בס"ד

The Filtered Voice:

Genre Shifts in Orthodox Women’s Fiction

Malka Schaps

§1 Introduction

Something has changed, quite recently and quite drastically, in Orthodox women’s fiction written in English. From novels focusing on relationships and role conflicts, there has been a swing toward crime novels. We will first review the history of the Orthodox novel, both in America and in Israel. Then we will give a brief survey of the development of the crime novel genre. Finally, we analyze the causes for the shift, which seems to be at least partly the result of cross-translation between the two Orthodox writing communities.

By Orthodox fiction, we mean fiction intended for adults published by the Orthodox Jewish publishing houses, and intended mostly for Orthodox Jewish readers. This is to be distinguished from various novels about the Orthodox subculture published by trade publishers for a mainly non-religious audience, rarely sympathetic and rarely reflecting the actual problems of the community.

§2 Orthodox novels

In an earlier paper [Schaps] we gave a detailed history of Orthodox publishing over the last hundred and fifty years. On the one hand there has been a strong sense of the importance of providing acceptable reading matter for the juvenile readership, together with a reluctance to provide fiction for adults, particularly men, on the grounds that reading such books is a frivolous pastime. In America the first books explicitly dealing with issues of concern to women over eighteen were published in the late Eighties. In Israel, where the standards for treatment of matchmaking and marriage were more restrictive than in America, the fiction for women was mainly about seminary girls, and the author who wished to touch on the problems of married women did so through the mothers and elder sisters of the unmarried main characters.

The publishing environments in Israel and in America are very different, mainly because of the complications of distributing from coast to coast in the United States and Canada. In Israel most well known authors first serialize in a chareidi newspaper or family magazine, and then put out the book themselves. Since most bookstores that carry these books are in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak, distribution is not complicated. In America self-publishing is rare, and most Orthodox fiction is put out by one of four or five Orthodox publishing houses. There are many fewer novels published in English, each book is more expensive, and in general more copies of each book are sold.

The English-speaking writing community of Orthodox women was analyzed in depth by Roller. She concludes that the literature of ultra-Orthodox women is a reaction to secular Jewish feminism, not in the sense of being directed to feminists as a refutation, but in the sense of being directed to other Orthodox women as a form of self-strengthening and reaffirmation of traditional female roles.

The resistance to ideas perceived as foreign and threatening – to writing that could not faithfully represent all Jewish female readers – spurred the creation of a new body of writing that did speak for those readers. [Roller, p. 35]

Roller distinguishes sharply between the styles of the ba’alot teshuva, who are tentative and questioning, and that of women born into religious families, particularly the older women, who write from a position of certainty and seem to be free of identity conflicts. An exception, which she does not mention, is Sarah Birnhak’s Family Secrets, in which the author suggests that many model Orthodox families actually may have had some rocky periods in their past.

There is another difference between the raised-Orthodox writers and the ba’alot teshuva which is relevant. Roller implies that these Orthodox writers are satisfied to be writing for a mainly Orthodox audience, and this may be true of many of the writers from Orthodox backgrounds, particularly the older women. It is definitely not true of the ba’alot teshuva, nor is it true of some of the more ambitious of the raised Orthodox writers. One of the milestones in Orthodox women’s writing was the appearance of the anthology Our Lives, in the wake of which a women’s writers’ group met for about half a year. The two major themes discussed were the restrictiveness of the Orthodox publishers standards of what could or could not be discussed, and the frustrations of all the authors of books with the fact that their works were not advertised, promoted or distributed outside a very narrow market. After the group had shared enough information to discover that advertising and promoting outside the Orthodox community was too expensive either for the publisher or for a group of individuals, the writer’s group disbanded.

Roller notes that sociologists writing about the chareidi community ignore the literature altogether, preferring to substitute their own stereotypes for the authentic voices of the community. She claims that this leads to serious misunderstanding and underrating of the women involved. She devotes considerable space to analyzing two such sociological studies, and concludes that the authors are not willing to hear what the women are saying. It is hardly surprising that the Orthodox women authors, many of whom are college educated and some of whom have advanced degrees, are frustrated by an attitude that their books do not deserve to be reviewed and that what they say is not to be taken seriously.

