News from the New American Diaspora - and Other Tales of Exile (Paperback, New)

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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