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American Jewish Fiction enough that they continue to inspire budding cultural critics in America and abroad. They have also been the subject of a number of novelistic treatments, the funniest of which is Wallace Markfield’s first novel, To an Early Grave. The title is literal: four intellectuals pile into a car in Greenwich Village and head to Queens for the funeral of Leslie Braverman, who has died tragically at 40. They remember Braverman as a vigorous, larger-than-life schmuck, a miraculously talented writer and raconteur who is not above selling pornographic stories in a pinch (including “a beauty . . . about a Tibetan monk”). The mourner with whom the narrative spends the most time is Morroe Rieff, a fund-raiser and speechwriter for Jewish causes who has moved uptown and feels distanced from the Village scene; he sees himself judged as “something dull and flat and ordinary, an outsider, a nachshlepper, a bourgeois, one who held a job and carried a briefcase and set too much store by appearances”—and no one can ever remember his wife’s name. The others include a writer for a Yiddish daily; a pretentious New Critic of wide erudition; and a neurotic who makes the nearly fatal mistake of owning a car in Manhattan. For those familiar with the New York Intellectuals and their writing, the fact that Braverman is modeled on Isaac Rosenfeld enriches the experience of watching these men bumble their way to the funeral home and cemetery; but even if you don’t recognize any of the specific individuals caricatured here, the types they represent won’t be unfamiliar. Sidney Lumet’s movie version, Bye-Bye Braverman (1968), deserves a look, too, but Markfield’s stew of pop culture, Yiddish, and high culture is a priceless original. Further reading: The list of available sources on the real-life New York Intellectuals keeps growing; Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (1986) is not a bad place to start. Mary McCarthy’s short novel The Oasis (1949) takes on some of the same characters as they form a utopian commune, in a much less cartoony style. As for Markfield, he published four more books, most of which are now sadly out of print—you can track down a copy of Teitelbaum’s Window (1970) easily enough, though—as well as dozens of essays and stories in journals and magazines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57pFriday, the Rabbi Slept Late By Harry Kemelman CROWN, 1964. 160 PAGES. Agirl turns up, murdered, in the parking lot of a synagogue in the New England hamlet of Barnard’s Crossing. In another place and time—say, Shiraz, Iran, in 1910; Kiev in 1911; or Atlanta in 1913—this would be the setup for a charge of ritual murder and maybe a pogrom. In Harry Kemelman’s debut mystery, Friday, the Rabbi Slept Late, which won an Edgar Award, it is the occasion for an unusual whodunit in which Jewish brilliance saves the day. “I know very little 82 about these things,” Kemelman’s hero, Rabbi David Small, admits to the police, “but as a Talmudist,” he continues, “I am not entirely without legal training.” In fact, Rabbi Small, fresh out of seminary, turns out to be no mean sleuth, and it is a matter of time before he has discovered the unfortunate girl’s murderer, surprising not only his congregation and the police chief but also the reader. The first Jewish hero of a detective novel to achieve wide recognition, Rabbi Small stars in a series of books that offer up the typical enticements of the mystery formula: suspense, clever plotting, surprising solutions, and easy reading. Kemelman also includes two less typical elements: a sociological and historical analysis of Conservative Judaism in a suburb modeled on East Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as a handful of lectures on comparative religion in contemporary America. When he isn’t chatting with the police chief, Lanigan, or ferreting out clues, Rabbi Small spends his time educating the locals, Jewish and gentile alike, about Judaism, expounding on the essence of the rabbinical profession, or the relevance of the Talmud to everything from business disputes to criminal detection. Meanwhile, the synagogue’s board deals with fund-raising as well as social and administrative issues. The puzzles in Kemelman’s novels remain more or less puzzling, and as time goes on the books become increasingly valuable as repositories of detail about the postwar period. (Among the surprising circumstances crucial to the plot of...

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