During the past couple of years, I've been training to become a cantor and, at the same time, have been getting serious about piling up bylines. I spend three days a week at our local Jewish weekly reading page proofs and getting stories ready for publication. The rest of the time, I'm attending classes (as of this writing, in chazzanut,--cantorial training--modern Jewish thought, music theory, and Hebrew, at three different schools), doing homework, reading textbooks, learning music, singing here and there, reporting stories for the newspaper, and picking up free-lance assignments. Add to that affection for a supremely deserving husband, a slice of the domestic chores, and just under half the dog's walks, not to mention worrying about the projects I'm not working on because I don't have time. Shabbat is a very welcome guest in our home every week.

It's actually a nice life. But it's a busy one, packed with ideas and deadlines and new stuff to learn. I read in bed every night before turning out the light, and by midnight, I don't want to read about Franz Rosenzweig or dominant sevenths or how contemporary Jewish composers employ the Ahavah Rabah mode. I don't need or want to turn off my brain at bedtime, but for night reading I want fiction, and I want to be entertained.

If you share my penchant for drifting off to sleep after a couple chapters of a tasty story, you can do so this month, Women's History Month, in the company of sisters: and in particular novels by Jewish women who spin a good yarn and have something to offer besides heaving bosoms or vengeance against perfidious males. A number of contemporary writers have mined distant and not-so-distant history for engaging tales.

Two recent novels give voice to two silenced women, one robbed of words by Torah, the other by history. Anita Diamant's 1997 novel The Red Tent, a compelling, extended midrash on the daughter of Jacob and Leah, has become a must-read for Jewish book groups (and has plenty of fans among non-Jewish women, if Amazon.com's reader reviews are any index). In The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, Naomi Ragen gives readers the diary of historical figure Gracia Nasí that historians have never found--a journal that may never have been written but, just as likely, existed but was not preserved.

The Red Tent gives flesh and character to Dinah, whose visits to the village where her family is encamped bring about a bloody episode described in Genesis 34. The author, who has also published a number of nonfiction books about Jewish lifecycle milestones, makes real not only Dinah but generations of early Israelite women before and after her, as they cook, tend animals, tell stories, menstruate, give birth, and deal with the often wrongheaded actions of the men in their lives.

Diamant has been taken to task by some traditional Jews who object to her exposure of Judaism's pagan roots, her description of Dinah's relationship with a pagan prince as a love match, and her less-than-reverent portraits of important male characters in Genesis. But by showing Dinah's visits with "the daughters of the land" not as foolishness or defiance but as the natural act of a lonely girl surrounded by roughneck brothers and overworked elders, and by detailing a rich, eventful adult life for Dinah after the tragedy in Shechem, Diamant removes a Biblical woman from passive, silent victimhood and gives contemporary Jewish women another ancestor to identify with and admire.

Gracia Nasí (1510-1569), a brilliant conversa businesswoman who escaped from various European cities a step ahead of the Inquisition and used her fortune to help hundreds of Jews and conversos start new lives outside Iberia, left behind no words of her own. Ragen uses the detailed historical account of Nasí's life to construct parts of a memoir in The Ghost of Hannah Mendes and sets it against a contemporary story in which two highly assimilated Manhattan sisters, descendants of the House of Nasí, go to Europe to look for pages of the journal at the behest of their dying grandmother, who wants the young women to reconnect with their Sephardic heritage and, of course, find suitable Sephardi husbands.

The contemporary story is a little too romance-novel for my taste (no heaving bosoms, but plenty of true love found, almost thwarted, and in glorious flower at story's end), and Ragen doesn't have the best ear for the inner and outer dialogue of twenty-something Manhattanites. But she does a convincing job with the sixteenth-century memoir and even with the story's slightly supernatural elements, and, most important, you can believe that the granddaughters' lives are changed by their experiences. The Ghost of Hannah Mendes may be Danielle Steel with a Renaissance overlay, but some would say that recommends it all the more as a bedtime read.

For something with a little more intellectual bite, try The Puttermesser Papers, in which the doyenne of American Jewish novelists, Cynthia Ozick, juxtaposes recent history with medieval Jewish legend in some of her stories about lawyer Ruth Puttermesser, a rationalist who finds herself caught up in a fabulist world. Set in New York during the 1970s and 80s, before Rudy Giuliani made the trains run on time, the stories chronicle what happens to Puttermesser, a city functionary, when her ordered life is thrown into chaos.

At one point Puttermesser dreams up a female golem, who helps her bring about a renewal of culture and civility in the Big Apple before meeting her inevitable downfall. While not a soothing book to drift off with, Ozick's Bronx version of magic realism is fascinating.

The other books I'd like to recommend are more about their authors' histories than the sweep of time, but they're all by Jewish women, and they're all perfect for the nightstand. I like most of Susan Isaacs' books, but the most "relatable" one, I think, is Lily White, her 1997 novel that alternates a tongue-in-cheek murder mystery with the life story of the attorney representing the murder suspect. Lee White is every Jewish gal on Long Island who ever had to deal with toxic parents, destructive siblings, a bad marriage, and demanding work.

It's a pleasure to watch Lee learn and grow from her experiences, to see her figure out, little by little, how to balance what's best for her with what others need from her, to watch her reconnect with Judaism, find love, build a family from other families' castoffs. I would definitely clear an hour to have lunch with her if she could make the time. The murder plot is fun, too.

Iris Rainer Dart is best known for Beaches, but her most Jewish book is her semi-autobiographical 1987 novel 'Til the Real Thing Comes Along, which basically alternates her story, that of a wisecracking Pittsburgh girl from a Yiddish-speaking home trying to make it as a comedy writer in Los Angeles, with that of her polar opposite, a gently (and distantly) bred WASP, younger than she is and (gasp!) Republican, whom she meets after she becomes a 37-year-old widow.

The protagonist's travails with men are horrifyingly delicious (this is one of those books that makes me so glad I'm married), and her determination to be true to herself is inspiring. Less slick and formulaic than her most recent novels, 'Til the Real Thing Comes Along is warm and heartfelt in its details.

No one remembers that Nora Ephron was an essayist and novelist before she started writing and directing movies, but her 1982 novel Heartburn is an acerbic little gem. Ephron draws on her life, especially her failed marriage to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, to satirize yuppie life in D.C. while slicing and dicing her ex-husband. The book includes some wonderful recipes (though way too high-fat to serve at our house) and the definitive take-out of that all-too-easy target, the Jewish prince.

Finally, I wanted to mention one of my very favorite books, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. It isn't a very Jewish novel--of the four main characters, only one is Jewish, and tenuously so--but it's a thoroughly joyous journey through the lives of two couples, served up without tragedy, betrayal, or heartache.

One of the pairs is too perfect to care much about, but the other is totally lovable and brings in all the fun secondary characters, too. The novel is like an impressionist painting: dab after dab of colorful detail, insightful dialogue, baby steps toward love. My husband gives me extra hugs when he sees Happy All the Time next to my side of the bed, because he knows I read it when I'm blue and want to cheer up.

Published in 1978, Happy All the Time was Colwin's second novel, written before her style got a little mannered, she became obsessed with babies, and her protagonists started having extramarital affairs for no particular reason. That said, I'm really sad that Colwin died of a heart attack in 1992, at the age of forty-eight. I would love to see what she would have written about love, friendship, and children in old age, and I wish she were on her way to having one.

Ellen Jaffe-Gill is deitor of The Jewish Woman's Book of Wisdom and a contributing writer to the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.