Reading can transport us to faraway places, expose us to new ideas or introduce us to interesting people whose lives are, well, just like an open book.
Three of them headline the upcoming Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center Jewish Book and Cultural Arts Fair, set for Nov. 1-15, sharing the stories detailed in their recent books and offering personal insights.
Adam Harmon takes readers into the day-to-day life of a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces; Rich Cohen, into the drama that ensues when relationships in a sweet family business go sour; and Jim Keen, into a loving marriage as the non-Jewish spouse of a Jewish wife and father of Jewish children. Cohen will open the series 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 1; Harmon will speak the following evening also at 7. Keen is featured 7 p.m., Monday, Nov. 13. Cost for individual events is $5 for VOSJCC members, $10 for nonmembers, $12 at the door.
Jewish News spoke to the trio of fascinating writers to provide a peek into this year's book fair offerings.
Chayal boded
A nice Jewish boy.
That's the first impression when speaking to Adam Harmon on the phone.
Friendly, polite, personable.
Raised in a nice Jewish family in New England. Active in his temple and its youth group. Goes to Israel one summer as a teenager.
And, boom, his life changes.
"I felt a deep and personal connection to the place," says Harmon from his Washington, D.C., home. "I knew I was going to live there someday."
That was 1984; over the next several summers, Harmon returned to Israel, each subsequent visit deepening his ties to the land and strengthening his resolve to make a life there.
Six years later, fresh with a degree from American University, Harmon departed for the Jewish state. His parents, he says, were supportive of his decision, even agreeing to sign the necessary papers to allow him to serve in a combat unit in the military. As an only son (Harmon has three sisters), he could have been exempt from combat duty, but his parents acceded to his desire to "serve with the best."
Harmon served with the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion for two years and was invited to serve with an Israeli Special Operations reserve unit. Even after returning to the United States six years ago to finish his master's degree in literature and later to work as a marketing director for a high-tech company, he has returned to Israel periodically for reserve duty, most recently in 2003. Harmon's unit was not activated in last summer's conflict in Lebanon.
In his book, "Lonely Soldier: The Memoir of an American in the Israeli Army" (Ballantine Books, $25.95 hardcover), Harmon details his transformation from civilian to soldier in an easy, engaging style. He begins with the rigors of basic training and takes the reader through exhaustive maneuvers both on the field and in the air. His deeply held commitment to Israel and his belief in his duty to serve sustain him - and the reader. This is what gives the simply told story its quiet power.
Harmon, now married and expecting his first child in December, says the financial realities of supporting himself and a family in Israel are what have kept him in the States.
"If I could go back there and live, I would," he says.
Asked what he might tell his soon-to-be born son if he expresses a similar desire to go to Israel and serve in the army, Harmon pauses.
"I'd do for him what my parents did for me," says the chayal boded, lonely soldier, the term for a soldier serving in the IDF with no family in the state.
"They supported my decision and empowered me to make choices and become the person I've become today."
Family business
Sweet revenge - or just the lure of a good story?
Rich Cohen's "Sweet and Low: A Family Story" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 hardcover) is a wickedly funny - and indelibly sad - chronicle of his family's business developing the sugar substitute Sweet 'N Low and building sales of the little pink packets into a multimillion-dollar company. It begins with the rags-to-riches story of Ben Eisenstadt, and his wife, Betty, who founded Cumberland Packing in the years after World War II, and ends with the disinheritance of Cohen's mother, Ellen, one of the three Eisenstadt siblings, and her children (including writer Rich Cohen).
"It's sort of between genres," says Cohen of his fifth book, not the first to draw on family lore. "A memoir and a history."
More like a human soap opera, he finally concedes, with all the elements of a good television drama - love, money and power.
