A rare Aleichem work, one not even included in the standard Yiddish-language collected works. The plot renders a version of the famous Beiliss trial, in which a Jew was accused in Czarist Russia of murdering a Gentile child in order to have Christian blood with which to bake Passover matzohs—the pathetic blood libel that's roiled Russian anti-Semitism for time immemorial (it was also the basis for Bernard Malamud's The Fixer). Here, two student friends get the at-first whimsical idea of trading places, Gentile with a Jew and vice versa: Grigori Popov becomes Hersh Rabinovich for a year, enrolls in dental school, and is eventually the suspect in the child murder. Meanwhile, the real Rabinovitch is living in relative splendor as a private tutor in another city. Both students fall in love with young women they cannot have—the cross-religious secret—and Aleichem keeps things moving by relentless comparison between mores, destinies, entitlements, strategies. Not surprisingly, the sections focusing on the false-Rabinovitch in the home of his landlord's family, the Shapiros, are the ones where Aleichem's characteristic humor and acute sociology fall best into place—especially about indignation and resignation as seemingly racial traits. Fairly mechanical and not as startling as the best Aleichem, but the authorial kibitzing (``In another room, Betty was creating a new coiffure, which was a pity. To take the hair with which nature had blessed her and to try to force it into some artificial style—feh!'') and muscular attack of the whole make it still characteristic of the author. Aliza Shevrin does the knotty job of translating all of this (the false-Rabinovitch is all at sea with Yiddish and is forever mispronouncing) quite well.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-253-30401-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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