Product Description

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.

€ Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction € Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #385865 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 374 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780299181246
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Former philosopher Goldstein's latest novel looks at the twists of fate provided by chance in three generations of a Jewish family.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA?Mazel?luck in Yiddish?enables Sasha to escape both her confining little village in rural Poland and the confusion and horror of Warsaw's ghetto on the eve of World War II. But it is Sasha's independent spirit and creativity that are her legacies to her daughter Chloe and her granddaughter Phoebe. Sasha's story, interwoven with fairy tales and Yiddish folktales, is told with humor and feeling for the details of Jewish life. This novel challenges YAs on a variety of levels: What is the price of success? Can we ever escape our past? How influential is family in the molding of character? The text is sprinkled with Yiddish words and references, most of which are understandable in context.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A fine storyteller, Goldstein probes the lives of Jewish women and the role that mazel, or luck, has played in their achievements. Here she presents three generations of Saunders women?Sacha, a well-known actress from the Yiddish stage; her daughter, Chloe, a professor of classics at Columbia University; and Chloe's daughter, Phoebe, a physicist and an expert on the mathematics of soap bubbles. (The Saunders family was previously seen in Goldstein's Strange Attractors, Viking, 1994.) It is Phoebe who has come full circle, accepting what the two generations before have rejected?she lives in suburban New Jersey, is expecting a baby, and has bought into the traditional Jewish lifestyle of her in-laws. The generational stories interweave as we travel with Sacha from the Polish shtetl of her childhood, to the prewar Warsaw of her youth, to New York and on to Lipton, New Jersey, to attend her granddaughter's imminent delivery. Emotions, intellect, beauty, flamboyance, all evident in some measure in one or another of the Saunders women, would be insufficient without a little bit of mazel. The retelling of all these lives may be a bit cloying for some, but others will find it good reading. Recommended for popular collections.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Mazel casts a fresh look at pre-war and contemporary Jewry.
My first impression of Rebecca Goldstein's novel Mazel was that this was a Jewish book written for my generation. I'm 29 and growing up Jewish I was saturated with stories and films of the Holocaust throughout my childhood to the point of becoming jaded. Never had I heard anything about Europe from my elders that was positive. Everyone knew of the so-called "Golden Days" of the Jews in Europe, when scholarship and the arts flourished in Jewish communities, and even in the ghettos the culture could not be stemmed. Yet all the images I had in my mind until I read Mazel were black-and-white, the colors of Hitler's proud films of his concentration camp successes. Mazel describes life in the pre-war shtetel of Poland not through the misty eyes of an elderly person remembering a lost way of life, but through the eyes of a girl, Sasha, living the life and finding it rather oppressive. Sasha's family moves to Warsaw where she finds a thriving culture of young "enlightened" Jews, part of the Bohemian intelligentsia. She becomes an actress in the Yiddish theater and finds love and herself in a Poland whose fate is as yet unimaginable. The story then moves to present-day New Jersey where Sasha, now an old woman, is at the wedding of her granddaughter, a professor at Princeton, who has adopted the old ways and has become an Orthodox Jew, much to her grandmother's dismay. Most of the book is about Sasha's life in Europe before the war. Mazel is unique because it casts a fresh perspective on the final days of European Jewry. Much of the story is told from the point of view of young optimistic characters who strive to enjoy life. It doesn't dwell on the knowledge that the readers must inevitably share: that most of the characters are fated to die just when they were beginning to live. Mazel is about how three generations of Jewish women deal with their Jewishness. The book doesn't judge the women, rather, it allows the reader a glimpse into the perspective of all three generations: the older generation who abandoned the old ways, the middle generation who never understood them, and the younger generation who are trying, in ever-increasing numbers, to learn about their heritage and what it means to be Jewish in a society that doesn't, really, care one way or the other.

A Rare Discovery
By chance, I found Mazel on the shelf of the tiny library of the small outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where I live. How it got there I have no idea. I found the first chapter or two almost impenetrable, which may perhaps be explained by the fact that - as I later learned - it's a sequel to an earlier novel. But the wit, charm and incisiveness of the style lured me on, and once I had sorted out the characters and got used to shuttling through time, I realized I had made a rare discovery. Everything felt so true. An obvious example: the way Sasha's egotism and theatricality had cowed and almost silenced her daughter and granddaughter, yet how they had quietly found their own forms of resistence and assertion. But many a novel and even soap opera can give you that. Far more remarkable was the way Goldstein brought to life the lost world and lost people of prewar Jewish Poland, and embodied in her characters the whole spectrum of ways people can and do respond to the sometimes impossibly difficult dilemmas and limitations into which they are born. You can see how each temperament and each generation arrives at what it thinks to be the best resolution, only to find itself outmoded. Most remarkable of all, I felt I understood considerably more about myself, the world, history, life, etc. when I had finished than when I had begun, and only a masterpiece can do that. Mazel is an extraordinary achievement, and what a pity that it should be out of print.

One of those books you want to reread as soon as it is over!
This is the 4th book I have read of Rebecca Goldstein's, and this was my 2nd favorite (after the superb Mind-Body Problem). I liked the "generational" aspect where we follow Sasha (Sorel) from early childhood in a Schluftchev shtetl to present day USA where she has a grown daughter (Chloe) and a granddaughter just about to get married (Phoebe). I must admit I enjoyed the early childhood and early adult descriptions of Sasha the best - here there is a rich sense of storytelling, and the human characterizations are gripping and vivid. Sasha evetually rejects and leaves behind the old-fashioned Jewish ways of the shtetl and becomes a great stage actress and part of the Jewish intellectual life ("The Enlightenment") in prewar Warsaw.

The story in the present is also good, but I thought Sasha's antics were described with too much cliche and suffered a bit from the "feminine-writer syndrome". In addition, the daughter and granddaughter stay very one-dimensional. Mazel means LUCK in Yiddish, and this book very successfully plays with its meaning throughout someone's life. Finally, Phoebe's decision about going back to traditional Jewish ways is one of the best contrasts in the story...perfectly unimaginable and understandable at the same time!