The nine stories collected in this volume are all populated by seekers—of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the U.S., Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider’s authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy.

‍

"A darkly humorous mélange drenched in all forms of Judaism, from its historic and spiritual fountainhead to its varied streams of irreverent secularity, all conveyed in turbo-charged prose, part-didactic, part-sermonic."
—TLS

“These are dark stories, powerfully and simply told”
—The Jewish Chronicle

"Reich’s stories have a density to them: long paragraphs weighted with rich description, bricks placed carefully to build constructions capable of supporting the weight of history. But they do not make for labored reading. Rather, they build worlds worth returning to."
—The New York Times

‍
“[Tova Reich’s] verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage.”—Cynthia Ozick

"Reich’s stories have a density to them: long paragraphs weighted with rich description, bricks placed carefully to build constructions capable of supporting the weight of history. But they do not make for labored reading. Rather, they build worlds worth returning to."— Gwen E. Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

‍