The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) By Stuart Rojstaczer

More fun than a barrel of monkeys! Imagine being surrounded by socially awkward geeks-on-a-mission for seven days, then sprinkle in a few serious sub-plots and themes, and voila, you have a novel titled The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer. Life (and death) is funny sometimes, and then life moves on.

The woman who dies is Rachela Karnokovitch. She was a world famous mathematician, a genius, whose colleagues worship her. Most of them, though an exceedingly bright and overly educated group of people, are not of her intellect.        

As a child, Rachela and her parents fled their native Poland in advance of the German invasion (1939) taking the only route available to them, Russia. They were sent to a refugee camp on the Barents Sea, where her mother did not survive. After the war, Rachela and her father made their way back to their village which had been annexed into the Soviet Union. School officials soon recognized her intelligence, sending her to the University of Moscow as a child prodigy. She distinguished herself academically and became a professor by age 22. She married and had a son. As time went on, she realized that no matter how intelligent she was, her academic career would be severely limited because she was a Pole, a Jew, and a woman. Eventually she defected while at a seminar in Berlin, knowing her husband and their son would figure out a way to follow – two years later they did, heading to the border on the day Joseph Stalin died, knowing the Soviet guards, along with the rest of the country, would be distracted with their mass grief.  

The family eventually re-united and ended up at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There, Rachela joined the faculty and re-established her academic and intellectual credentials, though still battled with institutionalized sexism. 

Her Russian-born, American-raised son Sasha narrates the book.

At the time of her death, there was a rumor spreading rapidly in academic circles that Rachela had solved a century old problem, the famed Navier-Stokes equation – a proof she apparently decided to take to the grave with her. While mathematicians from around the globe descended on Madison to celebrate her life, they also came to hopefully uncover the Navier-Stokes proof among her papers. During the shiva they searched her home, ripping up floor boards, looking behind pictures, ransacking the attic, and even at one point attempted to interrogate Pascha, her Polish-speaking parrot. Shasha put a halt to their insistence on an open casket.

Eulogizing Rachela with this book also gives the author ample opportunity to provide insight into her family as a whole. From Sasha we learn of the challenges of being an immigrant in the U.S., the difficulties of being the son of a genius, and are offered an interesting subplot when his child from his short-term marriage, who he is aware of but has never met, attends the funeral. Another character who plays an outsized role in the story is Shlomo, Rachela's brother.

While the field of mathematics may have its equations, so too the field of literature has many classic formulas – one of which is using a funeral as the setting for a story. Rachela Kornokovitch mastered the mathematic equation.  Using the voice of Sasha, Stuart Rojstaczer has expertly mastered the shiva.