2007 Archive: About The Book

Joy Comes in the Morning takes us into the lives of characters who search for meaning in a post-Holocaust world through their relationships, work, and spiritual quests. The novel follows the growth of a romantic relationship between Lev Friedman, a science writer, and Deborah Green, a Reform rabbi, begun by a chance meeting at the hospital bedside of Lev's father, Henry Friedman. Lev feels overshadowed by his ultra-competent brother, Jacob, and by his friend Neal Marcus, whose energetic mind has been derailed by schizophrenia. Deborah, on the other hand, is a highly capable young rabbi, adored by her Manhattan congregants, and apparently confident in the role of the divine in her life, but becomes faced with an existential crisis, which shakes her own spirituality. Through their relationship, Lev strives to create a more meaningful connection to his Jewishness while Deborah realizes her relationship with God and Judaism may not be as unshakable as it once seemed.

Rosen's characters negotiate between history and modernity, the sacred and the secular, and the body, the mind, and the soul, in a playful, probing novel about Jewish faith and identity. The result is an engaging and unabashedly spiritual-minded novel which is at the same time mischievously irreverent. Readers will see parts of themselves in one or more of these characters, and the relationships between them, as they search for the joy and meaning in their own lives.

About The Author

Jonathan Rosen is the author of two previous books, Eve's Apple and The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, as well as numerous essays published in The New York Times, The American Scholar, and The New Yorker. He is currently general editor of the Jewish Encounters Series from Nextbook a project that matches great contemporary writers to subjects in Jewish life, history, and culture. He has a B.A. in English literature from Yale University, and was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Rosen created and oversaw the Arts & Letters section of The Forward from 1990-2000.