A great Yiddish novelist’s grimly foreboding and fiercely alive final work.
Finally available in English, Grade’s sprawling novel—originally serialized in the 1960s and ‘70s in two New York–based Yiddish newspapers—dissects a Jewish family in early 1930s Poland torn apart by religious, cultural, and generational differences.
The head of the family, based in the tiny village of Morehdalye, is hardcore traditionalist Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, who sees Yiddish poets—secular freethinkers divorced from the laws and language of the Torah—as the bane of his existence. To his offspring, his rigorous demands tie him to a “dead world.” Escaping his harsh authority, one of his sons studies not the Torah but Kierkegaard in Switzerland, where he secretly marries a non-Jewish woman who won’t allow their son to be circumcised. Another son spends time in America, which his father thinks is “akin to renouncing Judaism,” before becoming a Zionist radical in the land of Israel. One of the rabbi’s daughters, married to a cold-hearted soul considered "one of the Torah greats," rejects the subservient role of rebbetzin, while his other daughter rejects a semi-arranged marriage to another rabbi in favor of studying nursing in Lithuania. The recriminations never let up even as Polish youth gangs, embodying the terrors to come (Grade only alludes to the Holocaust), begin terrorizing Jewish merchants. “My greatest enemies are my own family,” laments Sholem Shachne. In sustaining his densely detailed, closed-in, slowly advancing narrative over 700 pages, Grade embraces modernism on an epic scale. He planned a second volume, but died before he could write it—or complete this abruptly ending book. One can only imagine what Volume 2 would have added. But even unfinished, this long-awaited novel is a monumental achievement.
A great Yiddish novelist’s grimly foreboding and fiercely alive final work.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780394536460
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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