A 19

ar demand!

The Jewish Ensemble Theatre
proudly announces the return of
the smash hit from the 1999-
2000 season

On The Book-§heit

RANT

AUG. 16 SEP. 17, 2000

`Bee Season'

Performances
Wed. 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.,
Thur. 7:30 p.m.Sat. 8 p.m.,
Sun. 7:30 p.m.

Myla Goldberg's debut novel examines
the unraveling fabric of a Jewish family.

In The Aaron DeRoy Theatre

DIANE COLE

Special to the Jewish News

For ticket information call

248-788-2900

ril rom Madonna to prolifer-

fax: 248-788-5160
Jewish Ensemble Theatre
6600 West Maple Road
West Bloomfield

ating study groups around
the country, Kabbala is in.
But really now. Who
would have guessed that a novel about
so prosaic a subject as spelling bees
could penetrate so deeply into the core
of Jewish mysticism?

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Orchard Lake: Dell

A CONVERSATION WITH

Myla Goldberg

HOURS:Mon.-Sat. lOarn-9pm

4157 Orchard Lake Rd.

(South of PontiacTrait)

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irst-time novelist Myla Goldberg's

Bee Season has been given the
thumbs up by The New York Times
Book Review, Newsweek and People
magazine, but the 28-year-old author,
who grew up in Laurel, Md., "lost my
first and only spelling bee" in fourth
grade.
The experience didn't derail her life-

Yet that is exactly what Myla
Goldberg achieves in her smart, funny
and ultimately heartbreaking first
novel, Bee Season (Doubleday; $22.95).
The spelling bee/Kabbala compari-
son is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
. Kabbala, Goldberg reminds us, centers
on the concept of tikkun olam — the
business of collecting and then mend-
ing, repairing and reconnecting into a
unified whole, the broken pieces of
the world.
In that context, a misspelled word
is not just an affront to the dictionary;
it is the equivalent of a broken shard.
But perfect its spelling, and you have
created, in the sphere of that single
word, a perfect world — perhaps,
even, a brief moment of transcen-
dence.
At least, that is the theory of Saul
Naumann, the father and nominal
head of a family so peculiarly isolated
and disconnected from one another
that they require even more sorcery
than Kaballa can provide to bring
them back together again.
An outwardly respectable family
man when we meet him, Saul, we
learn, had spent his adolescence and
young adulthood specializing in sex,
drugs and rock 'n' roll, before discov-
ering Jewish mysticism and becoming
the guitar-strumming cantor for a
small, local shul on the outskirts of
Philadelphia.
He spends his spare time locked in

long goal of becoming a writer. She
pursued that end through reading,
ecliting her high-school literary maga-
zine, winning a national poetry corn-
petition and attending summer writing
camps.
After graduating from Oberlin
College in Ohio, Goldberg went on to
spend a year living and writing in
Prague. There she taught English to
psychotherapists, insurance salesmen
and former Communist officials.
When she returned to the United
States, Goldberg headed for New York
City. "My complete inability to hold
down a regular job led to a freelance
career as a reader for television
movies," she says.
The idea for Bee Season sprung