American Jewish Fiction:
A Century of Stories
Copyright © 1999
by Gerald Shapiro
Bison Books
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Shapiro's vigorous and highly entertaining collection of 23 stories forms a
valuable complement to Ilan Stavans's current Oxford Book of Jewish Short Stories
Though some better-known contemporaries are represented by such perhaps overfamiliar pieces
as Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish" and Cynthia Ozick's "Envy," Shapiro also offers such
unconventional delights as a fine, wry Bernard Malamud story ("The Lady of the Lake") and
Philip Roth's "On the Air," a dazzling display of verbal comic energy that first appeared
nearly 30 years ago in Theodore Solotaroff's American Review.
The selections are uniformly well chosen to
portray familiar component parts of the Jewish-American experience: immigration, Holocaust
survival, assimilation, generational conflict, and the hard-fought preservation of traditional
culture.
One regrets the omission of writers like Daniel Fuchs and Lore Segal, but appreciates the
vivid presences of Steve Stern (his frisky "The Tale of a Kite"), Robin Hemley (whose
ironical "The 19th Jew" is a beauty), Melvin James Bukiet, and the precociously gifted
and justly acclaimed Allegra Goodman. There isn't a dud to be found in this consummately
readable anthology. — Kirkus Reviews
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Bad Jews
Copyright © 2004
by Gerald Shapiro
U of Nebraska P
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Leo Spivak is a bad Jew. So are Shifman and Rosenthal and
Suskind. They drink, they smoke, they lust in their hearts; they
stagger blindly into one promised land after another.
Bad Jews and Other Stories form a
nuanced and
comic vision of life, love, and spiritual
adventurism among the
determinedly secular class of contemporary American
Jews.
These are stories about exile. In the title story, Leo Spivak, a Chicago
marketing executive, finds himself trapped in the relentless heat of Tucson, utterly
unfit to mourn the death of his aged, decrepit, nov-very-beloved father:
"He tried half-heartedly to recall the prayers he'd learned as a boy,
but all he could dredge up were tattered fragments, a shred or two of melody,
a few unintelligible syllables.
Well, who was he kidding?"
Cut off from the character-building hardships their parents
and grandparents endured, unable to reach the safety and comfort of
faith because of their inability to believe in much of anything, the characters of
Bad Jews and Other Stories meander through the moral landscape of their
lives in a kind of loopy navigation of the Children of Israel's route home. Along the way,
they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And, as often as not, they find
redemption as well as disaster — redemption that comes when it's least expected,
from the most improbable sources: the flight of a flock of homing pigeons, the deeply
satisfying ache of a broken nose, the soft caress of a dying woman. — from the jacket
Gerry Shapiro's stories delight us, and make us squirm, in the ways that good writing, and
only good writing, can do. — Francine Prose
Gerald Shapiro manages to pull off that rare feat of writing fresh, surprising stories that
are, at the same time, clearly informed by the long, rich tradition of Jewish-American
fiction. Short stories do not get any funnier or any sadder — any wiser or more
beautifully written than these simultaneously entertaining and heartbreaking stories.
— Marly Swick
There's an oft-quoted thespian's line: Dying is easy, comedy is hard. As writers go,
one either has a comic gift or doesn't. Gerald Shapiro has it. For me, that rare combination
of comedy and emotion is the mark of a master. There's another oft-quoted line: Laughter
is good for the soul; do your soul a favor and read Bad Jews and Other Stories.
— Stuart Dybek
As Rabbi Futterman tells Elliott Suskind in "Suskind the Impresario": "if
the mistake you make is bad enough, one is all it takes." This is a
premise for tragedy, but Shapiro shapes it into high comedy in the nine
stories in his second collection. ...
In Shapiro's
pessimistic world, even when a character gets what he wants, it immediately
evokes a feeling of doom. Brimming with keen insight into the psyches of
hilarious, even lovable losers, the wacky brilliance of these remarkable
stories marks Shapiro as a writer to watch. — Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
Shapiro shows his readers the way home both emotionally and spiritually
with his abiding compassion and tightly wound humor. — Booklist
Gerald Shapiro casts an incisive eye over his own
contemporaries. ...
