Wex's humorous writing is crisp. Note: There's a lot of Yiddish threaded through the story, so the glossary at the back of...
A fish-out-of-water tale of an outcast adolescent growing up in exile out in the Canadian wilderness.
Diaspora doesn’t generally lend itself to comedy, but it works pretty well in this distinctly Jewish coming-of-age novel by Wex (The Frumkiss Family Business, 2011, etc.). It concerns Yoine Levkes, a teen growing up in the desolation of Coalbanks, Alberta, post–World War II. Like many young people, he finds himself caught between the religious solemnity of his parents and the natural impulses of growing up. And like smart young people in his situation, he’s painfully aware of the limitations of his situation. “If only Tradition had barfed me forth onto the dry sands of Western civilization, I could have grown into a big shot, a contender; a stammering, nattering, chest-pulling Jewish intellectual with nothing on my mind but social justice and yellow-pubed shiksas, the hero of a thousand novels,” he muses. Acting as our narrator, Yoine is smart—smarter, really, than a character of his age and demeanor has any right to be, but it’s his quick-witted running commentary that carries the novel more than its minimal plot. However, Wex does excel at building incongruous characters who demonstrate the counterintuitive complexities of Jewish life—the radical poet who publishes pornography for gentiles to fuel his agenda is just one highlight. “I get fathers coming to see me with pictures of their daughters shtupping horses, and this is at least eighty percent of the population—and I use their money to exalt, to try to keep alive the only culture in the world that knows from good and evil, from life and death, and from life that’s worse than death.” But even a death in the family brings no gravity to this feathery story, as Yoine’s goals consist mostly of getting into the pants of girlfriend Sabina Mandelbroit.
Wex's humorous writing is crisp. Note: There's a lot of Yiddish threaded through the story, so the glossary at the back of the book may prove helpful.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-36463-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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