This year’s Jewish Community Book Fair is the 41st, and this year’s program of speakers presents a balance of local and out-of-town authors.

On the local end of the equation is Dr. Howard Wolf, a professor of English at the the University at Buffalo. Wolf’s new book, to be released in November, is Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile (Artzy Books), a collection of essays Wolf wrote about his travels over several decades, reaching back to the days of the USSR and extending into the very recent past and the rise of radical Islam in the public consciousness. Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee calls Wolf a “sharp-eyed and intelligent observer…able to register acute observations of his foreign hosts, as well as on the unease of the American in their midst.” Wolf will deliver a lecture about his book on Thursday, October 18, at 10:30am at the Jewish Community Center Benderson Building, 2640 North Forest Road, Getzville (688-4114).

That evening at 7:30pm, in the same place, Michael Wex will expound on the pleasures and utilities of Yiddish. The novelist, playwright, lecturer and performer is the author of two greatly admired books on the subject of Yiddish. Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (St. Martin’s Press, 2005) is as rich and lively as the language whose history it traces to the Bible and follows along the many roads of diaspora, describing its nuances and etymologies with a verve that refuses to be contained within the categories of traditional scholarship. At turns a study in sociology, linguistics and folklore, part of the book’s charm is that Wex—like so many practitioners of Yiddish—never allows a dull fact to stand in the way of a good story. Wex’s most recent book on Yiddish, Just Say Nu: Fluent Yiddish in One Little Word (St. Martin’s Press, October 2007), is a practical guide indeed: In addition to no less than 13 Yiddish words for “rear end,” he offers detailed parsing of what he calls the five most useful and nuanced Yiddish words. To learn about them, buy the book—or attend his lecture.

Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass

New Yorker Lindsay Pollock has written about the business of art for Bloomberg News, the New York Sun, Art News, Art & Auction, Art Review and The Art Newspaper. She comes to the Jewish Community Book Fair to discuss her book, The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market (PublicAffairs, 2006), on Tuesday, October 23, at 7:30pm, at the Jewish Community Center Benderson Building, 2640 North Forest Road, Getzville (688-4114). Born in 1900, Halpert opened her Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village in 1926 and ran it for 44 years. In that time, she became a formidable dealer and a champion of contemporary American art, one of the pioneers of contemporary promotional and sales tactics, making names and careers for such artists as Georgia O’Keefe, Ben Shahn and Stuart Davis. Though she started her American experience as a penniless Jewish immigrant, she became an arbiter of taste and culture at a time when the American art scene was in its ascendancy. Halpert’s story is fascinating, and Pollock is the first to tell it comprehensively.

Another local voice at this year’s fair is poet Barbara D. Holender, who has put out four collections of her work: Shivah Poems, Ladies of Genesis, Is This the Way to Athens and Ani Cli-zemer, a children’s book in Hebrew. Her latest collection is Our Last Best Perfect Day (Jewish Women’s Resource Center, May 2007). Holender reads her work on Thursday, November 1 at 10:30am at the Jewish Community Center Benderson Building, 2640 North Forest Road, Getzville (688-4114).

Those are only four participants; the first lecture, in fact, takes place this Sunday, October 14, at 2pm, when mother and daughter Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass will discuss Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace and a Really Clean Kitchen (Ballantine Books, 2006). (I think you can imagine what that one is about.) In all, the Jewish Community Book Fair stretches over eight weeks and features 11 authors, as well as numerous other activities and events. And it is one facet of the larger, second annual Jewish Cultural Arts Festival. For a complete listing of these events, check out jccbuffalo.org—and keep looking in our literary and cultural events listings.