In “The Desire to be Gisella,” David Grossman ponders the root of our fear of the “other” in ourselves and in those we love

One of the realities of our age—or rather—one of the realities of literature—is that often poets and writers do not write in their first language. Or, if they do, this first language is not the language of the culture in which they find themselves.

In 2014, historian Fania Salzberger Oz, and her father, the late writer Amos Oz, paired up to write a book which is “a nonfiction, speculative, raw, and occasionally playful attempt to say something a bit new on a topic of immense pedigree... the relationship of Jews with words.”