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Jewish Book Festival Brings Mitch Albom and More to St. Louis This November | Arts Stories & Interviews | St. Louis

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click to enlarge Courtesy Photo Veteran journalist Martin Fletcher (left) and Andrew Rea (right) are two of the authors sharing insights on their new books at this year’s St. Louis Jewish Book Festival.

When Hannah Dinkel started as director of literary arts at the Jewish Community Center last year, she imagined there would be some authors who would be way too prominent to land for the annual St. Louis Jewish Book Festival.

Mitch Albom — author of Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven and so many other huge hits — definitely fell into that category.

“He is just such a household name,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, this is a long shot.’ I love that in my desk I have years’ — decades’ — worth of Jewish Book Festival programs. And I’m like, ‘Oh, we got Jerry Stiller in the ’90s. I can go after Mitch Albom.'”

So go after him Dinkel did — with great success. The famous author will be closing the Jewish Book Festival at 7 p.m. on Sunday, November 19. “It’s going to be a great event,” Dinkel says.

But that’s not the only reason that she’s looking forward to this year’s festival. In celebration of its 45th anniversary, there are several headliners, including Albom.

But more than that, it’s simply a singular event that every year brings authors from around the world to St. Louis. They present their books, discuss their process and inspiration and do book signings and extensive Q&As. The J partners with Webster’s independent bookseller Novel Neighbor, which sells the books on site.

“It’s so special because our audience and community gets that really unique opportunity to engage with the authors,” she says.

Putting together the lineup is about more than figuring who has published a book recently. It’s also about thinking what’s timely, what genres are “in” and who is a really good, engaging speaker, as well as balancing the people with large followings or New York Times bestsellers with emerging writers.

Although the festival does have “Jewish” in its name and amplifying Jewish voices is important, Dinkel says that featured authors can come from any religious background. She points to speakers from previous years such as U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch or this year’s Wolf Gruner, a historian who specializes in the Holocaust and German-Jewish studies.

Every year there is also a panel of Missouri authors. This year’s program will include Lindy Drew, co-author of the Humans of St. Louis book, based on the popular Instagram account; Martin Sneider, author of Shelf Life, a novel about a family and the rise of its fashion retail empire; Lea-Rachel Kosnik, author of Seeking Forgiveness, a novel based on her experiences with inter-racial adoption; and Jeff Bender, author of Apparel Has No Gender, which discusses his experience raising a transgender child.

Whether you’re interested in fiction, cooking, current events or more, Dinkel says there will be a panel that interests you.

“There’s really something for everyone,” she says. “There’s a high entertainment value behind these programs. Even if you don’t have necessarily have interest in reading the book, it is a great way to inform yourself about the topics that authors are engaging with.”

Dinkel is especially looking forward to the opener on at 7 p.m. on Sunday, November 5 — a conversation with longtime Middle East correspondent Martin Fletcher, author of Teachers: The Ones I Can’t Forget — and YouTube cooking star Andrew Rea, author of Basics with Babish, which takes place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, November 7.

Read on to learn more about their stories.

Teachers: The Ones I Can’t Forget
click to enlarge Courtesy Photo Martin Fletcher’s new book Teachers.

Veteran journalist Martin Fletcher has written many books — Walking Israel and Jacob’s Oath among them — so he wanted to do something different to memorialize the amazing people he’d met throughout his career covering wars, disasters, famine and civil unrest as a foreign correspondent. He thought he’d do something akin to an art project and take stills from his TV news reports and enlarge them to make up an exhibit.

When people look at an image, he says, they don’t overanalyze it. “You just look at the picture, and you respond to it in some kind of way, maybe emotionally. And that’s what I wanted to do.”

Fletcher made that photo exhibit, dubbed Teachers, as a nod to everything he’d learned from the people that he’d met, and he thought he’d show it in a little gallery for a weekend. But the show didn’t stay small, and it has opened in galleries as august as Christie’s in New York. It’s now traveling to venues across the U.S.

And once people saw Fletcher’s images, they had questions. They wanted context. So Fletcher thought he’d write about a paragraph for each image.

“I just kept writing, and it became a book,” he says, noting that, for him, it’s the most significant one he’s written. “It’s a very intimate, personal response to the people that I met. … [My] nonfiction books were about my career, about Israel in a kind of traditional way, and the novels, they’re straight novels, but this was really from a gut. I hardly did any research. I just wrote for a few months, I just kept writing, and it’s all poured out.”

Fletcher says that the book includes the people and their stories that he’d find himself thinking about constantly, and that all the profits are being donated to Artolution, a charity that supports art-making in “communities in crisis,” including refugee camps in Jordan, Uganda and Bangladesh. He was inspired by a boy, clearly starving, in Mogadishu, who turned down Fletcher’s offer of food and water and asked for his pencil.

Working in the field with only one pencil, Fletcher had refused and then felt terrible about it later, which led him to Artolution.

But the chance to support a good cause isn’t the only incentive to read Fletcher’s book.

“It’s a very different kind of book,” he says. “It’s not pushing anything. It’s just about people and their stories and how it affects me. And the stories, they’re all remarkable.”

Basics With Babish
click to enlarge Courtesy Photo Andrew Rea’s new cookbook Basics With Babish.

You could say that Andrew Rea’s successful YouTube channel Babish Culinary Universe started with a mistake. Actually, a lot of mistakes.

“My knowledge set is entirely mistake derived,” he says. “I only know anything I know how to do in the kitchen or in life from making mistakes. I would say that the first 10 years of my trying to be a cook were a complete disaster.”

Rea remembers a lot of those early bad dishes — like a signature chicken breast stuffed with cream cheese and artichoke hearts but unseasoned, or serving quail eggs with black truffle oil to some hungover friends — with obvious humor.

In all of Rea’s videos, he focuses on how things can go wrong and what you can do to prevent or troubleshoot problems. That’s especially apparent in his Basics with Babish series, which became the backbone for his new cookbook of the same name, which appropriately, has the tagline: recipes for screwing up, trying again and hitting it out of the park.

The cookbook is hefty with sections that span everything from bread to pizza to eggs to seafood to poultry to desserts. Each recipe starts with a little intro from Rea alongside a section titled “How I’ve Screwed This Up” and a few different troubleshooting Q&As. Rea’s jokey, tongue-in-cheek voice comes through strongly in these sections.

For example, in his babka recipe, Rea includes both “my babka is dry” (answer: you overbaked it) and “my babka is raw” (you underbaked it) as well as two more serious answers about filing and shaping the breads.

“I wanted to include that with every recipe to make things feel more accessible,” he says. “I started [showing mistakes] because I thought it was funny, but then I realized not only with people learning from my mistakes, and I was learning from my mistakes, it also made things feel more accessible. Like, ‘If this guy can do it, I can do it.'”

Rea says this approach of messing something up to figure out how to do it is the way he approaches everything, not just cooking.

“I think that’s the only way I know how to do anything,” he says. That goes back to the very roots of his career, when Rea was going to film school and making an unwatchable documentary about post-Katrina New Orleans.

That project could not be more different than Rea’s videos now — but film school did lead him to YouTube. He was working freelance and trying to get his foot in the door when he made his first cooking video just for himself. But people kept asking for more and he kept making more and things just clicked.

It’s a bit surreal, looking back at it all.

“You got to keep making new things, gotta keep trying new things, and that’s what I’m most excited about having the ability to do now,” Rea says. “I’m really, really grateful for the opportunity that this career has given me.”

For more information about the festival and the full lineup, visit ccstl.com/arts-ideas/st-louis-jewish-book-festival

Email the author at [email protected]

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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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