Star Search

New York Times Book Review: By RACHEL DONADIO (June 24, 2007)

Over three evenings last month, several dozen writers gathered in the airy sanctuary of Hebrew Union College for a bizarre rite of passage: the Jewish book tour casting call. In a combination of “The Gong Show” and speed-dating, they each had two minutes to pitch their books to the Jewish Book Network, 100 cultural programmers from Jewish community centers, or J.C.C.’s, synagogues and libraries nationwide. An M.C. ruthlessly held up a sign when one minute was up and cheerily announced “on deck” to prepare the next speaker....

With its wild shifts in tone and quality, the annual conference offered a chaotic cross-section of American Jewish life — and of the current state of publishing. Holocaust memoirs vied for time with cookbooks and diet books, books on how to pray and why not to pray, books on motorcycles, punk rock and drug addiction, first novels and graphic novels, nonfiction reportage and novels with soft-porn covers.

But this big game of “Will this play in Peoria?” serves an important purpose. While publishers have scaled back dramatically on book tours, the Jewish Book Network has picked up some of the slack over the past decade, organizing and underwriting multicity gigs. ...

The auditions and centralized tours were the brainchild of Carolyn Starman Hessel, who has become a formidable power in the publishing industry in her 13 years as the director of the Jewish Book Council, which runs the Jewish Book Network. Not only does Hessel persuade authors to “fly from Minneapolis to Houston to Miami in a day and a half,” as the novelist Dara Horn put it, but her tours have also helped kick-start the careers of promising young novelists including Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer. ...

In addition to doing a tour arranged by his publisher, Nathan Englander was sent by the network on a tour of 30 cities in 28 days to promote his 1999 story collection, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.” He said he had two favorite audience questions from the “Hessel tour.” “One woman in Toronto asked if she could relieve my unbearable urges,” he said. “She was young and I was young, but nonetheless, I gave the wrong answer at the time.” Then there was an older woman at a Jewish book fair in Florida. “I was onstage and I said, ‘Yes, ma’am?’ And she said, ‘Why didn’t you shave?’ Why didn’t you shave is such a clear, excellent question.”