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
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
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
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