Ellen Gol­ub kid­naps the sharp-tongued Sheyne Sheyn­del and her luft­men­sch hus­band, Men­achem Mendel, from Sholem Aleichem’s 1890s shtetl sto­ries and drops them off in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca. They have one foot in the sec­u­lar world — think Stabucks, Prozac, pornog­ra­phy — and the oth­er in the world to come — think Sahb­bat, kashrut, and dav­en­ing. Men­achem Mendel is now yeshi­va-edu­cat­ed and a physi­cist; his wife the doyenne of a promi­nent rab­binic fam­i­ly. But when he begins obsess­ing about the com­ing of the Mes­si­ah, who should the prag­mat­ic Sheyne Sheyn­del call — a rab­bi or a psy­chi­a­trist? This wit­ty nov­el weaves togeth­er neu­ropsy­chi­a­try, quan­tum physics, and the Tal­mud, nav­i­gat­ing the para­dox­i­cal straits of mod­ern Jew­ish iden­ti­ty in a lin­guis­tic ves­sel infused with Yid­dish and Hebrew. The end result? A greater under­stand­ing of the ​“Psy­choSe­mit­ic” con­di­tion and a laugh-out-loud Jew­ish bang.