Tova Mirvis

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Tova Mirvis is a Newton, Massachusetts novelist. She is a graduate of Barnard College and holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Mirvis ' family has lived in Memphis, Tennessee since 1874 when her German-born grandmother moved there at age two. ^[1]

Mirvis came to National attention when her novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, became a best-seller.

Literary critic Morris Dickstein describes Mirvis as part of a young generation of American Jewish novelists engaged in "a persistent search for roots" ^[2] Nancy Maxwell describes her work as exemplifying the "library as travel" literary experience. ^[3] Lucy Long holds her up as the paradigm of the fact that "The whole Orthodox world had taken a giant step to the right, and like partners in a dance, we had followed." ^[4]

1 Controversies
2 Novels
3 References
4 Sources

[edit] Controversies

Mirvis became the center of a minor controversy in 2005 when Wendy Shalit published an essay entitled "The Observant Reader" ^[5] in the New York Times Book Review accusing Mirvis, an orthodox Jew, of writing ostensibly "'insider' fiction (that) actually reveals the authors' estrangement from the traditional Orthodox community." Mirvis defended herself in an essay in the Jewish Daily Forward. ^[6]

[edit] Novels

The Ladies Auxiliary, 1999
The Outside World, 2004

[edit] References

^ JBooks.com - Interviews and Profiles: Wandering a Long Way from Home
^ [ A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World, by Morris Dickstein, Princeton University Press, 2005 p. 179-80]
^ [ Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship, Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, 2006, p. 90 ]
^ [ Culinary Tourism by Lucy M. Long, p. 157]
^ [ www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30SHALITL.html ]
^ Judging a Book By Its Head Covering , By Tova Mirvis, Forward.com, Fri. Feb 04, 2005