Fabulous Small Jews

Rating:
Summary: Like The Title--Distatseful
Review: A small work of distasteful stories that exploits the underbelly of human experience. This is a book for the dispirited and those without hope. It is no more than a breadcrumb trail of dispair masquerading as nourishment--it substitutes irony for redemption, craft for insight. The title tells it all-small stories of a self-hating author. If you want to be depressed and pretend you are thinking, better get a mediocre bottle of scotch and smack it a against your head instead of spending time with this little book.

Rating:
Summary: fabulous short stories
Review: Although there are 15 stories listed in the table of contents, it's impossible to come up with a real total of all the narratives in Joseph Epstein's Fabulous Small Jews. Epstein uses stories for every possible function: to set a mood (a joke), to set a place (childhood memory), to describe a character (every character in this book receives a short bio). Reading Epstein is a little like wandering through a city without a map; one story ends and another begins and, slowly but surely, something of human experience becomes evident. Like Homer or the Brothers Grim, Epstein's stories read like they've accumulated through a dense oral culture before transcription. Of course they haven't, and that's one of the reasons this book is so good.

The other reason is that Epstein never forgets that, willful as people may be, human agency is only truly tested by fate, by what we never see coming around the corner till it changes our lives. Fabulous Small Jews revolves around some of the most difficult situations fate can come up with: bereavement, divorce, cancer, alzheimers, weariness of life. It's a messy world, and the only redeeming feature is that Epstein's characters never stop trying to do the right thing, never stop trying to wrest a livable destiny from a cruel fate. The fact that they manage to do just that in credible ways is the hallmark of stories, not of life; of imagination, not reality. It's also an indicator of Epstein's generosity--both toward his characters and his readers. Dignified resolutions restore our ability to make hard decisions with courage, clarity, and hope, but that doesn't necessarily make them happy endings. Luckily, Joseph Epstein knows the difference.




Rating:
Summary: Old-fashioned stories of high quality
Review: Epstein's work is old-fashioned in the best sense of the term. There is no "writers' school" trendiness here. Each story packs in a lifetime of detail about one or more characters, with plots that dwell on similar themes: Jews growing up in Chicago, illness and death, family tensions, the debt to high culture. On the surface this may seem repetitious, but it never is. Indeed, the literary cohesion of the stories is one of the charms of this collection -- it is not all over the place. Curiously, it reminds me in some ways of the stories of Louis Auchincloss; even though their two ethnic milieus are far apart, both writers share a profound sense of the moral dimension of life. This moving work is sensitive, humorous, gripping. In 340 pages we get the stuff of twenty novels, all propelled by a power of description that is continuously engrossing.

Rating:
Summary: Bellow it's not
Review: Fiction about old Jewish guys in Chicago is Saul Bellow territory, and to say that Joseph Epstein isn't Saul Bellow isn't fair criticism, because who is? But these stories don't do much for me. The characters are broad stereotypes, and the entire effect is labored -- too self-consciously clever.

But what really annoyed me was the constant name and place dropping, and meaningless detail. I live in Evanston, just like Prof. Epstein, but knowing that the retired European lit professor at Northwestern in the first story bought a cake for his sister at Tag's Bakery on Central Street, instead of, say, Judy's Bakery on Main, doesn't do much to establish atmosphere (especially for readers who aren't familiar with Evanston bakeries) or define his character, and of course adds nothing to the plot. Neither, for that matter, does Epstein's announcement that the man is gay, or at least was when he was young enough to have any kind of sex at all. The fact doesn't explain anything the character does, or thinks, or how others respond to him. It's just a trait that Epstein sticks on his character, coming up with a list that makes him seem distinctive (he's not just a Viennese Intellectual Holocaust Survivor; he's a Gay Viennese Intellectual Holocaust Survivor!)-- but in short fiction, especially, characters are defined by what they do or say, not by where the author tells us he bought dessert, or who the author tells us he used to have sex with.

I have the same complaint about the 38-year-old Catholic female lawyer who falls in love with the 57-year-old Jewish drycleaner. Leaving aside the implausibility of the lady's proffered explanation, which is that he's a nice guy and there aren't many of them out there (this may be so, but I still haven't noticed a whole bunch of talented and attractive women marrying balding old nebbishes who are way below them on the educational and job status scale), Epstein makes a point of telling us that she works a Sidley & Austin, an actual big downtown Chicago firm. Oh, THAT explains it. If she had worked at McDermott Will & Emery, who knows how things might have worked out.

