Kirchheimer assumes a certain basic knowledge of the Sephardic experience, but her fiction transcends ethnic specificity,...
Kirchheimer, who as Gloria Levy was a folksinger specializing in the music of the Sephardim, offers a charming first collection about Sephardic Jews often at sea in contemporary New York City.
The author (co-writer, with Manfred Kirchheimer, of We Were So Beloved, 1997) knows whereof she speaks: a Sephardic Jew herself, she was raised in Washington Heights, where many of these stories are set, and the recurring theme of mothers and daughters gently battling across the generations may well be drawn from firsthand experience. In her introduction, Kirchheimer talks about the ways in which the world of the Sephardim is defined by language—French, Spanish, Turkish and, most of all, the Judeo-Spanish known as Ladino—but she could have just as easily pointed to other cultural constants such as music and cuisine. All three elements run through the volume's 11 stories. For Kirchheimer, as for so many Sephardim here who feel that American observers have slighted their contributions to Jewish culture in favor of the more visible Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi communities, the intergenerational elements of the collection are really about preserving this culture in all its diverse elements. As seriously as she takes that mission, Kirchheimer is never somber about it; on the contrary, her tone is wry and warm, and her tales generally amusing. Some readers may find the stock characters and situations repetitive—mothers are machines designed to induce feelings of guilt; fathers are unrepentant old-world benevolent despots; imagined ties to the truly glorious history of the Sephardim are found in unlikely places—but a pervasive sweetness disarms such minor misgivings.
Kirchheimer assumes a certain basic knowledge of the Sephardic experience, but her fiction transcends ethnic specificity, suggesting the lighter side of acculturation for any new American.Pub Date: July 24, 2000
ISBN: 0-8419-1404-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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