Though the wild, wounded rant of the opening story seems promising, by the time we get to the mental patient and the...
Monologues in the voices of six guests, plus the mother of the bride, at a wedding in Atlanta.
"There is no justice in this world, and you can start with the simple fact that some people look like Elizabeth Gottlieb," announces Carla Leftkowitz at the opening of the first story in Weisman's fiction debut, set at Elizabeth's wedding among the Jewish elite. The beauty of her lifelong friend, whom she now serves as bridesmaid, is particularly enervating because Carla has a port-wine birthmark covering half her left cheek. Author Weisman's background as a dermatologist adds texture to Carla's furious ruminations on physical beauty, as she passes her time imagining her 17 sister bridesmaids with "double chins, saggy breasts, twenty unlosable pounds around the middle, disappointment creased into their foreheads," yet she also dreams of a time "when we evolve to see the beauty in the stroked-out and the misshapen, the one-eyed and the cleft-lipped, the swollen and the stained." In the next story we hear from a character even more bitter than Carla: Elizabeth's grandfather Albert, a powerful, repellent man now mute and confined to a wheelchair after a stroke. Next up...a close family friend, who's attending with her nasty husband and also-wheelchair-bound son, the latter having been Elizabeth's charge when she worked as a teenager at a summer camp for the disabled. There are just a few tendrils of backstory to tie the characters together and virtually no plot development in the present tense of the wedding, so these long forays into the unhappy characters' inner lives have to hold the reader's attention on their own.
Though the wild, wounded rant of the opening story seems promising, by the time we get to the mental patient and the Holocaust survivor who wander (separately) off into the woods, the reader, too, is ready to leave.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-79329-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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