Inspired by history and a trove of love letters, The Rabbi's Suitcase recounts how, in the early 1880s, a battered steamship, overcrowded with Orthodox Jewish travelers, makes a treacherous journey from Lithuania to Jerusalem, the home of their patriarchs. On board, Yosef Siev, a twelve-year-old mystic, is entranced with wild-haired Chana. Their story is told against a backdrop of Ottoman rule, the privations of WWI, and British Mandatory uprisings. In 1926 Yosef and Chana's seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Zipora, enters into a forbidden relationship with Reuven, a young Lithuanian immigrant destined, as a close ally of David Ben Gurion, to become a founder of the State of Israel. The liaison extracts a heavy toll. With dreams of self-discovery and a better future for herself and her family, Zipora travels to America determined to contribute to Reuven's studies at the Sorbonne. Conflicts arise over issues of politics, gender inequality, and fidelity, forcing heart-wrenching decisions.

Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova have spent almost fifty years refining the art of casting large sculptures made of delicately colored glass. Their achievements have won them a place among the leading artists working in their medium. The Inner Light gives special prominence to the most recent work of this celebrated team. Libensky and Brychtova have mastered the complex technical and aesthetic demands of glass, using the material's unique properties to create works on a par with the best of modern sculpture. Their work uses changes in surface treatment, the dynamics of intersecting planes, and the presence of voids within the sculptures to control the way light is held, transmuted, and radiated in the presence of the observer.Robert Kehlmann places their aesthetic in the context of the Czech intellectual and artistic climate that played an important formative role in their development, with particular attention to the influence of Czech cubism. His essay takes a close look at their latest body of work, which utilizes monumental forms to probe issues relating to life, death, and the afterlife.Two interviews provide further insight into Libensky and Brychtova's creative process. Kehlmann's conversation with art historian Jiri Setlik, a close friend of the artists, gives a personal perspective on their work. Setlik is vice-director of the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design, Prague, and has written extensively about Libensky and Brychtova's work. A lively interview with the artists themselves provides yet a fuller sense of the collaborative process behind their luminous and mysterious sculptures.Robert Kehlmann is an artist and critic who lives and works in Berkeley, California. He has published widely on the subject of glass art and is the author of Twentieth Century Stained Glass: A New Definition. His own glass art has been featured in many exhibits and publications.