by Steve Stern ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015
Audacious, hilarious, unabashed fiction.
The Pinch—for many years in the early 20th century a predominantly Jewish section of Memphis—has found its Whitman and its Faulkner in Stern, who's written a stylistically effusive, verbally extravagant novel.
In the late 1960s, Lenny Sklarew is living…well, not much of a life. He works in Avrom Slutsky’s bookstore, The Book Asylum, deals drugs on the side, and spends time listening to his favorite band, Velveeta and the Psychopimps. But then two things happen that change his life: he meets Rachel Ostrofsky in a bar and finds a book by Muni Pinsker called The Pinch: A History in Avrom’s bookstore. Rachel is a folklorist who came to Memphis "to research the roots of the Southern Jewish community," and she’s of course fascinated by the Pinch. And in a metafictional trope, Lenny finds out that he’s a character in Pinsker’s book. From here, Stern’s narrative gets really complex, as he bounces back and forth between the events in Lenny’s life, the early history of the Pinch, and supposed excerpts from Pinsker’s history. One of the main strands of Stern’s multilayered narrative involves Pinsker’s arrival in Memphis from Siberia in 1911, a journey financed by his uncle Pinchas Pin (nee Pinsker), a shopkeeper in the Pinch, and his wife, Katie. Shortly after his arrival, Pinsker meets and falls in love with Jenny Bashrig (aka “La Funambula,” a tightrope walker), and they consummate their relationship in the branches of an iconic oak tree. The action unfolds against visits by the Ku Klux Klan and, by the end of the novel, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Audacious, hilarious, unabashed fiction.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-715-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942
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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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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