Books I read in October

Three adventures of very different sorts this month: Yiddish for Pirates, Walking to Mercury, and The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Yiddish for Pirates, by Gary Barwin

A novel exploring the events surrounding the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain. Slightly oddly, the hero is an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe whose shtetl was destroyed. That would explain why the title is Yiddish for Pirates instead of “Ladino for Pirates”. Some of the Sephardic Jews expelle...