Kindle edition, Wordrunner Press, 2011
ISBN: 1-931002-97-4
$9.95
Available at
www.amazon.com
Milkweed Press, 1998
ISBN: 1-57131-022-3
306 pages, hard cover, 6 x 9 inches
$23.95
Available
at www.amazon.com
NOTE: The Kindle edition of The Promised Land is now available. The Milkweed hardcover edition is out of print. Look for a paperback edition in Fall 2012.
Ruhama Veltfort’s exhilerating debut novel delves into the nature of will and of faith, telling the story of a modern exodus that echoes the American quest for spiritual fulfillment. What begins as a search for a better life by a group of Jewish immigrants in the mid 1800s becomes the embodiment of the longing—physical, familiar, and spiritual—we all feel for a home.
Yitzhak, the renegade son of an Orthodox rabbi in the shtetls of Poland, flees to the New World with his young wife. Chana, to escape religious persecution and suspicion about his powerful charisma and fervent beliefs. Chana is a woman of quiet piety whose practical bent balances her husband’s loftiness. Together with a small group of followers, they encounter a land of extremes, from the mercantile splendor of golden-age St. Louis to a western wilderness of Indians, settlers, and religious zealots. Re-creating the shtetls of old Europe, the bustling cities of the American frontier, and the majesty and rigor of the pioneers’ trek west, The Promised Land movingly mingles the Old Testament story of Exodus with an epic of emigration, creating a rich story of one family’s tragedies and triumphs in the New World.
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