Concerning the books in her study, which goes up to ’96, Roller also notes that

A major feature of the writing of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, which differentiates it from general women’s writing, is that it is dominated by autobiographical, anecdotal, personal narrative, not fiction. And even the fiction of the writing/reading community is possessed by realism and frequently imitates the style of personal narrative.[Roller, p.82]

As we pointed out in our introduction, the fiction has turned toward crime novels since ’96, with a consequent sacrifice in realism. We will return to this point after saying something about the historical development of the crime novel in general literature.

§3 A history of the crime story as a genre

At the very outset, it will be useful to distinguish between two different genres, “crime” and “horror”. The horror story maintains suspense by trying to arouse terror of the supernatural; the crime story relies for its suspense on a sense of danger, as in “thrillers”, or by presenting an intellectual puzzle that the reader is invited to solve, as in “detective stories”. Both genres are considered popular rather than literary.

Presumably the origin of the “horror” genre was in ghost stories told around warm fires, but as a form of literature the starting point is usually considered to be Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, followed by a whole string of what were call “Gothic novels”, of which the most famous in the eighteenth century were Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolfo and Lewis’ The Monk. The typical plot, ably parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, has the ingénue heroine wandering through the labyrinthine passageways of a ruined castle or abbey. In the nineteenth century, with Frankenstein and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, some of the horror stories acquired a pseudo-scientific overlay, but others, like Dracula, continued to rely on the “old-fashioned” supernatural.

The Gothic novel often involved a crime; why was the ghost haunting the castle if not because he was murdered there? Under the technique of the “explained supernatural” used by Mrs. Radcliffe and some other Gothic writers, the crime is sometimes more modern; the villain is manufacturing supernatural effects in order to intimidate the girl he is pursuing. At this point the Gothic novel almost converges with a detective story like The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Sherlock Holmes is called upon to tear away the supernatural veil in order to reveal the crime.

The crime story is considered to have originated with Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and to have been brilliantly continued by Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Real or fictional reports on crimes, with all the gory details, were widely circulated and avidly read among the working classes for many years before that. Poe made the crime story relatively respectable for middle class readers by focusing not on the crime but on its solution.

In Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, the communist thinker Ernest Mandel traces the decline of the “good bandit” myths and the rise of the crime story to the development of professional crime in the nineteenth century cities, and corresponding bourgeois anxieties about being robbed or murdered. These anxieties made the middle classes much more sympathetic to the authorities than they had been during the era of the debtors’ prison in early nineteenth century England.

The dramatization of crime that so innocently tingles the nerves of alienated people can be bent to the purpose of defending private property because this defense takes shape in an unreflected way. People don’t read crime novels to improve their intellect or to contemplate the nature of society or the human condition, but simply for relaxation….The criminalization of these conflicts [between individuals and society] makes them compatible with the defense of bourgeois ‘law and order’. [Mandel, p. 10]

The hero of the prewar detective story was not usually the police inspector of lower class origins, but the brilliant detective coming from the upper classes. In order to have a proper battle of wits, the criminal was also endowed with a strong intellect and often with educational attainments unusual among professional criminals. The resulting work was rarely true-to-life, but that has never been considered a strong drawback in the crime story genre.

