Curt Leviant Books In Order

Novels

The Yemenite Girl (1977)
The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah (1990)
Partita in Venice (1999)
Diary of an Adulterous Woman (2000)
A Novel of Klass (2008)
King of Yiddish (2015)
Kafka’s Son (2016)
Katz or Cats (2018)
Me, Mo, Mu, Ma, Mod (2021)

Collections

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara (2002)
Zix Zexy Ztories (2012)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Curt Leviant Books Overview

The Yemenite Girl

A love story with a comic flair. The novel explores the phenomena of fame and hero worship, as well as the relationship between life and art.

The surprise of this novel lies in its ability to draw the reader in to a quite serious matter, with the lightest of touches. So light and so serious that you will be certain that Leviant’s favorite writing instrument must be a quill, not a computer. What else could combine levity and acerbity so throughly…
so pointedly? For the novel’s setting we have Venice, a city that Tommy Manning has returned to after twenty five years to meet an old flame. Just as slick as Hollywood, Tommy must think. But items go astray. Who is this mysterious young girl he spotas gliding on a vaporetto? Why does her hair color keep changing each time he sees her? Who is ‘tall Aunt Maria’ and why does she seem to know so much about Tommy? Why do landmarks in Venice disappear, then reappear? Why is this young girl so quaintly named ‘Happy,’ so volatile and unhappy? Why for heaven’s sake does Jack Benny work as an ageless gondolier? To top it all, on Partita night, Tommy is simultaneously so it seems mugged and saved, just in time to listen to the midnight, open air concert. What else should he be listening to, though? Maybe his heart, maybe his instinct? But he seems never to have listened to the first, and the latter…
well, the latter will grab him by the neck soon enough. Tommy Manning is the type of character that you can love to hate: he is so suave, so acerbic, so sure of himself that you just know he will fall. And his trip will be much more severe rthan the one he receives from the foot of ‘the chief rabbi of Venice,’ a man who claims to be over five hundred years old.

Diary of an Adulterous Woman

Two old friends reunite at their Jewish day school’s reunion. Now in their early forties, Guido and Charlie, become interested in the same married woman, the alluring Aviva. This triangular tale of love and lust is narrated from from the point of view of all three characters.

A Novel of Klass

A tragicomic novel with two endings! The self proclaimed ‘Yiddish painter’ Ayzik Klass, who lived through the Holocaust, gets his first New York gallery show, but his wife Griselda seems intent on ruining it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara

Filled with Curt Leviant’s signature blend of humor and drama, these two enchanting and original novellas lure readers into a dazzling storybook world. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet’ is set in Budapest during the Communist era. The story focuses on the tenuous seesaw between Dr. Isaac Gantz, a musicologist, and engineer Ferdinand Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that he possesses one of the greatest manuscripts of the ages, a Rosetta Stone of Judaica. Friedman is willing to share it but there is a ‘but.’ In pursuing this prize, Gantz enters a world of strange human relationships filled with doubts and surprises. A vibrant cast of characters adds dimension to this gripping story in which Jewish folklore, music, and history coalesce. ‘Weekend in Mustara’ unfolds on the fictional island of Mustara in southern Europe, a mountainous, totalitarian country that tolerates Judaism. Its few Jews cling to their heritage, embodied in their beautiful but sparsely attended synagogue and their museum, where a great memorial book is inscribed with the names of all Mustara Jews martyred during World War II. A scholar of medieval Hebrew manuscripts comes to the island, searching for traces of Yehuda Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of the Spanish Golden Age. He is soon enmeshed among elusive personalities and tangled loyalties, but only when he finds himself displaced in time in a kind of theater of the absurd are the purposes of his journey finally realized. Library of American Fiction