Reviews for Great Jewish short stories

The average rating for Great Jewish short stories based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-05 00:00:00 Andrew Rolston All of my best friends in college valued hard-earned learning; a large proportion then and since have been Jews, including my Ph.D. advisor, Saul Bellow's best friend at U Minnesota, Leonard Unger. Bellow collected these stories there, mentioning "the most considerate non-Jewish reader in Minneapolis"(13), as he makes his usual brilliant points, that these stories are filled with "laughter and trembling so curiously mingled." One Jewish writer, Hymen Slate in The Noble Savage "has argued that laughter, the comic sense of life, may be offered as proof of the existence of God. Life is too funny to be uncaused" (12). Bellow admits he sometimes did not choose an author's best story, but the one best translated. Of Sholom Aleichem's great Yiddish stories, Bellow says, " he was a great humorist, but a raconteur rather than a literary artist"(13). As for the greatest story of 'em all, "To certain writers, Christianity itself has appeared to be an invention of Jewish storytellers… a victory of the weak and few over the strong and numerous." But this is a bilbul , a false charge. (11) A couple stories I had previously read, by Grace Paley and Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose brother Israel's "Repentance," I found funniest. The title sounds very unfunny, so it's deceptive like Dead Souls, Gogol's hilarious work on tax evasion in Russia (which Gogol repenting wished to burn). Despite my rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew (learning a new word at every Bar or Bat Mitzvah, "rishon, sheni, shlishi, revi'i" number the readers), I was over-run with new words, largely Yiddish. I sorely regret never asking my Ph.D. advisor to inform me, since he and Bellow translated the first four lines of TS Eliot's "Wasteland" into Yiddish, at the U Minnesota Faculty Club. Consider: schnorrer, an entitled beggar; shtreimel, a festive hat; ziztith, fringes of thread each one of the 613 commandments in Deuteronomy and Numbers, worn on the talith, a white shawl; phylacteries, small leather boxes containing strips of Hebrew scripture, worn on forehead or under arm. "Shul," for temple, the Yiddish word from German "schule," school. "Repentance" focuses on a large Rabbi Ezekiel who believes in joyousness, especially eating and drinking. When a gloomy, skinny opposing rabbi comes for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (this year, Sept 29 and Oct 8), Rabbi Ezekiel counsels,"Repentance? Assuredly! Take a glass of whisky. What is the meaning of 'repentance'? To turn! And when a Jew takes a glass of whisky he turns it upside down, he performs an act of repentance." "Reb Ezekiel filled two silver beakers with brandy in which floated spices and little leaves."(203) He then ironizes, "The road to repentance is not an easy one, but there is no turning back." Reb Ezekiel's effect on the gloomy rabbi, who disapproves even chanting because it appeals to the "lust of the ear," holds both amusement and finality. Shocking to me, Eastern European Jews a century ago drank a lot; contrast all my Jewish friends, very moderate drinkers. In "The Old Man," the rabbi in the title tells stories of drinking spirits directly from a cellar barrel, or "Right after prayer, we were served a large decanter of wine and a side of veal."(249) This, from Isaac Bashevis Singer's short and detailed "The Old Man," who had "teeth like rusty nails." He lives among Jews who had lost everything in WWI, moving from Warsaw to Galicia; warned that the German soldiers would not allow him to cross the border, he nevertheless proceeds. He walks for five weeks, barefoot during the day, and then also after his boots are stolen. He eats turnips for food, and white Valahki berries' mistletoe? Probably not, since they're semi-poisonous, drowsy-inducing. He is restored in a town he used to live in decades ago, the Jewish community feeding, clothing, housing him, and even'I leave it to you to read, only adding that nearing a hundred, he had wished for a young boy to sing kaddish at his end. The shortest story, one leaf, comes from the Haggadah, fiction based on the Talmud. One of two such stories, both with emperors; the second features Hadrian, the suppressor of the final Jewish revolt. But the shorter features Alexander the Great, who shows interest in a small, peaceful community in Africa. Bellow himself translates "The Lord Helpeth Man and Beast," where a man sells land to his neighbor, who finds treasure underneath, and offers it back to the original owner, who refuses it. The story astonishes Alexander, but the reader will be even more astonished by the concluding decree by the village chief.(40) The most conventional story may be Philip Roth's "Epstein," a period piece about a businessman whose daughter considers capitalism evil, her boyfriend the folk guitarist, his brother Sol in Detroit at odds, Sol's visiting son a handsome devil who immediately hooks up with the girl across the street, only on Epstein's living room floor, "zipping and unzipping," almost a theme.(373) Epstein's concerned he has no-one to leave his Paper Bag company to, but he also covets his neighbor's widow, and gets a rash, for which his wife wants a divorce. The ending defies summary. Malamud's "Magic Barrel" features an impoverished marriage broker working for a young Yeshiva grad, soon to be rabbi, surrounded with stacks of books and papers. He has no social skills, has met no young women, so calls in the broker, who has so many marriage applicants he can fill a barrel. Amusing ending. Two of the grandest characters in the collection appear in the last, sad story, Isaiah Spiegel's "A Ghetto Dog," where both the title character and his old mistress with the silver-topped cane start above the terrible circumstance, which only worsens. Let me say, though, this story begins with a metaphor I found in other stories,"her fingers, which were as gnarled as old, fallen bark," as in "The Old Man," where a flock of goats peel the bark of firewood for the synagogue, while owls complain in a sorrowful womanish voice (256). Isaac Babel grew up in Odessa, was published by Maxim Gorky, to whom he dedicated "The Story of my Dovecot," about a Jewish kid memorizing Russian books to be one of the two Jews accepted into a higher education class of forty. When the entrance examiner and vice-head asks him about Peter the Great, he goes blank and recites stanzas from Pushkin. (I've based my own Parodies Lost on his Evgeny Onegin, stanzas of which a Russian waitress recited to me.) He does get in, for which his father promised him some doves, which with effort he buys (first, some cherry-colored ones, then Kryukovs) but his venture is wasted by the same fate that in fact probably ended the author's own life.(219)

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-23 00:00:00 Joseph King Good, interesting read, though a bit bitty. Have to pick and choose and, for me, could have done with some extra biographical notes. But well worth a look.