A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas (review)

Book Reviews 131 forth between early and later, famous and forgotten writers, Uffen demonstrates the cable metaphor of the book's title. Sally Ann Drucker Department of English North Carolina State University A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas, by Steve Stern. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. 267 pp. $20.00. Stern is one of the most interesting younger writers on the American Jewish literary scene. He is less concerned with documenting the immigrant experience and its aftermath than he is with the interplay of the Jewish imagination with Jewish history and Jewish texts. He sets his work in the Pinch, a fabricated ghetto of Memphis, which he once described as a relocation of the "whole cockamamie circus of Second Avenue [circa 1920] to the bluffs of his Mississippi River town." Stern achieves this relocation by sheer force of his prose style, a zesty tzimmis of Judaic legend, American popular lore, bizarre catalogs, and juicy metaphors and similes. Two of the works in this volume, "Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams" and "Hyman the Magnificent," are just over 50 pages. Both protagonists seek to overcome the terminal condition of being a nice Jewish boy. Zelik climbs a tree at night and steps into the dreams of his neighbors. He, or rather his soul, manages this feat by leaving his body behind, and somehow in the waking world these nocturnal visitations transform him from a pathetic wretch into an idolized hero. But he ends them when the strain of sleeplessness becomes unbearable, and his status plummets. He therefore decides to make one last visit, in which he severs his soul from his weak and ungainly body-willing his own death in order to enjoy permanent residency in the collective dreams of the community but with no access to the dreamers, among whom he had led a miserable life but nonetheless belonged. In the second novella, an orphaned young man seems bent on destroying himself as he attempts to reenact escapes performed by his late idol, Houdini. Undaunted by increasingly severe injuries and impervious to failure, ridicule, and rejection, Hymie abandons his project only after he nearly dies while practicing Houdini's escape from live burial. Unconscious 132 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 from lack of oxygen, Hymie has a vision-his long-dead parents denounce his mad flirtations with death, from where so far as they know there is no escape. He returns from the grave to use his mastery of Houdini-esque trickery to claim his bride just as she is to marry his rival. With their surprise endings and reversals of tone, these complementary tales form a dyptich: Zelik, the terrified weakling drunk on ecstatic visions, chooses death, while Hymie, the iron-willed would-be artiste steeped in Houdiniana , veers off his course of self-destruction at the last moment by choosing life. "Annals of the Kabakoffs" is a far more ambitious enterprise spanning over 150 pages and three generations. Yankel the grandfather is a yeshiva boy who is kidnapped into the Czar's army and eventually finds his way to Memphis, where he marries and settles down. Moses, his son, founds a successful printing business, but his life is defined by the night he is seduced by his "Aunt" Laylah, a daughter of Lilith. Itzhak, or Itchy, their illegitimate offspring, eventually runs away to become a carney freak but then returns to take up (in his own way) his grandfather's devotion to his collection ofJewish books and to drive his father first to attempted suicide but ultimately to atonement and reconciliation. Stern does not unfold this family saga chronologically but jumps forward and backwards in order to highlight his major preoccupations-do Jews live in or out of history, in or out of their sacred texts? In Grandfather Yankel's yeshiva days, he used to dismiss Zionist notions of emigration from Russia and return to Palestine by reasserting the primacy of the Torah: "The text is our homeland." Stern is echoing George Steiner, whose essay entitled "Our Homeland, The Text" appeared in 1985 in Salmagundi, a journal published at Skidmore College, where Stern teaches creative writing. Steiner argues that the essential genius of...