Special Event: Jennifer Natalya Fink reads The Mikvah Queen
Posted in Announcements
November 18, 2010
7:00 PM | Lannan Center (New North 408)
Georgetown professor Jennifer Natalya Fink will share excerpts from her recently published Pulitzer-nominated novel The Mikvah Queen.
The Mikvah Queen is a coming-of-age story with many disco twists. In the anti-everything hippie culture of early ‘80s Ithaca, New York, what rituals can a girl borrow, steal, or invent to make sense of puberty? Jane Schwartz, a lonely, Talmud-quoting, disco-worshipping eleven-year-old girl, builds a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) in the porta-sauna of her middle-aged neighbor, Charlene Walkeson, in hopes of saving Charlene from the ravages of cancer. Will Jane also save her fierce, fragile self? Out of fragments of disco, feminism, cooking shows, Christian salvation narratives and Jewish law, Jane forges her own theology.