The Frozen Rabbi

The Yiddish literary tradition is full of bizarre characters, offhand curses and incantations, self-deprecatory humor, and a deep sense of humanity. It's a tradition spun by hearty survivalists who have been to hell and back and know how to laugh about it. Steve Stern's THE FROZEN RABBI fits the mold quite well. There are two stories here. The first concerns the nominally Jewish teen Bernie Karp --- overweight, boring and irritating --- stimulated only by food and pornography. In Memphis, Tennessee, he lives with his equally reprobate family, as uncaring, unpleasant and spiritually deadened as he. One day, while rifling through the basement freezer, Bernie discovers an old Chasid frozen in a block of ice. His father casually remarks that it's a family heirloom, over a hundred years old, and lets the matter drop. And so it does, until Bernie is home alone for the weekend during a thunderstorm that cuts the house's power, and the rabbi thaws. And so begins the rabbi's --- a well-practiced, slightly batty mystic --- adventures into a consumerist America that treats enlightenment as both a commodity and a drug. As Bernie wrestles with his newfound sense of Judaism, he studies the tract written by his grandfather that tells the second story of the novel: how the rabbi arrived in America from a tiny village in Poland, frozen all the way. This isn't your classic immigrant story. The characters are all pleasantly mad, and events range from magical to nonsensical. But the story winds up, like so many immigrant tales do, in New York's Lower East Side, depicted as an underworld and a fantasy, a home to gangsters and honest men. And yet this is the more grounded of the two narratives; unlike Memphis's banal surreality, this is recognizable as the home of our grandparents (indeed, at one point the home of most Jewish families in this country). This is a novel of the burdens of our past and the challenges of what it means to be Jewish today. If that sounds like every generic piece of Jewish fiction for the past several decades, you're absolutely right. While Stern dresses his book up in flamboyant personalities, plots and language, this is the same story you've read before. THE FROZEN RABBI is something of a mashup of the grand Yiddish tradition. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. Let's take a closer look at that window dressing. As the rabbi becomes the cynical Deepak Chopra of Memphis, Bernie begins his Jewish education in earnest and almost immediately delves into mysticism. Soon he's having out-of-body experiences and exploring the bounds of the cosmos. But Judaism isn't about life out there; it's about what's here on earth. It's a lesson Bernie learns from two sources. The first is the rabbi, fascinated by modernity's excesses (he is convinced he has died and that this world is a heaven for people of his time), embracing base material desires while shelling out two-bit enlightenment. The second is Bernie's newfound girlfriend, who would like h

Hard to rate this book because at least 2/3 of it was 6 stars, the other 1/3 didn't hold me fast. I had never read Steve Stern before and now I have put all his novels on inter-library loan. He is brilliant--brillliiiiant. His writing is crisp, intelligent, hilariously funny, original, and zany, too. My library places this novel in the fantasy category. I think of fantasy as vampires, zombies, aliens and all that totally stupid stuff that is the current rage--when will it be over I ask the universe every night. The frozen rabbi himself dates from the 18th century. For 300 years he has been sealed in ice and transported from one eastern European location to the next until he makes the voyage to the Lower East Side and then on to Memphis, Tennessee. The book has alternating chapters--the historical periods of several centuries, the most pages given to the period of 1880 or so to 1920s, and contemporary times when the rebbe comes back to life and lives with a family in Memphis. I loved loved loved the chapters from the past. We have pogroms, we have a girl disguised as a boy in order to escape certain death, we have the Jewish mafia, and we have an unlikely and tender love story. We have kabbala and numerology, we have kreplach and pickled herring. The contemporary chapters paled by comparison for me. A friend is reading the book right now as I type, and he loves both sections equally. He finds the rabbi-cum-entrepreneur falling in love with game shows and soap operas on TV, and via this medium learning English, the best part of the book. Perhaps another reviewer who is a better writer can adequately describe the language of the book. There's a lot of Yiddish, only haphazardly defined. I remember bits and pieces from my childhood and the rest, either context would make sense of or I just passed it on by on my way to the next sentence. And as for the English--I don't usually need a dictionary, but I did for The Frozen Rabbi. It's a personal choice if a reader wants to whip through the pages of a 10-pound dictionary and then come up without the word being there! The erudition of Mr. Stern. Cynthia Ozick who wrote the brilliant Puttermesser Papers and knows about flying souls and magical disturbances, says that Stern is our contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer. And Singer was the heir to the Yiddish folklorist tradition that preceded him by hundreds of years. Give a look The Frozen Rabbi, disappointed you won't be.