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book review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It's been interesting reading this at the same time as The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry. Both are nonfiction books that focus on genetics and the information scientists can get from people's cells. But Rebecca Skloot is an experienced science writer, while Bryan Sykes is a scientist, and it shows in the less scintillating writing. Skloot delves into the medical science as well as the social science behind the story, delivering a scathing account of how blacks were/are treated by the white medical establishment as well as a fascinating story of how the HeLa cells were discovered and the myriad medical advances they made possible. She brings the family's trials and tribulations alive as we hear their own stories in their own words.



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self-publishing advice

When my husband and I decided to start our own small press to publish the first volume of RASHI's DAUGHTERS in 2005 [hoping to take advantage of Rashi's 900th yartzeit, we knew it wouldn't be cheap.

And it wasn't. After hiring content editor, book shepherd, interior designer, cover designer, copy editors, and printer - it ended up costing about $30K to print 3000 trade paperbacks [this was before e-books]. But we had a great marketing plan and a distribution by a company that specialized in small presses. The end result was selling 26,000 copies in 18 months, after which the trilogy was picked up by Plume Books, a division of Penguin.

My advice: if you're going to do something this important, know what you’re doing and do it right. Check out this link on the true costs of self-publishing for an expert's opinion.

JOFA blog pt 2

Here’s Part II of my post on JOFA’s blog on My Jewish Learning , about my 20+ year journey to become a woman Talmud student/scholar. Shabbat Shalom.

As a Driven Leaf

As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I first read this novel before I studied Talmud, so I didn't realize it was based on actual Jewish texts. I was fascinated by Steinberg's descriptions of life in Roman Palestine, especially how the Jews lived, since there wasn't any other Jewish historical fiction from this time period. I wasn't so happy with the ending, never quite understanding why Elisha had to completely reject his religion when he couldn't reconcile it with Hellenism.

Later, when I studied the Gemara where his story appeared, I was even less happy. The Talmud is quite clear that Elisha ascends to Paradise with Rabbi Akiva and their 2 younger colleagues, and that all except Akiva are traumatized by the experience, Elisha so much that he becomes an apostate. Yet Steinberg leaves this crucial scene out of "As a Driven Leaf" so we never understand what set Elisha on his difficult path.



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My JBC presentation

As many of you know, I was in NYC two weeks ago to do a 2-minute presentation about ENCHANTRESS for the Jewish Book Council. Here is a great article in the NY Jewish Week about Gary Rosenblatt’s experience.

I was sitting behind Gary in that HUC auditorium, thankful that he had to leave early and thus saved me from being the first author to speak [they go in alphabetical order]. Though this was my fifth time at the JBC’s annual event, and despite having spoken about my historical novels at over 600 Jewish venues since the first volume of RASHI'S DAUGHTERS came out in 2005, it was still an anxious two minutes. The anxiety only heightened as bright orange signs counting down the time left kept going up in front of me, culminated in the dreaded "Time's Up." Still, if I wanted the Jewish world to know about my upcoming novel, ENCHANTRESS, this was the best way to do it.

For those who want to hear my 2-minute speech, here it is. .
Be sure to click CC to get the subtitles.

Bar Ilan conference

Wouldn’t you love to attend this “From I, Claudius, to Private Eyes: the Ancient World and Popular Fiction” conference? Happening June 16-18 at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Session Three will focus on Ancient Jews and Christians in Popular Fiction. The first two speakers discuss Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. But the third, Prof Tal Ilan from the Freie Universität in Berlin, speaking about “Jewish Women Writing Historical Novels Based on Rabbinic Sources” will focus on my historical novel, RAV HISDA’S DAUGHTER.

Happy Father's Day

I just came across, if the comments are any measure, a controversial article in Tablet Magazine titled The 13 Worst Jewish Fathers in Literature, From Abraham to Mr. Portnoy. They lie. They cheat. The treat their kids terribly. This Father’s Day, be thankful your own dad is such a mensch.

Like one of the commenters, my first candidate was Jephtha, the warrior in Judges chapters 10-12, who sacrifices his own daughter to fulfill an ill-conceived vow. Not that Abraham or Jacob were so great. Indeed, I am hard pressed to find a “good” father among our biblical heroes.

As for the other Jewish fathers in literature, I confess that while I was familiar with Fagin, Shylock and the biblical patriarchs, the only modern character who appeared in a book I’ve read was Reb Saunders of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I did note that, though the article’s author is a woman, all but two of the men she excoriates are fathers of sons. And that all the literature she cites, except for Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers – one of the novels that features daughters - is written by men as well. But whether you agree with these choices or not, whether you are a father, have a father, or are married to a father – I wish you a Happy Father’s Day.

JOFA blog pt 1

Check it out! My first "guest" blog post - that is, a post not on my own blog. And not so much about being a historical novelist, but about my 20+ year journey to become a woman Talmud student/scholar. Find it on My Jewish Learning

Enchantress cover

Since I have finally finished sending all my contacts an e-blast announcing that my new novel ENCHANTRESS will be out on Sept 2, many of you reading this post may have already seen the cover. For those who haven’t, here she is.

