The Jewish Light receives many books by local Jewish authors on a variety of topics.   Here’s a round-up of  few that landed on our desk in recent weeks. 

“And You Thought Accountants Were Boring: My Life Inside Arthur Anderson,” by Larry Katzen, (Self-published, $25.94; ebook, $8.95).  Larry Katzen is a veteran entrepreneur, businessman and more recently an author.  He and his wife Susan are the parents of quadruplets and divide their time between homes in southern California and St. Louis.  The 1967 graduate of Duke University began his career at the once top-of-the line accounting firm of Arthur Anderson, where he rose to the position of regional managing partner.  He stayed with the firm for 35 years, serving clients in five continents until the firm’s demise in 2002.

Arthur Anderson was brought down during the government’s prosecution of the Enron scandal.  Katzen makes it clear that Arthur Anderson was “unjustly dismantled because of its supposed connections to the corruption.”  The company’s good name was later vindicated by a rare 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that absolved it of all blame.  “But it was too late,” Katzen adds.

The impact was devastating, he reports.  “Thousands of employees were suddenly tarnished  by the Arthur Anderson name, left reeling in the aftershock.” Katzen himself was one of those employees.  His book details how he dealt with the new reality that the company to which he dedicated more than three decades of his life had been unjustly shut down.  Katzen explains how he bounced back as a businessman, now serving as a member of the board of directors for three public and three privately held companies.  Katzen also shares the story of how his children became the first quadruplets locally to have their bar/bat mitzvah at one ceremony.  In these days of non-stop stories like “The Wolf of Wall Street” which illustrate the dark underside of the financial community, Katzen’s book shows the “flip side” of such issues, when over-zealous prosecutions can have unjust results.

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“The Lead Belt Jewish Oral History Project,” as told to Anita Hecht, (Life History Services in collaboration with the Missouri Lead Belt Jewish Historical Society). This fascinating book covers a little-known Jewish community in southern Missouri’s Lead Belt, a region which has been in the news in recent decades primarily because of the extremely toxic residues produced by the mining of lead, once one of Missouri’s premier industries.  Author Hecht approached Bernard DeHovitz, one of the many Jewish residents of the Lead Belt, suggesting that she be allowed to record the oral histories of the Jewish community of the region.

“I was struck by his vivid recollections and fondness for a world gone by,” Hecht writes.  “Fueled by sincere enthusiasm and respect for his history, Bernard had managed to inspire a small group of remaining inhabitants of this era to share their tales.” 

Over the course of 2011, Hecht conducted interviews with nine members of the region’s Jewish community.  “Their stories reflect both a large tale of the Jewish immigrant experience in the rural Midwestern United States, and their particular tales of family journeys, connections, adherence to Jewish tradition and family values, and assimilation to life in the New World,” Hecht notes.  With sadness she reports “a number of those who had tales to tell had passed on before the project’s inception.”

DeHovitz recalls the Beth El synagogue located on West Main Street in Flat River, now called Park Hills.  “It was a place of much enjoyment while we were growing up, especially during the High Holidays, Friday night services, and Sunday School.  It was the central place where we all met, and held our banquets, bar mitzvahs and confirmations.”

When Hecht interviewed DeHovitz, she asked him what the lead mined in the area was used for.  “The lead was sent to a town called Herculaneum, which was a few miles towards St. Louis,” he recalls.  “They used it for various things . . . pure lead; they used it to make paint; they used it to make batteries.  They even used it for glass because there was a big glass factory in Crystal City.”

Of course, more recently, lead mining stopped in Herculaneum due to its highly toxic nature. Even before all of this was known, DeHovitz recalls the dangers of the lead mines of his era.  “It was a hard living.  Sometimes miners would have bad accidents and get badly hurt in the mines.  Rocks would fall on them.”

DeHovitz, who inspired Hecht to complete this project, notes that the children of the Jewish families from the area had left years ago, “and no one remained.”  He feared that if the stories were not recorded, the history of the Jews of that section of rural Missouri, like sections of rural Poland where Jews had lived, “would vanish like those of our ancestors.” Thankfully, this fascinating book ensures that will not be the case.  

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“Crazy Rich:  Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty,” by Jerry Oppenheimer (St. Martin’s Press, $27.99).  Oppenheimer, the best-selling author of unauthorized biographies of public figures such as Hillary and Bill Clinton, Rock Hudson and Barbara Walters, and a veteran investigative reporter and TV producer, has penned a “tell-all” book about one of the most iconic American dynasties, the Johnsons of Johnson & Johnson. The company brought into production scores of health care and first-aid products, such as Band-Aids, enhanced by a red cross appearing on their company logo.

In Oppenheimer’s fast-moving narrative, the reader learns of the dynastic wars, legal and financial intrigues and the genius of the firm’s leaders in amassing a huge fortune.  He shares the story of the “General” Robert Wood Johnson, Jr., the patriarch who publicly and humiliatingly fired his son as president of the family business, after which both of them soon died of cancer.  “One Johnson scion went through a hundred-million-dollar divorce before his second marriage gave him the namesake he so desperately wanted.”

So where’s the St. Louis Jewish connection? It turns out that St. Louis native Nancy Sale Frey married into the Johnson dynasty, becoming Woody Johnson’s wife.  Nancy Sale Frey’s father was the late Robert D. Frey, a World War II Navy hero who later became a successful investment broker and served as a past president of Congregation Shaare Emeth.  Oppenheimer devotes considerable space to the Frey-Johnson connection, and among those he quotes is Lois Caplan, the longtime columnist for the Jewish Light.