Jewish Mysteries: Detective Fiction by Faye Kellerman and Batya Gur

66 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 Jewish Mysteries: Detective Fiction by Faye Kellerman and Batya Gur1 Naomi Sokoloff Naomi Sokoloffis an associate professor in the Department ofNear Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University ofWashington. Her publications include Imagining the Child in Modem Jewish Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and a range of articles on feminist approaches to modem Hebrew literature and American Jewish fiction. In the past ten years, a confluence of social and literary forces has enabled a burgeoning growth of crime fiction by American Jewish women authors, including Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Majer Krich, Marissa Piesman, Serita Stevens, Rayanne Moore, and Annette Myers (who, with her husband Martin, publishes under the pseudonym Maan Meyers)2 Jewish detective fiction by men first attained visibility in the I960s, particularly through the popularity ofHarry Kemelman's Rabbi Small series (the first volume in the series being Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, 1965). Later, in the 1980s, a boom of crime fiction in all its forms took place in the u.s. lbis was a period in which women became more prominently recognized as mystery writers. Indeed, there has been a surge offeminist detective fiction in the past 15 years, and during that time at least a half a dozen book-length studies of women's detective fiction have appeared in prine In addition, in recent years publishers 11 would like to thank several people who discussed Jewish detective fiction with me during the early stages ofmy work on this topic: Susan Shapiro, Marc and Etti Bregman, Hamutal Bar Yoset; Larry Raphael, and the proprietors ofthe "Killing Time" bookstore in Seattle. ~ittle serious critical attention has been paid to this fiction as yet. However, several scholars have published analyses of Faye Kellerman's novels in academic journals. See Ellen Serlin Uffen, "The Orthodox Detective Novels of Faye Kellerman," Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1992): 195-203 and Sharon Deykin Baris, "George Eliot as Revenant in Faye Kellerman's Mysteries: An American Daniells Alive and Well in Southern California," Prospects 19 (1994): 491-511. For an account ofAmerican Jewish detective fiction that focuses primarily on male writers, see James Yaffe, "Is This Any Job for a Nice Jewish Boy? in SynodofSleuths: Essays on Judea-Christian Detective Fiction, eds. Jon. 1. Breen and Martin H. Greenberg (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1990), pp. 19-55. "See, for example, Jessica Mann, Deadlier Than the Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing (London: David & Charles Publishers, 1981); Kathleen Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (Urbana: University oflllinois Press, 1988) and Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995); Victoria Nichols Jewish Women Authors andDetective Fiction 67 ofcrime fiction have increasingly tended to focus on specialized interests and subcultures. Mysteries by and about Jewish women have become just such a highly sought specialty. To accountfor the rise ofJewish women's detective fiction it is crucial to note, too, that these marketing trends have coincided with another broad development within American Jewish literature itself fu highbrow, middlebrow, and popular fiction as well, authors in the 1980s and 90s have increasingly turned to overtly Jewish themes, treating Judaism, Jewish history, and Israel among their central concerns.4 Since the late I980s, detective fiction has also sprung up in Israeli literature, and this trend has been spearheaded by women writers: Batya Gur, Shulamit Lapid, Devora Bregman, and Ora Shem Or. The almost simultaneous appearance of Jewish women's murder mysteries on both sides of the ocean is a striking coincidence. Ten years ago, in both literatures, the very notion ofJewish women's detective fiction would have sounded improbable if not oxymoronic. The two developments present a number of noteworthy parallels, but the internal dynamics of the American literature are distinct from those of Israeli writing. Hebrew detective fiction has its own distinct context, provenance, and emphases. The successful appearance ofIsraeli detective fiction in the 1980s and 90s has been a pathbreaking phenomenon. Little original crime fiction was ever written in Hebrew before, other than a spate ofshort stories that appeared in the 1930s. In a fascinating study, lohar and Yakov Shavit5 have...