A smart and empathetic look at the ways Zionism can manifest itself in modern Jewish life.
A debut short fiction collection examines the relationship that modern Jews at home and abroad have to Israel.
A month after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, a Long Island–raised volunteer in the Israel Defense Forces confronts his disillusionment manning checkpoints and conducting house-to-house searches in Hebron, all in the name of protecting Zionist settlers in the West Bank city. In Portland, Oregon, in 2014, the self-identifying liberal chairwoman of a pro-Israel organization attempts to explain to that same IDF soldier why his use of the term “occupation” precludes him from being able to serve on the group’s committee, but she has trouble elucidating—to him and to herself—why her progressive views do not extend to the treatment of Palestinians. The ambivalent executive director at a tony Portland synagogue is tasked with putting together a counterprotest to a boycott, divest, and sanction demonstration, but the division lines are not as clear as his rabbi thinks they are. Three IDF soldiers on vacation in Thailand look to decompress with sex, drugs, and spiritual exploration, but the specter of Israel dogs them wherever they go—whether in the form of Westerners’ opinions or the presence of other Israelis. Over the course of six interconnected stories, Flamm explores the myriad tensions that exist between Jews regarding their spiritual homeland. The author’s sharp and insightful prose molds the varying perspectives of his narrators, as here when the disillusioned soldier explains his reading of the fractured Jewish identity: “No longer were the Jews, Israelis, and IDF of the same body and mind, breathing the same air. These things had become nuanced and removed from one another, like three circles of a Venn diagram moving in opposition, where the point in common grew smaller each day.” More than simply analyzing the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Flamm shows what these complexities mean to contemporary (mostly male) Jews who find themselves at different points along the ideological spectrum. It’s a finely crafted and highly nuanced work that makes excellent use of the linked story format. What’s more, the author manages to speak effectively to a particular sociopolitical issue using the normally hermetic medium of short fiction.
A smart and empathetic look at the ways Zionism can manifest itself in modern Jewish life.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62901-598-9
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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