The period between World War I and World War II is considered the golden age of the classic detective novel. The book was a double battle of wits, between the detective and the criminal on the one hand, between the reader and the author on the other. The author was supposed to “play fair” and introduce enough real clues, mixed together with misleading information, that the reader could theoretically guess the identity of the criminal, usually a murderer. In particular, the criminal had to take some role in the book, perhaps as a humble butler, but often as a respected member of society. These drawing room murders and detectives who could solve the crime without ever getting their feet muddy examining a crime scene were considerably less realistic than Sherlock Holmes. “In Great Britain, though a few score murders and acts of grand larceny took place every year, not more than two or three of these had features in the least interesting to the criminologist as regards either motive or method; nor in any of these, did private detectives play a decisive part in bringing the culprits to justice—this was done by the competent routine procedure of the C.I.D. Yet from the middle of the twenties onwards, some thousands of detective novels were annually published, all of them concerned with extraordinary and baffling crimes, and only a very small number gave the police the least credit for the solution.”[Graves and Hodge, quoted in Mandel, p. 29]

What eventually undermined the classic detective story, with a time lag of twenty years, was the rise of organized crime on a national and international scale. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple could not do much against the Mafia, and even Hercule Poirot, a professional detective, would need considerable aid. While the upper and middle classes were still reading the classic detective novels, the pulp presses were churning out stories about gangsters and changing the popular perception of crime. The classic detective novels remain popular and are still being reprinted to this day but the bulk of the new crime novels are in different styles.

As crime became big business, or was perpetrated by states as espionage, the forces opposing crime also to had use more equipment and manpower. The postwar years saw the growth of the ‘police procedural’ detective novel, which relies on methods of crime detection closer to those in actual use, and the spy thriller. Unlike the detective novel, in which a murder has been committed and the detective must find the criminal, the thriller usually involves some plot by the enemy that the hero must foil. Goldfinger, for example, is planning to steal all the gold in Fort Knox, and James Bond must stop him. Because the project, if carried out, would be so catastrophic for “our side”, the enemy goes to great lengths to carry it though, and the hero must take great risks to stop them, thus providing local suspense within the overarching tension about the success of the plot.

Another change in the crime story market that occurred during and after World War II was tremendous expansion through the paperback trade. Between the wars an author of detective novels would expect to sell a few thousand copies of each book, about what an Orthodox novel sells today. Twenty years later, the same author might be selling hundreds of thousands of copies of the same book. About a third of the new paperback output was crime novels. Agatha Christie was at one time world leader in total book sales, with 500 million. In an effort to attract customers in this lucrative but highly competitive market, many authors began writing the “crime story plus” where the bonus was either an exotic setting or information about some slightly offbeat subject.

§4 The thriller in Orthodox fiction.

The source of the thriller in the Orthodox market was in books for juveniles in Hebrew. They were published as serials in weekly youth magazines and then brought out in book form. The plots were fairly standardized and generally similar to the Hardy boys books, in that precocious teenagers managed to foil the plots of one or another type of villains, usually Arab terrorists or Nazis in hiding. Because of the serial publication, the plots were loosely constructed and relied on various cliff-hanging incidents to maintain interest.

With the advent of Orthodox family magazines and weekly newspaper magazines in the early part of the previous decade, the thrillers were upgraded. A magazine would generally run two stories simultaneously, one of them a crime novel, and the other about relationships and personal development. The writers of the crime novels were usually men, the heroes were no longer teenagers but rather adults, and the purpose of the books was to make some point on a grand scale, about the meaning of suffering, or the consequences of decisions, or the pattern of Jewish history. The plots were much more carefully constructed, and heavy use was made of flashbacks and of ambiguous scenes that could only be interpreted in the light of later events. The best-selling authors of this type of book are Rabbi Moshe Grilak, writing under the name Chaim Eliav, and Yair Weinstock, who uses the penname M.Arbel. The books specialize in exotic locales, as do those of their new competitor, Tzippora Adler. Her latest book, Before the Sun Sets, takes place during the revolt against Mobuto in Zaire, the only Orthodox Jew involved being a hapless diamond merchant who was an unwitting courier for the C.I.A.

The books came under heavy criticism, both because of the many violent scenes and also because of the criticisms of Orthodox society. The book Runaway, about an abused child, was discontinued as a serial because of a storm of protest, and then reinstated because of a yet more furious storm of protest at its suspension. Similarly Blackout, concerning a Government Secret Service plot to sow dissension in the Orthodox community by playing on their very real weaknesses, was criticized from wall-to-wall in the chareidi press, which did not prevent it from being, by the standards of Orthodox publishing, a best-seller.

