Rachel Lynn Solomon (author of The Ex Talk) says Jean Meltzer’s debut novel The Matzah Ball is “a love letter to Judaism and an utterly charming romance…. it’s a luminous celebration of all types of love, threaded with the message that everyone is worthy of it.”
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from the first chapter of The Matzah Ball, which releases on September 28th 2021!
SYNOPSIS
Oy! to the world. Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach.
But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg.
Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze.
EXCERPT
Later that evening, after Mickey had departed, Rachel couldn’t sleep. Normally, she would assume her insomnia was the byproduct of her chronic fatigue syndrome, what doctors often referred to as a disrupted sleep-wake cycle. This evening, however, Rachel knew that her tossing was the result of something far more insidious.
Jacob Greenberg was coming back to New York.
Rachel groaned beneath her covers. She couldn’t get him out of her head. Lying in bed, memories of that terrible summer came flooding back to her. Pushing her into the lake. Leaving a dead bug in her siddur. Scratching on the window above her bunk at midnight, pretending to be a serial killer. All of which she could have probably forgiven, but he had taken the joke too far.
Rachel needed to relax. Rising from her bed, she knew just the thing that would help. Returning to the living room, she drew shut the curtains. The rest was ritual, a Christmas-themed pattern she had played out a million times since moving to her two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. She headed to her office and powered on her Christmas monstrosity.
The room sprang back to life. The thousand twinkling lights turned on around her. The hum of an electronic jingle, the chugging choo-choo of her Christmas train finished its happy path. Rachel leaned against the doorway, taking it all in. Her magic Christmas world, her safe and special place…her most dark and shameful secret.
Usually, it helped.
Rachel closed the door and returned to her bedroom. Heading to her closet, she stood on her tiptoe, pulling down a large flowered box.
Normally, as a kid, she had been obsessive about collaging. This box, which had traveled with her through most of college and into adulthood, contained the extras that hadn’t made it into picture frames. It contained years’ worth of photographs from Camp Ahava, letters long sent and forgotten, plus a hodgepodge of random friendship bracelets and other summer camp trinkets.
She took a deep breath and opened it. Surprisingly, the act didn’t injure her. Sorting through photographs, she found her-self smiling. The ones of her and Mickey, in third grade, tiny and adorable. She stopped on a picture of her with him, both of them wearing red bandannas, smiling toothless at the camera.
There were plenty from the girls’ side of camp, too. Rachel burst out laughing at a random shot, blurry and unfocused, of bunk 7G. It was absolute filth. Wet towels hung from every railing. Hair dryers and curling irons, with their cords unwrapped, lay open and exposed on beds. She landed on a photo of Leah Abraham drinking out of her favorite pink water bottle. The one Rachel’s father had specifically bought Rachel because it had her name painted in silver gemstones on the front.
Rachel had loved that damn water bottle.
She kept flipping through, each image bringing back with it a dozen memories. There really was nothing quite like Jewish summer camp. She saw the same familiar faces, year after year, summer after summer. At least, she had…until Jacob Greenberg arrived.
Jacob Greenberg burst into the Camp Ahava scene a total anomaly. He was Jewish, of course, but he didn’t come from her Jewish world. He made fart noises during morning minyan. He purposefully mixed meat and dairy dishes during meals. He was a notorious prankster, a total bad boy, never once giving a damn about what anybody thought of him.
No wonder Rachel fell so hard for him.
She wasn’t the only one. The l’shon hara, or gossip, that summer about Jacob was unrivaled. His mother was a French model. His father was some über-rich businessman. He lived in a seventeen-bedroom penthouse in New York, where he could order candy via delivery service, and even had a tele-vision in his bedroom. Most of which—Rachel now realized as an adult—was probably not true. None of that mattered to the seventh graders of Camp Ahava. Jacob Greenberg was all question marks and mystery. Everyone fell under his spell.
Rachel came to a photo of the boys of bunk 7B. Twenty-six gangly males stood in a half-moon circle outside their cabin. There was Mickey, Avi, Ben and Aaron. But in the middle of those familiar faces, poised like a king with his arms crossed, stood Jacob Greenberg. Grinning.
Ugh.
She was positive he was still grinning, laughing at her from oh, so fabulous Paris, the city he’d moved to with his mother after their one summer together at Camp Ahava. Her eyes wandered over to a stack of letters held together by a rubber band. She didn’t have the heart to open them up.
But she remembered how relieved she’d felt to read his final letter. The way she and Mickey had celebrated, jumping up and down on her bed, squealing aloud in sheer delight. Jacob Greenberg was leaving New York—and the United States—forever. He would never be returning to Camp Ahava.
And yet, despite the shrieks of gratitude emanating from her tiny pink bedroom in Long Island, when Rachel found herself alone at night—when she thought about all that had transpired between them that summer—there was a part of her that was sad to hear he was leaving.
Jacob had been her first love, after all.
Rachel threw down the photo. It was such sentimental stupidity, and for what? Jacob probably didn’t remember her, let alone recall the myriad ways he had broken her heart. But Rachel would always remember it. Always recall the way it felt to look up from her first kiss, and see the boys of bunk 7B hiding in the bushes with flashlights and cameras. Because Jacob Greenberg had turned her first kiss into a giant Camp Ahava prank.
He had never loved her. He had never cared about her, either.
Rachel closed up the box, returning it to the closet. Crawling back into bed, she decided that her mother was wrong. She was not being ridiculous. Jacob Greenberg had stolen something precious from her. Something important that she could never get back.
She had no intention of ever seeing that shmuck again.
Excerpted from The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer, Copyright © 2021 by Jean Meltzer. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Meltzer studied dramatic writing at NYU Tisch and has earned numerous awards for her work in television, including a daytime Emmy. Like her protagonist, Jean is also a chronically-ill and disabled Jewish woman. She is an outspoken advocate for ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), has attended visibility actions in Washington DC, meeting with members of Senate and Congress to raise funds for ME/CFS. She inspires 9,000 followers on WW Connect to live their best life, come out of the chronic illness closet, and embrace the hashtag #chronicallyfabulous. Also, while she was raised in what would be considered a secular home, she grew up kosher and attended Hebrew School. She spent five years in rabbinical school before her chronic illness forced her to withdraw, and her father told her she should write a book―just not a Jewish one because no one reads those. The Matzah Ball is her first novel.
