Description
A family saga considers issues of national and religious identity and how they impact one Jewish American family, including Charles, who aspires to be a Supreme Court Justice, and Bert, who becomes a rabbi despite his ambivalence toward Jewish institutions.
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In this family of six grown children is a clan as united in its blood yet scattered wide-like the elder son Charles, hoping to be a Supreme Court Judge; the family beauty and District Attorney Nell with children by different lovers; the art-expert sister Erika-Freddi whose altered nose hasn't kept her from being custodian of their Jewishness; or Zach, artist and manipulator with two wives at home.Over all is their mother, Zipporah-Zoe: infamous in Israel, American academic, born of a "well-to-do" Boston background but not nowadays rich. She is intellectualised, yet bound in memory to all the "embroidery past" of the women in the family, which never quite dies. Zipporah-Zoe is married in an eternally sexual love-match, to a non-Jew and archetypal father.Challenging them is Bert the grandson, who will become ordained as a rabbi yet hang back from the synagogue. Interspersed throughout is the buried history of their most significant Sunday visitor, Lev. He will ultimately bring Debra, the young Sabra nurse and war veteran, to them as his wife-and will vanish.This is the reality book for thousands of modern U.S. Jews now. Some generations away from the shtetl, college-educated, observing or non-observing but all of them with the mezuzah of the Jewish spirit over the door.
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