Mazel [Paperback]

Rebecca Goldstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996

A novel of three generations of Jewish women begins with Sasha, the matriarch, who has learned of Mazel, the great confounder of order and predictability, from her experiences in pre-war Warsaw and her current life in New York, as she passes this knowledge onto her daughter and granddaughter. Reprint.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former philosopher Goldstein's latest novel looks at the twists of fate provided by chance in three generations of a Jewish family.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA?Mazel?luck in Yiddish?enables Sasha to escape both her confining little village in rural Poland and the confusion and horror of Warsaw's ghetto on the eve of World War II. But it is Sasha's independent spirit and creativity that are her legacies to her daughter Chloe and her granddaughter Phoebe. Sasha's story, interwoven with fairy tales and Yiddish folktales, is told with humor and feeling for the details of Jewish life. This novel challenges YAs on a variety of levels: What is the price of success? Can we ever escape our past? How influential is family in the molding of character? The text is sprinkled with Yiddish words and references, most of which are understandable in context.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140239057
• ISBN-13: 978-0140239058
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rebecca Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, a professor of philosophy, and the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mazel casts a fresh look at pre-war and contemporary Jewry., January 5, 1998

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mazel (Hardcover)

My first impression of Rebecca Goldstein's novel Mazel was that this was a Jewish book written for my generation. I'm 29 and growing up Jewish I was saturated with stories and films of the Holocaust throughout my childhood to the point of becoming jaded. Never had I heard anything about Europe from my elders that was positive. Everyone knew of the so-called "Golden Days" of the Jews in Europe, when scholarship and the arts flourished in Jewish communities, and even in the ghettos the culture could not be stemmed. Yet all the images I had in my mind until I read Mazel were black-and-white, the colors of Hitler's proud films of his concentration camp successes. Mazel describes life in the pre-war shtetel of Poland not through the misty eyes of an elderly person remembering a lost way of life, but through the eyes of a girl, Sasha, living the life and finding it rather oppressive. Sasha's family moves to Warsaw where she finds a thriving culture of young "enlightened" Jews, part of the Bohemian intelligentsia. She becomes an actress in the Yiddish theater and finds love and herself in a Poland whose fate is as yet unimaginable. The story then moves to present-day New Jersey where Sasha, now an old woman, is at the wedding of her granddaughter, a professor at Princeton, who has adopted the old ways and has become an Orthodox Jew, much to her grandmother's dismay. Most of the book is about Sasha's life in Europe before the war. Mazel is unique because it casts a fresh perspective on the final days of European Jewry. Much of the story is told from the point of view of young optimistic characters who strive to enjoy life. It doesn't dwell on the knowledge that the readers must inevitably share: that most of the characters are fated to die just when they were beginning to live. Mazel is about how three generations of Jewish women deal with their Jewishness. The book doesn't judge the women, rather, it allows the reader a glimpse into the perspective of all three generations: the older generation who abandoned the old ways, the middle generation who never understood them, and the younger generation who are trying, in ever-increasing numbers, to learn about their heritage and what it means to be Jewish in a society that doesn't, really, care one way or the other.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Discovery, April 1, 2001

By 

Barbara Goulter (Werribee, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mazel (Hardcover)

By chance, I found Mazel on the shelf of the tiny library of the small outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where I live. How it got there I have no idea. I found the first chapter or two almost impenetrable, which may perhaps be explained by the fact that - as I later learned - it's a sequel to an earlier novel. But the wit, charm and incisiveness of the style lured me on, and once I had sorted out the characters and got used to shuttling through time, I realized I had made a rare discovery. Everything felt so true. An obvious example: the way Sasha's egotism and theatricality had cowed and almost silenced her daughter and granddaughter, yet how they had quietly found their own forms of resistence and assertion. But many a novel and even soap opera can give you that. Far more remarkable was the way Goldstein brought to life the lost world and lost people of prewar Jewish Poland, and embodied in her characters the whole spectrum of ways people can and do respond to the sometimes impossibly difficult dilemmas and limitations into which they are born. You can see how each temperament and each generation arrives at what it thinks to be the best resolution, only to find itself outmoded. Most remarkable of all, I felt I understood considerably more about myself, the world, history, life, etc. when I had finished than when I had begun, and only a masterpiece can do that. Mazel is an extraordinary achievement, and what a pity that it should be out of print.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of those books you want to reread as soon as it is over!, November 1, 2004

By 

kattepusen (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mazel (Library of American Fiction) (Paperback)

This is the 4th book I have read of Rebecca Goldstein's, and this was my 2nd favorite (after the superb Mind-Body Problem). I liked the "generational" aspect where we follow Sasha (Sorel) from early childhood in a Schluftchev shtetl to present day USA where she has a grown daughter (Chloe) and a granddaughter just about to get married (Phoebe). I must admit I enjoyed the early childhood and early adult descriptions of Sasha the best - here there is a rich sense of storytelling, and the human characterizations are gripping and vivid. Sasha evetually rejects and leaves behind the old-fashioned Jewish ways of the shtetl and becomes a great stage actress and part of the Jewish intellectual life ("The Enlightenment") in prewar Warsaw.

The story in the present is also good, but I thought Sasha's antics were described with too much cliche and suffered a bit from the "feminine-writer syndrome". In addition, the daughter and granddaughter stay very one-dimensional. Mazel means LUCK in Yiddish, and this book very successfully plays with its meaning throughout someone's life. Finally, Phoebe's decision about going back to traditional Jewish ways is one of the best contrasts in the story...perfectly unimaginable and understandable at the same time!