Ithamar Handelman Smith’s Shelfie
It is hard to choose my favourite three to five books from thousands of titles that I have in my home library, but it is worth trying. The shelf I choose to feature here is part of an old, wooded bookshelves that I have inherited from a friend who, in turn, inherited it from her grandmother, who brought it all the way from soviet Russia. Being of Russian-speaking Ukrainian descent myself, they hold great sentimental value.
The books in this bookcase are sorted accordingly. The bottom shelf is dedicated mainly to Jewish-American literature while the second one up is dedicated to Yiddish, central European and Eastern European literature (again, mostly Jewish). The middle shelf is all about noir, hard boiled and crime fiction that had a profound impact on me.
My favourite author of the past few years is the Jewish-American writer James Salter which you can find in the bottom shelf. If I must choose between his beautiful novels Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime, it would be the latter. It is probably the most beautifully written erotic novel I have ever read. It takes place in post-WWII France, and it is told from a very unusual point of view that breaks the rules of standard story telling. With his magical, declarative, staccato-like prose, Salter (born James Horowitz) wrote in a rare language of sad beauty.
One shelf up, amongst many Yiddish writers you can find The Family Carnovsky by Isreal Joshuah Singer. The older brother of the Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashvis Singer, I.J Singer was a great writer in his own right and probably would have been as important as his younger brother if he hadn’t died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The Family Carnovsky is a three-generation family saga spanning from early 19th-century provincial Poland to pre-war Berlin and New York, this is probably the strongest book I have ever read about Jewish fate.
On the same shelf you can also find Life with a Star by Jewish-Czech novelist Jiri Weil. It is the most baffling book written about the holocaust. It takes place in an unnamed city, in an unnamed country, and with the words “Jews” or “Germans” replaced entirely with “them” and “us”. The lack of specifics transforms it into a Kafka-esque story written in unique prose which is both terrifying and funny at the same time. One thing is for certain; you will never look at an onion the same way after reading this book.
Coming to the middle shelf, one can find some of my all-time favourite writers from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other hard-boiled detective and noir writers but I will still choose Patricia Highsmith’s Tremor of Forgery. Set in 60’s Tunisia it is another morality tale about an ambiguous character and a great example of Highsmith’s brutal, misanthropic prose. No one wrote better psychological thrillers than her.
Ithamar Handelman Smith
Ithamar Handelman Smith, also known by his pen name Itamar Ben-Canaan, is an Israeli born British writer, Haaretz columnist, filmmaker and playwright. Together with his wife Julia he lives between London and Newcastle. Handelman Smith publishes his literary and journalistic works in both English and Hebrew and is the author of seven books: two volumes of short fiction, three novels, one poetry book and one book of travel fiction titled Unholy Land.
As a documentary filmmaker he's known for Shalom Belfast, about Northern Irish factions taking sides in the middle east conflict. In 2012, he was selected as the youngest author to represent 20th-century Hebrew literature in English by Yale University Press.
Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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