!!) of charge, at 
What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?
Who is your intended audience?
life. I’ve often thought of this novel as a kind of elegy to what once was. 
I tend to read several books at once. Currently I am reading Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, and (revisiting) Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Organizing for Dummies.
The first time I felt jolted out of my isolation after arriving in America was while reading Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in eighth grade and identifying—despite the vast geographical and chronological gaps separating us—with the reticent but kindhearted protagonist, trapped in a loveless marriage in the bitter cold of a New England town. In Ethan Frome I had for the first time encountered a protagonist whose passivity I recognized all too well, and ironically, it was in this reticent man that I saw a world opening up to me—a world where all that is left unsaid in real life can finally be said—a world where fictive characters become the reflections of the tangled emotions of humans—the world of novels. 