The Frozen Rabbi

"Hanukkah is a holiday celebrating a miracle. The miracle of the oil is a fantastical story that the rabbinical tradition felt the need to tack onto this commemoration of a miraculous military victory. So, I wanted to include something that had a miraculous quality to it; The Frozen Rabbi certainly does. It’s a hilarious novel based on a fantastic premise. A Jewish teen in Tennessee, looking for hamburgers, discovers a 19th-century rabbi in his family’s deep freezer. Then there’s a power failure. The rabbi defrosts and it’s just hilarious. It becomes a story about the history of Jews in diaspora and about how the past haunts us. The Frozen Rabbi really captures that miraculous element of Hanukkah and the way all Jewish holidays tie modern people to an ancient past. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We all have an equivalent of the rabbi in the freezer. We keep family heirlooms and religious traditions for old times’ sake, without considering how we engage with them. In the United States, the belief that the past is past is prevalent. But in Judaism, the idea that the past is always present and waiting to reemerge prevails. Probably my most recent novel, Eternal Life , which was inspired by some of the five books we just discussed. It’s about a woman born in Jerusalem 2000 years ago who makes a spiritual bargain to save her son but ends up trapped in eternal life because her vow was taken in the ancient temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Also stuck in eternal life is an ex from her youth who stalks her through the centuries. It has a comic element to it, but it’s about how we’re all haunted by our pasts, which is also the subtitle of my current book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present ."