Sunday Jews - Hardcover

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2001, 0-15-100930-9

A rich family saga and a crowning achievement from a grande dame of American letters

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand[ing] vividly with Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried history of this extraordinary--and very American--family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously disappeared.
Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

"A rare fictional exploration of a great and disturbing theme." -- Washington Post Book World

"Summons a genuinely affecting lyrical elegiac voice, celebrating lives and ways of life as they pass into something else." -- Newsday

Hortense Calisher has written more than twenty books. Past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.