Ten thousand dollars is a nice chunk of change, but organizers of this year’s Koret Jewish Book Awards — who this week handed out checks in that amount to six authors — say the real gift they’d like to give the Jewish community is a way for writers and readers of Jewish books to interact more easily.
Decrying the “increasing barriers” between academia and popular culture, Koret advisory board chair Steve Zipperstein told 200 invited guests at the awards ceremony Monday night, April 11, in San Francisco that the Koret Foundation is taking steps to change that.
By “bringing together the best, most interesting Jewish writing of all sorts” in a weekend of author-led workshops — as it did here over the weekend — Koret is trying “to make learning and literature part of one’s immediate culture, not something exotic or rarefied,” he said.
From a gathering of mainly industry insiders held for the past six years in New York, Koret this year moved its awards ceremony to its home city, to the new Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
In addition to awarding $10,000 prizes in fiction, biography, philosophy, history and, for the first time, children’s literature, judges waded through almost 200 entries in the category of “young writers on Jewish themes” before bestowing $25,000 on University of Oklahoma graduate student Tim Bradford.
The judges also created a special translation and commentary category to honor U.C. Berkeley Professor Robert Alter for his monumental treatment of “The Five Books of Moses.”
“I never had any intention of translating the Bible,” Alter admitted. When he took on the task 12 years ago, he didn’t think he’d succeed. “I said, I’m going to try to do this thing, but I’ll probably end up with something I’ll be profoundly dissatisfied with, and others will hate.”
Instead, he says the work “gave me much pleasure,” and he’s now considering embarking on a translation of the Psalms.
The awards ceremony was the capstone of a weekend of public workshops at the JCCSF. On Tuesday, the prize-winning writers fanned out to speak at Bay Area day schools and universities.
“Why ought writers to meet?” Zipperstein asked rhetorically before launching into a paean to famous 20th-century writers’ groups. Even those writers who create in self-imposed isolation must draw upon “a network of human dramas,” he insisted, and their work needs “a community of readers” to give it cultural context.
Fiction award winner Tony Eprile, author of “The Persistence of Memory,” spoke of the merits of awards such as Koret’s.
The prize money is nice, he admitted. “And this is a reminder that while we write our works in solitude, we actually write for other people.”
Recalling his youthful refusal to have a bar mitzvah, Eprile said his late father “would have been amused that I won a ‘Jewish’ book award.”
In a pre-recorded video, Israeli writer Amos Oz accepted his award in the biography category for “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” The famed author and political activist said he had to employ all his novelist’s skills in this purported re-creation of his grandparents’ trek from Europe to Israel, and the story of their generation’s attempt to re-create in Jerusalem the intellectual society they’d left behind.
“To know what my grandparents did in bed in Russia, I had to consult my own genes, which, being their genes, told me,” he quipped.
Two awards paid tribute to groups traditionally marginalized in Jewish life.
The history award went to Elisheva Baumgarten, assistant professor of gender studies and medieval history at Bar-Ilan University, for “Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe.”
Accepting her award, Baumgarten said the Jewish medieval history she studied in graduate school “was lopsided; there were no women.” Her book, by contrast, focuses on how gender roles affected medieval Jewish history. It also places that history within the larger context of European Christian history, a context that scholars of Jewish history, she said, too often ignore.
This year’s philosophy award went to Rabbi Steven Greenberg for “Wrestling with God and Man: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition,” a chronicle of his own struggle to read Jewish texts in a way that supports both his homosexuality and his Orthodox faith.
Accepting the award in a sometimes emotional speech, Greenberg said the book sprang “from my love of Torah and my refusal to abandon it for what I consider a piece of my essential self.”
Referring to Leviticus 18, the biblical text most often cited to support Jewish opposition to homosexuality, Greenberg recalled “the hundreds, the thousands, the millions of us who have borne the weight of that verse on our shoulders.” He asked: “How could it be that a loving God consign us to a life of hopelessness?”
Illustrator Wendy Watson accepted the children’s literature award on behalf of herself and writer Karen Hesse for “The Cats in Krasinski Square,” a sober yet hopeful tale of a little girl in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Noting that the book was based on a true story, Watson said that getting inside the heads of the characters to devise her drawings and finding a way to make the Holocaust appropriate for young readers was “an agonizing experience.”
Koret Foundation President Tad Taube said books promote a greater appreciation of Jewish culture both inside and outside the community, which is essential to ensuring Jewish survival.