Risa Miller's Official Website
Risa Miller's Official Website Risa Miller's Official Website Risa Miller's Official Website Risa Miller's Official Website Risa Miller's Official Website


From Tablet Magazine

Secular an art form as the novel may be, its practitioners have never entirely shunned religion as a subject, and in recent decades American Jewish novelists have turned to Modern Orthodoxy and haredi Judaism with enthusiasm, if not always with perfect faith. Risa Miller’s first novel, Welcome to Heavenly Heights, focused a sympathetic eye on a community of Jewish settlers in the West Bank; her second, My Before and After Life (St. Martin’s, January), examines how two Boston sisters deal with their father’s being suddenly “born again” as a Jew in Jerusalem. But even describing what he’s experienced is tricky: as he says, “Born-again makes it sound like some white-hot hallelujah moment”; can’t his daughters “use the word ba’al teshuvah, ‘returnee’—or just the proper translation: ‘master of repentance’”?

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