Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven

Steve Stern is one of a group of younger writers who are investigating what it means to be a third-, fourth- or fifth-generation American Jew in a time when more than 50 percent of us intermarry, most of us are secular or nonobservant, and, despite our passion for education, know little about the religious culture that is the basis of our (largely Eastern European Ashkenazic) ethnic culture. Stern stands out from a very talented pack (Pearl Abraham and Allegra Goodman are two of its better known members) because he is a Southerner and because, in "Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven," he has created a shtetl below the Mason-Dixon line--a shtetl that never existed. The book's related stories read less like discrete stories and more like chapters from a novel, though each might be read independently--as, for example, in a magazine or an anthology.In his rueful, wistful humor, Stern reminds me very much of the Polish writer in Yiddish, Chaim Grade ("Rabbis and Wives") and somewhat, though less, of Cynthia Ozick in "The Pagan Rabbi."Buy this book, treasure it, and share it with your friends.