For the past nine years, it’s been my pleasure to serve as a judge for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, helping to choose the fiction winner every other year (alternating with nonfiction). The prize comes with $100,000 and is “presented to an emerging writer who demonstrates the potential for continued contribution to the world of Jewish literature,” according to its mission statement. This time around, the fiction judges were choosing from four years’ worth of eligible titles, since we took a detour in 2021 to present an “Inspiration” award to author Nicole Krauss. The winner of the prize will be announced Tuesday, May 2; in the meantime, here is a look at the four finalists, representing a range of styles and interests.
Israeli author Iddo Gefen conducts neurocognitive research into storytelling. His debut book, Jerusalem Beach (translated by Daniella Zamir; Astra House, 2021), is a collection of stories that range from the realism-adjacent (in “The Geriatric Platoon,” an 80-year-old grandfather enlists in the army) to the whimsically science fictional (in “The Girl Who Lived Near the Sun,” a young man on a tour of the solar system visits a woman, whom he met “in one of those tacky space parties on the Rings of Saturn,” at her home on a tiny planet with no other occupants). Our starred review said “Gefen’s background as a neurocognitive researcher filters through the collection in stories that meditate on dreams, cognition, mental illness, and the inner lives of his characters.”
New York journalist Max Gross’ debut novel, The Lost Shtetl (HarperVia, 2020), imagines a small Jewish town called Kreskol that’s so isolated in the Polish forest that the last century has passed it by. Its inhabitants don’t know about electricity, airplanes, or the internet, and most tragically of all, they don’t know about the Holocaust—and since the outside world doesn’t know they exist, they passed through it unscathed. When an unhappy bride decides to take her chances on leaving town, Kreskol’s isolation comes to an end. Our starred review said the book is “great fun, packed with warmth.…Reaching into the storytelling tradition that stretches from Sholem Aleichem to Isaac Bashevis Singer to Michael Chabon, the author spins an ingenious yarn about the struggle between past and present.”
Mikolaj Grynberg, a photographer, psychologist, and writer who lives in Poland, has written several works of oral history about Polish Jews, and I’d Like To Say I’m Sorry, But There’s No One To Say Sorry To (translated by Sean Gasper Bye; New Press, 2022), his fiction debut, takes off from there. It’s composed of brief monologues by characters who may have just learned that they’re Jewish, or don’t want anyone to know they’re Jewish, or are pondering how their lives have been different because of their religion. Our starred review said, “taken as a whole, the collection traces the commonalities as well as the differences between all these experiences.…At times witty, at others devastating, Grynberg’s first foray into fiction is a major triumph.”
In The Book of V. (Henry Holt, 2020), Brooklyn-based Anna Solomon takes the biblical story of Esther and connects it to the lives of women in different time periods, much as Michael Cunningham did with the story of Clarissa Dalloway in The Hours. There’s Vivian, a political wife in 1970s Washington, D.C., whose husband asks her to do something she can’t forgive, and Lily, a contemporary Brooklyn mother trying to hold onto her pre-baby self as she creates Purim costumes for her two daughters, as well as Esther herself. Weaving through all three stories is the figure of Vashti, the queen whose refusal to cater to her husband’s demands was the necessary precondition for Esther’s marriage to the king—which allowed her to save her people. Our starred review called it “a bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
