An uneven third collection from Neugeboren, author of seven novels
and two memoirs (Open Heart: A Patient's Story of Life-Saving
Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship, 2003, etc.). A gushing,
memoirish preface about "the making of stories" and an extended
Note on the Dedication (to a long-lost relative) mar the opening
and foreshadow the volume's virtues and flaws. The best of the
dozen stories ("Good in Bed," about a "word-smart" professor in the
preliminary rounds of a divorce; "His Violin," about a denizen of
Century Village in Palm Beach who passes along a family secret in
gratitude to his favorite nephew, a lawyer who handled the details
of his brother's funeral; and "Poppa's Books," about a narrator who
shows how much he treasures his immigrant father's precious
library, only to be chastised by his mother) are cleanly written
and close to the bone. Others are disjointed, unfocused and
sentimental, like "The American Sun & Wind Moving Company,"
about a young man who's out of his depth as an auteur in the family
enterprise of making a movie near an icy lake in Fort Lee, N.J., in
November 1915; and "The Golden Years," about two brothers visiting
the set of a film being made in their Florida retirement "village."
The story of a "profoundly inhibited" 40-something divorcee keeps a
promise to herself to visit the death camps if she and her children
"survived one another" after her husband left ("This Third Life")
is both ambitious and yet slight. The title piece follows a rabbi
through a day as he deals with a variety of dilemmas while bearing
the knowledge that he and his wife have had a bitter battle. He
renews his faith in the teachings of the Torah, opens his mind and
then his heart to his wife and community in a transformation that
reminds us what a master storyteller Neugeboren can be. As is, not
Neugeboren's best, though a judicious pruning might have helped.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's third collection of short
stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and
expatriation--strangers in strange lands, far from home. These
dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more
than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and
O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly
capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in
a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation
and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a
boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the
Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with
the family who helped them immigrate. In "The Other End of the
World," an American soldier who has survived life in a Japanese
prisoner of war camp grieves for members of his family murdered in
a Nazi death camp, and in "Poppa's Books" a young boy learns to
share his father's passion for the rare books that represent the
Old World. "This Third Life" tells of a divorced woman who travels
across Germany searching for new meaning in her life after her
children leave home, while both "His Violin" and "The Golden Years"
explore the plight of elderly Jews, displaced from New York City to
retirement communities in Florida, who struggle with memory,
madness, and mortality.
Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all
tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater
diaspora--geographical, emotional, or spiritual--in which many of
us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.
General
Imprint: |
University Of Texas Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Literary Modernism |
Release date: |
April 2005 |
First published: |
2005 |
Authors: |
Jay Neugeboren
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 13mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade / Trade
|
Pages: |
166 |
Edition: |
New |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-292-70661-3 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
0-292-70661-8 |
Barcode: |
9780292706613 |
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