Blog

(CNN) -- A 19-year-old Nigerian undergraduate student has signed a two-novel deal with the British publisher Faber, making her its youngest ever woman author.

Chibundu Onuzo, a history student at King's College London, will have her first novel, "The Spider King's Daughter," published next year..

"I wrote the book in my last year at school," Onuzo told CNN. "I've been writing since I was 10, but this was the first novel I finished, so it was very liberating to be able to write 'The End.'"

Onuzo, who moved to England to go to school five years ago, found an agent before she had even finished writing, and sealed the book deal on her first meeting with a publisher

Her editor at Faber, Sarah Savitt, describes Onuzo as a "very talented writer at the beginning of an exciting writing career."

Onuzo is the latest of a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers -- many of them female -- who have made their mark in the literary world in the past few years.

They include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction for "Half of A Yellow Sun;" and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, published her first novel, "I Do Not Come To You By Chance," last year, which has also garnered several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Nigeria has a rich literary tradition spanning the 50 years since its independence, including one Nobel Prize for Literature, one Man Booker Prize winner, one Man Booker International Prize, one Orange Prize winner, and three winners of the Caine Prize for African Writing, which is often described as the "African Booker."

It is an impressive haul, even for Africa's most populous country with a population of 150 million, but according to those in the know, it is just the beginning.

Publishers and writers say there is an explosion of young Nigerian writers about to gain even more international recognition.

Jeremy Weate, a British man who set up Cassava Republic publishing company in Abuja in 2007 with his Nigerian wife Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, said: "This is a very exciting time and the best of Nigerian writing is still ahead.

"There is some awareness overseas of Nigerian authors and an increasing number of Nigerians winning awards, but we believe this is just the beginning.

"There is still a huge amount of undiscovered and up-and-coming talent in Nigeria."

Among the new wave of literary talent are Chika Unigwe, an Afro-Belgian author who writes in both Dutch and English published her first English novel "On Black Sisters' Street" in the UK last year. It was described by Alistair Campbell, press secretary to the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on Twitter as the "best novel so far read this summer."

Habila, who won the Caine Prize for his novel "Waiting for an Angel," told CNN: "My generation has been very fortunate. The return to democracy in [in Nigeria] the last 10 or 12 years has brought people more freedom to express themselves and to travel, and opportunities for publishing and writing workshops that have encouraged creativity. There was active suppression of these things until the late 1990s.

"There are going to be even more brilliant young writers coming through in the next few years. Whenever I go home I see the incredible enthusiasm and hunger of young writers. They have seen us succeed, so they know it's possible."

Unigwe, too, is optimistic about the future.

She told CNN: "For a long time we thought the western market was closed to African writers, so it was a huge thrill when we started to see them being published.

"I get lots of emails from young writers who want to get published and there's some really amazing stuff coming out. It gives me a lot of hope for the next few years."

Most successful writers have moved away from Nigeria, some leaving when they were very young. If writers of Nigerian parentage, born elsewhere, were counted the list of success stories would be even longer.

Lizzy Attree, expert in African literature and consultant to the Caine Prize for African Literature, said: "Nigeria has a rich literary tradition and at certain points it has come particularly to the world's attention.

"The first wave was in the 1960s after independence with writers like Chinua Achebe, and then a new wave has emerged in the last few years with the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Some second and third generation Nigerians in the West have also made links back home and brought their stories to a younger generation."

Or, as Onuzo puts it simply: "There's something in the water in Nigeria. I guess we just have a lot of interesting stories to tell."

Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: ראש השנה‎, literally "head of the year," Israeli: Hebrew pronunciation: [ˈʁoʃ haʃaˈna], Ashkenazic: ˈɾoʃ haʃːɔˈnɔh, Yiddish:[ˈrɔʃəˈʃɔnə]) is a Jewish holiday commonly referred to as the "Jewish New Year." It is observed on the first day of Tishrei, the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar.[1] It is ordained in the Torah as "Zicaron Terua" ("a memorial with the blowing of horns"), in Leviticus 23:24. Rosh Hashanah is the first of the High Holidays or Yamim Noraim ("Days of Awe"), or Asseret Yemei Teshuva (Ten Days of Repentance) which are days specifically set aside to focus on repentance that conclude with the holiday of Yom Kippur.

Rosh Hashanah is the start of the civil year in the Hebrew calendar (one of four "new year" observances that define various legal "years" for different purposes as explained in the Mishnah and Talmud). It is the new year for people, animals, and legal contracts. The Mishnah also sets this day aside as the new year for calculating calendar years and sabbatical (shmita) and jubilee (yovel) years. Jews believe Rosh Hashanah represents either analogically or literally the creation of the World, or Universe. However, according to one view in the Talmud, that of R. Eleazar, Rosh Hashanah commemorates the creation of man, which entails that five days earlier, the 25 of Elul, was the first day of creation of the Universe.[2]

The Mishnah, the core text of Judaism's oral Torah, contains the first known reference to Rosh Hashanah as the "day of judgment." In the Talmud tractate on Rosh Hashanah it states that three books of account are opened on Rosh Hashanah, wherein the fate of the wicked, the righteous, and those of an intermediate class are recorded. The names of the righteous are immediately inscribed in the book of life, and they are sealed "to live." The middle class are allowed a respite of ten days, until Yom Kippur, to repent and become righteous; the wicked are "blotted out of the book of the living."[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_Hashanah

For secular Jews

It would happen each fall around the Jewish new year. At the very time when renewal was in the autumn air, Arnold Barnett, an engineer from Moorestown, would go into a mild funk. His wife eventually figured it out: He was less than enamored with high holiday synagogue services.

