Tova Mirvis is an American novelist. She is a graduate of Columbia College of Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

's School of the Arts

Columbia University School of the Arts

The Columbia University School of the Arts , also known simply as the School of the Arts or as SoA, is the division of the university that offers Master of Fine Arts degrees in Film, Visual Arts, Theatre Arts, and Writing, as well as a Master of Arts degree in Film Studies...

. Mirvis ' family has lived in Memphis, Tennessee since 1874 when her German-born grandmother moved there at age two.

Mirvis came to National attention when her novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, became a best-seller.

Literary critic Morris Dickstein describes Mirvis as part of a young generation of American Jewish novelists engaged in "a persistent search for roots" Nancy Maxwell describes her work as exemplifying the "library as travel" literary experience. Lucy Long holds her up as the paradigm of the fact that "The whole Orthodox world had taken a giant step to the right, and like partners
in a dance, we had followed."

Controversies

Mirvis became the center of a minor controversy in 2005 when Wendy Shalit

Wendy Shalit

Wendy Shalit is an American author who has written two books— A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, published by Free Press in 1999 and Girls Gone Mild: Young Rebels Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good, published by Random House in 2007.Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,...

 published an essay entitled "The Observant Reader" in the New York Times Book Review accusing Mirvis, an orthodox Jew, of writing ostensibly "'insider' fiction (that) actually reveals the authors' estrangement from the traditional Orthodox community." Mirvis defended herself in an essay in the Jewish Daily The Forward

The Forward

The Forward , commonly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American newspaper published in New York City. The publication began in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily issued by dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon...

.

Sources

http://mirvis.etherweave.com/

http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/IP_Jacobs.htm

http://media.www.touroindependent.com/media/storage/paper790/news/2006/01/01/Features/Tova-Mirvis.On.Balance.Motherhood.And.Moving.Beyond.Stereotypes-1308385.shtml

http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=66&Itemid=223

http://www.exclusivebooks.com/interviews/ftf/tova_mirvis.php?PHPSESSID=of70o22c2grqpg9gf7tm74s5n0