LIGHT FELL

Twenty years have passed since literature professor Joseph Licht left behind his entire life - his wife Rebecca, his five sons, his father, and the religious Israeli farming community where he grew up - when he fell in love with a man, the genius rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Their affair is long over, but its echoes continue to reverberate through the lives of Joseph, Rebecca, and their sons in ways that none of them could have predicted.

Now, for his fiftieth birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons and the daughter-in-law he has never met spend the Sabbath with him in the Tel Aviv penthouse that he shares with a man, who is conveniently out of town that weekend. This will be the first time Joseph and all his sons will be together in nearly two decades.

The boys' lives have taken widely varying paths. While some have become extremely religious, another is completely cosmopolitan and secular, and their feelings toward their father range from acceptance to bitter resentment. As they prepare for this reunion, Joseph, his sons, and even Rebecca, must confront what was, what is, and what could have been.

Evan Fallenberg is the author of the novels Light Fell (Soho Press, 2008), When We Danced on Water (HarperCollins, 2011) and The Parting Gift (Other Press, 2018) and a noted translator of Hebrew fiction, plays and films. His work has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including an American Library Association Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University and Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the recipient of residency fellowships in the US, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland and China. He serves as artistic director of the Translation Residency program at Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem, and is the founder of Arabesque: An Arts and Residency Center in Old Acre.