Novelist Black (Peep Show, 1986, etc.) takes readers on an odd but affecting journey through Jewish history. A “bobeh myseh” is Yiddish for “grandmother’s tale,” that is, an old family story of dubious provenance, and An Impossible Life is really a series of such stories strung together. Leo Polishook, a writer whose mother has been institutionalized, finds himself searching his own past and that of his parents for a clue as to the roots of her insanity. Delving into his childhood memories, he recalls an ill-concealed adulterous relationship between her and her father’s friend Binzy. More than that, he begins working his way backward through the generations, through the manifold sufferings of East European Jews in the 19th and 18th centuries, as well as through the haunting tales of demonic possession and wonder rabbis, a genre familiar from the work of I.B. Singer, among others. Interspersed with these tales is a series of dialogues between Leo and the ghost of his father; these are anything but Hamlet-like, owing more to the Borscht Belt and Woody Allen than to the Bard of Avon. Black brings to all this narrative movement a tremendous joy in the sheer act of storytelling, piling on gangsters and children, musicians and peasants, adultery, insanity, pogroms, transmigrating souls, the whole of it with gusto. As a result, his wry, often enchanting mÇlange of Jewish history and myth is experienced as a collection of tall tales. Although the book’s structure seems rather ramshackle, the authorial voice has considerable charm. Brisk and often funny, marred a little by its structural weakness and an unsatisfying epilogue.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55921-222-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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