Mazel - Hardcover

Goldstein, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670856487 ISBN 13: 9780670856480

Publisher: Viking, 1995

Synopsis

A Jewish actress in Warsaw begins anew in America, where her legacy of vitality and independence--and her penchant for story-telling--endures in her daughter, a sixties intellectual, and granddaughter, a mathematician. 20,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Goldstein teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Reviews

YA?Mazel?luck in Yiddish?enables Sasha to escape both her confining little village in rural Poland and the confusion and horror of Warsaw's ghetto on the eve of World War II. But it is Sasha's independent spirit and creativity that are her legacies to her daughter Chloe and her granddaughter Phoebe. Sasha's story, interwoven with fairy tales and Yiddish folktales, is told with humor and feeling for the details of Jewish life. This novel challenges YAs on a variety of levels: What is the price of success? Can we ever escape our past? How influential is family in the molding of character? The text is sprinkled with Yiddish words and references, most of which are understandable in context.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel, Goldstein's most ambitious work to date. Goldstein, bright and creatively philosophical, pursues some of her signature themes here, such as how the distant past unexpectedly affects the present and how Judaism has survived both attempted annihilation and steady assimilation. She also returns to a marvelous set of characters she introduced in Strange Attractors (1993). Phoebe, a scientist, has stunned her shy classics-scholar mother, Chloe, and her sophisticated and indomitable grandmother, Sasha, by returning to their Jewish roots and becoming Orthodox. And now, as they await the birth of Phoebe's first child, Sasha is flooded by bittersweet memories of her shtetl childhood. Ravishingly beautiful, Sasha eagerly escaped her circumscribed world, finding freedom and love performing with a Yiddish theater group in lively prewar Warsaw and, later, in the safe haven of New York. Sasha's vivid story dominates this heartbreakingly tender and devilishly funny drama, an ebullient, folktale-like novel that celebrates the passion of the old Jewish ways, the resiliency of women, and our capacity for joy. Donna Seaman

A fine storyteller, Goldstein probes the lives of Jewish women and the role that mazel, or luck, has played in their achievements. Here she presents three generations of Saunders women?Sacha, a well-known actress from the Yiddish stage; her daughter, Chloe, a professor of classics at Columbia University; and Chloe's daughter, Phoebe, a physicist and an expert on the mathematics of soap bubbles. (The Saunders family was previously seen in Goldstein's Strange Attractors, Viking, 1994.) It is Phoebe who has come full circle, accepting what the two generations before have rejected?she lives in suburban New Jersey, is expecting a baby, and has bought into the traditional Jewish lifestyle of her in-laws. The generational stories interweave as we travel with Sacha from the Polish shtetl of her childhood, to the prewar Warsaw of her youth, to New York and on to Lipton, New Jersey, to attend her granddaughter's imminent delivery. Emotions, intellect, beauty, flamboyance, all evident in some measure in one or another of the Saunders women, would be insufficient without a little bit of mazel. The retelling of all these lives may be a bit cloying for some, but others will find it good reading. Recommended for popular collections.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670856487
• ISBN 13: 9780670856480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368