Cohen's dead-on characterizations power the story from page one. There's Uncle Marvin, curly-haired and handsome, the first son of the patriarch, who insists, writes Cohen, that his nieces and nephews call him "Uncle Marvelous." Then there's Uncle Ira, the youngest son of Ben and Betty, an eccentric who, writes Cohen, was a pampered kid who grew up into a genuine nut. And then there's Aunt Gladys, the so-called crazy aunt hiding in the attic, who refuses to leave her first-floor room in her parents' house for 30 years. The three receive the bulk of their parents' multimillion-dollar estate; Cohen's mother, Ellen, and "her issue," as Cohen scathingly refers to himself and his siblings, receive nothing.
Cohen drew extensively on court proceedings and in-depth interviews with family members to research the story.
"I always knew it was a great story, even before all the bad stuff happened," he says in an interview from his home in New York City. But it was the death of his grandmother, Betty, in 2001 and the disposition of her will that provoked him to write it.
"I also had my own family by then," he says. Cohen is married with two sons, 3 and 1 1/2. "And I began thinking about inheritance and what happens at the end."
But what about airing his family's dirty laundry in public, so to speak?
"There is a conflicting set of codes," he says. "One (as a family member) is keeping the family secrets; the second, as a writer, is your responsibility to tell the story."
He says that being disinherited relieved him from the first code.
His family, he says, supported his effort.
"They know I am a writer, and this is what I do," says Cohen.
But he is quick to emphasize that the sweet and low of Ben and Betty's story has been played out repeatedly across America in countless family owned businesses.
"My intent was to tell the bigger story," says Cohen, calling the Eisenstadt saga just one chapter in the American Jewish epic.
"It's the story of America," he says, "a story about all of us."
When intermarriage works
A hero?
Clean-cut Jim Keen is a dedicated family man with solid values and a matter-of-fact approach to life - but a hero?
That is how Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, describes Keen in the foreword to Keen's book, "Inside Intermarriage: A Christian Partner's Perspective on Raising a Jewish Family" (URJ Press, $15.95 paperback).
Yoffie calls Keen, and other gentile spouses who marry Jews and choose to raise their children Jewishly, "the heroes of Jewish life."
Keen, a practicing Protestant raised in Ann Arbor, Mich., in a warm and loving family with firm religious grounding, met his wife, Bonnie, a Conservative Jew who grew up in Boston, as a freshman at the University of Michigan.
"I remember it like it was yesterday," says Keen in a telephone interview from his home. "I was sitting in my dorm room with the door open; I saw her walk by and tossed a Nerf football at her. She picked it up and ran down the hall with it."
Now married 15 years, the Keens have worked hard to make their marriage work, confronting the challenges of religious difference and making thoughtful end runs around the obstacles that sometimes get in the way, such as family resistance, discomfort with different holidays and rituals, and deciding how to raise their children.
The Keens are the parents of Gabrielle (Gabby), now 10 years old, and Molly, almost 7.
Keen says that in the early stages of their relationship, he and Bonnie avoided discussing religion.
"I just enjoyed being with her so much," he says.
But as the couple continued to date and the romance turned serious, they began to think about the future.
"We made out a plan early," says Keen, "and cemented it during our engagement. We were not going to get married without deciding what religion we would raise the children."
Though Keen's father-in-law raised the prospect of his converting, Keen says he quickly dispelled that notion.
"My religion gives me a center," he says. "My faith is part of who I am."
He worships at the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, and he, Bonnie and their daughters celebrate "his" holidays with his parents and siblings.
That's one big reason, among others, that the couple decided to raise their children as Jews, he says.
His family was nearby, Bonnie's farther away, with many fewer opportunities for exposing the children to Jewish history and tradition.
"It took me a while (to make that decision)," says Keen, "but I respected Bonnie and loved her and realized that if I could do it with Bonnie, why not with my kids?"
The Keen offspring attended Jewish preschool and the family is active in their congregation, Temple Beth Emeth.
Keen says he wrote his book to tell his story and to encourage other interfaith families to make Jewish choices. He offers practical advice, interspersed with postscripts offered by a range of Jewish professionals who draw on their knowledge and experience.
"I want people to know that there are workable solutions," he says.
