Funny, scary, often wonderful meditations on Jews encountering the inexplicable.
Twenty-five highly literate fantasies of Jews around the world, by Jews around the world.
In his introduction, editor and Russian translator Jaffe, a former lawyer who now writes and teaches fiction, traces the Jewish fabulist fiction of I.B. Singer, Stanley Elkin, and even Woody Allen back to biblical miracle tales. None of those writers is represented here: instead Jaffe has gathered an international assortment of lesser-knowns whose use of the fantastic ranges from the magical realism of Iranian Avi Shmuelian’s “Moonstruck Sunflowers,” about a medieval sorcerer who dispatches supernatural justice upon a malevolent eye surgeon, to the slap-shtick of American Steve Stern’s “Tale of the Kite,” about the way the faith of a Jewish enclave in Memphis, is threatened by a levitating Hassidic rabbi “living mostly on air and the strained generosity of in-laws.” John Shepley’s “A Golem of Prague” winks at I.B. Singer’s shtetel tales, but here the golem metaphorizes the irrelevance of folk beliefs in a contemporary city. A mother’s cooking comes back to haunt a family in Argentina, in Daniel Urlanovsky Sack’s “Home Cooking,” while the historical Sabbati Levi, who falsely proclaimed himself a messiah, contemplates the contradictions of homosexual love while imprisoned in Cuban Angelina Muniz-Huberman’s “The Tower of Gallipoli.” Several stories examine the moral ambiguity of modern, assimilated Jewishness, from the predatory Israeli felines in Ruth Knafo Setton’s “Cat Garden” to the sentient and inflatable toy doll in Joe Hill’s defiantly wonderful “Pop Art” and Joan Leegant’s “The Tenth,” in which a rabbi wonders if a set of Siamese twins, mysteriously recruited to make up the necessary ten men for a Jewish service, count as one man, or two, or something far more terrifying.
Funny, scary, often wonderful meditations on Jews encountering the inexplicable.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-9679683-5-6
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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