Mazel » (1st Edition)

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel and of six works of fi ction. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has received many awards for her fiction and scholarship, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She lives in Massachusetts.

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.

Jewish Book World

Three generations of fascinating women -- grandmother, mother and daughter -- are seen through their interaction and their particular milieu. In the course of the narrative, goldstein touches on questions of chance and coincidence as they affect lives; Jewish identity and ritual as they impact on the three women. Pheobe Saunders, the Princeton professor who is an expert on the mathematics of soap bubbles, triggers a return to the past for her grandmother, whose roots are in a Polish shtetl.