A non-Jewish San Francisco friend, whose book club has invited me to speak early in 2011, commented, after reading the book herself, that it would be helpful to have some terms explained. So, I’ve developed a glossary, which is actually included in the ebook version of After the Auction.

Readers Guide to Jewish-related terms in After the Auction

afikomen: “dessert” in Greek;refers to a piece of unleavened bread hidden for children to find after the Passover Seder meal.

aliyah: “ascending” or going up in Hebrew;“making aliyah” refers to moving to Israel

Ashkenazic: refers to Jews of eastern European (including Russian) descent

charoses: a mixture composed of variations of fruits, nuts, spices, wine symbolizing the mortar enslaved Jews in Egypt used to build the Pyramids

challah: a braided egg bread eaten on the Jewish Sabbath and High Holidays

dayenu: “we will be satisfied” in Hebrew; also the name of a popular Passover song

haggadah: “the telling, recounting, saga” and name for the book used for the Passover Seder ritual

hamentaschen: a triangle-shaped pastry filled with fruit preserves or poppy seed to symbolize the triangular hat of Hamen, the villain of the Purim holiday story

havdalah: “differentiation” in Hebrew; a term used for the ceremony that closes the Jewish Sabbath

Judaica: cultural, historical aspects of the Jewish people, also used to describe texts and ritual artifacts

kaddish: the Jewish prayer for the dead recited by mourners during the first year after a loss and on the anniversary of the death each year thereafter

kashruth: the practice and laws of ensuring that food is kosher and of keeping kosher in the home

kiddush (cup): the Jewish blessing for wine recited on the Sabbath and holidays and the designated cup of wine raised in the process

l’chaim: “to life,” the traditional toast of Jews

matzah: the unleavened (cracker) bread Jews were said to have eaten in the desert, therefore traditionally eaten instead of other bread during Passover

menorah: a candelabra traditionally with nine branches and lights lit every night during the Chanukah festival

mezzuzah: the biblical word for “doorpost” that refers to a tiny scroll inscribed with a Torah passage and the case that encloses it that is hung on the doorpost of a Jewish home

Mossad: The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations

refusnik: term used for Soviet citizens, mainly Jews, whose applications for visas to emigrate were refused

sabra: prickly pear cactus fruit and colloquial term for native Israeli

Seder (plate):“order” in Hebrew, the opening meal of Passover with symbols of the holiday displayed on a special vessel that are explained during the ritual that is read and told before and after the actual dinner

Sephardic: refers to Jews of Mediterranean descent, including from Spain, Northern Africa, and the Middle East

Shabbos: Yiddish word for the Sabbath, vs. Shabbat in Hebrew

shul: Yiddish word for synagogue

tallit: Jewish prayer shawl

Talmud:“learning” in Hebrew and the name for the primary text of rabbinic pronouncements on Jewish law, ethics, history, and practice.

Torah: the Five Books of Moses, the beginning of the Jewish Bible.

treyf: Yiddish word for non-kosher food

Zionism: a political and social movement aiming for self-determination for Jews in a designated homeland

Pronunciation: \ˈzhän-rə, ˈzhäⁿ-; ˈzhäⁿr; ˈjän-rə\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, kind, gender — more at gender
Date: 1770

1 : a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content
2 : kind, sort
3 : painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday life, usually realistically

As the protagonist in Secrets of the Afikomen, I should be uniquely qualified to answer this question about the book my friend, Linda, has written. Ah, yes, we are friends–we’ve spent a lot of time together over the years as she’s worked to tell my story. Some in the book business strive to pinpoint a genre within fiction. Let’s go over some of the choices: mystery, thriller, literary, science fiction, romance, historical, women’s, spiritual. Then there are a couple that are new to me: chick lit and hen lit. And the “biz” categorizes uses the terms commercial and trade book, too. I understand commercial; trade fiction????

Where does Secrets of the Afikomen fit?

Like many people–Linda and me, to name two (OK, at least one of us is a real person)–it’s not a round peg in a round hole. The book transcends genres. It has elements of mystery, historical, women’s hen lit (sometimes called matron lit or granny lit, when referring to authors and female protagonists over a certain age), and I get a nice romance, too, though it’s not the bodice-ripping type. Linda and I admit we’re not literary here. But we’ll take commercial!

So, genre-wise, we’re a hybrid.

Does genre matter? Not to us. What matters is that people enjoy the read and that they get the chance to read Secrets of the Afikomen. Getting published would be a good way to accomplish this, of course. But these days there’s even not just one definition of getting published. More on that soon…

My story–the quest to find my Seder plate–was complicated enough. The vagaries of the book business these days serve up yet another mystery (but no romance).

My husband, Eli, and I recently spent a week in the Berkshire Mountain area of western Massachusetts.  It’s a bounty of glorious nature and culture: Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Jacob’s Pillow Dance Center; the fabulous Clark Art Institute; the Norman Rockwell Museum and others; theatre festivals.  We were busy and enjoyed it all.

The Berkshires are also home to such literary greats as Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton,…and Dr. Seuss!  But Sholem Aleichem? Glückel of Hamelin, Who knew?

No less revered by their readers in their time and locales were some of the great Yiddish writers, and, remarkably, their legacies are also preserved in the land of their American Lit peers.  The National Yiddish Book Center (http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/) sits on a lushly wooded site on the campus of Hampshire College, just outside Amherst, MA.  The center’s 37,000 square foot building architecturally resembles a shtetel synagogue.

The 1.5 million books were rescued by center founder, Aaron Lansky, a MacArthur Genius Award Fellow, who in 1980 started an effort to preserve Yiddish literature and books by advertising for and, along with volunteers, personally collecting truckloads. The ongoing vibrancy of the center lies in its efforts to revive and preserve not just the books themselves but the richness of the language and the writing and other culture it produced. Toward this end goes Steven Spielberg’s funding to digitize the physically deteriorating tomes, more of which still pour in every week.

*Eastern European village, where Yiddish speaking and reading Jews lived.
**Mother tongue.