New Jewish Counterfactuals: On Andrea D. Lobel's and Mark Shainblum’s anthology, "Other Covenants"

I’m grateful to Larry Yudelson at Ben Yehuda Press for sending me a copy of Andrea D. Lobel’s and Mark Shainblum’s new anthology of Jewish alternate histories, Other Covenants.  

I’m halfway through the book and I can already see that it’s full of clever and entertaining tales.  Of the two-dozen+ stories in the collection, more than half have been written especially for the volume (some older tales are included as well).   

Among the stories that stuck out for me:  

* Robert Silverberg’s short story, “To the Promised Land, leads off the volume by exploring the present-day travails of an Egyptian Jew who lives in a world where Pharaoh’s forces defeated the Israelites’ attempt to cross the Red Sea 2500 years earlier.   

* Jack Dann’s haunting story, “The Mall,” describes a dystopian United States that has gone fascist and incarcerated American Jews in concentration camps converted from shopping malls.  

* Alex Shvartsman’s “The Book of Raisa,” depicts a Russian Jewish neurosurgeon in 1969 performing brain surgery on an aged Joseph Stalin, who has survived his stroke of 1952 and deported Soviet Jewry to the USSR’s autonomous oblast of Birobidzhan.      

* Patrick A. Beaulier’s “The Bat Mitzvah Problem” depicts a bat mitzvah girl in Indiana struggling to cope with the challenge of properly reciting the Saturday prayers to Asherah, Baal, and El Elyon.    

* C. L. McDaniel’s “Ka Ka Ka” switches the historical experiences and contemporary situations of German Jews and African Americans, so that the former experience relentless police brutality in a world where they have escaped genocide, and the latter, despite having suffered mass death, enjoy a privileged existence in a country that has acknowledged its historic crimes.  

There are plenty of other stories – about Anne Frank living as an elderly grandmother in Miami; shtetl Jews battling zombies in Tsarist Russia; and orthodox Jews shooting off into outer space.      

There are even some counterfactual poems by Jane Yolen, James Goldberg, and Seymour Mayne.  Mayne’s poem, “Another Son,” for example, points to the perils of poor parenting by depicting an aged Abraham casting his son Isaac out into the desert where he becomes a de facto Ishmael.  

There is something for everyone in Other Covenants.  Kol hakavod to Ben Yehuda Press, Andrea D. Lobel, and Mark Shainblum!