Everyone says they love the design, but they also remark how this cover is so different from my previous books. It is indeed a deliberate departure. The woman’s face, while compelling, gives no clue when or where the novel takes place. There is no overt Jewish content, only a small mention that this is a novel of Rav Hisda’s daughter. The only similarity to previous covers is that it prominently features a woman’s face, with no man or landscape included.

Why the change? The mosaic cover on APPRENTICE was not only beautiful, it alerted potential readers that the novel took place in ancient times and the Hebrew script attested to its Jewish subject. But apparently the cover looked far more like a Roman history textbook than a novel, and the title confused potential readers further by suggesting that this was a nonfiction biography. Yes – the subtitle was “A Novel of Love, the Talmud and Sorcery” – but these days, most people see a book cover online first rather than in an actual book store, and the subtitle was too small to read on a computer screen, especially with only a cursory glance.

Ruth Calderone, whose book about Talmud tales has a modern photo on the cover, asked why must a novel about a Jewish woman have Jewish symbols on the cover? Why should her appearance pin her down to a certain time period and location? My heroine is an enchantress, so let the cover be mysterious. Let people wonder if she is casting a spell. One thing is certain – ENCHANTRESS is not a textbook.

A name for Rav Hisda's daughter

So how did I create an authentic name for Rav Hisda’s daughter? Against all odds, my research in Talmudic times led me to a corpus of information on something called Babylonia Incantation bowls or magic bowls. Dating from 4th-6th century, and literally unearthed by archaeologists from under homes in modern-day Iraq, these pottery bowls were inscribed with magic spells. Undeniably Jewish, they were written in Aramaic with Hebrew script. They called upon various holy names and often quoted Torah. The clients' names on them always include the person's mother's name.

Halleluiah [which itself was often written on the bowls]! Hundreds of these had been translated in scholarly articles, giving me a long list of possibilities, almost none of which was found in the Bible. So much for naming my heroine Sarah, Rivka, Leah or the like. I quickly noticed that many of these bowl names ended in “dukh,” the Persian word for daughter. I already knew that Persian princesses were named after their fathers, such that King Shapur had several daughters named Shapurdukh.

That’s when it occurred to me: what if the Talmud called her Bat Rav Hisda, Hisda’s Daughter, because that was her name? Like most Persian Jewish women, she had a Persian name, and like many, she was named for her father. Her name was Hisdadukh. Normally no novelist in her right mind gives the heroine such an unwieldy, unpronounceable, name, but I wanted to be historically accurate. More important, I felt sure that Hisdadukh was her name; that by the time the Talmud was written down, Jews didn’t speak Persian anymore, so they gave her the Aramaic equivalent.

Loved the 4 Seasons

The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice by Laurel Corona

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I not only enjoyed this novel, but like all good historicals, I learned a lot about a time and place that I knew nothing about. I read this book because my father, gone now for 5 years, loved Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" and the music was part of my childhood background. But I found it fascinating to discover that in 17th-century Venice, bastard daughters of the nobility [from their courtesans] were raised in convent-like music academies, but they were not sworn to poverty or chastity. Corona's writing totally brings this obscure culture to life, made even more interesting by its female pov.



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Tikkun Shavuot

For those in the LA area, I'm teaching tonight at midnight at Beth Am. My topic is "Turning Holy Text into Historical Fiction: Looking at Talmud from a Woman's Perspective." To see what else is happening there, click here.

back from NYC

JetBlue ballyhooed that most of its planes were being equipped with WiFi, which passengers could enjoy for free through June. With a trip to New York for several days of intense book business on my schedule for this week, I got tickets on JetBlue and greatly looked forward to taking advantage of the uninterrupted 5+ hours to catch up on email as well as Facebook and Twitter. Unluckily for me, neither my flight to NYC nor my return to LA offered WiFi.

One thing I could do, after reading the New York Times, was write a bunch of blog posts. I have an assortment of questions readers have asked about Rav Hisda’s Daughter and this is as good as time as any to answer them. A few months back I posted about the position of slaves, particularly Jewish slaves, in the Talmudic community, and how the average wife wasn’t much better off than her enslaved sister.

Another question is: after writing Rashi’s Daughters in third person, why did I write Rav Hisda’s Daughter in first person? Most authors don’t use first person because of its limitations. The reader can only know what that character knows, none of this “meanwhile, back on the farm …” Yet first person makes for a closer connection between readers and my heroine, they are literally walking in her shoes.

I confess that I did this merely to avoid the drawback of her having no name; the Talmud only calls her Bat Rav Hisda. I thought I’d solve the problem by writing in first person. She would be “I” instead of some misappropriated biblical name. But I didn’t get far into the novel before I realized that this wouldn’t work, that other characters would have to call her something. Though by that time I was committed to first person, I knew I still had to find her an authentic Aramaic name that Jewish women in 4th-century Babylonia used.