The two most
memorable stories are about Shifman, a young colleague of
Spivak's who
has cancer. He manages to defeat Hodgkin's disease but not
Spivak, who, true to form, cheats him out of his job. Somewhere in
between there is a poetic, filmlike interlude where Shifman and his
girlfriend befriend a mismatched elderly Jewish couple — an uncouth,
loudmouthed man and his shy, cancer-stricken wife. The Milmans don't take
up muchspace in Shapiro's book, but they are perfect. I loved the
description of Mrs Milman's voice as
"rich and ruined, like burnt sugar." — The New York Times
To judge from Gerald Shapiro's wonderful new story
collection, Bad Jews, conflict, exaltation and suffering follow
his displaced generation of wandering Jews everywhere, from
the "old world" of Jewish Cleveland to the lonely frontier of
Oregon, from yuppie Chicago to the wilds of Nebraska. As
evidenced by his previous collection, From Hunger, Mr
Shapiro's Jewish literary imagination draws deeply from at
least two rich sources: the immigrant world of Bernard
Malamud's Bronx shoemakers and Brooklyn egg candlers,
figures burdened and enshrined, identified only by their last
names, and the antic, often wickedly satirical vision of Jewish
American manners found in Philip Roth's writing.
Mr Shapiro's characters appear, above all, lost: a generation
of Jewish baby-boomers floating, unmoored from
identity-conferring sources offered by family, faith and
region. Facing sickness and divorce, their own and their
parents' mortality, they seek salvation through nostalgia,
self-pity and rage.
In the end, Bad Jews marks the emergence of yet another
original voice on the contemporary Jewish American literary
scene — a voice that registers in often richly comic and
profoundly moving ways what Irving Howe called our
"involvements and confusions with Jewishness." Mr Shapiro,
like his artist alter-ego Rosenthal, likes "the sound of Yiddish
in his mouth," and for attentive readers, Bad Jews resonates
with the familiar overtones — comic and fantastic — of Jewish
American writing. — Forward
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From Hunger
Copyright © 1993
by Gerald Shapiro
U of Missouri P
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"To say that this past year had been a bad one would be
to insult all the other bad years of Levidow's
long life. As he was apt to tell anyone who would listen,
every day fresh misery poured on his head. Fruit
spoiled as he carried it home from the market. Cars
splashed mud and slush on him, even on the sunniest
afternoons. ... Pigeons flew for miles to soil his shoulders.
A piece of bad fish at a lunch counter landed
him in the emergency room at Mount Sinai, where someone
stole his glasses.
"'What are you doing to me?' he moaned toward heaven.
'You've got the wrong man.'"
When God tells Levidow to buy a big blue car and get out
of town, he dares to think that his
suffering might be over. Instead he begins a journey that
will put him out on the open highway with a
reincarnation of himself as a much younger man, a hideous
woman and an oversupply of Dr Brown's
soda. His is just one of the journeys undertaken by the characters
of From Hunger. With wit and irony,
Gerald Shapiro leads us from a London park to the streets of
Chicago, from the Vietnam War Memorial
to a New York art gallery, as his characters search for sustenance
in a world full of hunger.
In a stroke of brilliance, solitary Altshuler, the failing, forty-ish
shoe designer of the title story,
invents an open-toed, stiletto-heeled hiking boot that makes him
rich. But money doesn't satisfy his
unnamed longing. When his 380-pound Uncle Phil comes to visit,
Altshuler learns that there are cravings
even greater than his own. "I been hungry my whole life," Uncle Phil
says, as he eats his way through
barbecued ribs and bags of corn chips, toward an inevitable finale
with a meatball sandwich.
During his annual research trip to London in "Golders Green," Ted
Lustig, an inept scholar,
searches for purpose in the life of an obscure German writer
whose greatest achievement was his own
suicide. Lustig is obsessed with the writer whose brilliant failure
mimics his own. But when he meets the
aging Anna Peltzman, he begins to realize that meaning isn't
always revealed in dramatic moments, but
rather in far more puzzling ways.
Lenny Schrank is inexplicably drawn to the city of his father's youth
in "The Community Seder,"
where he happens upon a mysterious synagogue filled with faces
from his past. "Let anyone who is
hungry, come in and eat," chants the congregation. What Lenny
finds at the Passover celebration is an
exquisite recognition of all that is missing from his life —
and a brief moment of community.
