The Illuminated Soul Hardcover - 2002

by Aryeh Lev Stollman

Eva Laquedem, a scientist who has fled Prague at the outbreak of World War II, settled briefly in Japan, and then traveled rootlessly like the legendary Wandering Jew, arrives, by accident, in Windsor, Canada, at the home of a devout widow and her two sons. Within her purse she carries the renowned Augsburg Miscellany, a magnificent fifteenth-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript, for which she has risked her life. Eva's physical beauty, the dazzling tales she tells, and, above all, the magnificent Augsburg Miscellany powerfully affect Adele and her sons, giving them a new experience of the world and its possibilities.

Aryeh Lev Stollman's first book, The Far Euphrates, was hailed as "radiant" and "remarkable" by The New York Times Book Review; New York Newsday described it as "kin to the fiction of the late, great Bernard Malamud"; and The Forward declared that the novel "lifts the level of recent American-Jewish writing to a new plane." Now, in his long-awaited second novel, he illuminates the themes he touched on in The Far Euphrates and once again magically expands our sense of the everyday and the limits of our imaginations.