Barak Bassman: 7 books

Dovid was a poor man down on his luck in a 17th century Polish Jewish world traumatized by the pogroms of the Cossack chieftain Chmielnicki and reeling from the tragedy of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Eking out a meager existence reading psalms for the sick and recently deceased, his prospects...

Drawing from the extensive tradition of medieval Jewish folklore surrounding the Biblical King Solomon, King Solomon and Ashmedai: A Wisdom Tale recounts the fall and restoration of the legendary king of Israel. In order to build the Temple in Jerusalem, King Solomon is forced to entrap the demon...

After centuries of wandering the small towns of Central and Eastern Europe, Zalman has finally been exposed by a great Hasidic Rebbe as a walking corpse, an affable zombie impersonating the living shtetl Jews around him. But when the rebbe insists that Zalman permit his soul to move on to the next...

Drawing upon ancient and medieval Jewish legends about the perils of trying to force the dawn of the Messianic Age, The Last Confession of Joseph della Reina tells the story of a dreamy, idealistic young Jewish man in medieval Spain who becomes convinced that, as recounted in the Talmud, the Messiah...

At the beginning of the First Crusade in the year 1096, bands of marauding Crusader knights attack and massacre Jewish communities across the Rhineland in Germany. Yet one of the victims, a wine merchant from Worms who had lost his wife and son, receives a second chance at life: a magical fairy named...

The Twilight of the Magical Siren is the tale of Judah, a young Jewish man, adrift, living during the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, a time when a newly triumphant Christianity overcame and marginalized the cults of the old pagan gods. One evening Judah meets an ancient goddess abandoned...

The Minotaur is one of the most fearsome monsters in the ancient Greek imagination: the half human, half bull child of Queen Pasiphae of Crete, who is locked away in a mysterious and treacherous maze, beneath the royal palace of Crete, called the Labyrinth. There he feasts on the flesh of the youths...