good novel
Mar. 18th, 2005 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe Autobiography of God by Julius Lester
B. is a member of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award committee, and liked this intriguing-sounding novel so much I decided to read it too.
The heroine is a non-practicing rabbi who works as a college counselor. Years earlier, when she was forming what might have become a congregation on campus, she put in a request for a Torah scroll. The nascent congregation died off, and now, years later, the scroll order she'd forgotten about has been filled. What she's received is a scroll that had been once retrieved from Nazi storage, that had originally belonged to a Jewish community in Poland, all of whose members had died in the Holocaust.
There's a lot of such scrolls around in real life - our temple has a Czech one - but this one comes with the spirits of the dead. Their small town had not had a rabbi, you see, and they've decided to ask her to be their rabbi. They are not seen, but they talk to her. One old woman is their spokesperson, and talks to the rabbi while she drives around in her car. (At this point the old woman's voice suddenly took on for me the timbre of Ann Sothern's.)
The scene where the dead Jews chant Kaddish is genuinely moving, especially if you know the prayer, but B. doesn't and she found it so as well. The book is also funny, and sometimes even reminiscent of Charles Williams, though the external plot is a little too lurid to match with the protagonist's internal development (rather like the film Ulee's Gold in that way). The author, whom I believe is a Jewish convert, conveys the spirit and style of at least some forms of Judaism very well.
As for the "Autobiography of God" part, you'll have to get that far yourself.
B. is a member of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award committee, and liked this intriguing-sounding novel so much I decided to read it too.
The heroine is a non-practicing rabbi who works as a college counselor. Years earlier, when she was forming what might have become a congregation on campus, she put in a request for a Torah scroll. The nascent congregation died off, and now, years later, the scroll order she'd forgotten about has been filled. What she's received is a scroll that had been once retrieved from Nazi storage, that had originally belonged to a Jewish community in Poland, all of whose members had died in the Holocaust.
There's a lot of such scrolls around in real life - our temple has a Czech one - but this one comes with the spirits of the dead. Their small town had not had a rabbi, you see, and they've decided to ask her to be their rabbi. They are not seen, but they talk to her. One old woman is their spokesperson, and talks to the rabbi while she drives around in her car. (At this point the old woman's voice suddenly took on for me the timbre of Ann Sothern's.)
The scene where the dead Jews chant Kaddish is genuinely moving, especially if you know the prayer, but B. doesn't and she found it so as well. The book is also funny, and sometimes even reminiscent of Charles Williams, though the external plot is a little too lurid to match with the protagonist's internal development (rather like the film Ulee's Gold in that way). The author, whom I believe is a Jewish convert, conveys the spirit and style of at least some forms of Judaism very well.
As for the "Autobiography of God" part, you'll have to get that far yourself.
