Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven

By Steve Stern

Book Overview

All of Steve Stern's effervescent stories in this collection have a common relationship, either by setting or allusion, to the whimsically dangerous North Main Street neighborhood of Pinch--a mythical Jewish area perched atop the river bluff in Memphis. Here the voice of the Lord rises up from gas burners and out of pay phones. Here aging fathers-in-law live in backyard sheds and negotiate with the Angel of Death. Here is a land in which a host of very different characters share a common tendency to ignore the usually agreed-upon bonds of reality And in their rollicking wisdom all will confirm Susan Sontag's earlier inventory of Mr. Stem's talents: "Great brio, whiplash sentences, lots of energy, and charm."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815603568
• ISBN13: 9780815603566
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Related stories set in an imaginary Southern shtetl

Steve Stern is one of a group of younger writers who are investigating what it means to be a third-, fourth- or fifth-generation American Jew in a time when more than 50 percent of us intermarry, most of us are secular or nonobservant, and, despite our passion for education, know little about the religious culture that is the basis of our (largely Eastern European Ashkenazic) ethnic culture. Stern stands out from a very talented pack (Pearl Abraham and Allegra Goodman are two of its better known members) because he is a Southerner and because, in "Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven," he has created a shtetl below the Mason-Dixon line--a shtetl that never existed. The book's related stories read less like discrete stories and more like chapters from a novel, though each might be read independently--as, for example, in a magazine or an anthology.In his rueful, wistful humor, Stern reminds me very much of the Polish writer in Yiddish, Chaim Grade ("Rabbis and Wives") and somewhat, though less, of Cynthia Ozick in "The Pagan Rabbi."Buy this book, treasure it, and share it with your friends.