By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Lifecyle events – changes in status – often make us pause and review our lives. They also can cause us to re-evaluate the way we understand our parents’ behavior and our connection to them. These ideas form the basis for two recent memoirs: After his mother’…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
There are several approaches to writing short stories. Some offer only a brief glimpse of a person’s life or thoughts. Others tell of events that encompass decades, but which focus only on the most relevant details. Each approach offers something different, remin…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
I have an eclectic taste in books. Sorry, eclectic was a high school vocabulary word that I fell in love with: it’s just a fancy way of saying I like to read a wide variety of books. Years ago, there was bookstore on Washington Avenue in Endicott. The salesman an…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Reverberations from World War II have continued throughout the decades, but, when novelists deal with these echoes, they often focus on very different aspects. Take, for example, two recent novels: Joss Weiss offers a dystopian version of the United States in the 19…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Any choice a person makes can result in unexpected consequences. After all, no one can predict the future. But some choices are more fraught than others, for example, surrogate motherhood or having an affair. Those actions occur in two recent novels: Jacqueline Fri…
