RACHEL KADISH WINS KORET AWARD FOR YOUNG WRITER ON JEWISH THEMES

Rachel Kadish, 34, of Newtonville, MA, whose prolific works — both published and in-progress — have wrestled with issues of Jewish identity, history, and future, is the winner of the 2003 - 2004 Koret Award for a Young Writer on Jewish Themes.

Kadish, whose first novel was published in 1998 by G. P. Putnam, takes home a $25,000 prize and a quarter-long residency at Stanford University.

Her novel, From A Sealed Room, relates the stories of a middle-aged Israeli woman, an elderly Polish Holocaust survivor and a naïve American Jewish university student whose lives become intertwined in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. Its larger themes address the choices that people make when hope and reality argue against one another.

Finalists in the second annual Koret Award for a Young Writer on Jewish Themes were Sam Apple, Shalom Auslander, David Bezmozgis, Danit Brown, T Cooper, Boris Fishman, Matti Friedman, Keith Gessen, Sara Houghteling, Joshua Kun, Jay Michaelson, Samantha Shapiro, Sean Singer and Miriam Udel-Lambert.

A 1991 graduate of Princeton University, Kadish earned her M.A. in Fiction at New York University in 1994 and went on to win a Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001, and a Fiction Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2002, where she all but completed a collection of short stories titled Collect Call from Mars, which explores subjects including American Jewish lives and an evolving understanding of the searing choices that Israelis face.

The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Kadish is also working on Love and Reparation, a book interweaving fiction and non-fiction in exploration of the question, "What exactly does a reparation claim repair?"

"To work on material related to the Holocaust is to labor in dark regions of human experience," Kadish wrote in her winning application for the Koret award. "In the midst of my research on Love and Reparation, and perhaps as a way of keeping an intact spirit while metabolizing all those layers of loss, I began writing a very different book… one that concerns itself with the heart's capacity for joy."

Her new novel, Soon Also for You, is an existential romantic comedy, an exploration of love and its compromises. The narrator is a young Jewish professor living in contemporary New York, determined to plumb the depths of love; to ferret out, through rigorous inquiry, the truth behind the facades of coupling and marriage. The protagonist is the product of an assimilated Jewish family that considers its roots irrelevant yet can't seem to shake them.

The Koret award is the latest in a string of awards for the young Kadish, who won a Pushcart Prize in 1997, received citations in 1997 and 2003 in Best American Short Stories, and, perhaps the most rewarding of all, publication in such prestigious journals as Zoetrope, Story Magazine, Tin House, and Bomb, Moment, Sh'ma, Congress Monthly and Lilith.

Five Koret Jewish Book Awards also were awarded in New York on March 29:

  • In Fiction, A Love Made Out of Nothing and Zohara's Journey by Barbara Honigmann, translated from German by John Barrett (David R. Godine); and Foiglman by Aharon Megged, translated from Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman (The Toby Press) tied for first place;
  • In Biography/Autobiography/Literary Studies, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative by Benjamin Harshav (Stanford University Press);
  • In History, The Jewish Enlightenment by Shmuel Feiner, translated from Hebrew by Chaya Naor (University of Pennsylvania Press);
  • In Philosophy/Thought, The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Volumes I and II by Daniel Matt (Stanford University Press).

Contact: Director of Communications, Koret Foundation, 415-882-7740