This award-winning novel takes readers to postwar Israel, introducing them to a mother and daughter-in-law with an unusual relationship and offering a unique perspective on Jewish identity and experience.
Moses in the Sinai rewrites the books of Exodus and Numbers by way of The Arabian Nights, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Cecil B. DeMille. It makes generous use of myth and history, ancient and contemporary. The Hebrews of the novel are a varied mob of outlaws, magicians, sorcerers, aristocrats, and idolators, all content with being slaves. Moses must lead them into the Sinai against their will in the hope of serving a God whose very identity he doubts. The Hebrews of this historical and imaginative novel inhabit a world where children are born in cooking pots, meat rains from the sky, fish talk, and prophecies come true. It is a world where human emotion can take miraculous forms. Moses in the Sinai is full of such miracles.
It is 1988. Judit Klemmer is a filmmaker who is assembling a fortieth-anniversary official documentary about the birth of Judenstaat, the Jewish homeland surrendered by defeated Germany in 1948. Her work is complicated by Cold War tensions between the competing U.S. and Soviet empires and by internal conflicts among the “black-hat” Orthodox Jews, the far more worldly Bundists, and reactionary Saxon nationalists who are still bent on destroying the new Jewish state. But Judit’s work has far more personal complications. A widow, she has yet to deal with her own heart’s terrible loss—the very public assassination of her husband, Hans Klemmer, shot dead while conducting a concert. Then a shadowy figure slips her a note with new and potentially dangerous information about her famous husband’s murder.
The Confession of Jack Straw is both a political novel and a literary novel of great style and humanity. Taking the form of a confession of one of the leaders of the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, the novel accompanies the peasants as they travel through southern Englan, gathering followers, opening prisons, killing lawyers and telling stories. Simone Zelitch's first novel, it marks her as a writer already of the first rank.
It is 1988. Judit Klemmer is a filmmaker who is assembling a fortieth-anniversary official documentary about the birth of Judenstaat, the Jewish homeland surrendered by defeated Germany in 1948. Her work is complicated by Cold War tensions between the competing U.S. and Soviet empires and by internal conflicts among the “black-hat” Orthodox Jews, the far more worldly Bundists, and reactionary Saxon nationalists who are still bent on destroying the new Jewish state. But Judit’s work has far more personal complications. A widow, she has yet to deal with her own heart’s terrible loss—the very public assassination of her husband, Hans Klemmer, shot dead while conducting a concert. Then a shadowy figure slips her a note with new and potentially dangerous information about her famous husband’s murder.
The Confession of Jack Straw is both a political novel and a literary novel of great style and humanity. Taking the form of a confession of one of the leaders of the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, the novel accompanies the peasants as they travel through southern Englan, gathering followers, opening prisons, killing lawyers and telling stories. Simone Zelitch's first novel, it marks her as a writer already of the first rank.
This award-winning novel takes readers to postwar Israel, introducing them to a mother and daughter-in-law with an unusual relationship and offering a unique perspective on Jewish identity and experience.
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