LEADING literary names will gather in Bloomsbury next weekend for the annual Jewish Book Week.
Novelist and Orange Prize nominee Gillian Slovo will appear alongside journalists Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Howard Jacobson, Ned Temko and Tom Bower.
They will be joined by comedian David Baddiel and actress Maureen Lipman, while actor Anthony Sher – currently appearing at Hampstead Theatre in an adaptation of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man – will discuss his life and his work.
Historian David Cesarani is speaking on the subject of his latest book, the life and times of Adolf Eichmann, while Cherie Blair’s lifestyle guru Carole Caplin also features.
Ms Slovo, who lives in Hampstead and is the daughter of anti-apartheid campaigners Joe Slovo and Ruth First, will be discussing her latest novel and Orange Prize contender, The Ice Road.
Set in Soviet Russia during the 1930s, it is a study of the nature of tyranny and a consideration of the death of idealism.
Ms Slovo said: “It is affected by my past in the sense that when I am writing about the Soviet Union I am writing about a communist state.
“In my childhood I knew a lot of communists. It is also about heroism and political involvement – and the downsides of heroic struggle.”
But Ms Slovo said the novel, which she researched during numerous trips to St Petersburg, could not be specifically defined as a Jewish book.
She said: “It is impossible to define Jewish literature. What lumps together all the people speaking at the Book Week is the fact they are Jewish. There is no similarity in the literature and there is no such thing as Jewish writing.”
Ms Slovo says this is partly due to the huge disparity within the ethnic make-up of Judaism. “There are so many different kinds of Jewish writers – for example, to be a secular Jew is to be different to a religious Jew.”

• The Book Week runs from Saturday, March 5, to Sunday, March 13, at the Royal National Hotel in Bedford Way. Tickets are available on 0870 060 1798.