The Hanukkah Gun and Other Secondhand Sol Old West Tales is a collection of short stories about a nontraditional, Jewish hero in the late 19th-century Arizona Territory. A seller of secondhand goods, Solomon Pliskin is closer to 5-feet-4 than the classic height of heroes, 6-feet-4. Slight and self-deprecating, balding and bearded, he wears a wool suit, not buckskins and chaps. He dons a bowler, not a Stetson. Faith and family, not firepower, are his best defense against the dangers of the frontier. With a gun molded from Hanukkah gelt, he foils a bullying bigot; trying to do a mitzvah on Rosh Hashanah, he rescues an innocent Indian from a lynch mob. And with a crock of chicken soup as his only weapon, he prevents a drunk from ventilating a Sephardic Jew from San Francisco, even thought he is lording it over Pliskin. As one fellow Jew notes of Secondhand Sol: ‘For such a small man, he sure sits tall in the saddle. People of all beliefs can discover and enjoy universal themes in his adventures. As Pliskin says, all good men and their families, regardless of their faith, deserve light in their lives.
