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Summer Sampling
Does American Jewry have a future? Can a Jordanian king befriend a Jewish carpenter? Is there scientific evidence for the Jews' enslavement in Egypt and the miraculous exodus that followed? This summer's crop of books tangles with these and other questions, ranging from scholarly musings on medieval anti-Semitism to Faye Kellerman's tale of an Orthodox couple who investigate a murder in trendy Los Angeles. Following is a selective listing of the season's offerings.
Summertime is fiction time. Erica Jong returns to her Jewish roots in "Inventing Memory" (HarperCollins), a four-generation saga of artsy, gutsy women, from immigrant matriarch Sarah through her great-granddaughter Sara, who recovers the family history. Howard Fast is back with the conclusion to his immigrant saga in "An Independent Woman" (Harcourt Brace), as Barbara Lavette becomes the matriarch of a new generation of her clan in San Francisco. The fictional family of Stephen Birmingham (of "Our Crowd" fame) has "The Wrong Kind of Money" (Dutton): The Russian-German liquor producers have seedy connections and shady doings in their past. Detective Peter Decker and wife, Rina Lazarus, return in Faye Kellerman's latest, "Serpent's Tooth" (Morrow).
The rueful wit of Alan Isler is again evident in his new collection, "The Bacon Fancier: Four Tales" (Viking). Ida Fink also returns with a second collection of stories about the Holocaust, "Traces: Stories" (Metropolitan/Henry Holt). Holland is the setting for resistance and tragedy in "Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat" by Grete Weil (Godine). New York is home turf for the golem-creating heroine of Cynthia Ozick's novel "The Puttermesser Papers" (Knopf).
A fortuneteller aids an Orthodox mother's self-deception in Sheila Solomon Klass' "In a Cold Open Field" (Black Heron). Summer brings some fiction debuts: In Cheryl Sucher's "The Rescue of Memory" (Scribner), young Rachel Wallfisch views her family's tragic past through old photos and film reels. Holly-Jane Rahlens, an American-born actress living in Berlin, offers a Queens-born...