The Outside World (Vintage Contemporaries) Book

Tzippy Goldman's mother has been planning her wedding since before she was born. Her four younger sisters want her to marry the fairy tale Jewish prince of their mother's stories. But Tzippy, approaching spinsterhood at the age of twenty-two, has other ideas. She is hungry for experience and longs to escape the suffocating expectations of religious stricture and romantic obligation. But when she falls in love with Bryan Miller she surprises everyone. Bryan comes from a different kind of family. Like Orthodox Jews anywhere in the world, they spend Saturdays in synagogue, and the rest of the week like suburbanites everywhere. But to Bryan, this middle road looks more and more like hypocrisy. He longs for conviction, for the relief of absolutes. To his parents' bewilderment, Bryan decides to embrace a very different kind of lifestyle, swapping his beloved Yankees cap for something else entirely. In the courtship and marriage of Bryan and Tzippy, Tova Mirvis illuminates an insular world, where ancient and modern collide in a warm and hilarious novel about two very different families brought together by the marriage of their children.Read More