Hot Rabbi by Aviva Blakeman
I feel like I should be up front about this: I received a copy of HOT RABBI as a gift from the author, Aviva Blakeman. She is a dear friend and knew that I would need something to occupy my time while Hurricane Delta passed overhead – and boy was she right about that. The wind, oh my God, the wind. FOR HOURS. I hate that sound. I’m getting off track a little; I just meant to reassure you that the fact this was a […]
I was raised in an interfaith household, and I read a lot of books about young Jewish girls when I was growing up. There was Judy Blume’s Sally and Margaret, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and the All-of-a-Kind Family, of course, but there was also the lesser-known Rachel Bloom and Sashie from The Night Journey. The Night Journey is a simple story–Rachel is 13 years old, growing up in Minnesota with her parents and her great-grandmother, Nana Sashie, who lives with them. Sashie tells the story […]
The novel centers around two friends, Amran and Zelikman, who have been traveling across the Caucasus. Zelikman – a very skilled, very thin physician with a hat fetish – is from the country of Francia (wherever that is in made-up Europe); Amran is an Abyssinian, or African in this context, who has a huge sword called Mother-Defiler, and is very good at a game I surmised was the Chabonian version of chess. Throughout their travels, they have to resort to certain tricks to cheat money […]
