THE VILLAGE FEASTS

Suspect dishes, strange visitors, and riotous antics enliven a shtetl’s Passover celebrations in this collection of Jewish stories.

In this third installment of his Village Life series, Abrahmson (the pen name of humorist and klezmer harmonica player Mark Binder) continues chronicling the goings-on in a mythical version of Chelm, Poland. The town is famous in Jewish folklore as a setting for shaggy dog tales that convey off-kilter wisdom. Many of these whimsical, Passover-themed yarns focus on food. Town baker Reb Stein invents matzah—think saltine crackers without the salt—and then sets out to build the biggest slab of it the world has ever seen; a shortage of kosher fare forces the villagers to resort to a cabbage-based holiday menu; and Rabbi Kibbitz wanders into a bakery by accident and is driven to distraction by the pastries and other delicacies forbidden during Passover. Other tales reflect on the holiday’s meaning. A seder gathering answers a knock on the door to discover a mysterious guest who may be the Prophet Elijah or Mark Twain; Chelm’s women insist on leading the seder rituals one year and provoke the men into taking over the cooking; an immigrant family from Chelm finds New York an alienating place until an act of Passover selflessness heartens the clan; and cobbler Reb Gold, his business ruined by a new shoe factory, refuses offers of free Passover matzah from the villagers but is inspired to start a new career publicizing the town’s spirit. Abrahmson’s stories steep readers in quirky characters and the niceties of Passover rituals while working classic themes of Jewish humor, including the subversion of the ideal by the pragmatic, the gap between vainglory and reality—“One of the czars, Fyodor, The Not So Great, had commissioned, from the bakers in Moscow, an unleavened bread the size of a tabletop”—and the discontents of close-knit communities and families whose members sustain one another in annoying ways. The author writes in a gently sardonic style that coils around sly twists. (Invited to a family’s seder one year, Mrs. Chaipul is shocked to discover that its matzah balls are, unlike her own, “soft, chewy, and, above all, edible.”) The result is an entertaining comic celebration of Jewish life and tradition.

A winsome album of Passover riffs, wryly funny with dollops of heartwarming schmaltz.