Though all of Elkin's work is saturated with Jewish-American, Yiddish-tinged rhythms, few of his novels are explicitly, centrally Jewish in character and theme. This new book is extravagantly ethnic and blissfully sectarian, as Elkin drapes grotesque tall tales, baroque spiels, and irreverent parodies around a jaunty narrator: Jerry Goldkorm, a "pickup rabbi, God's little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey." Jerry, you see, is Rabbi of Lud, a tiny north N.J. town that exists only to service nearby Jewish cemetaries; congregationless, Jerry is employed by the local funeral home. In the novel's first, best section, delivered in a rambling monologue that mixes the profane, the preachy ("I'm speaking in my rabbi mode here"), and the grimly hilarious, Jerry reveals his weak academic past, his iffy command of Hebrew, and shares arcane, super-orthodox strictures. ("According to some interpretations of Talmud, a man may be denied his place with God if he can lift three times his own body weight.") He testily addresses God by funny names—tit for tat; details his ever-blazing lust for wife Shelley, who gets turned on by phylacteries and talks in babyish pidgin Yiddish; and frets about daughter Constance, 14, who's fed up with the morbidity and isolation of Lud. ("Daddy, our back yard is a cemetary!") Then, in a 90-page digression, Jerry recalls his year ('74-75) as Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline. There's a wayward plane trip, a wilderness-survival ordeal (featuring a dandy parody of outdoorsy uplift), and a surreal encounter with "an old Jew with a beard made out of flowers." More amusingly, there are tales of Jerry's weird success as Chief Rabbi, using reverse-psychology to draw crowds (largely non-Jewish) to Shavuoth services. The novel's final section returns to Lud—where Constance claims to have had a cemetary visit from none other than the Holy Mother, come "to rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews." (Holy Mother's drawl is half yenta, half Butterfly McQueen.) Constance's vision becomes an embarrassment, of course—to the funeral home (which is having money problems, anyway) and to the Rabbi, who's dabbling in adultery and real-estate salesmanship. Like most of Elkin's novels, this is episodic, disjointed, and unshapely. The verbal shenanigans (unwieldly parentheses, paragraph-long sentences, rococo riffs) occasionally get out of hand. But, though Rabbi Jerry isn't a fully credible or coherent character, his narration—loose, angry, half-hip, half. cloddish—gives the book a center. The combination of favorite Elkin themes—mortality, theology-ad-absurdum, hucksterism—generates loopy, creepily memorable vignettes. And while only a limited audience will appreciate all the layers of intensely allusive humor here, this is a bouncy, zestily outrageous comeback from The Magic Kingdom.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1987
ISBN: 1564782700
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
Hoffman (The Red Garden, 2011, etc.) births literature from tragedy: the destruction of Jerusalem's Temple, the siege of Masada and the loss of Zion.
This is a feminist tale, a story of strong, intelligent women wedded to destiny by love and sacrifice. Told in four parts, the first comes from Yael, daughter of Yosef bar Elhanan, a Sicarii Zealot assassin, rejected by her father because of her mother's death in childbirth. It is 70 CE, and the Temple is destroyed. Yael, her father, and another Sicarii assassin, Jachim ben Simon, and his family flee Jerusalem. Hoffman's research renders the ancient world real as the group treks into Judea's desert, where they encounter Essenes, search for sustenance and burn under the sun. There too Jachim and Yael begin a tragic love affair. At Masada, Yael is sent to work in the dovecote, gathering eggs and fertilizer. She meets Shirah, her daughters, and Revka, who narrates part two. Revka's husband was killed when Romans sacked their village. Later, her daughter was murdered. At Masada, caring for grandsons turned mute by tragedy, Revka worries over her scholarly son-in-law, Yoav, now consumed by vengeance. Aziza, daughter of Shirah, carries the story onward. Born out of wedlock, Aziza grew up in Moab, among the people of the blue tunic. Her passion and curse is that she was raised as a warrior by her foster father. In part four, Shirah tells of her Alexandrian youth, the cherished daughter of a consort of the high priests. Shirah is a keshaphim, a woman of amulets, spells and medicine, and a woman connected to Shechinah, the feminine aspect of God. The women are irretrievably bound to Eleazar ben Ya'ir, Masada's charismatic leader; Amram, Yael's brother; and Yoav, Aziza's companion and protector in battle. The plot is intriguingly complex, with only a single element unresolved. An enthralling tale rendered with consummate literary skill.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1747-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
