The Union for Reform Judaism recommends two Significant Jewish Books each quarter for individuals and book groups. Study and discussion guides are available at URJ Press.

Those Who Save Us: A Novel by Jenna Blum
(Harcourt, 482 pp., paperback $14)

I confess, I did not expect to like this novel, with its flashbacks to the war experiences of a German woman, now living in the States. For me, it represented an attempt to equate the wartime sufferings of Jews and Germans, or to portray both as Hitler’s victims. What about the “ordinary Germans” who, in Daniel Goldhagen’s words, were Hitler’s “willing executioners”?

Jenna Blum, a writer of German descent on her mother’s side and Jewish on her father’s, probably approached the subject of her novel with similar feelings. “Had I been alive in 1939,” she writes on her website, “I would have been classified as a Mischling, a half-breed, and sent to the gas chambers.” Yet on a trip to Germany with her mother in 1993, she is intrigued by the mentality of “ordinary Germans.” “What would you have done?” she asks her mother. “I don’t know,” she honestly responds.

In Blum’s novel, Trudy, a history professor at a Midwestern university, embarks on a research project—interviewing German Americans about their lives during and after the Holocaust. A personal goal underlies her research: to understand her mother, Anna, who stubbornly refuses to discuss the past with Trudy. Her only clue is a small photograph found in a sock drawer of her mother, herself, and an SS officer, in what seems to be a family portrait. Was this Trudy’s father? How could her mother live with such a man?

Anna’s story gradually unfolds—to the reader, not the daughter. We learn that Anna became the mistress of the sadistic Obersturmführer, a camp commandant, in order to protect her child. Though neither villain nor saint, Anna will not share her story with Trudy, who must discover for herself the power of shame, silence, and secrets in the lives of survivors.

How to Read the Jewish Bible by Marc Zvi Brettler
(Oxford University Press, 384 pp., paperback $17.95)

Biblical scholar Marc Brettler says he wrote this book “in response to the frustration most people experience who read the Bible”; in some sense, it is a “sealed book,” because “it arose in a culture whose values and conventions were fundamentally different from ours.” His intention is to peel back the layers of Jewish and Christian interpretations that have colored our views of the Hebrew Bible and read this ancient document on its own terms. This book (first reviewed in RJ Winter 2006) represents a layperson’s guide to the approach used by biblical scholars to decipher the original meaning of the text.

One example concerns the stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The rabbinic tradition takes them to be role models, but the text itself gives warts-and-all portraits of all our ancestors and some of their stories are clearly intended as morality tales.

Biblical stories, he observes, always have an agenda—didactic, moralistic, or political—based on the context in which they were written. Brettler’s goal in applying historical-critical methods to reading the Bible is to delve behind the stories—to uncover a civilization in the making, with cultural ideals and self-defining myths that still hold tremendous resonance for us.

Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.