Fic­tion

Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes

Tamar Yellin
  • Review
By – November 14, 2011
This slim vol­ume by award win­ning author Tamar Yellin com­pris­es ten sto­ries, each named for one of the lost tribes of Israel. The inter­con­nect­ed sto­ries are told by an anony­mous trav­el­ing nar­ra­tor and they are fin­ished with a sat­is­fy­ing though mys­te­ri­ous end­ing. Each chap­ter begins with quotes from var­i­ous sources about the lost tribes, the wan­der­ings of the Jews and the phys­i­cal appear­ance of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Each sto­ry describes an encounter between the nar­ra­tor and an eccen­tric char­ac­ter, every meet­ing tak­ing place in a dif­fer­ent unspec­i­fied stop on the narrator’s trav­els. Although this may sound vague, the tales are intrigu­ing and the read­er is eas­i­ly pro­pelled for­ward to the next sto­ry. The nar­ra­tor is a good lis­ten­er and observ­er of the char­ac­ters encoun­tered dur­ing the trav­els and the descrip­tions of peo­ple and places are vivid.

Miri­am Brad­man Abra­hams, mom, grand­mom, avid read­er, some­time writer, born in Havana, raised in Brook­lyn, resid­ing in Long Beach on Long Island. Long­time for­mer One Region One Book chair and JBC liai­son for Nas­sau Hadas­sah, cur­rent­ly pre­sent­ing Inci­dent at San Miguel with author AJ Sidran­sky who wrote the his­tor­i­cal fic­tion based on her Cuban Jew­ish refugee family’s expe­ri­ences dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion. Flu­ent in Span­ish and Hebrew, cer­ti­fied hatha yoga instructor.

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