Simon Stern is a multimillionaire realtor, possible Messiah,
tortured by guilt about the death of his parents - the fire in a
tenement where they lived while he cached his millions in drawers.
He founds the Society for the Rescue and Resurrection of the Jews
(1500 carefully chosen from the death camps of Europe at the end of
World War II) now hidden on the Lower East Side. The organization
is later destroyed from within so that its now-healed inmates may
re-enter the world - a symbolic reenactment of the Legend of the
Wandering Jew. Simon's life, as told by the rescued blind scribe
(all scribes are blind) Nathan Gaza, is presented in
pseudo-historic form, replete with documents (birth and marriage
records), interviews with childhood teachers and his psychiatrist,
letters, diary entries, plus Nathan's own interpolations - in true
Hebraic hair-splitting fashion - on marginally relevant doctrinal
points about the nature of God, evil, religion, history and
philosophy galore. This is an ambitious and learned novel by an
established Jewish scholar which is at once the strength and
weakness of the work: mysticism is the content but not the message
(as Simon himself is the least charismatic of Messiahs) - a
difficult, overeducated book most likely to be appreciated by those
accustomed to the verbal convolutions of the rabbinic tradition.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the
Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern--from his birth on the
Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real
estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World
War II. A majestic work of fiction that should stand world
literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A
masterpiece.--Commonweal This book ensnares one of the most
extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a
number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed
of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly
conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For
another, it is clearly an 'American' novel--altogether American,
despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the
history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as
haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book
runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found
in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any
American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a
profoundly Western theme.--Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book
Review This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history,
theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous
Judaic archeological ruin--often hard for the uninitiated to
interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive,
fascinating.--New Yorker
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