The University of Wisconsin Press


Fiction

 

Mazel
Rebecca Goldstein
With a New Afterword

Library of American Fiction



"Shimmering with humor and intelligence."
—New Yorker

  • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
  • Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award

Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics at Columbia. Chloe's daughter Phoebe grows up to become a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the sort of domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected.

"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

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.


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Cover for Mazel by Rebecca Goldstein.

August 2002
LC: 2002022786 PS
380 pp.    5.5 x 8

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Paper $24.95 t
ISBN
978-0-299-18124-6
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"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

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