Mystery Midrash , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

193 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Confront murder, mayhem—and your own mysteries of being.

From a corporate giant's kidnapping of a rabbi, to the disappearance of the clarinetist in a klezmer band, to four rabbis' use of their text interpretation skills to help a detective solve a murder that one of them has committed, this unique collection of mysteries will enlighten you at the same time it intrigues and entertains.

While featuring enough death and deception to keep the detective protagonists on their toes, each story presents the uncertainties that are a part of contemporary Jewish identity—inviting us all to confront our own mysteries of being. Throughout the stories' tangled puzzles and suspenseful adventures, the characters solve not only the "whodunit"-type mysteries, but also struggle to solve the mystery of their spiritual lives.

Mystery Midrash will be a lasting delight for mystery buffs of all faith traditions.

Preface Joel Siegel Introduction Lawrence W. Raphael O! Little Town of Bedlam Toni Brill The Reading Howard Engel A Final Midrash Richard Fliegel The Bread of Affliction Michael A. Kahn Confession Stuart M. Kaminsky Holy Water Faye Kellerman Jacob's Voice Ronald Levitsky Poison Ellen Rawlings Lost Polars Shelley Singer The Good Rabbi Bob Sloan Wailing Reed Janice Steinberg Mom Remembers James Yaffe Kaddish Batya Swift Yasgur

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Jewish literature

Judaism

Religion

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	03 mars 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781580236096
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0848€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

T o my wife, Terrie, without whom this book would not have happened.
-L.W.R.

Contents
. . . . .
Preface Joel Siegel
Introduction Lawrence W. Raphael
O! Little Town of Bedlam Toni Brill
The Reading Howard Engel
A Final Midrash Richard Fliegel
The Bread of Affliction Michael A. Kahn
Confession Stuart M. Kaminsky
Holy Water Faye Kellerman
Jacob s Voice Ronald Levitsky
Poison Ellen Rawlings
Lost Polars Shelley Singer
The Good Rabbi Bob Sloan
Wailing Reed Janice Steinberg
Mom Remembers James Yaffe
Kaddish Batya Swift Yasgur
About the Editor
Copyright
About Jewish Lights

Preface
. . . . .
JOEL SIEGEL
I THOUGHT CASABLANCA WAS FOR SISSIES and when Lauren Bacall said, You know how to whistle, don t you? I was sure she really was talking about whistling, so it couldn t have been To Have and Have Not. I must have been nine or ten and the movie was The Maltese Falcon that made me decide I wanted to be Humphrey Bogart when I grew up, to be a private eye, wear a trench coat, and talk tough and without moving my lips.
I had role models, but none of them were Jewish role models. There s a line in Neil Simon s Brighton Beach Memoirs where the kid wants to be a ballplayer, but all the great Yankees are Italian. Lazerri, Crossetti, DiMaggio. My mom makes spaghetti sauce with ketchup. What chance do I have?
He had a better chance than I did. I grew up with They Are All Jews on our bookshelf. And these days, when I really do have trouble remembering what I had for breakfast or where I have to be for dinner, I have no trouble remembering Siegfried Marcus who invented an internal combustion engine or Otto Lilenthal who flew before the Wright Brothers or Daniel Mendoza who was once heavyweight champion of the world. I also grew up with Jews in Sports, an even thinner book in those days before Sandy Koufax and the wrestler who we re now calling just by his last name, Goldberg. But Hank Greenberg was in both books. And his mom probably made spaghetti sauce with chicken schmaltz and gribbenes. But there was not one word in these books about a Jewish cop or a Jewish detective or, God forbid, a Jewish crook.
I did know about Jewish crooks. That other Siegel-Bugsy-was one, for instance. Not to mention our landlord, Mr. Cooperstitch. But no Jewish cops and no Jewish detectives.
Even the movie actors who I knew were Jewish-Paul Muni and Kirk Douglas-almost never played characters who were. Louis Pasteur? Vincent Van Gogh? Were they Jewish? I don t think so.
When Edward G. Robinson played a crook, it was an Italian crook. In Brother Orchard, he played an Italian crook who repented, entered a monastery, and became a monk. Even when I was a kid and had no idea what a tonsure was called, I knew one thing: it sure wasn t payess .
When Edward G. Robinson finally did play the guy who solved the crime, in Double Indemnity, he was an insurance actuary. There s a life of glamour and excitement, a real role model.
I ve since learned there were reasons why there were so few Jewish cops. In Eastern Europe, our families typically didn t come under civil law until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The police or soldiers we did come in contact with were inevitably the enemy; the best we could hope for was that, like Tevye s friend in Fiddler on the Roof, they d warn us a few hours before the pogrom happened. Even in America, this was not a job for a Jewish boy, let alone a maidel. Besides, we Jews wrestle with bigger mysteries every Montag and Donnerstag. Saturdays, too.
It took two generations in America for us to be free enough not just to tackle the mystery genre (haven t we always been puzzle-solvers and problem-solvers?), not just to want to be part of it, but to feel comfortable enough to be part of it. Moses Wine (Roger Simon s Jewish half-hippie law-school dropout) would not have been a credible character in the forties or fifties. The same for Kinky Friedman and for Faye Kellerman s Peter Decker, who might have been an LA cop a generation ago, but who certainly would have hid his Jewishness instead of exploring it.
(When I read Faye Kellerman s first Peter Decker novel, Murder at the Ritual Bath, I was sure the original title had been Murder at the Mikveh and the publisher had changed it, thinking who knows what a mikveh is? But when her husband, Jonathan, was on Good Morning America selling one of his novels-and why isn t Alex Delaware Jewish?-I asked him about the title. He said, No, that was always the title. The moral? Never ask. Nothing can ruin a good story like the truth.)
True, there is still some apologizing and equivocating in this collection. Among the protagonists you ll find are two reporters, a novelist, an attorney, and a rabbi who just happen to solve mysteries on the side.
But in this first-ever collection of Jewish-themed mysteries, you ll also find some terrific stories; dialogue that will make you smile, if not laugh out loud; mysteries that will make you marvel at their neat solutions; and, in the attribute I most appreciated, situations that force the characters to deal with their own Jewish identities. Of course, that forces us into thinking about our own Jewish identities, which, I d bet, was Larry Raphael s motivation for collecting these stories in the first place. At any rate, he has certainly chosen well. It s been a long time since I ve read through collections from Black Mask, and these stories reminded me how the short-story form and the mystery genre make a perfect shiddach.
If you already know these authors, you will want to read their original stories that appear here for the first time. If there are authors here who you don t know, you will want to go on to their novels after you read the stories here since their characters are that compelling and their stories are that much fun.
And we shouldn t be surprised. After all, remember memorizing your Haftorah? We invented the short story. And though we may not have invented the Mystery with a capital M, we came up with the idea first that the Mystery might have a solution. And aren t we the people who raise our voices, point a finger, and use the word Enjoy! as a command?
So what are you waiting for? Turn the page, already.

