One Hundred Philistine Foreskins: A Novel
Shibboleth-smashing satirist Reich (My Holocaust, 2007) wrestles with the crushing paradox of Judaism and many other religions—the denigration of women. Temima, a Jewish prodigy in Brooklyn, reads her way through the public library and the holy texts and becomes enraged by how women are universally “dismissed and excluded.” Add to that secret and appalling personal traumas, and Temima rebels, vowing never to marry. But matrimony is her ticket to Israel, where she becomes a radical “holy wise woman healer,” mother, and leader. Reich, who comes from a family of rabbis, spikes every churning, mesmerizing page in this riotous and righteous epic with acute reprisals of the Torah and Jewish customs, history, and conundrums while unspooling a deliriously inventive and barbed plot wild with sex, mysticism, politics, family betrayals, and wicked humor. With settings ranging from a former leper colony in Jerusalem to a tent city presided over by an African American ex-con claiming to be a descendant of one of the lost tribes, Reich’s consummately crafted tale of a female messianic revolutionary is gloriously brilliant, audacious, and resounding. --Donna Seaman