Artie Rubin is in the full­ness of his life— mar­ried to the woman he has loved since their first date almost 40 years ago, about to be a grand­fa­ther, com­fort­ably enmeshed in a cir­cle of old friends and start­ing his 20th book on mythol­o­gy, Norse Myths Retold & Illus­trat­ed. But Artie can’t get the book going and con­fides to his jour­nal, ​“I often won­dered why I put off tack­ling the Norse gods. Now, at 67, I know. The Norse gods die. Much thought of death these days.” 

August 2001/​Elul 5760: the Days of Awe are approach­ing, stir­ring Artie’s Jew­ish mem­o­ries and long­ing to believe and to belong. But thoughts of death chal­lenge his Judaism — the bod­ies of dead Pales­tin­ian and Israeli chil­dren are on the pages of The New York Times, a friend has can­cer and anoth­er is in the ear­ly stages of Alzheimer’s, his own body is sag­ging, and he receives the total­ly unex­pect­ed and par­a­lyz­ing news that his wife is at risk for a heart attack. And on Sep­tem­ber 11 the tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­ter col­lapse in a bru­tal attack, killing 3,000 people. 

The Days of Awe is told in many voic­es. The read­er hears con­ver­sa­tions but also over­hears the inner thoughts and anx­i­eties of the peo­ple whose lives touch on Artie’s— those he loves and those he encoun­ters as he goes about his day — as they grap­ple with the grit­ty ver­i­ties of belief and death, love and lega­cy, take-out din­ner and dog walk­ing, on the streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This is a mov­ing med­i­ta­tion with many pos­si­ble mes­sages, includ­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that every day holds with­in it the ele­ments of awe. The author of eight books, Hugh Nis­senson him­self lives on the Upper West Side.