The Autobiography of God
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Rebecca Nachman is a Rabbi without a synagogue. Having resigned from her dwindling congregation, she now works as a college counselor at a small Vermont college advising students about private matters and offering the "Jewish perspective" on issues raised at faculty dinner parties.
Deeply lonely and on the edge of losing her faith, she comes into possession of a Torah, the last relic of Czechowa, a village of Polish Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. With the Torah, the unquiet spirits of the village dead begin to visit Rebecca. On one visit they leave a manuscript written in Hebrew and titled My Life, an autobiography by God who, like any eager author, is seeking a sympathetic reader. No one has ever finished reading the manuscript, including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Maimonides, and Augustine. God thinks Rebecca will.
Rebecca's life is further complicated when one of her advisees-a troubled young woman who seemed on the verge of confessing something-is found murdered. As the college struggles to comprehend the tragedy and a police investigation is launched, Rebecca begins reading, and so comes to confront the central challenge to her faith in His most troubling and unlikely incarnation.
Julius Lester's first adult novel in more than a decade, The Autobiography of God marks the return of an utterly original and provocative voice in American letters, addressing religion with wicked humor and profound reverence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lester, author of the critically acclaimed novel Do Lord Remember Me and the memoir Lovesong, melds the classic college mystery with deeply theological ruminations on suffering and death. Rebecca Nachman is a former rabbi whose emotional failures in relating to the members of her synagogue cause her to seek refuge in a small college community in northern Vermont, where she works as a therapist. When one student who had come to her for counseling is found strangled in Boston, Rebecca chastises herself for failing to see signs of trouble and realizes she knows the identity of the killer. But the murder mystery is only a subplot in a larger, much more compelling story of theodicy. When Rebecca, the child of Holocaust survivors, comes to possess a Torah scroll that the Nazis stole from a shtetl in 1944, she becomes the "rabbi" of the village's dead, whose spirits visit her each night to say Kaddish. Lester's use of magical realism takes a masterful turn when God himself begins visiting Rebecca, anxious for her to read his autobiography (which has been rejected by the likes of Maimonides, Akiba and Augustine) and know the truth about him that he is lonely, morally ambivalent and fascinated with evil. Although the murder mystery is predictable, the real mystery of this novel the mercurial nature of God is richly absorbing.
Customer Reviews
The Autobiography of God by Julius Lester
I got this from our library a few years ago and enjoyed the fictional story, but was more impressed with the alternative vision of God. Now wanting to read it again, it is no longer in our library. It is definitely worth re-reading.