Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People by Andrea D. Lobel

Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People Reviews

• 
  Arturo Serrano

  I reviewed this book for the Hugo-winning blog Nerds of a Feather:
  
  
  http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/01/...
• 
  Carolyn

  Okay, so admittedly, I mostly picked up this book because I know one of the authors, and because reading your colleagues' work is kind of like sanctioned eavesdropping? But damn if this wasn't worth it.
  
  I'm going to apologize in advance of writing this review: I am totally a generic white girl and this isn't my religion, so a lot of this book probably went over my head despite all the Yiddish now in my Google search history. Please let me know if anything below is ignorant or incorrect so I can edit this accordingly.
  
  Sooooo:
  
  I really, really love 'If the righteous wished, they could create a world'. Using combinatorics and modern computing to get functional golems? Amazing. Having the golems make golems?
  It's parallels how life has been replicated since it spawned in the primordial soup, or since Adam and Eve came out of Eden, whatever you prefer. And it seems to imply the same intentionality and purpose in our lives as in the spacesuit golem's brief existence--the sense that even if we were just meatsacks replicating one other, the ability to ask that question, cogito ergo sum, implies intentionality, implies a ground under all the turtles.
  
  Follow-up: If Rabbis COULD make golems so long as they were human-shaped, I really need a crossover fanfic between this and 'Frozen' with Elsa as a rabbi.
  
  'White roses in her eyes'. Okay, yeah. I love the fact the author chose an epistolary format, given that we know Anne mostly by her diary. Other notes: Yeah, I cried on those pages. The juxtaposition of what actually happened to Anne next to what could have happened for her, for all of us, makes the history of this world feel worse.
  
  'Ka-Ka-Ka' with the role switch between African Americans and Jewish folk? It's always tempting to think that ethnic violence is something that happened a long time ago. Somehow, I've never connected what African Americans deal with in the States to what Jewish people dealt with historically in Europe--even if towns literally had Black ghettos before desegregation, and even if some of the same rhetoric has been historically used to dehumanize both African Americans and Jewish people.
  
  "Night at the Crimea". Yes, I checked IMDB to see if there were Zohar films. Yes, you can laugh, so long as someone goes and gets on making those adaptations.
  
  ... I have a lot of other feelings about this anthology. To sum it up though, it's beautifully written and arranged, and while this wasn't its intended purpose, it was a fascinating way to learn about Jewish perspectives and faith for someone whose engagement with the religion has been fairly limited. I'll admit to wishing there was a glossary in the back, but again--a glossary wouldn't make sense given the intended audience. Oh well, guess I'll just have to remember the Yiddish and Hebrew for the next time I see it ;)
  
• 
  Sarah

  I always find it difficult to rate collected anthologies, because there are so many author-styles in one book. I was worried about this one when I didn't like a couple of the first stories but then as I kept reading, I was delighted to find that I was rating almost all the stories 4 or 5*. I don't rate poetry so of the 26 short stories, I gave a full ten 5* and only three received below a 3*.
  My top favourites were The Golem with a Thousand Faces by Claude LaLumiere, which was a bit of a surprise because I don't generally read spy fiction, but I loved the world-building and how it ended, and A Sky and a Heaven by Eric Choi, which just gave me a beautiful "What if The Martian but Jewish" feeling.
  The most disappointing in the bunch was Ka-Ka-Ka by C.L. McDaniel. I understand what they were trying to do with the story but it felt like extremely low-hanging fruit to co-opt someone else's communal struggle. Prejudice and bigotry and the struggles that stem from such are not a competition and it just felt weirdly cheapening to read such a one-to-one swap.
• 
  Shanni

  I very eagerly backed this anthology on Kickstarter, both because the premise was fascinating, and I was a fan of other works from the publisher, Ben Yehudah Press. And oh my, it did not disappoint!
  I was a bit worried that most of the stories would focus on an alternate history in which the war ended differently, and while there were some stories with that premise, there was a delightful variety of other histories.
  
  My least favorite part of this anthology was that it ended. That being said, I did have a few stories that were my favorites:
  
  If The Righteous Wished, They Could Create a World by Jack Nicholise - Jews in space, creating golems to mine asteroids? Sign me up!
  
  A Sky and a Heaven by Eric Choi - what happens when you combine a Holocaust survivor who saved the tiny Torah scroll he read from while in the camps, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, and the Columbia shuttle disaster? Me ugly sobbing, that’s what you get.
  
  Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove - I can’t even describe this, but it is definitely going to stick around in my head for a while.
• 
  E.

  I am not just saying this because one of the contributors is my rabbi. I couldn't put this book down. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I wanted to cry. It's just love being Jewish in any other context. Highly recommend but it helps to be familiar with the culture.
• 
  ST

  A Sky and a Heaven made me cry