"His books have not just been good for the Jews; they have been great." – Joel Yanofsky, Literary Review of Canada
Michael Wex's first novel, Shlepping the Exile, was published in 1993.
The rollickingly dyspeptic adventures of Yoine Levkes, boy hasid of the Canadian Prairies, Shlepping the Exile is an inside portrait of orthodox, post-Holocaust Judaism in a place that it never expected to be.
Svelte and supple as unleavened bread, Shlepping rends the shmaltz from Jewish fiction and replaces it with a pound of real flesh.
It's the story of Yoine, his refugee parents, and the Jewish community of Coalbanks, Alberta, between 1956 and 1959. Confronted with a dying people, an ailing culture, the perils of near-orphanhood and the allures of Sabina Mandelbroit, whose family doesn't keep the Sabbath, Yoine can no longer tell whether he's a human being or a loot-bag of conflicting traditions. He's too religious to be "normal", too "normal" not to realize this, and too much of a kid to be able to make any sense of it.
Read an extract from Shlepping the Exile here. To order a copy of Wex's first novel, click on the links below - the one on the left is for US customers, the middle one is for Canadians and the one on the right is for UK customers. You can also download the short story The Kugel Story that appears in Shlepping the Exile here.
