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Praise for Tova Reich’s Previous Novels

One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

“Shockingly daring and cuttingly brilliant . . . dazzlingly allusive . . . unforgettable . . . a marvelous read.”

—Ilana Kurshan, Lilith

My Holocaust

“Serious and hilarious and utterly scathing—no, lacerating; no, disemboweling—My Holocaust takes no prisoners. . . . There’s something in My Holocaust to offend everyone. . . . Yet there’s almost—dare I say it?—faith at work in Reich’s willful outrage. Beneath the humor lies the pure fury that once animated thoughts about the original atrocity.”

—Melvin Jules Bukiet, Washington Post

The Jewish War

“With its merciless skewering of all that is ridiculous in religious fanaticism, and at the same time its sympathy for those burning with a holy vision of their land, The Jewish War succeeds marvelously in depicting some of the many complexities of Israel today. It brings this off in great style, with relentless humor and broad humanity—and also, one suspects, with no little prescience.”

—Patrick McGrath, New York Times

Master of the Return

“A novel in the form of an ambush—a wildly funny story that becomes mysteriously touching and ponderable before the end . . . I urge you not to miss [it].”

—Benjamin DeMott, The Atlantic

Mara

“It is evident from the very first page that an extraordinary energy is at work.”

—Harper’s

Title Page

Dedication

To the memory of my father,

MOSHE WEISS

Ma

Ma

1

THE HOLY MAN SAID, “Whosoever dies in Varanasi will achieve liberation, even a cockroach.”

It was the boldface pullout quote in a magazine my mother opened at random during chemotherapy at her local medical center in Brooklyn. Lounging on the salmon-colored leatherette recliner as the toxic infusion dripped into her veins, Ma read every single word of the article. She had been looking forward to death as liberation was how she justified it to me later—so what was this business now of having to schlep all the way to Varanasi, India, nearly eight thousand miles away on the backside of the earth?