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Synopsis
Praise for Julius Lester and his previous books
Lovesong: Becoming a Jew
"A spiritual journey such as Lester's demands our respect."
- Richard Gilman, The Los Angeles Times
"A moving memoir...Mr. Lester has paid attention, so it's worth paying attention to him."
- Joel Oppenheimer, The New York Times Book Review
And All Our Wounds Forgiven
"Lester belongs with writers like William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison."
- The Washington Post Book World
Do Lord Remember Me
"This is an important book. It tells the truth and tells it eloquently. It is gentle poetry and biting prose. I love this book. I love Julius Lester."
- Maya Angelou
"[A] convincing, tender account of black life through the civil rights movement and into the present....The writing is distinguished by a simplicity and clarity that seems exactly right."
- People
"An intense and passionate story of family, politics, and religion."
- Ebony
Publishers Weekly
Lester, author of the critically acclaimed novel Do Lord Remember Me and the memoir Lovesong, melds the classic college mystery with deeply theological ruminations on suffering and death. Rebecca Nachman is a former rabbi whose emotional failures in relating to the members of her synagogue cause her to seek refuge in a small college community in northern Vermont, where she works as a therapist. When one student who had come to her for counseling is found strangled in Boston, Rebecca chastises herself for failing to see signs of trouble and realizes she knows the identity of the killer. But the murder mystery is only a subplot in a larger, much more compelling story of theodicy. When Rebecca, the child of Holocaust survivors, comes to possess a Torah scroll that the Nazis stole from a shtetl in 1944, she becomes the "rabbi" of the village's dead, whose spirits visit her each night to say Kaddish. Lester's use of magical realism takes a masterful turn when God himself begins visiting Rebecca, anxious for her to read his autobiography (which has been rejected by the likes of Maimonides, Akiba and Augustine) and know the truth about him-that he is lonely, morally ambivalent and fascinated with evil. Although the murder mystery is predictable, the real mystery of this novel-the mercurial nature of God-is richly absorbing. (Nov. 17) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.