"He simply wasn't engaged by what went on inside our Reform synagogue, or with the traditional approach to Judaism," said Ellen, 70. "I knew he was struggling. So sometimes, I would just go to services alone."

Then last year, the Barnetts saw a small notice in a local Jewish newspaper about a recently formed group in South Jersey. "We went to a meeting that was focused on Jewish history," Arnold, 71, recalls, "and that was something I could relate to. It was much more appealing."

And so the Barnetts will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, which begins Wednesday at sundown, by meeting Sunday with like-minded members of South Jersey Secular Jews - a group of people who may or may not believe in God, but do believe in caring about the world and one another, respecting and understanding Jewish history, and celebrating a culture that has meaning and emotional pull.

"The most important aspect of secularism is the survival and continuity of the Jewish people," said Paul Shane, a native New Yorker now living in Philadelphia and married to the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Shane, 75, a member of the more established Philadelphia Secular Jewish Organization, believes humans are responsible for what happens on Earth. The here and now is central, and actions speak louder than words.

That philosophy resembles traditional Judaism. But secular Jews and traditional Jews part company when it comes to accepting religious dogma.

If you're secular, God is optional. (Traditional Judaism has "God at its heart. That's not an option," said Rabbi Ethan Franzel of Main Line Reform Temple Beth Elohim in Wynnewood.) Also, life-cycle events are handled individually - for instance, there are no set burial or wedding traditions in secular Judaism.

Of course secularism, in which one adheres to cultural norms rather than religious ones, is hardly new. During the Renaissance, from 1450 to 1600, and the Enlightenment in the 18th century, many Jews shed the God-oriented elements of their Jewishness, according to Shane, a professor of social policy at Rutgers University in Newark. That shedding also continued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What's different today is that a growing number of secular Jews are finding one another, forming groups, and practicing the social responsibility Judaism requires - minus the synagogue.

Rifke Feinstein, executive director of the national Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations, says there are approximately 2,000 affiliated secular Jews in the United States. But because seculars typically are unaffiliated, and therefore uncounted, estimates for the entire American secular population range from 8,000 to 40,000.

In the Philadelphia area, there are six such organizations for secular Jews - including the five-year-old South Jersey Secular Jews - all under the local umbrella cooperative venture called Kehilla for Secular Jews.

For many people, discovering that such an organization exists has been a relief.

" 'I thought I was the only one!' is what people often express when they discover that they are not alone in their secular relationship to their Jewishness," said Larry Angert, 59, a member of 11-year-old Shir Shalom: A Havurah for Secular Jews. "The Jewish tent is big, and there's room for all of us in it."

Some local secular groups, like Philadelphia's Sholom Aleichem Club, which started in 1954, and Philadelphia Workmen's Circle, founded nationally in 1900 to aid Jewish immigrant workers and to promote Yiddish, have graying memberships. Bob Kleiner, 85, of Elkins Park, a retired sociology professor at Temple University, and his wife, Frances, a teacher of Yiddish, both long active in the secular movement, lament that younger people are not actively involved in these historic groups.

But the formation of new groups, such as South Jersey Secular Jews, is evidence the movement still has traction.

Credit Naomi Scher, 64, of Cherry Hill, whose children attended the Jewish Children's Folkshul, another Kehilla group, which is a parent-run cooperative held at Springside School in Philadelphia. About 100 children receive their Jewish education, not in a traditional Hebrew school but in classes that nourish social justice and individual responsibility. Bar and bat mitzvah aspirants undertake personally meaningful projects that they ultimately share with the entire Folkshul community.

Although Scher formed relationships with parents of her children's classmates, commuting to Philadelphia became burdensome once her children graduated, and in 2005, the retired social worker decided to start a secular group closer to home.

What began as a gathering of eight to 10 people now regularly attracts 30, meeting monthly with speakers who address social and political concerns, Scher said.

Deborah Chaiken, 74, of Palmyra is delighted to have a group close to home. "In the formal Jewish community, I felt that I didn't really have a voice. Here, I know that I do."

Dues are $25 a year, and participants are asked to bring food for potluck dinners. Meetings are held on the second Sunday of the month at Unitarian Universalist Church in Cherry Hill..

South Jersey Secular Jews members Cary and Bilha Hillebrand of Cherry Hill call the group a welcome addition to the local landscape. For Bilha, 54, the philosophy of the group is more in keeping with that of her native Israel, where the majority of the population leads a more secular lifestyle.

"We are not in any way antireligious," says Cary, 60. "We hold the belief that we are responsible for what happens to ourselves and to the world. And to us, that's the essence of what religion is, and should be."