The Genizah

Winner of Brazil’s prestigious São Paulo Prize, Jacques Fux’s brilliant literary debut novel unveils an outrageously entertaining Portrait of the Artist as a Young Schlemiel. Antitherapies relates the life journey of a young Jewish man coming of age in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from his sensitive childhood and the primal indignation of circumcision, through awkward adolescence, and up to early adulthood and his decision to become a writer. Its peevish protagonist sees Jewishness in general as a festive carnival of irritations. The sources of his joy as well as his misery include his mother’s overbearing love; the Nazis, who never really left the stage after their defeat in 1945; his absurdly high IQ; and his grappling with the perpetual tension between cultural assimilation and the preservation of his Jewish identity and heritage. Told through twenty-one playful “anti-therapeutic” sessions, the narrator summons myriad remembrances of things past, chronicling how he carefully considered and then ultimately rejected an assortment of possible life paths: astrophysicist, delinquent, clairvoyant, forger, hairdresser, logician, charlatan, and mathematician, among others. Fux masterfully integrates poetry, humor, magical realism, and a host of literary allusions—including Borges, Pessoa, Joyce, Primo Levi, Georges Perec, and Phillip Roth—to create a delightfully rich and original work of autofiction.

Set in a suburban New Jersey interfaith community during the fall of 2023 and told through the eyes of the passionate, inclusivity-minded Rabbi Adinah, the novel unfolds as the shadow of Hamas’ gruesome attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza looms over an already fractured community. The narrative opens with Rabbi Adinah returning from a summer in Haifa, only to find her synagogue literally falling apart: a hurricane has torn through the roof, and her office is flooded. Within her congregation, a new conservative member causes strife in her weekly Torah class, and differing opinions about Israel threaten to upend her authority. In the wider community, a young Syrian refugee she mentors lies in a coma, the victim of a brutal hate crime, and the treasured alliances she’s cultivated with leaders of other faiths become increasingly challenged. Rabbi Adinah struggles to keep her community together while her foundational beliefs and closest relationships are tested. Through a kaleidoscope of characters, Nathaniel Popkin reflects the contemporary American experience, unraveling the existential consequences that political divisions pose to a community that has long offered strength, purpose, and belonging to all its members. PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN tackles questions that have fractured countless families, friendships, and communities even before October 7th. What does it mean to be a Jew in America today? How can the suffering in Gaza and Israel’s promise of refuge be reconciled? When core religious, personal and political values conflict, how do people respond? The novel doesn’t offer easy answers—but it grapples with these questions with urgency, intimacy, and honesty. By exploring them through fiction, Popkin captures the emotional and moral complexities, the nuances and contradictions, that are too often drowned out in rancorous debate.

A debut novel by the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, following two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them 1938: Fanny Zelshinsky is a sophisticated, modern daughter of the city’s Jewish elite who wants nothing more than to be recognized as a legitimate artist by her family, her radical professor whom she idolizes, and the world at large. And all while she wonders if she is really going to go through with her wedding. Meanwhile, Zosia Dror has left behind her small northeastern shtetl and religious family in the wake of violence. Part of a budding youth movement that believes in social equality and creating a Jewish homeland, all she wants is to not get distracted by the glitz and hubbub of the city—or by the keen eyes of a certain tall, handsome comrade. When legendary artist Wanda Petrovsky—both a member of Zosia’s movement leadership and Fanny’s beloved photography professor—goes missing, the two young women are thrown together in the pursuit of the elusive firebrand. Is Wanda simply hiding, or is her disappearance connected to the rise in antisemitic laws and university practices? Fanny and Zosia may be the most unlikely of allies, but they must bridge their differences to help someone they both care for—and dodge the danger mounting around them in the process.