Kirjahaku

Lydia Steinberg knew her husband, Yaacov, was dead. She had held shiva for him almost two years ago. So why was his voice speaking to her now from the silence of their empty shop? She had spent every Christmas season for the past fifty years here on this small-town mall offering unique Old World antiques to the customers of Steinberg's, but this was the first season she had heard voices when only she and Samson, the cat, were there. She would know Yaacov's voice anywhere, but that other voice--was it the voice of the Mayeem Khayeem, the Living Water Yaacov had discovered just before he died? Then there were the miracles, one nes gadol right after the other. Some came in answer to her needs; some met the needs of others. The evicted mother and child who came into the shop to get warm, the little boy with $1.87 seeking an expensive gift for his Grandma, the homeless man eating from the trash barrel, the suicidal caf owner down the street, the alcoholic ringing the bell over the Salvation Army kettle, the would-be robbers, the man with dementia insisting on buying a gift for his dead wife, the pregnant girl who almost had her baby in the shop--all were desperate, and she was allowed to participate in a miracle for every one of them. Never before had she even seen a true nes gadol. Yaacov's voice suggested that was because she had not believed in miracles--not until this wonderful miraculous season.

This beautiful novel of friendship between a boy and an old man takes place during World War I--when the death of thousands in Europe takes a backseat to a lone murder in the rural quiet of Drennan's Crossing on the banks of the Kentucky River. The narrator, 14-year-old Phillip, describes his special relationship with Joe, a new-comer to the small Southern community, as being "...like a rush of water down a narrow creek bed, widening, deepening, opening up fascinating new channels..." "Most everythin' was put here for a purpose," the old man tells him, and Phillip finds himself viewing nature and the God who created it in exciting new ways. Suddenly, murder disrupts the peaceful neighborhood, and Phillip is forced to face strange, violent feelings in his own heart. Struggling to come to terms with evil, he questions God's role in the scheme of things. Then he discovers something Joe knew all along--the legacy of Drennan's Crossing. "It is our Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird," says Kentuckian Jean Ann Myatt in a post on "Good Reads."