The Blind Eye,  by Marcia Fine
- Chapter One

 “Hermando, no. Please. Hanna’s still a girl. She made a mistake.” My mother appealed to my father even as she, too, made preparations for our long journey. The air in the front room of our home that served as our place of trade reeked with anger and frustration. Despair replaced hope. Three months had passed since the Edict of Expulsion on the thirty-first of Adar. Originally we were to leave on the first day of Ab but the monarchs in their cruel contempt gave us one more day.

“No!” my father shouted, gathering stacks of Byzantine silks and flax linen. Furious, he stuffed them into large hemp bags. A swath of crimson tapestry fell to the floor.

“But Hanna’s only fourteen.”

“Old enough not to be a fool. Pregnant by a common Marrano who believes in their Holy Ghost? What kind of a Jew is that?”

More....

Downloads:  Book Cover (Front)  /  Book Cover (Back)  /  Chapter 1

ISBN: 1-4010-9303-5 (Paperback)
Pub. Date: March 2003
Pages: 246
Subject: FICTION / Humorous

SYNOPSIS
Our reluctant hero, Jean Rubin, is back for another round of dealing with with problems on every front. Married to absent-minded Maury, a physician fighting the managed care mess, their lives explode when their son brings home his pregnant girlfriend, Rosa, who disrupts the routine of the household.

Jean's professional life boils when she fails a student whose mother is a right-wing legislator with immense popular support. She attacks Jean and threatens to wreak havoc on the college. Jean's arrogant, Anglophile department head, insists she change the grade. With her job in jeopardy and the Dean applying pressure, Jean takes on a fight for academic freedom.
 

To complicate matters, Jean's friends, April, a beautiful busybody, and Glee, an erotic artist addicted to plastic surgery, introduce the Rubins to a new couple who have their sites set on the pocketbooks of Scottsdale's finest.

The three plots create hilarious and bizarre levels of stress as they come to a climax when the scam artists make their move during Passover as Rosa goes into labor. In the end Jean makes peace with her daughter-in-law and triumphs in her defense of academic freedom while Maury's distraction provides a twist that saves them from financial ruin when the scam artists disappear.

Downloads:  Book Cover (Front)  /  Book Cover (Back)  /  Chapter 1