Once in a while, you buy a book just for its title. And really, who could resist Don't Cry for Me, Hot Pastrami? Authored by Sharon Kahn, this is a send up of rabbi/rabbi's wife/synagogue life published in 2002. She's also the author of others in the series, including Hold the Cream Cheese, Kill the Lox. And they are both subtitled A Ruby, the Rabbi's Wife, Series. I assume they are all as silly and fun as this one -- which is set at sea on a very bargain cruise where everything is, to be blunt, cheap and thus awful. While cruising the seas, there is, of course, a murder, and Ruby (whose rabbi husband is gone before the book opens) finds both danger, romance, and eventually, the murderer. All in all, a romp filled with stock characters who, if one did not detect the gleam of love in the author's eye (well, at least her prose) you'd think was politically incorrect in the extreme. One might even call the book campy. Instead, the books are, one presumes, rooted in the 31 years Kahn spent as a rabbi's wife, according to her bio.
The food in this book is uniformly awful. The titular pastramis are part of a raffle and obtained on the cheap by one of the Temple's big wigs. (In the end, they turn out to be exactly that.) And, the cruise on which the Temple group goes -- with Ruby along as a reluctant "winner" (yes a set up) of a raffle for cruise tickets -- is characterized by foods died in rainbow colors, inedible and unidentifiable dishes, and running out of edible items like corn flakes. The drinks are weak as well. (All in all this cruise sounds like a hotel I was in in San Diego not that long ago.)
Despite the food, and the notion that the rabbi (the whole point of the cruise is apparently to set him up with Ruby on the one hand, and on the other, to help boost his poor ratings in the group) actually swipes all the information from a murdered professor, one does learn a bit about conversos in the book, including their presence in the Caribbean. Who knew? Apparently loads of people. See this January 2010 conference. Not to mention the book reviewed here on Jewish pirates of the Caribbean. Or this historical overview. One also learns a bit about synagogues in the Caribbean; for pictures, try here. And, for conversos and food, try here (for Tex-Mex and Judaism) or here for the many ways the Inquisition depended on foodways to track Jews.
Meanwhile, on a substantially less serious note, I shall try to find Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Choir next -- in which the Temple Rita group makes a trip to Banff and Lake Louise. How fun.