Introduction
. . . . .
LAWRENCE W. RAPHAEL
AS A RABBINIC STUDENT at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in 1972, I was anxious while preparing for my semester s final exams. Seeking a relief from the pressure, I picked up my first mystery novel. Fascinated by the plot and the rich character development of Ross MacDonald, I was hooked. I did manage to complete my exams and papers, and I did pretty well at them, but in the next few months I devoured mystery novels at a faster and faster pace.
Shortly after being initiated into this genre, my wife, Terrie, suggested that I combine my passion for mysteries with my interest in Jewish studies. So my hunt for a good mystery now revolved around seeking Jewish mysteries that featured Jewish characters. That journey was primarily responsible for this book. It was easy to find the mysteries of Harry Kemelman, which had begun to define this sub-genre, but the real research began after I d read all of his popular Rabbi Small stories.
Rabbi David Small first appeared in 1964 in Kemelman s Friday the Rabbi Slept Late . Thirty-two years later, his last book, The Day the Rabbi Left Town, was published . It appeared shortly before his death, and it featured the now-retired Rabbi Small who had by now moved out of Barnard s Crossing (a Boston Back-Bay suburb). In all of these novels, Small solved cases by using skills he had honed in his Talmudic studies. In all of them, he had his pulpit in a very accurately described suburban congregation.
Throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, my quest for Jewish detectives, police officers, and private eyes netted a modest return. Since that time, there have been an increasing number of mysteries with Jews who are detectives by profession or by accident, and whose Jewishness may be peripheral or central to their lives and the plot. In fact, since 1986, more than 150 Jewish mystery novels have been published. Here are a few things I have learned over time about mysteries and about Jewish identity.
First, as the Jewish educator Steven Steinbock has noted, there is something essentially Jewish about mystery fiction. Like the story of Creation, a mystery begins with chaos and ends with everything solved and in its place. The Bible also flows with whodunits. In its earliest tales, God plays detective, such as when asking Eve how she came to eat the fruit and when asking Cain about his brother. The mystery is all about right and wrong, crime and punishment, justice and mercy. And isn t every gumshoe in some sense a rabbi, scouring the mean streets or the sacred texts to get to the truth?
Second, the detective novel is an invention of the nineteenth century, when it sprang up nearly simultaneously in England and America. Couple basic human curiosity, fondness for puzzles, and interest in violence with a growing need for police forces to maintain order and prevent violence during the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, and the result was an ideal atmosphere for the beginning of the detective novel. Prior to that, tales of outlaws appeared, but they were usually romanticized stories of attractive rogues, or allegedly true accounts of villains who met bad ends and whose punishments served as warnings to readers. These stories emphasized the villain. Whether romanticized or demonized, the robber or murderer was always the centerpiece of the story, not the person who caught the villain.
For my understanding of how these stories shifted their focus to

Univers
Ebooks
Livres audio
Presse
Podcasts
BD
Documents

Mystery Midrash , livre ebook

Philosophie et théologie

Jewish literature

Judaism

Religion

YouScribe

Le catalogue

Le service

Les conditions