| Vendor | |
|---|---|
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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
| Categories | |
MASTER OF THE MIRACLES
Rena Bunder Rossner’s MASTER OF THE MIRACLES is a literary feminist orthodox Jewish novel about the daughter of an Israeli Rosh Yeshiva in Tiberias, Ora. She is the caretaker of Rabbi Meir's tomb there, and begins to have visions of herself as Rabbi Meir's wife, the disgraced teacher Bruriah. Each time she has a vision where she channels Bruriah, she develops stigmata based on the vision.
Ora is married to one of the teachers at the Yeshiva, but they are unable to have a child. She ends up in a very...unusual relationship with another man. The consequences are devastating.
This novel is written by Rena Bunder Rossner, who's an agent with Deborah Harris in Jerusalem. It's tight first person, and Ora's depiction of modern yeshiva life from the perspective of a woman who wishes to take control of her voice and her body while remaining true--mostly--to her traditions is remarkable in its complexity. The author has said that she wants “to make sure it makes a statement about women and about feminism and about historical figures in all traditions and about the men who told these women's stories and how they chose to tell the stories...and what the biblical and historical stories might all look like if they were told differently.”
This is a novel that will cause waves in the Jewish community for its at times explicit descriptions of sexual situations and for its questioning of the sequence of events in the Bruriah story. I've also given it to several non-Jewish readers, who were actually shaken at the end. One of them described what Rena did in her discussion of the community in Tiberias as "World-building" and I get it, because that's how alien it felt. The book is a bit Red Tent, a bit Deborah Feldman, a bit like the recent movie Fill the Void.
Rena Rossner is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars Program, where she majored in poetry and non-fiction writing. She also studied at Trinity College Dublin and holds an MA in History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She currently lives in Jerusalem, where she works as a literary and foreign rights agent at the Deborah Harris Literary Agency. She's written extensively for The Jerusalem Report and The Jerusalem Post. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in The Prague Revue, MiPoesias, Poetica Magazine, Ascent Aspirations, The 22 Magazine, Full of Crow, Fade Poetry Journal, Exterminating Angel Press and more. Her cookbook, "Eating the Bible" is forthcoming from Skyhorse Press in September 2013.
This novel is written by Rena Bunder Rossner, who's an agent with Deborah Harris in Jerusalem. It's tight first person, and Ora's depiction of modern yeshiva life from the perspective of a woman who wishes to take control of her voice and her body while remaining true--mostly--to her traditions is remarkable in its complexity. The author has said that she wants “to make sure it makes a statement about women and about feminism and about historical figures in all traditions and about the men who told these women's stories and how they chose to tell the stories...and what the biblical and historical stories might all look like if they were told differently.”
This is a novel that will cause waves in the Jewish community for its at times explicit descriptions of sexual situations and for its questioning of the sequence of events in the Bruriah story. I've also given it to several non-Jewish readers, who were actually shaken at the end. One of them described what Rena did in her discussion of the community in Tiberias as "World-building" and I get it, because that's how alien it felt. The book is a bit Red Tent, a bit Deborah Feldman, a bit like the recent movie Fill the Void.
Rena Rossner is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars Program, where she majored in poetry and non-fiction writing. She also studied at Trinity College Dublin and holds an MA in History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She currently lives in Jerusalem, where she works as a literary and foreign rights agent at the Deborah Harris Literary Agency. She's written extensively for The Jerusalem Report and The Jerusalem Post. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in The Prague Revue, MiPoesias, Poetica Magazine, Ascent Aspirations, The 22 Magazine, Full of Crow, Fade Poetry Journal, Exterminating Angel Press and more. Her cookbook, "Eating the Bible" is forthcoming from Skyhorse Press in September 2013.