Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics at Columbia. Chloe's daughter Phoebe grows up to become a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the sort of domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected.

Rebecca Goldstein is author of The Mind-Body Problem, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors, and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, she is professor of philosophy at Trinity College.