Winner of the National Jewish Book Award (2003)
Winner of the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction (2003)
Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award (2002)
“Stunning” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Raw Genius” – Christian Science Monitor
“Richly imagined” – New York Times Book Review
“Powerful” – Seattle Times
“Tour de Force” – Commentary
“Riveting” – Hadassah Magazine
“Profound” – Booklist
Seamlessly weaving its deeper preoccupations into a narrative thoroughly absorbing and satisfying, In the Image follows a young New Jersey woman, Leora, through the death of a friend in high school and on to college, career, and falling in love. Simultaneously, it traces the story of Bill Landsmann, her lost friend’s grandfather, back through several generations of experience in Amsterdam, Austria, and New York’s Lower East Side. Each dramatic episode of their lives is also a foray into the nature of good and evil; of the significance of tradition and the law; of the presence or absence of God.
Not just a first novel but a cultural event — a wedding of secular and religious forms of literature—In the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it, but rather assimilates it, in the best sense of the word, honoring what is lost and finding, among the lost things, the treasures that can renew the present.
