The People of the Book Come to Light
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
What do a 10th-century B.C. king, an A.D. 11th-century physician, and a 20th-century boxer have in common?
Two things: David, Moses Maimonides, and Barney Ross were all Jewish, and they are the subjects of the first three titles in Jewish Encounters, a new series of short books that begins publication this fall. The range of the first three titles gives some idea of the curiosity and ambition that make the series, edited by Jonathan Rosen, one of the most interesting publishing projects of recent years. As Mr. Rosen puts it, his goal is to send readers “swimming across generations, languages, different ways of thinking,” by exploring the variousness of Jewish history and culture.
The sponsors of Jewish Encounters are the newest and the most venerable forces in American Jewish publishing: Nextbook and Schocken Books. Schocken, now a division of Random House, was started in Germany in 1931. When it resumed life in New York after World War II, Schocken helped to bring the work of Kafka, Gershom Scholem, and S.Y. Agnon to American readers – as well as giving employment to refugee intellectuals like Hannah Arendt.
Nextbook is a baby by comparison – it was officially launched, with funding from the Keren Keshet/Rainbow Foundation, in 2003 – but it has already built an impressive array of Jewish literary projects, including a Web site and a collection of reading lists for use in libraries and bookstores.
Like other entries in the recent wave of short-book series, from Penguin Lives to Modern Library Chronicles, Jewish Encounters benefits from a strong editorial vision – Mr. Rosen commissions all the titles in the series – and a willingness to take risks on the pairing of authors and subjects. The first two books give writers who are not specialists, in Mr. Rosen’s words, “the freedom to approach their topics seriously but fancifully.”
For “The Life of David,” Mr. Rosen enlisted, not a biblical scholar, but the poet Robert Pinsky, who brings a new perspective to the king reputed to have written the Psalms. Some of the best moments in Mr. Pinsky’s book come when he engages with the David story on the level of language. He observes, for instance, that the familiarity of names like David and Jesse and Ruth makes David’s world sound deceptively like our own, and advises paying attention to the more exotic biblical names: “We should not try to imagine the feelings of Shocoh and Barzillai the Meholathite and Mephibosheth the son of Saul … more quickly than we can pronounce their names.”
Similarly, Mr. Rosen asked Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and author of “How We Die,” to take on the complex figure of Maimonides, who, in addition to being a major medieval philosopher, was a practicing physician. Dr. Nuland’s “Maimonides” begins, innovatively, with a wide-ranging examination of the traditional Jewish affinity for medicine: “Why is it, in fact,” he asks, “that so many Jews have become doctors?”
These two titles will be followed in January by “Barney Ross,” by Douglas Century, a biography of the prizefighter who won championships in the ring and a Silver Star on Guadalcanal. Future books will expand Jewish Encounters beyond biography, to address institutions (“The Dairy Restaurant” by Ben Katchor), texts (“The Song of Songs” by Elena Lappin, “The Hebrew Alphabet” by Ilan Stavans), and ideas (“Messianism” by Leon Wieseltier, “Jews and Power” by Ruth R. Wisse).
“Judaism,” Mr. Rosen points out, “is both an obsession of the West and simultaneously invisible, hidden in languages many people do not know, created by heroes whose work is read only by the deeply traditional or the scholarly.” he Jewish Encounters series has already begun to bring those “hidden” stories to light.
