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- Mystery - |
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Mystery Midrash |
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 Mystery Midrash (Anthology)Edited by Lawrence W. Raphael; preface by Joel Siegel Order from the publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing 300 pages, 1999 ISBN 1580230555 Reviewed by Lisa Eagleson-Roever Mystery Midrash gets a permanent spot on my shelf. I'm thinking of putting my name inside the front cover, as if I were twelve-years-old again, in case I'm asked to loan it out. I don't want to lose this one. From the preface by Joel Siegel to the final entry, I had a hard time putting it down. If I weren't obliged to be a functioning human being at six-thirty every weekday morning, I'd have spent all night reading it. As you'll learn in the preface, this is a first-ever collection of Jewish-themed mysteries. But not every main character is identifiably Orthodox or Reformed, and some are not particularly comfortable being identified as Jewish. It's not an issue of discrimination so much as "How do you define Jewish?" Faye Kellerman's Holy Water is laugh-out-loud funny. A Final Midrash by Richard Fliegel enthralled me with its concept: three rabbis, long-time friends and fellow scholars, asked to decipher the dying message of a murdered fourth rabbi; each has a distinctly different interpretation, and each knows that one of them is the murderer. My notes for Jacob's Voice by Ronald Levistky read as follows: "Murder, tortured souls, misbehaving husbands, zealots--what more could a mystery need?" Some entries are classic examples of the mystery genre, others are poignant twists worth savoring for their special flavor. There is something for every mystery fan. Don't pass it up. |
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