Literary Guides

During Elena Kagan’s United States Supreme Court confirmation hearings of 2010, at a particularly contentious moment, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham directed the discussion to the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner.

Many books tell the inspiring and amazing stories of Holocaust survivors who manage to resume their lives anew after experiencing unspeakable horrors. A large-format book transcends the genre, providing an unblinking account of the life of an artist who survived seven slave labor and concentration camps and went on to create fine art. In “Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron” (Posterity Press/Hudson Hills), Susan Beilby Magee adds her perspective, illuminating his paintings.

Her name was the first clue. Over the years, people pointed out to Doreen Carvajal, who was raised Catholic, that her last name sounded like a name of conversos, Spanish Jews forced to convert during the Inquisition. Caught up in other ambitions, she didn’t pay much attention.

In the wake of the Six-Day War, our lives as college-bound preppies seemed puny compared to the glorious achievements of 18-year-old Israeli soldiers. In those days, the experience of our Israeli counterparts was so thoroughly mythologized, their coming- of-age literature always had a formulaic arc: Young recruits went from self-doubt to mature commitment to a mission larger than themselves. Their lives had a sense of purpose that ours, as teens in the diaspora, could never rival.

Last year, Stephen King titled a short story, “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive.” Well, it’s time for an update. Not only is Herman Wouk still alive, now age 97, he has just published a new novel, “The Lawgiver” (Simon & Schuster).

Amuch-discussed fact in the publishing world is the following statistic: only about 3 percent of all books published annually in the U.S. are works translated from another language. The stats for literary fiction and poetry are even more dismal, at 0.7 percent. So if you are an excellent writer writing in Danish or Polish or Chinese, a writer with good reviews, even a faithful following of readers, your work may never see the light of day in English.

‘The other Arab-Israeli conflict,” a locution famously visited upon us by Middle East analyst Steven Spiegel, is well applied to “The Unmaking of Israel” (HarperCollins), Gershom Gorenberg’s cogent and incisive new book. Indeed, Gorenberg’s very first chapter — on the well-remembered but little-understood Altalena Affair — tells us all we need to know about the internal conflicts in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) and in the new state.

In Jewish publishing, the Year of the Prime Minister continues. On the heels of Yehuda Avner’s exhaustive 2010 “The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership” (Toby Press), an insider’s look at the lives and careers of four world-stage Israelis, come two more profiles of Israeli prime ministers by authors who knew them well — in one case, a son; in the other, a longtime adviser and confidante.