OK, so technically, Amazon is having a Kindle sale on nearly 1000 books through July 27th, with prices ranging from $0.99 to $3.99. The selection includes such must-haves as Susanna Clarke’s wry English fantasy epic Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell ($2.99), cult classic Pride, Prejudice and Zombies ($0.99), and Roger Ebert’s compilation of his most punishing film reviews, aptly entitled Your Movie Sucks ($1.99), among others.
But for our parochial purposes, what matters is that found among this throng of discounted digitalia–which can be read on computers, iPads and so forth with the appropriate free reader app–is the entire fictional oeuvre of Milton Steinberg, the Reconstructionist rabbi and noted Jewish public intellectual of the first of half of the twentieth century.
Steinberg passed away at the too-early age of 46 in 1950, but he has lived on through his many literary works on Judaism, most notably his novel, As A Driven Leaf. The book, a fictionalized account of the struggles of the Talmudic heretic Elisha ben Abuyah, has become, in the words of Marissa Brostoff at Tablet, “part of an unofficial reading list shared by young adults from liberal Orthodox and traditional Conservative backgrounds.” In this new canon, Brostoff also includes, “books like Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen.” Interested readers, or those hoping to relive Steinberg’s story, can now acquire the digital edition of As a Driven Leaf for just $3.99.
Last year, Steinberg’s unfinished novel The Prophet’s Wife was published with great fanfare (and blurbs by everyone from Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick) after languishing amongst the rabbi’s papers for decades after his death. The book is a creative retelling of the story of the biblical prophet Hosea, and an attempt to come to a modern understanding of prophecy. (More of the manuscript’s fascinating backstory as well as critical appraisal of the work can be found in my review of the book in The Harvard Crimson.) The Prophet’s Wife, too, can be purchased in eBook form for $3.99 through July 27th.
It seems fitting that a rabbi so devoted to using literature to bridge the gap between the Jewish past and the Jewish present should have his works made available in a format that could not have been imagined at the time he wrote them.
