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American Jewish Fiction 124pThe Collected Stories By Leonard Michaels FARRAR, STRAUS, AND GIROUX, 2007. 403 PAGES. Among the most respected of American short story writers, Leonard Michaels didn’t produce an enormous body of work. His oeuvre consists of a handful of collections of fiction, often fleshed out with reprints; a novel, The Men’s Club (1981), which was turned into a movie; some memoirs, journals, and an autobiographical novella; and a smattering of academic publications—he was a Ph.D. in English, having written his dissertation on Byron. The relatively small extent of his published work doesn’t capture Michaels’s impact, though, as he was a master of compression who could tell quite a story with just a few words. There are a number of examples that begin and end in a single line. A characteristic one reads, in its entirety: “I phoned my mother. She said, ‘You sound happy. What’s the matter?’” The Collected Stories includes the vast majority of Michaels’s important short fiction, including all of his first two collections, Going Places (1969) and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975). The first of these, containing a passel of awardwinning pieces, got him nominated for the National Book Award. Reports from the trenches of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, these stories pair a thick poetic style with an audacity of content. “Manikin” describes the rape and suicide of a rabbi’s daughter, “Making Changes” takes place at an orgy, “Murderers” features boys who spy on a rabbi’s lovemaking with his wife from the roof of an apartment building, and in “Getting Lucky” a man is ejaculated by an unknown stranger’s hand while riding the subway. Several stories in the latter collection, and the long piece “Journal” from 1990’s Shuffle, are composed of a multitude of short narrative sections that don’t obviously relate, relying instead on the subtler mechanics of a symphony—repetition, juxtaposition, counterpoint—to achieve their cumulative effects. It is surprising that, after finding success with this minimalist approach, toward the end of his career Michaels published a series of conventionally plotted, highly crafted fictions that lack the experimentalism of his earlier work but, perhaps for exactly that reason, have become audience favorites. Late stories such as “A Girl with a Monkey” and “Viva La Tropicana” offer all of the pleasures of mainstream fiction—setting, plot, conflict—that Michaels had studiously avoided for decades, as do the seven tales about Nachman, a mathematician at UCLA, which Michaels was revising for publication in book form at the time of his death in 2003. Raised until the age of five in Yiddish, Michaels consistently impresses with verbal daring and startling images (for example, “The audience, submerged in silence, was like a many-eyed crocodile, the body suspended underwater, inert”). Though often and not unfairly thought of as a New York writer, he made fictional homes for himself in Ann Arbor and the Catskills, Los Angeles, Cuba, and Berkeley (where he taught for decades, mentoring such writers as David 168 Bezmozgis). His work, ranging from lyric flights to, improbably, gangster thrillers, offers something for every taste. If he wasn’t consistent, so what? He could write sentences astounding in their elegance and honesty. Further reading: Michaels’s diaries were published as Time Out of Mind (1999), and much of his work is quite autobiographical, including Shuffle (1990). All of his fiction, meanwhile, is slated to be reissued soon by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Short story junkies should also seek out Richard Stern’s career retrospective, Almonds to Zhoof (2005), or the collection of Harvey Swados’s shorter fictions, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn (2004). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125pPetropolis By Anya Ulinich VIKING, 2007. 325 PAGES. The future of American Jewish literature looks a lot like the past, with a couple of major modifications. Like Mary Antin, David Levinsky, and Sholem Aleichem’s Motl, Sasha Goldberg, the plucky heroine of Anya Ulinich’s debut novel, wends her way from Eastern Europe to the United States, hoping to find the Promised Land there. While Sasha’s predecessors escaped pogroms, though, her motivation to emigrate is much more mundane. Asked in an ESL class in Phoenix, Arizona, to explain why she came, she selects “(b) To seek a better life”—just like her Mexican classmates—because the other choices, including “(a) To escape religious oppression,” “don’t apply at all.” In fact, Sasha’s Jewish grandfather, an engineer, had been “a media star” in...

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