With wonderfully idiosyncratic characters and deft use of detail,
Gerald Shapiro takes us beyond
the grimness of the lives of his characters to reveal the hunger — and
the hope — in us all. — from the jacket
A promising first collection of nine stories abut men full of
Weltschmerz and tangled up by affairs of the
head. Shapiro's sardonic delivery is leavened by a black humor
reminiscent of Bruce Jay
Friedman. — Kirkus Reviews
In a dozen short stories, Shapiro conveys the angst and appetites
of many appealing and appalling
characters. ... There is plenty of humor and emotion in these
well-crafted tales of modern life. — Booklist
Shapiro's prose is often acerbic and witty, but his heart is
compassionate as he allows his bemused men a
flash of insight and the gift of a second chance. — Publishers
Weekly
These stories explode out of the Jewish experience, wonderfully
funny and poignant, full of mystery and
that particularly Jewish kind of suffering that brings with it its
own comfort. Shapiro's characters flail
away at their fates, tossing off one-liners as they wipe their brows.
These stories are an odd blend of
naturalism and fantasy that make sense because they spring so richly
from a tradition millennia old.
People address a God who snarls back at them like a surly uncle; they
are chased by phantom lovers,
forced into situations they would not have chosen for themselves,
because there are lessons to be learned.
I was hungry for these stories the way one is hungry for experience.
— Paul Ingram, Midwest Bookseller
The moral fables collected between the covers of From Hunger
remind me of nothing so much as
Bernard Malamud's early fictions. Mentshlekhkayt, that complex
structure of value and action that vests
its hope for redemption in the "Jewish heart," is not the way one would
usually describe Jewish-American
fiction in the 1990's, but, with Shapiro's work, the term is both
appropriate and earned. The Yiddish
phrases and, more important, the Yiddish heartbreak he invokes are
neither an affectation nor an occasion
for cheap exoticism. — Sanford Pinsker, Exponent Extra,
Gerald Shapiro's From Hunger is a book that made me laugh
out loud many times. And for that reason I
thought it could not be serious, earnest, or profound. But even during the
great orgy of reading I went
through for this roundup, I kept remembering lines and moments in Shapiro's
stories. He does magic
realism, but instead of being a South American exotic, he is a Jew in
Nebraska, which is still fairly exotic
I would think. But the passion of these pieces is ecumenical, universal.
— "The Year in the Short Story," DLB Yearbook 1993
Shapiro is a master of the fictional form that breaks free from reality.
He uses his acute imagination to
move beyond the conventional testing of our senses while blending
fantasy with actuality. Each of his
stories is a gem of this difficult genre and each has a special appeal for
Jewish readers since most of the
people he writes about are unabashedly Jews who make liberal use of
Yiddish phrases. ... All the stories
portray singular characters whose experiences are adroitly capture in
Shapiro's nimble and dexterous
prose. He is a gifted writer with a flair for the fanciful and a
simultaneous capacity to depict earthy truth.
This exception combination of hard-headedness and dreaminess marks
Gerald Shapiro as an able writer
with a great faculty for splendid craftsmanship. — Jewish
Journal
These nine stories, many previously published in America's noted
literary quarterlies, display a wild
imagination, a sense of humor, and a sense of character and place.
The protagonists are invariably young
Jewish men, lonely, and struggling for success who have some
quirk in their lives. The themes range from
a man who writes publicity releases for dolphin shows and goes
on to write for zoos and other animal
theme parks, to a lonely scholar writing a dissertation in England
who gets distracted by another writer
and spends years (in vain) studying him instead. The title story is
about a young male shoe designer who
takes in his obese, food-gorging uncle when the latter's wife has
kicked him out. The stories are wry
penetrating, intelligent. A new voice in American fiction. — Festa
Newsletter
Gerald Shapiro's collection of stories, From Hunger,
hovers somewhere between South American
Magical Realism and Marc Chagall's flying fiddlers, but he never
seems silly and he works in a tone and
timbre altogether his own. If Isaac Bashevis Singer had been
writing in English, and if he had been
plucked up out of Manhattan and set down in Nebraska to blink
his blue eyes in astonishment under those
oppressively wide and matching pale-blue skies, his stories would
very likely resemble these. Shapiro
takes chances, not to show off but out of sheer desperation, to describe
in accurate terms, the
extravagances of existence. — David R Slavitt, judge for the
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
Award for a Distinguished Volume of Short Stories Published in 1993
Schlemiels, Schlemazels, Schmegeggies. Gerald Shapiro's collection
of short stories, From Hunger, is so
dense with has-beens and coulda-beens that disillusion hangs heavy
as the smell of cabbage in a tenement.
