A collection of short, slightly repetitive comic stories.
Wolf’s humorous story collection pokes fun at the foibles of Jewish life.
Actor Jeff Goldblum has his legs surgically shortened to portray a famous little person who helped others escape from Auschwitz. A man suspects that a mohel about to perform a bris is actually a famous Nazi in hiding. Brothers raised in Conservative Judaism drift in separate directions in adulthood—one becomes more religious, one less—which leads to unforeseen consequences for one of their daughters. In these 60 stories, many only a few paragraphs long, the author explores the ironies and absurdities of Jewish American life, from questions about religious law to minor social transgressions. The title story contains an extended conversation in which the narrator’s Jewish mother attempts to determine whether the plumber he’s just hired is also Jewish (“What am I asking? I’d just like to know if he’s Jewish. That’s all. What’s so bad?”). The author’s prose exhibits the practiced economy of a standup comedian: “L’Affaire A-hole”begins, “Sy Blyweiss was pickpocketed at a nudist colony and immediately reported the theft to the police. Through a combination of state-of-the-art proctology and forensic science, investigators gathered and identified the culprit’s fingerprints.” Many of the stories are essentially long-form jokes that build to punchlines, which can be rather groan-inducing (several of these involve puns). The better stories end in less jokey places, either in moments of sincerity, as in “Changes,” a story of a hard-to-please father, or in moments of irony that do not rely on wordplay. Some pieces (collected in the “MISHEGAS” section) abandon narrative for lists and questions; the final section is made up of imagined dialogues between anthropomorphized animals. The text is accompanied by Weidner’s full-color, hand-drawn illustrations. Wolf’s humor is of a certain vintage and will likely appeal most to readers of his same generation, especially if they too are from a Jewish background.
A collection of short, slightly repetitive comic stories.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1647496951
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Go to Publish
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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