The Angel Of Losses-Stephanie Feldman

The Angel Of Losses

Stephanie Feldman

Ecco/HarperCollins, Jul 29 2014, $25.99

ISBN: 9780062228918

The Burke sisters were best friends growing up off the Jersey Turnpike and listening to their Russian grandfather Eli telling tales of the White Magician.  As adults Marjorie and Holly went their separate ways and rarely see each other; especially since Nathan entered their lives and destroyed Eli’s sacred study and who knows what inside the den.  Marjorie attends Barnard working on her Ph.D. dissertation re The Wandering Jew while Holly marries Nathan and converts from a gentile to the Orthodox Jewish Berukhim Penitents.

After Eli recently died, Holly gives birth to a child named after her late grandfather; while Marjorie found one of his notebooks that focused on the carrier of the Sabbath Light, the White Rebbe.  She peruses Eli’s scrawl and seeks the other tomes on the legendary White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses.  Her study leads her to another scholar Simon and a strange older man who gives her an amulet.  When Nathan vanishes and his son becomes very sick, Marjorie learns the legend of her grandfather. 

The Angel of Losses is a strong Judaic spiritual family drama that at times is difficult to follow due to the profound but extremely complicated mysticism especially that of the Kabballah’s unknown 23rd Hebrew alphabet letter to complete God’s true holy name when the Messiah arrives.  Not for everyone, Stephanie Feldman provides a powerful reflective Jewish mysticism saga as seen through the respective filters of the Jersey girls.

Harriet Klausner