bookshelf

WITH SIGNS & WONDERS

Name: WITH SIGNS & WONDERS
Author: Daniel M. Jaffe
ISBN: 0-9679683-5-6

AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH FABULIST FICTION

edited by Daniel M. Jaffe ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Funny, scary, often wonderful meditations on Jews encountering the inexplicable.

bookshelf

Twenty-five highly literate fantasies of Jews around the world, by Jews around the world.

In his introduction, editor and Russian translator Jaffe, a former lawyer who now writes and teaches fiction, traces the Jewish fabulist fiction of I.B. Singer, Stanley Elkin, and even Woody Allen back to biblical miracle tales. None of those writers is represented here: instead Jaffe has gathered an international assortment of lesser-knowns whose use of the fantastic ranges from the magical realism of Iranian Avi Shmuelian’s “Moonstruck Sunflowers,” about a medieval sorcerer who dispatches supernatural justice upon a malevolent eye surgeon, to the slap-shtick of American Steve Stern’s “Tale of the Kite,” about the way the faith of a Jewish enclave in Memphis, is threatened by a levitating Hassidic rabbi “living mostly on air and the strained generosity of in-laws.” John Shepley’s “A Golem of Prague” winks at I.B. Singer’s shtetel tales, but here the golem metaphorizes the irrelevance of folk beliefs in a contemporary city. A mother’s cooking comes back to haunt a family in Argentina, in Daniel Urlanovsky Sack’s “Home Cooking,” while the historical Sabbati Levi, who falsely proclaimed himself a messiah, contemplates the contradictions of homosexual love while imprisoned in Cuban Angelina Muniz-Huberman’s “The Tower of Gallipoli.” Several stories examine the moral ambiguity of modern, assimilated Jewishness, from the predatory Israeli felines in Ruth Knafo Setton’s “Cat Garden” to the sentient and inflatable toy doll in Joe Hill’s defiantly wonderful “Pop Art” and Joan Leegant’s “The Tenth,” in which a rabbi wonders if a set of Siamese twins, mysteriously recruited to make up the necessary ten men for a Jewish service, count as one man, or two, or something far more terrifying.

Funny, scary, often wonderful meditations on Jews encountering the inexplicable.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-9679683-5-6

Page Count: 360

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
by Daniel M. Jaffe

- BOOK REVIEW
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
by Daniel M. Jaffe

- BOOK REVIEW
YELED TOV
by Daniel M. Jaffe

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.