(Was that even a pun?) Jewish culture has always been rife with precisely the type of archetypes Sherman has interrogated; not for nothing does Tevye introduce the villagers of Anatevka each as their own special "types." From the shtetl we inherited the yenta, the yeshiva bucher, the gonif , the shtarker; the postwar era gave American Jews self-hating punchlines like the JAP and the nebbish; the Soviet Union had its "Rabinovich" jokes and Israel its brash "muscle Jews" who know how to clean a gun and never saw a line they didn't want to push to the front of.

But closest to her heart is Dave at Night, published in 1999, about a boy living in a Hebrew orphanage in New York City who runs away one night and finds new friends at a Harlem "rent party"--a rich African American girl named Irma Lee and an old Jewish gonif [thief] with a good heart.