And yet the stories are uplifting, amusing and magical, with a hint
that the world is ordered despite its
seeming disarray and unfairness. ... Shapiro has many strengths as a
writer, and his good and better
become best when he's weaving tales of supernatural powers. ... Shapiro's
stories are delightfully well
written. The dialogue reflects a perfectly pitched ear and a strong
command of urban Yinglish, and his
odd juxtaposition of the supernatural with the familiar makes
even the most outlandish stories resonate
with meaning. To his credit and the reader's delight, Shapiro grounds
even his most oddball stories and
characters with just enough of the here and now to keep them
engaging and appealing. — Hadassah, February 1994
The nine evocative, often magical stories that comprise Gerald Shapiro's
debut collection are frequently
so stunning that it is a special pleasure to be one of the first reviewers
to share this find with the reading
public. ... Mr. Shapiro's characters never stay out of trouble for long,
but their misadventures provide many
hilarious and touching moments, and we sense that their lives will
somehow turn out all right. It might
take a miracle, but the author of From Hunger can handle miracles.
Mr. Shapiro is a writer with talent to
burn and a sense of humor that imparts a special grace upon his
charming but troubled Jewish. — Forward
He is a deft and clever writer, combining the biting wit of the early
Philip Roth (who also gained
significant recognition for his short fiction), the mysticism of Isaac
Bashevis Singer and the absurdist
irony of Kafka. ... Shapiro's stories are very much connected to each
other; their unifying themes of
hunger, confusion over what constitutes success, and brilliant insights
derived from ordinary situations
combine to make From Hunger as satisfying as a nine-course
dinner or Passover seder. I read the entire
collection in just two days, and savored each morsel. Like Uncle Phil,
I was hungry for more when I
finished the book. We look forward to future offerings from this gifted
and sensitive writer. — Robert A
Cohn, Jewish Light
Although most of the characters in Shapiro's stories are Jewish (or have
Jewish names) and share
attributes and experiences with the traditional schlemiel, they are
otherwise far removed from the worlds
of Sholem Aleichem, Singer, and even Malamud. These are third-generation
Jewish Americans, fully
assimilated in most respects, like Scheer in "A Tale of Urban Horror
and Mayhem" and Ted Lustig in
"Golders Green." Only Lenny Schrank, however reluctantly,
is pulled back into the religion of his
forefathers. And therein lies, I think, a significant commentary
on the state — and perhaps the future — of
Jewish-American literature today. — Studies in Short
Fiction
Though the characters in each story are different, there is a
thread which
ties them together; that thread
is "hunger." For Shapiro's creations the hunger resides in
primal yearnings for belonging, for connecting,
for inclusion. For the reader, "hunger" no longer applies.
After thoroughly digesting Shapiro's sagacity and
sensitivity, the appetite for good literature is slaked, and the
only regret one has is that the dessert — the
final story — comes too soon, all too soon! — Jewish Community
News
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Little Men
Copyright © 2004
by Gerald Shapiro
Ohio State UP
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Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of "A Box of Ashes," one of two novellas in Little Men,
is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father’s dying wish by taking the old
man's ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout
camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It's a long way to go just to dump some ashes,
and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he's
managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they’re still having sex every Friday night).
In "Spivak in Babylon," Little Men's other novella, it's
1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious
30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break:
a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television
commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company's expense account! A room at the fabled
Chateau Marmont (Garbo's old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the
commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls.
Hovering over all the proceedings in "Spivak in Babylon" is the genial, befuddled presence
of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, whose presence haunts Leo's
dreams. — from the publisher
Welcome to the skewed, hilarious, slightly frightening world of Gerald Shapiro.
Here everything
seems to begin well — little bit of post-divorce sex, a seemly amount of
on-the-job flirting. But then, before the characters know it, action tilts and
shifts and they find themselves in wild, inventive, outrageous situations
from which only a brilliant can extract them. The stories in Little Men
are as rich as novels, as surprising as the best comedy, and as complex and
satisfying as life itself. — Erin McGraw
Jazzy, quick ... Gerald Shapiro's collection will grab and hang on —
beware: You will be a prisoner of the musty brown recliner, the beanbag, the breakfast
nook, the backyard swing — gone for hours with
Shapiro and his tales, spinning. Swerving. High velocity mayhem! — Rex Walton,
Lincoln Journal Star
Ample comic gifts ... funny, accomplished ...
Shapiro's own ear is so good, both for dialogue and for pungent exposition. ...
Admirers of Bad Jews won't be able to stop themselves from reading Little Men.
— San Francisco Chronicle
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
