Raincoast Books

What Will You Read Next?

Shlepping the Exile

A Novel

9780312364632

St. Martin's Press
Available: 02/18/14
6.18 x 8.43 · 224 pages
9780312364632
CDN $28.99 · cl
With dust jacket

 Canadian Title

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Michael Wex

Svelte and supple as unleavened bread, Shlepping the Exile rends the shmaltz from Jewish fiction and replaces it with a pound of real flesh.
It's the story of Yoine Levkes, a hassidic boy of the Canadian prairies, his refugee parents, and the Jewish community of Coalbanks, Alberta in the late 1950s. Confronted with dying people, an ailing culture, the perils of near-orphanhood and the allures of Sabina Mandelbroit, whose family doesn't keep the Sabbath, Yoine can no longer tell whether he's a human being or a loot-bag of conflicting traditions. He's too religious to be 'normal,' too 'normal' not to realize this, and too much of akid to be able to make any sense of it.
Shlepping the Exile is Michael Wex's inside portrait of orthodox, post-Holocaust Judaism in a place that it never expected to be.

Michael Wex is a novelist, professor, translator (including the only Yiddish translation of The Threepenny Opera ), lecturer, and performer. He's been hailed a Yiddish national treasure" and is one of the leading lights in the current revival of Yiddish, lecturing widely on Yiddish and Jewish culture. He lives and shmoozes in Toronto."