The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six

Several years ago a group of us studied how to write "folktales" under a Jewish author. These are the stories we were trying to write - stories delivered to us in a neat package by Jonathon Keats. The reader quickly learns to expect the unexpected - how does a thief revive a town, a klutz become a circus star, a gambler a social reformer? In Keats world, these are the lives that keep us in existence. The social context of the stories are sufficiently old, rural, ethnic ... to keep the illusion of collected folktales alive. And yet, the context also points to our own foibles - the characters' (and our own) participation in the absurdity that is the human condition. The human condition that Keats encourages us to smile (or even laugh) about. As for the writing, Keats has an unerring eye for the right details to pull us into and along a story. The writing reads very smoothly but retains the "folk touch" of stories collected by an academic. The most likely response to this volume -"encore, encore".

I would suggest making sure that when you start reading this book that you make sure you have plenty of time for it, because it is extremely hard to put this book down. This is the best work of fiction that I have read in a long time. I started the book yesterday and read straight through. It is really that good and that entertaining. For such short stories the author has an amazing ability to pull the reader into the characters, and really makes the reader invest something in the story right from the beginning. This is what makes the stories so compelling, but it is the author's imagination and story telling that keeps you hooked and reading on. Each story has the feel of a parable which was the author's intent, but the stories are not preachy. What I most enjoyed was how the author was able to employ such clever twists in the stories. At the beginning of each new story I would find myself wondering how the author is going to turn this character into a lesson. Just how was each story going to work to its unique conclusion was something I wondered with each new story. This is just a wonderfully written book. I enjoyed every page of it, and I feel very comfortable highly recommending this excellent little book to everyone.

Genesis 18:20-32 in the Old Testament tells the story of God's plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's attempt to talk God out of it. It starts with God's announcement of his intention, and Abraham asked "Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?" And God says for the sake of 50 righteous men, He would spare the cities. So, seeing his opening, Abraham proceeds to negotiate God down, step-by-step, to sparing Sodom and Gomorrah if at least 10 could be found. Well, to cut to the chase, not even 10 righteous men could be found, so Lot escapes with his wife (who looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt) and his two daughters, and God destroys the cities utterly. A similar story in the Talmud from the time of the Prophet Isaiah tells of the Lamed Vav, the thirty-six righteous ones, who are hidden among all of humanity. Writer Rachel Remen says the story was told to her by her grandfather: "In this story, God tells us that He will allow the world to continue as long as at any given time there is a minimum of thirty-six good people in the human race. People who are capable of responding to the suffering that is part of the human condition....If at any time, there are fewer than thirty-six such people alive, the world will come to an end. "Do you know who these people are, Grandpa?" I asked, certain he would say "Yes." But he shook his head. "No," he told me "only God knows who the Lamed-Vovniks are. Even the Lamed-Vovniks themselves do not know for sure the role they have in the continuation of the world, and no one else knows it either. They respond to suffering, not in order to save the world but simply because the suffering of others touches them and matters to them....It turned out that Lamed-Vovniks could be tailors or college professors, millionaires or paupers, powerful leaders or powerless victims. These things were not important. What mattered was only their capacity to feel the collective suffering of the human race and to respond to the suffering around them. "And because no one knows who they are, anyone you meet might be one of the thirty-six for whom God preserves the world. It is important to treat everyone as if this might be so." My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging The Lamedh-Vov of Jonathan Keats' book are described in 12 stories the narrator comes across, from a list found in the recently uncovered ruins of a lost synagogue, and it seems "male and female, He created them" (an insightful and wonderful touch by Keats). As in the tradition, they do not know their own true natures and they come from all walks of life. There is Alef the Idiot, Beit the Liar, Gimmel the Gambler, Dalet the Thief, Heyh the Clown, Vov the Whore, Zayin the Profane, Chet the Cheat, Tet the Idler, Yod the Inhuman, Yod-Alef the Murderer, Yod-Beit the Rebel (th

Don't let the title mislead you, there are only 12 short stories here but these twelve are so well written, so engaging, and so enlightening that I devoured it in less than 24 hours. From the first page we are dropped into a fictional world where a Jewish scholar shares his latest find with us in the form of "real accounts" of the lives of the Lamedh-Vov who justify the existence of humanity in the mind of God. We meet 6 men and 6 women whose lives are both tragedy and victory as they merely live best they can, battered and bolstered by the world around them. Set in an unspecified but likely early modern Europe, we see them and feel for them as embody what might be called cultural icons. Love them or hate them, their tales touched me and made me keep reading and reading.

These stories are like a rich chocolate dessert--you can't read the book fast. Every story deserves a full stop, a break, to enjoy. The stories themselves are lovely, floating in a fairy tale world of odd logics (a town that refuses to sleep, a city that Death didn't visit, etc) that serve as backdrops for the themes of each story. Like fairy-tales, also, morality doesn't often figure into the equation, and characters are types used to illustrate the larger theme; but thankfully, in these stories there *is* a larger theme to each story (what it *is* is your job to puzzle out while you digest each story). This means that if you want mystery, action, thrills, etcetera, this book may not be to your taste. I do wonder about the necessity of the fictional scholarly apparatus that bookend the stories: I'm most familiar with that mysterious-disappearance-but-left-text device from Lovecraftian horror tales, so it reads to this reader, at least, as a bit cheezy. Not sure what his purpose is--perhaps to create some sort of DaVinci code mystique? It does seek to elevate the tales from just a story-collection, but I'm honestly not sure that they need that kind of help. Beautiful, haunting, lyrical. A must-read.