The Autobiography of God

Book excerpt: A critically acclaimed author “melds the classic college mystery with deeply theological ruminations on suffering and death. . . . richly absorbing” (Publishers Weekly). Rebecca Nachman is a Rabbi without a synagogue. Having resigned from her dwindling congregation, she now works as a college counselor at a small Vermont college advising students about private matters and offering the “Jewish perspective” on issues raised at faculty dinner parties. Deeply lonely and on the edge of losing her faith, she comes into possession of a Torah, the last relic of Czechowa, a village of Polish Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. With the Torah, the unquiet spirits of the village dead begin to visit Rebecca. On one visit they leave a manuscript written in Hebrew and titled My Life, an autobiography by God who, like any eager author, is seeking a sympathetic reader. No one has ever finished reading the manuscript, including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Maimonides, and Augustine. God thinks Rebecca will. Rebecca’s life is further complicated when one of her advisees—a troubled young woman who seemed on the verge of confessing something—is found murdered. As the college struggles to comprehend the tragedy and a police investigation is launched, Rebecca begins reading, and so comes to confront the central challenge to her faith in His most troubling and unlikely incarnation. “In true Yiddish style, Lester writes with the irony and intensity and sometimes dark comedy . . . that dramatize the Jewish belief that good and evil coexist in people and in God.” —Booklist