Fabulous Small Jews

Most of these stories are populated by middle-aged and elderly Jewish men: a richly detailed assortment of professional men -- psychiatrists, attorneys, professors -- as well as a few losers -- dealing with everyday battles of health, love, finances, and family. In "Family Values," two middle-aged brothers squabble over money lent to them by their aging father; "Moe" finds a grandfather confronting his mortality while in the presence of his grandson; "Saturday Afternoon at the Zoo with Dad" has a divorced dad trying to keep his estranged young children entertained. "A Loss for Words" and "Felix Emeritus" are set in retirement communities, and their protagonists comically and poignantly face issues of aging gracefully and creating new friendships. Several men wryly face courtship after years of marriage, relationships, or maintaining their bachelorhood. Middle-aged romance and its complications are featured in "Don Juan Zimmerman," "Dubinsky on the Loose," and "Artie Glick in a Family Way." Structurally these tales are simple, straight-forward narratives -- a lot of backstory which builds up to a climatic scene. But Epstein is a master at superbly orchestrating an accumulation of personal details and the effect of reading these stories together as a book is like spending time with a good friend in his big-city neighborhood and meeting his family and friends. The two stand-out stories are those with the youngest narrators: "Uncle Jack" finds a young man detailing his mother's long-term love affair with an elegant mobster, and "The Executor," where a student is bequeathed with upholding the legacy of his favorite professor, a renowned poet, and his wife.

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 may not live up to statistical analysis but it's the hallmark of great stories, and of the ways imagination reframes lived experience. It's also an indicatation 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; that doesn't necessarily make them happy endings. Luckily, Joseph Epstein knows the difference.

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.

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!

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.