What makes this book really interesting is that Zucker compares the "facts" of the modern rabbinate with the "fictional" rabbinate; that is, with rabbis in novels and short stories written during the past fifty years. He offers selections from over one hundred works of fiction and nearly seventy-five fiction writers, including: Harry Kemelman, Allegra Goodman, Noah Gordon, Rhonda Shapiro-Rieser, Joseph Telushkin, Naomi Ragen, Philip Roth, Faye Kellerman, Bernard Malamud, Eileen Pollack, Herman Wouk and Alex J. Goldman - one of the few men who write about a rabbi who is also a woman. In addition, Zucker devotes important chapters to God, Israel and Tradition as well as to contemporary issues, such as assimilation, intermarriage and patrilineality. Further, he includes a major chapter on rabbis who are also women.

Some "rabbi" fiction comes closer to reality than others do. The most famous of the fictional rabbis is "Rabbi David Small" of the Harry Kemelman mystery series. Beginning with Friday, the Rabbi Slept Late, Kemelman followed "Rabbi Small" through twenty-five years. To an outsider looking inside of this "weekday" rabbi series, the on-going tensions between "Rabbi Small" and his Board of Directors seem overdrawn. This is understandable considering that fiction often relies upon dramatic moments filled with strife to carry the plot. However to an insider, many of these conflicts are accurate. One of the unsolved mysteries of Kemelman's twelve books is "Rabbi Small's" survival of his congregational experience, a detail that is paralleled in the careers of many real rabbis.

On the other side of this fact-fiction coin, some rabbi-centered fiction is far from reality. Historically, TV and the movies have portrayed rabbis as Orthodox men, as if only they were authentic. Further, many have been portrayed as ineffectual. Thankfully, "Rabbi Small" - televised in 1977 - was an exception to these "norms".

All rabbis serve as priests, pastors, and companions through the life-cycles and life-crises of their congregants. The expectations upon them seem endless and at times, claustrophobic. In Rabbi Alex J. Goldman's novel, The Lady is a Rabbi, "Rabbi Sara Weintraub" asks herself if she can be both a rabbi and a mother. At one point, we read: "Sara stopped. Felt a twinge. She was alone ...Career? Yes. But she . . . felt the bitterness of her private reality . . . She struggled with her inner self ... Sara's mind was ... tumultuous . . . Woman or career?"

The rabbinate is a difficult profession. In Rhonda Shapiro-Rieser's novel, A Place of Light, "Rabbi Lynda Klein" discovers this - the hard way. Early in her rabbinate she believed that she would have the time to pursue her destiny. But in her experience, she found herself surrounded by "the walls of the rabbinate . . . there was no time. The congregation waited, a jealous lover. Hundreds of people wanted her to inspire them, to lead them to God, or prayer, or to their own souls."

Rabbi Zucker writes with an insider's knowledge of a contemporary rabbinate - whether Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or Reconstructionist. A congregational rabbi for over twenty years ....