Jay Trachtenberg’s Top Books of 2021

In light of the naked antisemitism on display in our fair city recently it's perhaps apropos that the books that resonated most with me this year had decidedly Jewish themes. Most entertaining was Joshua Cohen's hilarious, "based on true events" novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (New York Review Books, 248 pp., $14.95 [paper]). Historian Ruben Blum is the lone, token Jew on the entire campus of a small upstate New York college, circa 1960, who is drafted to be on the committee considering the job application of Israeli scholar Benzion Netanyahu. Cajoled into reluctantly hosting the applicant's visit to campus, Blum is blindsided when Netanyahu shows up with his entire family, including 10-year-old Benjamin, expecting to stay at their host's abode. What ensues is a comic and thought-provoking clash of cultures involving the unassuming, comfortably assimilated American Jews and their far more brash, historically fatalistic counterparts. What's not to laugh at?

Touching tangentially on some of the same themes in terms of formulating and achieving the American dream, musician/producer/radio-TV host/scholar Ben Sidran casts a wide net and delves deeply into the entire history of American popular music in his focused, absorbing tome, There Was a Fire: Jews, Music And The American Dream (Nardis, 246 pp., $36 [hard], $24.99 [paper]). Originally published in 2012 but now in a newly revised and updated issuance, Sidran insightfully examines the role of Jews, from Irving Berlin and George Gershwin to Bob Dylan and the Beastie Boys, in all aspects of the music business. He gets down to the crux of creating American popular culture by exploring the zeitgeist of our various social eras and technological advances. As well, Sidran highlights the ongoing relationship of African Americans and Jews, both perceived outsiders, who work together in a predominantly WASP world.

Another republication to be savored is William Gardner Smith's virtually unknown 1963 novel, The Stone Face (New York Review Books, 240 pp., $16.95 [paper]). It's a cogent semi-autobiographical story of an African American expatriate writer enjoying the comforts of life in Paris with his expat compadres and his Holocaust-survivor girlfriend until he realizes the prejudicial treatment of the local Algerian population by French officials is akin to the Jim Crow attitudes Black Americans receive at home. The French refused to publish this book 60 years ago during their war with Algeria, but the issues addressed still sadly resonate uncannily to this day.

A bit closer to home, the endlessly fascinating Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (Mondo, 416 pp., $35 [paper]) by Alamo Drafthouse/Austin Film Society programmer Lars Nilsen and friends tells the unlikely tale of how local cinema nerds turned their obsession with low-budget exploitation movies into a free weekly film series and then into a respected archive. Chock-full of photos, ad posters and artist appreciations, this homegrown project will interest any movie buff.