The story that made me stop reading was the fourth, which features a stereotypical AK handball player (at the Bernard Horwich JCC, we are told unnecessarily) who reconsiders his decision not to have bypass surgery when he realizes that his scrawny, bedwetting eight-year-old grandson, whom our hero's nogoodnik son abandoned, might benefit from having his grandfather around. Leaving aside the question of why the old man didn't realize this about six years earlier, when Epstein tells us the son decamped for Seattle, and start spending more time with the boy then, this is sappy enough to be an episode of Touched By An Angel. The story ends with our crabby but lovable old guy eating pastrami at Manny's, another bit of superfluous local color. Also, why anyone, let alone a man who makes his living selling scales to delis, as we are told this guy does (we are even told the name of the scale company), would drive from Rogers Park to Roosevelt Road to eat at that overhyped dump is beyond me.

Rating:
Summary: Bellow it's not
Review: How I Spent my Summer Vacation...well, at the top of the list will be reading this fine collection of short stories, almost all of which take place in Chicago. Indeed, I grew up next door to a building in which one of the characters lived. I was moved by this collection of stories about mostly middle and late aged Jews. I'm much younger then the subjects of this stories, but I was moved anyway. It is beautiful collection about religion, love, and a person's place in the world. It is a collection that I won't soon forget. Kudos to Epstein for getting the small Chicago details right--it just makes the stories richer. I've already lent this book out--I may never see it again! I loved it!

Rating:
Summary: Epstein's Collection is indeed fabulous...
Review: How I Spent my Summer Vacation...well, at the top of the list will be reading this fine collection of short stories, almost all of which take place in Chicago. Indeed, I grew up next door to a building in which one of the characters lived. I was moved by this collection of stories about mostly middle and late aged Jews. I'm much younger then the subjects of this stories, but I was moved anyway. It is beautiful collection about religion, love, and a person's place in the world. It is a collection that I won't soon forget. Kudos to Epstein for getting the small Chicago details right--it just makes the stories richer. I've already lent this book out--I may never see it again! I loved it!

Rating:
Summary: Chekhov in Chicago
Review: I have enjoyed reading Joseph Epstein's essays, and there are two kinds that I especially admire. The first are the personal essays that are autobiographical and often very funny, and the second are the literary essays that are rather dark and certainly sobering. In these stories Epstein manages to combine elements of both the funny and the dark in a way that resembles Chekhov, without, obviously, rising quite to that level. He does, however, rise well above the many recent American short stories that seem to present little more than puzzling ephipanies. Instead he describes, with considerable respect, characters from ordinary bourgeois life in Chicago, and he actually tells stories about their lives. That alone is practically heroic, and deserves praise.

Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: I've long enjoyed reading Joseph Epstein's essays, even if his political sensibilities diverge from my own. He has a great command of language and literature. It reflects a lifetime of learning as well as contemplating his environs and his craft. Among other things that one can say about Mr. Epstein is that he is a literary geographer of deserved renown, especially when his landscape is metropolitan Chicago.

Multiple friends commended this book to me. Some of them were attracted by its Chicago take, others by its Jewish theme. In my estimation, one of the great strengths are the class distinctions that Mr. Epstein uncovers (mercilessly).

I didn't like everything about this book yet I was enthralled by it. Clearly some of it is darker than I anticipated. Yet much of it is superbly real (translate as close to home). I could think about my own life, my own family, my own friends, and my own experiences, identifying various epsisodes with Epstein's well-devised tragically comical characterizations.

The more I read, the more I was drawn in. Don't put this book down because you are taken aback by some of its earliest chapters. In the end, you will find your literary reward, I can assure you.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Small Stories, Almost
Review: The title was in poor enough taste to draw my attention. The writing quickly drew me in. And once drawn in, I found it hard to put this book down. What is it? A collection of dark, brooding stories about old guys (mostly) facing loss, disillusionment and despair. Most of these guys have never had a meaningful long-term relationship. If they married, it didn't work out. If they had children, they typically abandoned them. If they did have good marriages, they lost them.

Most of the characters are old or aging men, most of the action takes place in Chicago. Most are Jewish, in a Seinfeldian, cultural sense, and have little relationship to Judaism, the religion. They are often uncomfortable with or embarrassed by their Jewish origins. Still, they display that typical Jewish penchant for ruminating, philosophizing, wondering who they really are.

Author Joseph Epstein is an extremely talented writer. He does a great job with these stories, injecting bits of manic humor into these otherwise gloomy tales. Still, there is something troubling about the collection, something that leaves--well--a certain unpleasant aftertaste. The stories that start out with so much punch, that are so entertaining, almost always seem to end with a whimper, with nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing to hope for. Sometimes those endings seemed contrived, as though the author simply didn't know how to end the story.

Still, even with its shortcomings, this is a most entertaining collection, and I can certainly recommend it. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Rating:
Summary: Epstein at his very best
Review: What's not to love?? Humor, wit, pathos. Epstein delivers. The wonderfully written short stories are as relevant to the human conditon as they are to the Chicago Jewish experience.
If you liked the Goldin Boys, you will definitely like this one.