Best Seller
A Song at the Edge of the World
Hardcover
$35.00
Available on Feb 02, 2027 | 352 Pages
In this freewheeling romp by the author of the post-Holocaust novel Not Me (“Nothing short of brilliant” —Baltimore Sun), the final pilgrimage of the great Andalusian Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi frames a tale of Jews getting into trouble across centuries and continents, still looking for home.
Beginning in the 1830s, when an itinerant Viennese book dealer doesn’t know the value of the moldy old Hebrew typescript he has to sell, this novel plays fictional cat and mouse with the historical figure of Halevi, who was shaped by the rich Andalusian culture of 12th-century Muslim Spain and famously wrote “My heart is in the East / And I am at the edge of the West.” Jacob, a salt merchant’s son in Zaragoza, leaves home to follow in the footsteps of the great poet, whose life-ending journey to Jerusalem remains shrouded in mystery. Jacob’s quest interleaves chapters in which each generation—from a well-heeled Jewish son of 14th-century Vaucluse to a 20th-century fish monger in Newark—must ask: where do we Jews truly belong?
Everyone on the merry-go-round of diasporic lives carries a piece of Halevi’s poetry on their bumpy path to enlightenment, and only at the end of this era-spanning human comedy will we learn why their tale is being told, and by whom.
Beginning in the 1830s, when an itinerant Viennese book dealer doesn’t know the value of the moldy old Hebrew typescript he has to sell, this novel plays fictional cat and mouse with the historical figure of Halevi, who was shaped by the rich Andalusian culture of 12th-century Muslim Spain and famously wrote “My heart is in the East / And I am at the edge of the West.” Jacob, a salt merchant’s son in Zaragoza, leaves home to follow in the footsteps of the great poet, whose life-ending journey to Jerusalem remains shrouded in mystery. Jacob’s quest interleaves chapters in which each generation—from a well-heeled Jewish son of 14th-century Vaucluse to a 20th-century fish monger in Newark—must ask: where do we Jews truly belong?
Everyone on the merry-go-round of diasporic lives carries a piece of Halevi’s poetry on their bumpy path to enlightenment, and only at the end of this era-spanning human comedy will we learn why their tale is being told, and by whom.
Author
Michael Lavigne
Michael Lavigne was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Millersville State College and the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work on the Committee on Social Thought. His first novel, Not Me, received the Sami Rohr Choice Award for emerging Jewish writers and was named an American Library Association Sophie Brody Honor Book and a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection; it was also translated into three languages. Lavigne has worked extensively in advertising, for which he has won many awards, is a founder of the Tauber Jewish Studies Program at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, and spent three years living and working in the Soviet Union. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Gayle Geary.
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