The books still have serious weaknesses. Some of these, particularly the unbelievable plots to be foiled and the brilliantly sadistic villains, are endemic to the entire crime story genre. Others, a tendency to overstate emotional reactions and an occasional slip into preachiness, are specific to the Orthodox thriller.

The Orthodox community in general writes in two languages, English and Hebrew, and its works are both cross-translated and selectively translated into several other languages, French, Spanish, Russian and Yiddish. However, for the first decade of adult fiction, from ’86-’96, there was very little translation of fiction from one language to the other, for reasons which were largely economic, but also connected with varying standards of what was considered appropriate material for inclusion in an Orthodox book. When A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew was translated into Hebrew, it was not considered appropriate for seminary libraries, both because of the scenes between young men and women on shidduch dates and also because, while not reaching feminist conclusions, it presented feminist arguments and attitudes. Being banned by the school libraries did not hurt the sales; it only meant that more girls had to buy the book in order to read it.

The first translation of one of the Hebrew thrillers, In the Spider’s Web, had an electrifying effect on the English-speaking Orthodox market. In general the American chareidi community is much more exposed to general literature than the Israeli chareidi community. There were many people in the community who had once read and enjoyed crime stories and had since decided that the standards of morality in the modern thriller were such that they preferred to avoid them. Thus the publication of a “kosher” thriller produced very gratifying sales figures. Yair Weinstock jumped into the newly-opened market with a translation of The Gordian Knot, and on the American side of the Atlantic he did not bother with a penname.

The effect on the English market was immediate. Two more male writers, Tzvi White and David Sussman, got their crime novels published, and most of the standard women writers went over to writing crime stories. This did not mean that publishers immediately started rejecting all novels about relationships; Shoshana Schwarz’ first novel, In Full Bloom, appeared in ’98, and As Mountains around Jerusalem came out in ’99, but there then followed a period of over two years in which only crime novels were being published, as a glance at the bibliography below will show.

Some shift in the direction of thrillers was probably coming anyway. Since All the Hidden Children, Ruth Benjamin had been writing crime novels, and Libby Lazewnik’s Give Me the Moon had a subplot in which a criminal intimidated the son of one of the protagonists. However, when Ruthie Pearlman, after a ten year retirement from writing, started her Detective Inspector Sommers series and Shoshana Schwartz wrote her second novel about a Jewish boy in a cult, it became clear that crime novels had taken over in English Orthodox fiction publishing. Nothing else was coming out.

The women writers did not entirely abandon their original readership. They generally hew to a higher standard of realism than the thrillers written by men, and they include a subplot dealing with relationships or personal development. In The Judge, main plot involves a murder and a murder threat, but the subplot concerns a girl trying to get over a broken engagement and start her life again; for good measure, Lazewnik throws in an entirely unrelated mystery to be solved. In Ruthie Pearlman’s two new books, the main stories are ‘police procedural’ novels about a kidnapping and a murder, respectively. However, the subplot concerns the romantic involvement of D.I. Sommers, a lapsed Orthodox Jew, and Leora Jakobovitz, a ba’alat teshuva who is a forensic evidence specialist. In The Selby Printout by Ruth Benjamin, the main plot is the attempt to clear the hero from a charge of embezzlement by finding the real embezzlers, but the subplot concerns the hero’s alienation from the Orthodox community into which he had been welcomed three years before.

We have intimated that the major trigger for the shift to the thriller genre among the women writers was competition from the translated Israeli thrillers, but a second factor in the process was the frustration we described earlier about the narrow market for Orthodox fiction. There may have been some hope that books of a more popular style would reach a wider audience. In Israel, the thrillers, because of their popularity with teenagers, do manage to break out of the chareidi market, and reach some of the religious Zionist community. In America the Orthodox books in general reach the broader Orthodox community, but a better-selling book is considered to have done this more successfully.

