Mazel
Rebecca Goldstein
With a new afterword

“Shimmering with humor and intelligence.”
—New Yorker

Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York; her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics at Columbia; Chloe’s daughter Phoebe grows up to become a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the sort of domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected.

“In her artful creation of Jewish female archetypes . . . Goldstein has written characters as worthy of Phillip Roth and Grace Paley as they are of their grand European progenitors, Sholem Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon.”—Los Angeles Times

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August 2002
LC: 2002022786 PS
374 pp. 5 x 7 3/4
ISBN 0-299-18124-3
Paper $19.95 T

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction

Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award

1995 hardcover, Viking;
1996 paperback, Penguin