Title People of the Book Series --- Editor Rachel Swirsky & Sean Wallace Cover Art Liwei Wang Publisher Prime Books - 2010 First Printing Prime Books - 2010 Category Anthology Warnings None Main Characters See below Main Elements Jewish SF&F

• Burning Beard - Rachel Pollack
• How the Little Rabbi Grew - Eliot Fintushel
• Geddarien - Rose Lemberg
• The Wings of Meister Wilhelm - Theodora Goss
• The Dybbuk in Love - Sonya Taaffe
• Fidelity: A Primer - Michael Blumlein
• Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane - Jonathon Sullivan
• The Tsar's Dragons - Jane Yolen
• Going East - Elana Gomel
• Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxies of Omnipotence - Ben Burgis
• Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes" - Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet - Lavie Tidhar
• The Problem of Susan - Neil Gaiman
• Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel - Peter S. Beagle
• Eliyahu Ha-Navi - Max Sparber
• Reuben - Tamar Yellin
• The Muldoon - Glen Hirshberg
• Semaphore - Alex Irvine
• Golems I Have Known, or, Why my Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon: A Trickster's Memoir - Michael Chabon
• The History Within Us - Matthew Kressel

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well -- in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

An interesting aside, for some reason I've by chance been picking up books with Jewish themes this year. Cassandra Claire's Mortal Instruments has a major character who happens to be Jewish (and probably my favorite character), and I just finished reading Philippa Gregory's Dark Tracks which shows the medieval treatment of Jews in Europe.

When I picked this up I was quite excited to read about the myths and legends of another culture. I'm familiar with the religious beliefs but not so much their folklore and myths (like the golem). But though the first four stories had some vaguely fantasy themes to it, the magic was more a backdrop to make a point, and it was questionable if any of the fantasy aspects were really there or just in people's heads. And out of the four stories, two of them had fantasy aspects that aren't even Jewish folklore, the only Google references for Geddarien is this story, and Orillion doesn't show up at all except as a pest control company rather than a floating city...And that's ok, it just wasn't what I was hoping for when I picked up the book.

Finally in the fifth tale we get a love story with dybbuk, and in the seventh a sorta golem (if you stretch the term, technically it wasn't remotely Jewish though was awoken by a rabbi), but the sixth...there was no fantasy element at all, unless detailed information on the penis and the debate of whether or not to circumcise counts? I guess a lot of people do fantasize about that body part anyway...

"The Tsar's Dragons" was interesting with black dragons representing the Tsar and the red ones representing communism (and how no matter which one it was, they still burned the land). "Going East" again seemed to be in the character's head, but it covered several Jewish bogeymen so I learnt something there, and "Dark Coffee..." was an alternate Israel with Muslims instead of Jews hold sway, and the characters wonder what it would be like if it were the reverse (apparently exactly the same except reversed).

"Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes"" felt like it was a short story set in a larger world, an alternate steampunk world where the borders and politics of modern countries are very different. "Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet" had an interesting structure, but I'll be honest, I didn't get the ending. "The Problem of Susan" asks what happened to Susan after the end of the Narnia books (nothing Jewish about it though), and in "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel" an angel appears to a painter claiming to be his muse, and he responds that he wasn't in need of one, but then becomes obsessed.

"Eliyahu Ha-Navi" was kind of creepy and definitely weird, keeping a thousands year old prophet in your dorm closet? Unfortunately I didn't get the ending again. "Reuben" was borderline fantasy, but that one was interesting, how a person looks in the eyes of adults versus the eyes of a child. "The Muldoon" was a good but disturbing one, and a cautionary tale about digging about among the skeletons in the closet. "Semaphore" is a tale of a young boy dealing with the loss of his brother during the war. "Golems I Have Known..." surprised me as it is actually a memoir, basically non-fiction, or at least intended to be perceived as such!

And we end with one of my favorites, "The History Within Us", where humanity is faced with extinction along with our history, and what we're willing to sacrifice to not be forgotten. Perhaps taking the term People of the Book and turning people into books of a sort.

So overall, there were some very excellent stories, some not so great, and a few that made me scratch my head to wonder why they were even included. Note that if you want, I was able to find 8 of the 20 stories online (as they were originally from online 'zines) if you want a taste of what is in this book.