Having said that the publishers and writers of the chareidi community are concentrating on crime novels because they sell well, we will go one step farther and ask why this should be so. This is not a trend peculiar to Orthodox society; it is a reflection of a trend in the general society. We consulted two of the authors involved for their opinion.

Ruthie Pearlman, herself a crime novel fan, sees the books as serving an important purpose. Because of the high crime rates, we live with anxieties we have trouble facing directly: the kidnapping of a child, a terrorist attack on our community, a dishonest caretaker for our elderly parent. A crime book dealing with the subject allows us to face our fears in all their terror, come to some sort of closure, and then get on with our normal life. She is no longer interested in writing the “cozy family” novels with which she started out.

Libby Lazewnik takes a dimmer view. She feels that the shallow, quick-paced style of television is filtering into the Orthodox community as well. People no longer have the patience for the discursive, slow-paced novels that were so popular in the nineteenth century. The writers’ awareness of this impatience was already reflected in the Orthodox novels of ten years ago, which avoided leisurely introductions or long descriptive paragraphs. However, the Orthodox novelists a decade back did take time over their characters, so that what kept the reader turning the pages was a desire to find out how the protagonists, with whom the reader had come to identify, resolved their conflicts. Lazewnik finds that in the crime novel format requested by her publishers, the need for constant suspense and action does not allow the same depth in describing relationships.

Insofar as Orthodox writers are interested in reaching at least the broader religious community, and most of them explicitly are, they are forced to compete with authors who have no compunctions about discussing the intimate side of the relationship between a woman and a man, and often put exactly that in the showcase. It is obviously possible to write excellent literature under such restrictions; the great novelists of the nineteenth century operated under similar constraints. However, it is easier to sidestep this restriction in the crime genre, where suspense and action are expected to be the focus of the plot. The precise genre into which these novels fit is that of crime novels with an exotic setting. For the chareidi home readership that exotic background is a foreign country or an unfamiliar segment of the Orthodoox community. For the wider readership, the entire Orthodox ambiance is exotic.

§5 Literature and the Orthodox spectrum

Literature is a community matter. Writers are affected by the expectations and preferences of the critics and the readers. Readers are limited by what their writers are willing and able to provide. Both writers and readers are dependent on the economic viability of publishing in the community. Some communities, though politically and socially well defined, produce little literature of their own; others export to the entire world.

The publishers putting out the books we have been describing, though thinking of themselves as serving the broader Orthodox and Jewish community, would, if pressed, admit to being chareidi. There is no comparable plethora of publishers and distributors for the other Orthodox communities, i.e., the Modern Orthodox in America and the Religious Zionists in Israel. The one publishing house that intends to publish for the Religious Zionist community in Israel is Sifriat Bet-El, but they have published very little fiction for adults.

The chareidi publishers do not publish much from non-chareidi authors, usually because of the different standards for relationships between men and women, which is one of the most sensitive topics in chareidi publishing. The secular publishers do not publish much that presents a positive view of any part of the Orthodox community. A sensationalist chareidi-bashing novel, or a thriller presenting the settlers as fanatics, will find a secular publisher much more readily than a serious novel dealing realistically with the broader Orthodox community and its problems.

The libraries in the settlements reflect the publishing situation. They are divided into two sections, the general and the Torah-oriented, the first being put out by secular publishers and the second by chareidi publishers. Some similar division is common in Jewish bookstores outside of New York, whereas in New York, as in Jerusalem, the bookstores specialize in either secular or chareidi publishers. The Orthodox publishers try to take the broader market into account in editing the books.

In Israel, the contrast between the two types of literature is disturbing to some segments of the Religious Zionist community. Their original intention was to become a part of the general culture, and there was little sympathy for the idea of a separate religious literature. As it has become clearer that the general publishers are not going to allow them to participate in shaping the general culture, and as parents discover the difficulties of raising Religious Zionist youth on literature which is aggressively secular and assumes that being born in America or Europe is the best luck a person can have, the opposition to a separate religious literature has softened. There are parents who ask the librarians to direct their children to the Torah-oriented section of the library.

