Notes:
Reissued by The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
Translated into German
Full Text
From the jacket:
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.
- Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
- Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award
- Read Helene Meyer’s analysis “The Death and Life of a Jewish Judith Shakespeare: Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel,” published in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
“Shimmering with humor and intelligence.”
—The New Yorker
“Grand storytelling... Mazel is a richly conceived work that extends the novel of social satire to a tale of mythic proportions. A dazzling mural of folk tale and family tale.”
—Maureen Howard
“Rebecca Goldstein is an enchanting storyteller, and Mazel is a work of extraordinary intelligence and imagination.”
—Hilma Wolitzer
“Rebecca Goldstein makes intelligence entertaining and entertainment intelligent. She understands the strange pacts we make with ourselves and others and from this understanding fashions narratives both irresistible and wise.”
—Sven Birkerts
“[Goldstein] has written female characters as worthy of Phillip Roth and Grace Paley as they are of their grand European progenitors—Shalom Aleichem and S.Y. Agnon.”
—Los Angeles Times
“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
“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
