A SINGLE LIFE

To marry, or not to marry? From a philosophical point of view, there is really no good answer to this question. ''Marry, and you will regret it,'' said the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. ''Don t marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.'' From a Jewish point of view, there is really only one appropriate answer to this question: marry.

Houston native Eli Newman, the most learned of all his classmates at Yeshivas Chelkas Yaakov in Baltimore, would like to get married. No one, however, seems to want to marry him. Having made his peace with the prospect of becoming the first Talmudic scholar to remain a lifelong bachelor since the second-century sage Ben Azzai, Eli leaves his yeshiva community in Baltimore to take a position as a Judaic Studies teacher at a Hebrew high school in West Hartford, Connecticut. Content at last (or so he thinks), Eli meets someone who challenges his every assumption, tests all of his convictions, and who leads him on an emotional and spiritual adventure he could never have imagined in his most spellbinding dreams

A Single Life blends a literary style and a Talmudic sensibility with the romance tradition. It addresses universal issues--racism and racial identity, religious conflict, and the persistent human quest for love--through the prism of the particular experience of a single Jewish man. Fraught with dramatic tension throughout and sprinkled with generous doses of humor and feeling, it is a timely novel with a timeless story--a story about the joys and sorrows, the pangs and torments, the doubts and dreams of romantic love.

Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, rabbi, and scholar from western Massachusetts. He writes on art, film, literature, and sports for the Washington Examiner, and his short stories have been published in over a dozen literary journals. He is also the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema. He currently lives in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.