Jewish Mysticism
Bee Season: A Novel by Myla Goldberg
Myla Goldberg's Bee Season is a bittersweet coming-of-age in which wise little Eliza Naumann's quirky passion for spelling bees unites and divides her family while revealing universal truths about the often crippling pain of love. [Book Jacket]
The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
According to Jewish tradition, each generation produces 36 righteous souls who hold up the universe. In this page-turner, a Gnostic group that wants the world to end, thus defeating God and paving the way for their own spiritual ascension, has murdered 33 of the 36. Ever since he was involved in a childhood accident, David Shepherd has been compulsively writing down names. When he learns through a kabbalistic rabbi that he is the keeper of the names of righteous souls (and realizes that his stepdaughter is one of them), he finds himself in the middle of a nightmare filled with killings, natural disasters, and the knowledge that the fate of the world in his hands.
Incantation by Alice Hoffman
Growing up in Spain around 1500 in the village where her family has lived for 500 years, Estrella, 16, knows that there are secrets in her home. As books are burned in the streets, and Jews from the nearby ghetto are murdered, she confronts the reality that she is a Marrano, part of a community of underground Jews who attend a special "church." The plot tangent involving Estrella's best friend, Catalina, jealous because Estrella has taken her boyfriend, seems too purposeful, but the historical fact is compelling, with the reason for the secrets spelled out in the horrifying persecution: Estrella is witness to her mother's burning and her brother's bones being broken by the police "one at a time."
Dante's Equation by Jane Jensen
Rabbi Aharon Handalman's expertise with Torah code – rearranging words and letters in the Bible – has uncovered a man's name. Who is Yosef Kobinski and why did God hide his name in His sacred text? In Aharon's investigation, he discovers that Kobinski, a Polish rabbi, was not only a mystic but also a brilliant physicist who authored what may be the most important lost work in human history and an actual physical law of good and evil. Trying to solve the astonishing riddle, investigators trace Kobinski to a clearing in the woods near Auschwitz, where they come face-to-face with the inexplicable: that Kobinski, drawing on his own alchemy of science and the Kabbalah, made himself vanish from the death camp in a blaze of fire. To solve the riddle, they must follow Kobinski – to wherever he may have gone. [Book Jacket]
An Almost Perfect Moment by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Kirshenbaum follows up Hester Among the Ruins with this fable of Valentine Kessler (so named because she was born on Valentine's Day). A nice Jewish girl growing up in late-1970s Brooklyn, Valentine becomes infatuated with her Polish-American math teacher and with the Virgin Mary, for she mysteriously resembles the vision of Mary seen by Bernadette of Lourdes. Valentine's father left when she was a baby, and ever since her mother, Miriam, indulges her beautiful, newly withdrawn daughter while eating herself into obesity and playing mahjongg every afternoon with her buddies. The so-called girls are like a Greek chorus, commenting on life around them and wondering at Valentine's inspired silence. As the story unfolds, it becomes a Jewish tale wrapped in Catholic mystery.
Kaballah: a Love Story by Lawrence Kushner
When an ancient text containing the answer to one of the eternal questions of the heart falls into the hands of Rabbi Kalman Stern, his life is transformed by his encounter with astronomer Isabel Benveniste, but he is unable to let true love into his life until he discovers the life-altering secret of the Zohar.
The Witch of Cologne by Tobsha Learner
Ruth bas Salazar is a midwife at a time when medicine is just emerging as a science and is still shrouded in mysticism and fear. That she is female and Jewish makes her situation even more perilous. Detlef von Tennen is a man of religion who avoids politics when possible. Yet this nobleman, cousin to the Archbishop, risks more than he knows to defend Ruth when she is charged with heresy by the inquisition. This is not an easy or a simple story...it is deep and intriguing, full of rich emotion, complex politics and situations, and a smoldering evil. Much more than a love story, it is a story about the triumph of the human spirit.
Benjamin's Crossing by Jay Parini
In this novel, Parini profiles the last few months in the life of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who escaped Paris just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. Told largely from the perspective of the various intellectuals and radicals that made up Benjamin's circle, the novel depicts Benjamin as a man who possessed a brilliant mind but was tragically unaware of and uninterested in the political state of the world around him. Most importantly, Parini's Benjamin is utterly human. The novel gives the uninitiated some insight into Benjamin's philosophy and may inspire them to delve into his writings, which were underappreciated in his own day but are now revered by many academics.
He, She and It by Marge Piercy
In the 21st century the world has been ravaged by environmental disaster and war, with much of the populace living in corporate domes. Depressed over child custody problems with Josh, her ex-husband, Shira Shipman returns to her childhood home, one of the few free Jewish towns. There she falls in love with Yod, an illegal cyborg created to defend the town against attack. Filled with fantastic technological description, the plot zooms to a page-turning climax.
Wormwood by G.P. Taylor
In this unremittingly dark fantasy set in 18th-century London, Dr. Sabian Blake, a scientist/Cabalist, receives a strange gift–a book of arcane knowledge that foretells the approach of a cataclysmic comet. As Wormwood draws near, bedlam breaks out and humanity's sinister side comes forward–all conveyed in exquisitely detailed scenes of violence and mayhem. When Dr. Blake's 14-year-old servant, Agetta, steals the book, she is pursued by demons, angels and gargoyles come to life. Warring factions of an occult group seem to be vying with each other for possession of the volume, but in truth, it's all a plot to sacrifice Agetta so that the fallen angel Lillith can live on in her body. The horrors that evil begets are made palpable, but goodness has little purpose in this book. When the angel Rafael says, "It is not for power that the universe was created, but for love," it leaves less of an impression than the eye-popping murders he carries out by spraying his victims with his explosive blood. Indeed, the author seemed to be more concerned with special effects than with plot or character development. Agetta is nothing more than a pawn, the adults around her are unrelentingly self-interested, and the characters who do discover how their lust for power has made them blind persist in their blindness, anyhow.
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler
Set in the universe of the Jewish Kaballah during the Lisbon massacre of April 1506, this novel tells the story of a secret Jew named Zarco who searches for the killer of his uncle – a renowned kabbalist and manuscript illuminator – and thereby encounters a secret language and code that obscures the truth.