Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction
Explore the prestigious Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, honoring outstanding books that celebrate Jewish themes, culture, and identity in contemporary literature.
Book
The Cantor's Daughter
by Scott Nadelson
The Cantor's Daughter is the compelling new collection from Oregon Book Award Winner and recipient of the GLCA's New Writers Award for 2005, Scott Nadelson. In his follow-up to Saving Stanley, these stories capture Jewish New Jersey suburbanites in moments of crucial transition, when they have the opportunity to connect with those closest to them or forever miss their chance for true intimacy. In "The Headhunter," two men develop an unlikely friendship at work, but after twenty years of mutually supporting each other's families and careers their friendship comes to an abrupt and surprising end. In the title story, Noa Nechemia and her father have immigrated from Israel following a tragic car accident her mother did not survive. In one stunning moment of insight following a disastrous prom night, Noa discovers her ability to transcend grief and determine the direction of her own life. And in "Half a Day in Halifax" Beth and Roger meet on a cruise ship where their shared lack of enthusiasm for their trip sparks the possibility of romance. Nadelson's stories are sympathetic, heartbreaking, and funny as they investigate the characters' fragile emotional bonds and the fears that often cause those bonds to falter or fail.
Book
Kafka in Brontëland and other stories
by Tamar Yellin
"Thirteen stories by the author of the critically acclaimed The Genizah at the House of Shepher address universal themes of yearning and displacement, love, loss and the struggle to belong. A latter-day Jewish Odysseus spends his life planning an intricate journey to the Promised Land, while an English father stranded in London mourns for his faraway Italian son. A man without a past searches the world for potential relatives, while in the title story, a Jew and a Muslim cast adrift in a Yorkshire landscape find momentary sisterhood over a copy of the Koran. Blending irony with pathos, the mythical with the mundane, Kafka in Bronteland gives voice to a rich mix of characters living outside traditional patterns of identity in a world of complex migrations and tumultuous change."--Back cover of book.
Book
Second Language (Many Voices Project)
by Ronna Wineberg
An honest and revealing look at life's difficult situations that readers can relate to.
Book
Joy Comes in the Morning
by Jonathan Rosen
Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions--a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he's struggled with difficult questions. Deborah's encounter with Henry and his family draws her into a world of tragedy, frailty, love, and, finally, hope.
Book
History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
Book
Natasha
by David Bezmozgis
Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before May 2003, when Harpers, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection.
Book
place will comfort you
by Naama Goldstein
For fans of Nathan Englander and Allegra Goodman, this stunning and darkly comic debut collection is a richly detailed, lyrical and at times incendiary vision of the cultural collision between Israel and America.
Book
In the Image
by Dara Horn
Not just a fine first novel, this is a young woman's coming of age story, a romantic love story, and a spiritual journey, each infused with the lessons of history.
Book
Everything Is Illuminated tie-in
by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past. By turns comic and tragic, but always passionate, wildly inventive, and touched with an indelible humanity, this debut novel is a powerful, deeply felt story of searching: for the past, family, and truth.