In America, the Modern Orthodox writer, and there are some very good ones, must either write what will find a publisher or write something other than fiction. The Modern Orthodox reader must read about other people.

From the very beginning, the Orthodox publishers have hoped to fill this vacuum. Some of the Orthodox novels about relationships included a subplot in the Modern Orthodox community. The crime novels, in which much of the action is not specific to the chareidi community, are another attempt to reach outside the chareidi readership.

Bibliography

Authors marked with an * wrote originally in Hebrew.

Benjamin, Ruth, On a Golden Chain, C.I.S. (1991). Concerns a Jewish girl adopted into a Gentile family in England, searching for her natural family in South Africa and Israel.

_____________, Yesterday's Child, C.I.S. (1992). The hero is a boy from a broken home who discovers that his mother had been divorced before marrying his father, and the book explores the South African attitudes toward Jewish divorce.

_____________, Stranger to her People, C.I.S. (1993). Treats a South African convert who explores the extent to which her family is implicated in the Holocaust.

_____________, All the Hidden Children, Targum/Feldheim (1995). Partly adventure story, but partly about a ba'al teshuva who feels that his spiritual roots are in Israel and who, at the end of the book, settles there to raise a family.

_____________, The Selby Printout, Targum Press. Hebrew: Nitpas b’Reshet, Ra’ananut (2001). A gang of embezzlers turns vicious when they discover that the family of their scapegoat is on their trail.

_____________, The Music of the Soul, Targum Press. A musician tries to save her young student, who is threatened by gangsters trying to collect an uncle’s gambling debts.

Birnhak, Sarah, Search My Heart, Moznaim, (1986). Leah, infiltrating the religious community in the guise of a ba'alat teshuva in order to play detective in a version of the Yossele Shuchmacher kidnapping case, is affected by her role.

_____________,Family Secrets, Targum/Feldheim (1993). This sequel documents the rise in religious standards in the religious community, showing why this respectable Orthodox housewife prefers not to tell her daughter-in-law what she and her husband were like as teenagers.

*Eliav, Chaim, In the Spider’s Web, (B’korei HaAchvish), Shaar Press (1996). A Brazilian lawyer receives threatening phone calls shortly after one of his friends is murdered.

_______, Persecution, (Don Carlos b’Madrid) Shaar Press (1997). Historical novel about the marranos.

_______. Runaway, (Ktonet Pasim) Shaar Press (1998). A teenage boy runs away to Switzerland to escape an unloving father.

_______, The Mission, (Shlichut) Shaar Press (2000). A diamond merchant, sent to Moscow on a business trip, is given another mission by his aged grandfather.

*Fried, Leah, I Can Call you Ima (Efshar Likro lach Ima), (1992). Also in English. About the difficulties of blending together two families when a widower marries a widow

_____________,Coming Home (Abba Chozer), Rubenstein, (1996). the story of a secular couple who have gotten divorced and split up the children because the father has become religious

Friedman, Miriam , Thirteenth Avenue, Diamond Books (1995). Gives the adventures of three religious housewives, friends from high school, who open a business together on Boro Park's main shopping street.

Lazewnik, Libby, The Search for Miri, Targum/Feldheim (1991). Miri's search for Jewish identity in the DP camps, including the question of going to Israel or America.

_____________,Between the Thorns, Targum/Feldheim (1994). This sequel deals with the children of the survivors, whose parents have done all they can to protect their offspring from suffering. As the children marry and make their way in life, they must discover for themselves that all roses have thorns.

_____________,Give Me the Moon, Targum/Feldheim (1996). About a brother and sister raising their families in New York and Jerusalem respectively, about the effect of their arrogance on the other members of their families, and about the crises that humbled them.

