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88pLazar Malkin Enters Heaven By Steve Stern VIKING, 1986. 250 PAGES. The term “magic realism” came into vogue during the Latin American boom of the 1950s and 1960s, as writers such as Gabriel García Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges rocketed to international fame. But magic realism is nothing new in Jewish narratives. What is the biblical book of Bereshit [Genesis], after all, if not an extended saga of family relations punctuated with appearances by angels, miracles, and prophetic dreams? In Yiddish, meanwhile, early-20th-century writers such as I. L. Peretz and S. Anski built upon research in folklore and mysticism to craft modernist literary fables about golems and dybbuks. A descendant of all of these traditions, Steve Stern has winningly brought Jewish magic realism to an unlikely home, Memphis, Tennessee, beginning with his first widely circulated collection of stories, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. In one of Stern’s typical tales, an old man bickers with the Angel of Death, who would like to cart him off to Paradise: “Don’t make me laugh,” the man retorts. “There ain’t no such place.” In another, a young boy conjures up an unearthly suitor for his spinster aunt, while, in a third, a wealthy Laundromat tycoon receives, and attempts Jonah-like to reject, the call to prophecy. All of these magical circumstances occur in one place: the Pinch, an immigrant neighborhood in Memphis where Jews, like the Germans and Irish before them, settled and plied their trades in the early 20th century, before the community moved on up and out to more comfortable suburbs. Stern transforms this real-life neighborhood into the locus of powerful Jewish magic, but the Pinch is not an American version of the ideal or nostalgic shtetl. Crucially, Stern’s miracles take place in a Jewish community on the verge of dissolution (the Pinch has “been dead since the War,” one of Stern’s characters says). Stern’s stories were inspired not only by his readings in folklore and mysticism but also by a job at Memphis’s Center for Southern Folklore, where he was responsible for recording the memories of the former residents of the Pinch before the last of them succumbed to old age. With this in mind, the collection’s first story, “Moishe the Just,” can be read as a metaphor for Stern’s project. It concerns an imaginative boy eager to hold the attention of his friends, who believe their “neighborhood held no particular secrets” and who are more interested in “life outside the Pinch.” To do so, he shares with them every intriguing factoid he can dig up in what they refer to as their “exotic heritage” (eventually, he tries to convince them that an old disheveled man is a lamed-vavnik, one of the world’s 36 holiest Jews). In a sense, this is Stern’s mission, too, one that he articulates, to some degree, in the collection’s finale, which takes place at a writer’s colony: to add miracles and magic to stories about the quotidian details of Jewish life, and thereby to make them alluring to Jewish readers who might otherwise be more concerned with the conflicts and dramas of the wider, non-Jewish world. Stern’s achievement with these witty and well-crafted 123 Titles American Jewish Fiction stories, in other words, is rescuing from irrelevancy the desires and tragedies of one specific Jewish community through the magic of literary invention. Further reading: In addition to Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, Stern has published short story collections, children’s books, novellas—three of which are collected in A Plague of Dreamers (1994)—and a few novels, the most recent and noteworthy of which is The Angel of Forgetfulness (2005), a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Many contemporary Jewish writers—from the Brazilian Moacyr Scliar to the Israeli Meir Shalev—employ techniques of magic realism to some degree; Daniel Jaffe’s anthology, With Signs and Wonders (2003), would be a useful place to start exploring this new Jewish fabulism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89pThe Ritual Bath By Faye Kellerman ARBOR HOUSE, 1986. 277 PAGES. Faye Kellerman’s first novel, The Ritual Bath, trades on a fascination with extremes of human behavior, from the piety and rigidity of ultra-Orthodox Jews to the brutality of rapists and drugged-out anti-Semitic gangbangers. Set primarily at a cloistered yeshivah in the gritty hills outside of Los Angeles, the novel employs some, but not all, of...

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