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125 Laughter and Trembling: The Short Fiction of Steve Stern and Nathan Englander Monica Osborne In an essay called “After the Law,” Steve Stern recounts an old Hasidic tale1 regarding the forest, the fire, and a prayer: The Baal Shem Tov, when he has a problem, goes to the forest, lights a fire, says a prayer, and finds wisdom. The next generation has forgotten the prayer, but they can still go to the forest and light the fire; the generation after that has forgotten the prayer and can’t make a fire, but they can still go to the forest. But the following generation is unable to find the forest, light the fire, or remember the prayer, though at least they know the story—and that must suffice. Then along come the children of the children of the immigrants , so divorced from tradition and community that they can’t even recall the story.2 Referring to his own childhood and early adult years, marked by little more than the most marginal trappings of Jewish culture and thought, Stern asserts the dangers of inhabiting a storyless space—of being so forward looking that we forget how to gaze back onto past narratives—and chooses instead to search for the stories of earlier generations as a means to gain ownership of the stories as well as access to the memories that inspired them. Consequently, the fiction of Stern draws so forcefully from the memories of the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant experience, that it is often difficult to remember that its impetus was indeed Stern’s own accidental discovery of the Pinch, a shtetl-like community of Orthodox Jews living on North Main Street in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Stern describes the jarring experience of bending around the corner of Poplar 126 MonIca oSborne Avenue and North Main Street, and feeling as though he had fallen “through the fabric of time” as he stumbled into what magically appeared to be a “blighted old ghetto” neighborhood, a street that seemed inhabited by ghosts that would later colonize his most successful fiction.3 It was a community that was not quite of this world, but almost eerily unaware of, or apathetic to, its status as a community of outsiders. For here was seemingly a microcosm of lost Eastern European Jewry, an immigrant society consumed with articulating through word and deed the gestures of a phantom world. It was, perhaps, particularly ironic that such a community—devoted to making the past reappear—thrived in the Southern city of Memphis, a “city remarkable for erasing its own past.”4 Ghosts they were not, however, and Stern found that their “antics made for diverting stories.” Indeed, Stern’s stories—much like those of Nathan Englander, whose work will be discussed later in this essay —resonate with the collision of Old and New Worlds as modern secularism and Jewish religious tradition come crashing into each other, leaving shards of narrative that magically recreate the Old World and Jewish American immigrant shtetls blatantly infused with a bizarre but comical mixture of sexuality, mysticism , Yiddishisms, religious zealotry, and Old World folklore. They are humorous in a way that is almost fanatical as seeming polarities are forced to merge in a reckless effort to recapture a lost Jewish art and tradition. In the title story of Stern’s short-story collection The Wedding Jester (1999),5 Saul Bozoff accompanies his mother to a wedding at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills—a place that Saul holds in magical regard, but perhaps only because it is the place “where magic died.”6 He grudgingly attends the wedding, his mind occupied instead by the fact that his fiction—he happens to be a Jewish American fiction writer—has earned him only a very small audience in what “he considered ‘the ghetto’” (161). Ironically, Stern describes Saul’s fiction as “full of exotic Jewish legends translated to contemporary settings . . . well-received among a generation that was already half legend itself. . . . Among his peers, [however,] Saul Bozoff had no currency at all” (161). Much like Irving Howe in the late 1970s, Saul believes that the kind of literature he writes—Jewish American fiction—is part of a dying breed of literature that, like the Catskills, is past its heyday and now more of a cultural artifact than a vibrant indicator of a flourishing culture. Saul was in his early forties when he was “seduced” by the notion of people’s “heritage” (162)—heritages...

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