_____________, Secret Accounts, Shaar Press (1997). An U.S. government accountant tracking terrorist funding gets personally involved.

_____________, The Judge, Shaar Press (2000). The brother of a criminal put behind bars by a Jewish judge revenges himself on the family.

Pearlman, Ruthie, Working it Out, (1990), Getting it Right, (1990), Making it Last (1991), Bristol, Rhein and Englander. This trilogy concerns a brilliant girl from an English Orthodox home who tries to fulfill her ambitions to be a doctor within the educational framework of the Orthodox community, in spite of having gotten married at eighteen and raising a large family.

_____________, Daniel, My Son, Bristol, Rhein and Englander(1995). An exploration of the problems of foster-parenting and the trauma of having a child taken away by a biological mother who is not competent to rear him.

_____________, Dark Tapestry, Targum Press. An only child from Golders Green is kidnapped, and the police pursue him via the internet and trace evidence.

______________, The Movement, Targum Press. A young girl whose parents have gotten involved in a cult confesses to a murder.

Pomerantz, Rachel, Wildflower, Bristol, Rhein and Englander (1989). A childless couple of ba’alei teshuva take a foster baby, Ronny, from a secular home. The remainder of the book treats their difficult relationship with the child's natural family, and the marital difficulties of Barbara's friend Aviva,

_____________,A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew, Feldheim (1996). Also in French and Hebrew. Two academically successful sisters try to balance their demanding careers against and awakening interest in Judaism.

_____________,Cactus Blossoms, Targum/Feldheim, (1997). The sequel deals with a court case for custody of Ronny at the time of his bar mitzva. The title refers to the difficulties of American immigrants in raising their Sabra children.

_____________, As Mountains Around Jerusalem. (1999). Two converts take very different paths in joining the Jewish people.

Schwarz, Shoshana, In Full Bloom, Feldheim Publishers (1998). An orphaned ba’alat teshuva has difficulty finding a match.

_______________, Captive Soul, Feldheim Publishers (2001). With the aid of an exit counselor, a family tries to rescue their son from a cult.

*Schreiber, Yehudit, Walking Together, (Litzod im Abba), Targum Press (2001). A boy, raised Orthodox, has trouble dealing with his father’s ba’al teshuva past, while the father is straining for the release of an army buddy in Syrian captivity.

Sussman, David, The Refugee, Targum/Feldheim (1998). A young Holocaust survivor who has repressed his memories must recover them.

_____________, Square Peg, Targum/Feldheim, (2000). A ba’al teshuva, after years in Israel, returns home to find his father behaving strangely.

*Weinstock, Yair, The Gordian Knot, (Kesher Gordi), Shaar Press (1997). A Holocaust survivor must repay the errors of his youth and help foil a bacteriological threat to Israel.

_____________, Blackout,(Bilti Hafich), Shaar Press (1998) An Israeli newsman, while investigating the Orthodox community, uncovers a government plot to cripple it.

____________, Eye of the Storm, Shaar Press (1999). The Hesbollah tries to detonate an atomic bomb in Israel’s nuclear storehouses.

____________, Calculated Risk, Shaar Press (2000). International computer crime tackles Mea Shearim.

White, Tzvi, Skyscrapers, Feldheim Publishers. The kidnappers of a young boy are traced by the police and a citizens’ patrol.

_________, Midnight Jewels. Dr. Beck of the Citizens’ Patrol helps track down a ring of jewel thieves disturbing the Orthodox community.

References

King, Nina, Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler, St. Martin’s Press (1997).

Mandel, Ernest, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, University of Minnesota Press (1984).

Roller, Alyse Fisher, The Literary Imagination of Ultra-Orthodox Women: An Assessment of a Writing Community, McFarland and Co., Inc. (1999).

Sage, Victor, ed. The Gothick Novel, MacMillan Press (1990).

Schaps, Malka, The One-Way Mirror: Israel and the Diaspora in Contemporary Orthodox Literature, Shofar, Winter (1998).