SHOLEM ALEICHEM (TRANSLATED BY HILLEL HALKIN)
Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
Schocken Books, $15.00

Sholem Aleichem's most famous character is an educated workingman in tsarist Russia, struggling to make a living, marry off his many daughters, and—despite a wife who raises cursing to an art form—live an old-fashioned life. Instead his children present him with all the troubles of a world in transition. Tsaytl's insistence on marrying for love is hard enough on Tevye, but his younger daughters' romantic entanglements bring more serious ills—antireligious socialists, class struggle, superstitious ignorance, and finally the anti-Semitism that drives the Jews from their shtetl homes.

Tevye believes unshakably in his special connection to the Master of the Universe, and remains optimistic even when irony is the only kind of joke he can sustain. Why, he asks himself, if God loves the Jews so much, does he make their lives so bitter?

ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Bread Givers
Persea Books, $8.95

Yezierska, who emigrated from Poland to America in 1890, tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest of five daughters living on the Lower East Side's Hester Street in the 1920s. Sara's father is a rabbi, a learned man who studies undisturbed while his wife and daughters struggle to cobble together a meager existence. After her father marries each of her sisters off in loveless (and often dubious) arrangements, Sara flees home, desperate to escape the same fate and determined to breathe in "the new air of America."

Yezierska's autobiographical novel remains a classic, a compelling depiction of the struggles of Jewish immigrant life, particularly for women, in the early 20th century.

JOHANNA KAPLAN
O My America
Syracuse University Press, $19.95

A provocatively and aggressively charming social critic, Ezra Slavin quotes De Tocqueville, Marx, and the rabbinic Ethics of the Fathers with equal measure. When he dies, his first daughter, Merry- product of the first of many marriages and affairs- must make sense of her father's life.

Skipping back and forth in time- from the 1940s when Merry's mother, Pearl, a Polish immigrant socialist drowned Ezra "in diapers and Palestinians" to the 1960s, when he talked politics with upper West Side psychoanalysts- Kaplan creates an colorful and cacophonous portrait of a man and his milieu. The novel brims with capacious with and intelligence: "Ez, with that first-generation disease, had believed himself to be self-generated," Kaplan writes. "He had put all his money on an idea of America he had just gone and made up."

PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Vintage, $14.00

"Being wrong about people is how we know we're alive," Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's recurring narrator, muses after discovering exactly how wrong he was about the golden-haired idol of his youth. Fifty years after high school, Zuckerman can see that Seymour "Swede" Levov's charming façade obscures complicated and tragic depths. Swede marries a beauty queen and runs his immigrant grandfather's prosperous company only to see his daughter become a bomb-throwing fugitive.

Swede embodies the promise and glory of postwar America—as well as the tragic loss of that paradise. This first installment of Roth's American Trilogy explores themes of loyalty and betrayal against a backdrop of social and political ferment.

MYLA GOLDBERG
Bee Season
Anchor, $13.00

Nine-year-old Eliza, the least impressive member of the brainy Naumann family, amazes everyone by winning the local spelling bee, then the state contest. When she nearly prevails at nationals, her father, a cantor, introduces her to the works of medieval mystic Abraham Abulafia in hopes that understanding the world "in alphabetical terms" will help her win it all next year. As Eliza gallops towards enlightenment, she outshines her geeky older brother, Aaron; no longer the family star, he turns his back on his family and faith.

With equal measures of deadpan humor and lyricism, Goldberg chronicles an extraordinary year in the life of a seemingly ordinary family. She unflinchingly details the awkwardness of Eliza's pre-spelling days and evokes the pure pleasure afforded by her spiritual quest.

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