Ehud Havazelet Selected Works

At the start of Bearing the Body, Nathan Mirsky learns that his older brother has died in San Francisco, apparently murdered after years of aimlessness. On the spur of the moment, Nathan leaves his job as a medical resident and heads west from Boston to learn what he can about Daniel's death. His father, Sol—a quiet, embittered Holocaust survivor—insists on coming along. Piecing together Daniel's last days, Nathan and Sol are forced to confront secrets that have long isolated them from each other and to being a long process of forgiveness.

A stirring portrait exploring the intersections of three generations of an Othodox Jewish family. David Birnbaum is a middle-aged man at the crossroads—of youth and old age, of Othodox Judaism and assimilation, of the well-worn past and an uncertain future. He is also at the dramatic center of this sensitive, often funny chronicle of three generations of a family straining to hold together in the face of changing cultures and shifting fortunes. Throughout this extraordinary book, David struggles with the mixed loyalties he has felt since childhood and that continue to haunt his present and future. Capturing the hopes and conflicts of a Jewish family, from its most assimilated to its most Orthodox members, Like Never Before exudes on every page a poignancy and truthfulness that will print themselves indelibly on readers' minds.

"Nine short stories about the spaces between people comprise the debut of this Israeli-American, a creative writing teacher at Stanford University. Writing in the spare and highly stylized language reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, Havazelet efficiently evokes a wide range of voices in various settings. Many of the stories have a New York backdrop that intrudes between the characters and forces definition into their faulty relationships. In "Glass," an unsuccessful architectural draftsman and his dippy female roommate are witnesses to violent incidents across the airshaft. He is disturbed and fascinated—like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window—but she is at first merely amused. In the title story, a drugged-out narrator slips a romantic history of New York between a fantasy existence and cold hard reality. In "What Everyone Wants," an assistant editor whose job it is to write vapid jacket copy must cope with a suicidal mother and a helpless and detached father. In all of his stories, Havazelet is adept at capturing the bleakness of missed connections and destructive relationships that are hopelessly out of sync." —Publishers Weekly