Literary Twofer Finds Characters ‘In Sickness And In Health’ And On ‘Yom Kippur In A Gym’

Tom Teicholz, Contributor
I'm a culture maven and arts enthusiast.
March 22, 2024
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Nora Gold, the prize-winning Canadian author of novels and short stories and the founder and editor-in-chief of JewishFiction.net, has just published what Vegas aficionados call a twofer – that is two for the price of one, in this case two novellas, In Sickness and In Health, and Yom Kippur in a Gym in one volume (Guernica Editions).

At first glance, the novellas could not seem more different. In Sickness and In Health is the account of a few days in the life of a college professor who is suffering a bout of a fugue state that doctors can’t diagnose but that she believes may be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – and that may or may not be related to having childhood epilepsy, a condition which she has hidden from her husband.

Yom Kippur In a Gym is, as the title indicates, the story of a Yom Kippur observance for a congregation’s overflow crowd held in a gym. Contrary to its sister novella, rather than one person’s story, it is the tale of half a dozen people at the service.

In terms of storytelling craft, in In Sickness and In Health, the challenge facing Gold is to deliver the way in which the narrator’s sickness clouds her subjective feelings and judgments and the way in which her thoughts and worldview improve as she begins to feel better.

Here, Gold explains how her character’s sickness affects her: “The hours are what worried Virginia Woolf, but you worry about the minutes. When you’re well there are never enough of them, but now there are too many.”

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