The Mathematician’s Shiva: A Novel by Stuart Rojstaczer (PDF)

Description

A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is IlluminatedAlexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha’s chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution–even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela’s notes.Written by a Ph.D. geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐”Sitting shiva” is the term given to the mourning done by Jews after the death of a loved one. Generally, certain rules and customs are proscribed for the period after the death and can cover outsiders providing food for the mourners and making sure the mourners are comfortable in their home. Wiki has an excellent definition of the term, with more details than I can write. And it is the shiva sitting of a mother who author Stuart Rojstaczer describes in his novel, “The Mathematician’s Shiva”.The setting of the book is Madison, Wisconsin. Sasha, the narrator, has just lost his mother to cancer. But if Rachela Karnokovich had ended her life in Wisconsin, she began it in the Soviet Union. Her life story is that of a mathematics superstar who lived in inner exile in northern Russia with her father during WW2, while beginning her life’s work in math. She later married, had a baby, and was able to flee the Soviet Union for life in the US. She was also able to eventually bring her husband and son to the US, and husband and wife settled in to professorships at the University of Wisconsin. She also began work on solving the very real Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem.”The Mathematician’s Shiva” is filled with brilliant, eccentric people. They gather in Madison after Rachela’s death to observe the mourning period and also…to look through Rachela’s house for the work she’d done on solving Navier-Stokes. In the six days of the shiva, secrets are confessed, love is professed, and a woman of great substance is laid to rest with recognition of her unique affect on the lives of those around her.I don’t usually write about the likability of a book’s characters. For me, it usually doesn’t matter if the characters are likable; I just like them to be interesting. However, in Rojstaczer’s book, all the characters – no matter how crazy and eccentric – are lovely. His book can be compared to the writing of Jewish writer Tova Reich, who writes about many of the same type of people, but with a harsher hand. I loved Stuart Rojstaczer’s book, just as I’ve loved Tova Reich’s books. I don’t know “who” will like this book, but I’d advise taking a look at other reviews. You don’t have to be Jewish and a mathematician to love this book.

⭐Rachela Karnokovitch, a world renowned mathematician, is told that she has only a few months to live. She responds to this grim news by informing her doctor that she has over a years worth of work left to finish. A year and a half later she calls her son and announces that today is the day that she will die. Rachela is…formidable. She has had to be. The world didn’t give her a choice.Rachela spent most of her youth behind the thick iron curtain that was the USSR in a labor camp close to the arctic circle. She was a Polish/Jewish Russian who nearly starved to death during WWII when it wasn’t a good time to be ANY of the three. It was here, in horrific conditions that the majority of people didn’t survive, that she met a teacher who would be instrumental in changing her life. This was the woman who discovered that Rachela was gifted in math. Really gifted.This is a story about both survival and family. Defecting to a new country, raising a son to be both American and Russian, being an incredibly smart woman at a time when most women didn’t work, not to mention that mathematics was an almost totally male dominated field, Rachela had to be larger than life.And then there is the formula. A mathematical puzzle that no one has been able to solve. Upon learning of Rachela’s death, mathematicians from around the country (and a couple beyond it) come to pay their respects to this strong, brilliant woman. They are also trying to figure out if she has left behind the solution to this pesky mathematical puzzle. It doesn’t take long for things to start slipping sideways.In the center ring is Sasha, Rachela’s son, who is trying to figure out how to corral a large group of odd academics in such a way that things don’t come totally apart. He’s a smart man and he knows that while they are there to remember a brilliant colleague and friend, they will also want the answer to the equation if it indeed exists. So in between sitting shiva for his mom, helping people get where they need to go and dealing with assorted weirdness, he’s got to make sure they don’t tear his mother’s home apart looking for the mathematical equivalent of El Dorado.I enjoyed reading this book. Russia, WWII, Jewish history, love, loss and more can make for difficult reading but the author did a tremendous job of writing in such a way that I could see the intertwining of everything that went into making an extraordinary and tough woman. A formidable woman who chose to go to a foreign country to build a new life. Knowing that there were people who actually did this (including my godparents) made it seem all the more real. In the end it’s an uplifting, life affirming good story. And while I could never have predicted that anyone could make even a hint of math enjoyable, I have to admit that the author did a splendid job.

⭐The Mathematician’s Shiva is a feel good novel that doesn’t require the reader to be Jewish or a mathematician to enjoy. In fact, learning a little about both is a side benefit to this very readable journey.The death of a parent can be a traumatic time for any person no matter his or her age, but when the parent is a world-renown mathematician and the son is, in terms of his career a lesser light, on top of which he has to entertain a sometimes rude band of academic geniuses and near geniuses for a week in his mother’s home, well then we have the basis for a potentially very interesting story.Rojstaczer pulls it off by a light-handed approach (most of the time) to such weighty topics as his mother’s childhood in the Soviet Union’s gulag, the anti-Semitism and male chauvinism she faced, the protagonist’s failed marriage and the math community’s intemperate desire to discover if the protagonist’s mother solved before her demise a major decades-old problem known as Navier-Stokes.Most readers will not cringe at the mild criticism of American culture expressed by the protagonist and will probably agree that the widespread disdain for intelligence is a cultural flaw that deserves being highlighted. Further, that criticism is balanced with appreciation for the fact that the protagonist and his parents were able to escape the old world and make a good life for themselves in the new.Rojstaczer and his editors could have offered more translations of the occasional Polish and Russian comments which are interspersed in the dialogue, but in the end those didn’t take away from the core of the story which ends on a moderately happy note with the protagonist solving his personal problem of facing the future as a single male with no contact to his sole off-spring.

⭐Arrived as ordered and earlier than expected. A terrific read. A mathematician dies and has supposedly solved a previously unsolved mathematical problem. For reasons that I’ll not reveal, lest I give away too much, she has not published her work. So, mathematicians from all over the world descend on her home for the Shiva, hoping to discover where she hid the long sought after solution. This book can even be enjoyed by non mathematicians!

⭐Truly a fun read! It won’t make you a mathematician but it will make you stop hating them.

⭐Great book if you are aware of some fluid mechanics & maths.

⭐Loved it.

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