At the intersection of family, faith and science, Stollman's Jewish protagonists find urgent moral dilemmas. This probing, intellectually acute story collection by the author of The Illuminated Soul
is set in Israel, Canada and the U.S., and writers and scientists figure prominently. In "Mr. Mitochondria," a nuclear researcher in Beersheba, Israel, considers the impact of a plague of locusts on both his work and family as he attempts to come to terms with the possibility that his child could die from the protective pesticide spraying. The title story covers similar moral ground as a pair of physicists journey to Israel (chatting about time and entropy along the way) in search of a miracle cure for their autistic child, only to have Middle East politics turn their situation upside down. A teenage boy explores his Berlin-born mother's obsession with a popular WWII-era film in "Die Grosse Liebe," leading him to a startling family revelation. "If I Have Found Favor in Your Eyes" depicts a Jewish adolescent's fixation on his new Hasidic neighbors as he copes with the divorce of his bohemian parents. Stollman's moral intensity occasionally shades into grandiose sentiment ("she needs so desperately to weep—for all of the children in everlasting time, compelled like their mother to wander forever in a wandering world"), but for the most part the stories offer lively conversations and likably self-effacing characters who find themselves in an ethical or spiritual pickle. As the nuclear scientist says to his wife (the author of a sci-fi epic), "I have faith, but it's not an antidote to reality." Rights sold in Germany. (Feb. 10)
