Here There Is No Why

by Philip Graubart

Overview

"...a political, poetic, and unputdownable page-turner of a novel." -Ali Viterbi, playwright, author of In Every Generation

"...offers a cast of complex characters and raises a number of provocative theological questions." -Michael Kinnamon, author of Summer of Love and Evil and The Nominee

"...a compelling, entertaining, and uplifting novel that will leave you inspired. Don't miss it!"-Richard Agler, author of The Tragedy Test and A God That We Can Believe In

Did Chaim Lerner, acclaimed Israeli author and Holocaust survivor, kill himself in 1983, thirty-eight years after surviving Auschwitz? If so, was it traumatic memories finally catching up to him? Or despair over Holocaust denialism? Or ordinary, difficult health issues-an aching hip, a damaged knee? Or simply a deadly episode of depression?

Or was it murder?

In 2005, Judah Loeb, Lerner's former student and now a struggling American journalist and single father, travels to Jerusalem to investigate Lerner's death. He drags along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, and they team up with Charlie, Judah's former Hebrew University roommate, now a Jerusalem homicide detective. Their investigation takes them through the darker corners of the Israeli psyche, where they uncover secrets that threaten to destroy Lerner's reputation and alter Jewish history. While probing the mysteries of Israel's past, they encounter personal betrayal, heartbreak, and the fragile possibilities of forgiveness and redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888244852
Publisher:	Koehler Books
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Philip Graubart is the author of the award-winning novels Planet of the Jews and Silwan, along with several other books. He's published essays, short stories, and op-eds in numerous publications, including Forward, Tikkun, Moment, The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Report. He is a rabbi and writer living in San Diego. He's served pulpits in Massachusetts and California and also served in leadership positions at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the National Yiddish Book Center, and the San Diego Jewish Academy, where he now teaches. He's published eight books, including five novels.

Editorial Reviews

2024-08-19
A writer reluctantly takes on writing a book about the life and mysterious death of his former teacher and mentor in Graubart’s novel.

Pulitzer Prize–winning pop culture writer Judah Loeb is compelled by his brother-in-law / agent to revive an abandoned project: a book about the life and death (by presumed suicide) of Chaim Lerner, a Holocaust survivor and “famous public intellectual [and] radical theologian.” A trip to Israel in 2005 to work on the book proves triggering—Lerner was Loeb’s professor when Loeb lived and studied abroad in 1982. (Loeb’s own wife killed herself, and her body was found by their then 5-year-old daughter, Hannah.) Loeb has been fascinated by Chaim’s death, a fall from the outdoor patio of his apartment building. Did he actually commit suicide? “There were reasons for doubt,” Loeb writes. Hannah, who as a teenager accompanied Loeb to Israel, thinks the answer is obvious: He was murdered, she asserts. Loeb and Hannah return to Israel in the present day for the funeral of Chaim’s widow, a prominent politician. Perhaps closure awaits Loeb in the truth about Chaim’s death, a revelation about his wife’s suicide, and his relationships with his daughter and Michal, whom he loved when he was a student in Israel. Loeb wants to know the whys, but, as the now grown-up and married Hannah tells him, “‘Why’ is not the right question.” In this novel, Graubart, a rabbi, grapples with primal and provocative questions about suicide and trauma. Was Chaim’s death because of the Holocaust? “Was he one of Hitler’s last victims, just delayed, done in by PTSD and not the gas chamber? Can thinking too much about God, good, and evil have fatal consequences?” These are good discussion starters; the circumstances surrounding Chaim’s death, which are relatively predictable, are less so. Still, Loeb’s fraught emotional and religious journey remains compelling.

A gripping novel of revelations and redemption with a searching and sympathetic character at its core.

Kirkus Reviews