KING, Ruchama,
(Ruchama King Feuerman)

PERSONAL:

Married Yisrael Feuerman (a writer, psychotherapist, and fund-raiser); children: four. Education: Brooklyn College, MFA (creative writing). Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Passaic, NJ. Office—c/o Author Mail, St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Agent—Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency, 1201 Broadway, Suite 708, New York, NY 10001.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

(Under name Ruchama King Feuerman) The Secret of the Hotel Dela Rosa, Aura Press (Brooklyn, NY), 1996.

(Under name Ruchama King Feuerman) The Marvelous Mix-Up: And Other Tales of Reb Shalom, illustrated by Vitality Romanenko, Hachai Publishing (Brooklyn, NY), 1997.

Seven Blessings, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of stories to journals and magazines.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ruchama King is the author of a well-received 2003 novel, Seven Blessings, set in a contemporary Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. King, a native of Silver Spring, Maryland, moved to Israel when she was seventeen, and spent the next ten years living and working in Jerusalem, where she studied and taught Torah, and did volunteer work with the disabled. "'I was there in the Eighties,'" King told Lisa Haddock in the Bergen County, New Jersey Record. "'Everyone thinks of Jerusalem as a place to die for now.…But Jerusalem is a place to live for and to live in and love.'" During her years in Jerusalem, King, the daughter of an Ashkenazi father and a Moroccan-born Sephardi mother, lived with a matchmaker.

King returned to the United States in the early 1990s, married, and earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Brooklyn College. She began publishing stories in small magazines, and also published two books under her married name, Ruchama King Feuerman. Her 1996 The Secret of the Hotel Dela Rosa is a detective story featuring Bina Gold, while her 1997 book, The Marvelous Mix-Up: And Other Tales of Reb Shalom, is a collection of three long tales for middle-grade readers featuring the wise Reb Shalom who lives in the Jewish town of Keppel.

With Seven Blessings, published under her maiden name, King utilizes the material from her Jerusalem years. "King's skillful prose reveals the heartbreak and the joy involved in trying to find the right partner," according to a contributor for Aish.com, "and her beautiful descriptions of the city make Jerusalem a place that readers will not wish to depart." In an interview with the same contributor, King noted, "I wanted to write an honest book, and yet I feared going overboard in my honesty." For King, other writings about Orthodox Jews have often missed the mark. She wanted to depict real people in real-life situations. "'Matchmaking and romance are the perfect camouflage for thornier issues,'" the author told Lisa Haddock in the New Jersey Jewish News Online. "'Along the way, you can slip in a little Torah, a little God, a little coming to grips with the dark side of your own soul and self.'" Thus King decided to set her story against the backdrop of matchmakers at work.

King features expatriate men and women in Jerusalem in the pre-Intifada 1980s: Beth, an independent thirty-nine-year-old American woman is at the center of action; the rather arrogant American artist, Binyamin who is a headache for the matchmakers; and the matchmakers themselves, Tsippi, a Holocaust survivor, and the alluring Judith, both of whom need a little help with their own marriages. Each character struggles towards love and self-fulfillment in this novel which puts a "fresh spin" on the subject of matchmaking, according to Andrea Kempf in Library Journal. Kempf also found that King's depiction of the Orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jewish community is "as warm and engaging as any in contemporary literature," and that her characters "jump off the page and into the hearts of her audience."

For a Publishers Weekly critic, Seven Blessings was a "bustling" title, with "richly detailed descriptions of Jerusalem" and "sympathetic characters [that] make this a fully realized novel." Similarly, a critic for Kirkus Reviews thought the same novel was a "tender, enlightening debut that, urban setting aside, reads like a comedy of provincial manners." And for Haddock, writing in the New Jersey Jewish News, the book "is a love letter to the faith that King cherishes," a "passion," according to Haddock, that "fuels a compelling story about the search for love—of God, of Torah, of life, of soul mates—in the land of Israel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2003, review of Seven Blessings, p. 772.

Library Journal, May 15, 2003, Andrea Kempf, review of Seven Blessings, p. 125.

Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2003, review of Seven Blessings, pp. 39-40.

Record (Bergen County, NJ), November 13, 2003, Lisa Haddock, "Seeking God and Soul Mates in Jerusalem," p. L4.

ONLINE

Aish.com,http://www.aish.com/ (February 22, 2004), "Seven Blessings: Q and A with the Author."

New Jersey Jewish News Online,http://www.njjewishnews.com/ (February 12, 2004), Lisa Haddock, "NJ Author Tells 'Passionate' Story of Israeli Singles Seeking Soul Mates."

St. Martin's Press Web site,http://www.stmartins.com/ (October, 30, 2003). *