GOODBYE, EVIL EYE

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.