About the Author

Rebecca Goldstein is author of The Mind-Body Problem, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors, and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, she is professor of philosophy at Trinity College.

Reviews

"A superb storyteller, Goldstein not only brings the almost-vanished world of Eastern European Jewry to life bit also conveys the depth and power of that culture."--San Francisco Chronicle

"From the first lines of Goldstein's enchanting novel Mazel . . . comes a voice redolent of matzoh balls and Schopenhauer, feeding body and spirit."--Village Voice

"Goldstein has written female characters as worthy of Phillip Roth and Grace Paley as they are of their grand European progenitors, Sholem Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon."--Los Angeles Times

"Shimmering with humor and intelligence."--The New Yorker

"A superb storyteller, Goldstein not only brings the almost-vanished world of Eastern European Jewry to life bit also conveys the depth and power of that culture."--San Francisco Chronicle

"From the first lines of Goldstein's enchanting novel Mazel . . . comes a voice redolent of matzoh balls and Schopenhauer, feeding body and spirit."--Village Voice

"Goldstein has written female characters as worthy of Phillip Roth and Grace Paley as they are of their grand European progenitors, Sholem Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon."--Los Angeles Times

"Shimmering with humor and intelligence."--The New Yorker

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

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.