Wedding at the Graveyard: And Other Stories of the Jewish Fantastical

For four decades Rabbi Bonder was immersed in spirituality and sought out by people who needed comfort. He has now transformed some of these cases into fiction.

A Romanian woman, resident of Copacabana, wants to marry her dead fiancéeacute;. The discovery of a manuscript from the Inquisition, written to defame a woman, has the power to awaken lust and perversion in whomever reads it. A boy who scares his parents with paranormal powers prepares for his bar mitzvah.

These are the subjects of Nilton Bonder’s imagination in this collection of short stories. He writes in the tradition of the best of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Each story comes from a place bordering reality with the unusual and inexplicable, revealing the little that’s required to transform the ordinary into extraordinary. With starting points from real situations (including the author himself as a young man, seriously bored in the house of Abraham Joshua Heschel), each story moves into another reality.

Previously published in Portuguese.

Nilton Bonder was trained and ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He lectures regularly in the United States. Born in Brazil, he’s a best-selling author of twenty-nine books in Latin America, leads one of Brazil’s most influential Jewish congregations, and is active in civil rights and ecological causes. Some of his books have been translated in Europe and Asia and twelve of them in the U.S., including The Kabbalah of Money and The Kabbalah of Food, published by Shambhala. He’s led workshops for corporations such as IBM and Globo Network Television, and delivered lectures at Boston University, New York Central Library, American Academy of Psychoanalysis, The Open Center, and Omega Institute. He lives in Rio de Janeiro and New York City.