Books by Naomi Ragen
- Translations
Pre-order
The Saturday Wife ,
available on August 7th. |
From Publishers Weekly
Like Emma Bovary, Delilah Goldgrab longs for a better life. A Queens yeshiva
girl, Delilah is prayerfully remorseful after fornicating with young,
opportunistic Yitzie Polinsky, and quickly marries mediocre rabbinical
student Chaim Levi, who is unable to provide her with a house, much less the
glossy upper-middle-class life she longs for. When Chaim accepts a position
as the rabbi of an affluent Connecticut congregation, Delilah has the
opportunity to indulge her ideas about happiness as the congregation's
rebbitzin, with deliciously disastrous consequences. It's hard to like
selfish, clueless Delilah or anyone else here: the pleasure of this novel is
in its mercilessness, with Ragen (The Covenant) raising the stakes until the
very end.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of
Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Reviews
“The pleasure of this novel is in its mercilessness, with Ragen raising the
stakes until the very end.”
–Publishers Weekly
“With The Saturday Wife, Naomi Ragen proves herself an adept satirist as
well as a brilliant storyteller....The heiress to such eternally
discontented heroines as Emma Bovary and Undine Spragg, Delilah Goldgrab
Levi's story is funny, poignant, and unforgettable.”
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The Covenant is the story behind the headlines we read
every day, the heart-wrenching reality of modern life, where terrorists
reign and average citizens find themselves at the pivot of politics and
history. Living in Jerusalem, Elise Margulies fears for the lives of
her husband and daughter every day. Then comes the day when her worst
fears are realized. Cancer specialist Dr. Jonathan Margulies drives
his young daughter home from her ballet recital and his bullet-ridden car is
found empty on the side of the road hours later. Elise, in the last
stages of a difficult pregnancy, desperately calls her grandmother Leah in
America for help and unknowingly revives a decades-old oath that transcends
both time and place. Over the course of five terror and hope-filled
days during which ordinary people join the front lines against terrorism,
the ties that bind two generations forge a potent alliance against
contemporary evil. With this novel, which examines the passionate and
terrifying struggle to preserve life in any age, Naomi Ragen is at her most
powerful and engrossing.
"While still maintaining her great warmth for characters,
The Covenant is as suspenseful as a Mary Higgins Clark as you
worry about the fate of characters hour by hour, minute by minute. The
Covenant brings the headlines heartbreakingly home and redefines the
unlimited boundaries of lifelong friendship."
- Gay Courter, author of The Midwife and Code Ezra
"A thrilling page turning
from start to finish, Naomi Ragen's The Covenant is not only a
mesmerizing tale with fine drawn characters, it is a story of truth and
integrity, a multi-generational novel love, friendship and duty. This is a
MUST READ book. It is Naomi Ragen at her finest hour."
- Faye Kellerman, author of Street Dreams
"Naomi Ragen's books are
always compulsively readable, and The Covenant is no
exception. An emotionally-charged and engrossing book, The Covenant
is a tribute to the power of friendship and the strength of love in the face
of evil."
- India Edghill, author of Wisdom’s Daughter: A Novel of Solomon
and Sheba
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Minyan Nashim
(2006)
Naomi's hit play,
Minyan Nashim,
which just closed a five year run at Israel's National Theatre (Habima) with
over 450 sold-out performances, has been published in book form. |
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- Chains
Around the Grass (2002)
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(from Publishers Weekly)
Set in the 1950's in New York City, Chains Around the Grass is a portrait of a
Jewish-American family that glows with affection, tenderness, and courage when
tragedy changes the lives of all who are left behind. A passionately personal
and heartfelt book, based heavily on autobiographical material, this is the book
Ms. Ragen says that she became an author to write.
Based on novelist Ragen's own experiences growing up in an ethnically mixed
low-income housing project in the Rockaways, this novel opens a window into the
bittersweet world of the Markowitz family as they struggle to make ends meet in
1950s New York City. A first-generation Jewish immigrant with incredible
reserves of optimism and ambition, David Markowitz trades in his religious
identity for the promised gold of America, believing that "if you really
wanted to, if you worked your can off, you could not only get out of Brooklyn,
but get Brooklyn out of you." After being conned into making a bad
investment that leaves him and his family financially and emotionally bankrupt,
David dies suddenly. For the first time in her life, his wife, Ruth, must take
sole responsibility for her three children, something that seems overwhelmingly
difficult.
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The Ghost of Hannah Mendes
(2001)
- A wise and deeply moving new novel depicting one family's search for its
Sephardic roots. An elderly Manhattan matron with only a short time to live -- who
despairs at the thought of her only legacy being her apathetic granddaughters -- is
visited by a ghost of a remarkable ancestor, who offers her a challenge and a partnership.
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- The Sacrifice of Tamar (1995)
- Tamar Finegold is a happy young bride in one of Brooklyn's insulated
ultra-Orthodox enclaves. As the wife of a rising young Rabbi and Talmud scholar, her
status is assured. But this staid, predictable life crashes violently when Tamar is raped
by a black intruder as she baby-sits for her baby nephew. Humiliated and confused, she
refuses to risk the unbearable stigma of discovery. But in her attempt to hide her shame,
she is sent plummeting into a moral crisis when she discovers she is pregnant and cannot
be sure who the father is. Faced with impossible choices, she turns to her two best
friends. Together, the three relive their childhood, exploring their past struggles to
reconcile their faith with the haphazard tragedies that befall all human beings. In the
end, heartbreaking sacrifices and impossible decisions lead to a surprising triumph of the
human spirit.
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- Sotah (1995)
- Sotah introduces a family with three daughters approaching the age of marriage:
Devorah, Dina and Chaya Leah. In the strict orthodoxy of their world, a sotah is a wife
suspected of infidelity who can be tried by ordeal to prove she is guiltless. Which sister
could be capable of such a thought, let alone the act? Into the pious world of strict
chaperoning, modest clothing, where a married woman's hair must never be seen by a man
other than her husband -insinuates this serpent suggestion of evil. Ragen's powerful tale
of three sisters spins endless questions: Which one? Could she? Did she? What changes
could come into this orderly world because of unthinking actions?
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- Jephte's Daughter (1995)
- Abraham Ha-Levi is a wealthy American businessman and the last male survivor of
an important Orthodox Jewish family. He decides it's time he finally honoured his
religious and cultural inheritance and so forces his 18-year old daughter - the beautiful
and intelligent Batsheva - into an arranged marriage. Her new husband is a devout Torah
scholar who lives in Jerusalem. Batsheva finds herself plunged into a new life and a
strange land, among people who follow their religious laws to the letter. Then she
realizes that her husband's piety is merely a mask for his cruelty. A magnificent book
that builds up momentum compellingly. It's so good that it's hard to believe this is a
first novel - keep your eyes peeled for the next one!" (Review, Best magazine,
London, England, Sept. 1, 1989).
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- Translations
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