From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose
deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class
Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge
of a poet's coming-of-age.
“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into
the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the
“prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In
microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with
titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly
Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father,
Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in
blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of
cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard
threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this
household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right,
never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and
Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a
heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed
with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.
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