The Curse of Blessings
by Mitch Chefitz
Ten short stories

$10.95
Order code: COB

This is the book I'm giving for Hanukkah this year.

I heard Mitch Chefitz read "The Curse of Blessings" (the title story of this volume) at a session of the National Havurah Summer Institute seven years ago, and I've asked him several times since to publish it as a stand-alone book -- for children, for adults, just to get it out there. He's finally done so, with 9 other short and often moving stories, and the volume is a gem.

I read this story to my Junior Congregation at Kol Nidre this yeat. It's just a story -- but it asks you to reconsider what it means to say a blessing, what it means to make your life a blessing, what it means to carry the "burden" of the Jewish commandments, what it means to make tshuvah/repentance. And it does this in a sweet and gentle story. There are nine more in this book, and any one of them might be your favorite.

I bought a dozen of these books to give to friends as gifts. I hope you'll do the same.

A Woman's Voice:
Sarah Foner,
Hebrew Author of the Haskalah
translated by Morris Rosenthal
hardback, 302p.

$21.95
Order code: WV

Feminism in a surprising place.

Sarah Menkin Foner (1854-1936), was the first woman to publish in Hebrew. This volume contains six excerpts from her work — romantic, historical, polemical — that deal with many issues familiar to us a hundred years later. The Jerusalem Post calls it "a worthwhile, inspirational read . . . one of the only female first-hand accounts of the feminine sphere in the Pale of Settlement . . . elucidate[s] the state of mind of at least one Haskala-era woman yearning for independence." It appears here for the first time in English.

. . .When my father came home for lunch, I opened up the Siddur and read before him the prayer "Ma Tov-ooh" fluently and well. He was astonished and hugged and kissed me, and he wanted to go out and tell our neighbors about this wonder. Just then, the door opened and my uncle came in, so my father called me and instructed me to read from the Siddur.
    "She learned this in a half-day, from morning till now," my father said.
    "I'm sorry that she's a girl," my uncle answered, "If she was a boy, she probably would have been a Gaon in Israel."
     "A girl can't become a Gaon?" I asked innocently.
     My uncle and father burst out laughing, and I was ashamed and humiliated. I hid in the corner and didn't want to sit down at the table to eat.
                                                                (From "A Girl Can't Become a Gaon," New York, 1919)