From the Publisher
Namdar redefines what it means to tell a Jewish story... The originality and power of this idea [of Jewishness], along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.” — Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine
“Poetic...ambitious…a novel to be reread, for its layers of meaning and symbolism, noise and silence, mystical resonances and lyrical passages. [Namdar’s] writing, in its deep and close observations, is prayerful.” — Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week
“A wildly original novel about the mental, physical and spiritual undoing of an arrogant college professor—a secular Jew living in elitist New York on the eve of 9/11. Unsettling and beautifully written, Namdar captures the seduction of an ancient religion as the world begins to crack.” — Newsweek, The 50 Coolest Books to Read This Summer: 2018’s Best Fiction and Non-Fiction (So Far)
“Artfully translated ...An imaginative and visionary work about one man’s spectacular mid-life crisis, framed by sacred texts and filled with poetic and portentous passages. Reminiscent of the work of Nicole Krauss.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“The Ruined House is a fascinating novel about the overwhelming presence of myth and historical trauma in our lives. A cross between Saul Bellow’s disintegrating intellectuals and Bulgakov’s mystical revelations, this is a fiercely inventive novel.” — Amos Oz
“Exhilarating..a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.” — New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
“Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.” — Washington Book Review, Best Books of the Fall
“The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s [the main character’s] mind…. A meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone.” — BookPage
“With richly poetic prose, Ruby Namdar portrays a man who leads a successful, comfortable secular life—until he finds himself haunted by religious visions. The Ruined House is shocking, insightful, and deeply disturbing.” — Lauren Belfer, New York Times bestselling author of And After the Fire, recipient of the National Jewish Book Award
“Above all, The Ruined House is a keenly observed meditation on the failing inner resources of American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century.” — Mosaic Magazine
“Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.” — Washington Book Review
“Namdar’s artistic prose is imprinted on every page as he explores age-old recurring themes: sin, expiation, ruin and renewal. “The Ruined House” should not be read casually because the story presents thought-provoking perspectives of time-honored traditions and their place in today’s world.” — The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
“Namdar’s excellent writing (for which Halkin must also be recognized), acute observational commentary, and fluency in Jewish religious texts make this novel a towering achievement of contemporary Jewish literature.” — Jewish Book Council
“Namdar may have written the Jewish- American novel for our time. It’s both disturbing and hypnotic, definitely one of the best novels of the year.” — Jewish Herald-Voice
“Ambitious, multidimensional, and beautifully written.” — New York Journal of Books
New York Times Book Review
Exhilarating..a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.
Amos Oz
The Ruined House is a fascinating novel about the overwhelming presence of myth and historical trauma in our lives. A cross between Saul Bellow’s disintegrating intellectuals and Bulgakov’s mystical revelations, this is a fiercely inventive novel.
Sandee Brawarsky
Poetic...ambitious…a novel to be reread, for its layers of meaning and symbolism, noise and silence, mystical resonances and lyrical passages. [Namdar’s] writing, in its deep and close observations, is prayerful.
Washington Book Review
Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.
Mosaic Magazine
Above all, The Ruined House is a keenly observed meditation on the failing inner resources of American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century.
Adam Kirsch
Namdar redefines what it means to tell a Jewish story... The originality and power of this idea [of Jewishness], along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.
BookPage
The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s [the main character’s] mind…. A meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone.
The 50 Coolest Books to Read This Summer: 2018 Newsweek
A wildly original novel about the mental, physical and spiritual undoing of an arrogant college professor—a secular Jew living in elitist New York on the eve of 9/11. Unsettling and beautifully written, Namdar captures the seduction of an ancient religion as the world begins to crack.
Lauren Belfer
With richly poetic prose, Ruby Namdar portrays a man who leads a successful, comfortable secular life—until he finds himself haunted by religious visions. The Ruined House is shocking, insightful, and deeply disturbing.
The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
Namdar’s artistic prose is imprinted on every page as he explores age-old recurring themes: sin, expiation, ruin and renewal. “The Ruined House” should not be read casually because the story presents thought-provoking perspectives of time-honored traditions and their place in today’s world.
Jewish Herald-Voice
Namdar may have written the Jewish- American novel for our time. It’s both disturbing and hypnotic, definitely one of the best novels of the year.
New York Journal of Books
Ambitious, multidimensional, and beautifully written.
Jewish Book Council
Namdar’s excellent writing (for which Halkin must also be recognized), acute observational commentary, and fluency in Jewish religious texts make this novel a towering achievement of contemporary Jewish literature.
Professor-Ruth R. Weiss
When I read Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House in the original Hebrew, I was surprised by how idiomatically it evoked some of New York’s Upper West Side. When I read the recently published English translation, masterfully done by Hillel Halkin, I was surprised again to feel how the haunting fate of the Jerusalem Temple intrudes on the life of an otherwise unmindful Jew. Among the intriguing features of this book is the way in which things that are either strange or familiar in the two civilizations, ancient Israel and modern America, figure differently in the two languages themselves. One wonders how the book might read in French or Arabic.
Tablet Magazine
An absolute masterpiece, one of the most monumental works written in Hebrew in the last century... Take the time, make the effort, and you’ll see that the novel, like all great works, contains multitudes: It’s about American Jewry’s search for meaning. It’s about faith in modern times. It’s about Judaism’s radical messianic spirit and its rebirth in each generation. It’s about exilic life in the aftermath of the Temple’s demise. It’s about the struggle for foundations in an era that seems to be built entirely on intellectual, moral, spiritual, and emotional quicksand... It is, in short, the quintessential Hebrew novel. It’s hard to think of one more ambitious, more engaged with the core questions that have bedeviled Jews, in Israel and abroad, for so long. It’s also hard to imagine a novel like this being written in Israel: Its scope, its facility with both the trifles of contemporary life and the awesome rhythms of antiquity, its psychological depths and its theological seriousness-all those could have only been achieved far from the cauldron of everyday Israeli existence and its own boiling concerns.
Dara Horn
In another writer’s hands, this would be a novel about a midlife crisis. But Ruby Namdar takes the usual selfish questions about ego and fulfillment and empties them out, placing his main character and his readers directly on top of a fault line in the edifice of time. The Ruined House is about one man’s life and how the world opens beneath him, letting him fall into an ancient legacy that has always rumbled beneath the surface of our superficial world. A fantastic work about the past that lives within the present.
Colum McCann
In The Ruined House a ‘small harmless modicum of vanity’ turns into an apocalyptic bonfire. Shot through with humor and mystery and insight, Ruby Namdar’s wonderful first novel examines how the real and the unreal merge. It’s a daring study of madness, masculinity, myth-making and the human fragility that emerges in the mix.
