LAZAR MALKIN ENTERS HEAVEN

by Steve Stern ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1986

Those unfamiliar with Yiddish might need a glossary to appreciate these nine heavily accented stories about ""wild Jewish girls and horny cheder boys,"" most of which are set in a mythical neighborhood of the author's native Memphis. What links these well-written, slangy tales is more than time and place. Stern, much like the writer in the 60-page long ""The Ghost and Saul Bozoff,"" fancies himself in collaboration with the angels. Bozoff, in this uncharacteristically reflexive piece, summons up for inspiration the spirit of a long-dead authoress, an obscure Jewish writer and the former resident of the artists' colony cottage he now occupies. Like the sure-handed Stern, the foundering Bozoff transfers his new subject matter--tenement and synagogue life typical of the Lower East Side or Warsaw--to the hostile terrain of the South. And they both do so by casually mingling the supernatural and the mundane. Here a dybbuk, there a golem, everywhere ""squalor and romance."" Stern's ""Patch,"" a neighborhood where ""death was very popular,"" is home to a wild bunch of momzers, pischers, gonifs, schnooks, putzs, nebbishes, nudniks, schlemiels, shmendricks, schnorrers, and yentes, with occasional appearances by schwartzers and shikses. There's ""Moishe the Just,"" the orthodox junkman, whom the local boys test for sainthood. There are the Shripkin brothers of ""The Gramophone,"" one a mischievous believer in a comic version of the cabala. There's Red Dubrovner, the mean kosher slaughterer, who laments the passing of the old culture in ""Shimmele Fly-by-Night."" And there's Morton Gruber, former Patchite, now a coin-operated laundry czar, ordered by God, in ""The Lord and Morton Grubber,"" to write another New Testament, this one to a doomed world. Stern veers in and out of fables, part Singer, part Dead End Kids. His ghetto humor and ""diaspora sensibility,"" when they don't descend into pure shtick, provide lots of apocalyptic yuks, and a couple of hearty heehaws.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION