"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...