TWO REVIEWS OF “THE FROZEN RABBI”…NEW BOOK OF A FASCINATING WRITER
Book Review: The Frozen Rabbi
An earlier review of this book is at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/21/AR2010062104405_pf.html
‘The Frozen Rabbi,’ Steve Stern’s fantastical comic novel
By Jess Walter
Tuesday, June 22, 2010; C06
THE FROZEN RABBI
By Steve Stern
Algonquin. 370 pp. $24.95
Among the wonders awaiting the reader of Steve Stern’s exuberant new novel, “The Frozen Rabbi,” is one of sheer logistics: How did he get all of this in here?
The book’s 370 pages are packed to bursting with epic adventure and hysterical comedy, with grim poignancy and pointed satire, as Stern repeatedly shifts time and tone to craft a wildly entertaining tale of the 20th-century Jewish experience and the paradox of tradition.
The author of seven works of adult fiction and two children’s books based on Jewish folklore, Stern grounds his fantastical tale within the perfectly recognizable: “Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents’ food freezer — a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room — an old man frozen in a block of ice.” It seems that while meditating near a pond in Poland in 1889, the mystic Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr was flooded, frozen, cut into a block of ice and eventually left in the care of Bernie’s great-great-grandfather Salo King (or Salo Frostbite, as he’s soon called).
This origin story of the Frostbissen/Karp clan and their rabbi-cicle provides one of the novel’s two parallel tracks. Bernie’s predecessors must negotiate savage pogroms and wrenching poverty in Eastern Europe, gangster-infested streets in old New York, even a short side trip to pre-Israel Palestine. This is all to explain how a family comes to have a rabbi inside its rumpus-room freezer in Memphis in 1999. The family’s adventure provides enough chases, fistfights, love stories, rescues, escapes and human tragedies to plot five novels.
The other rail of the story concerns the acidly comic exploits of the old man once he’s thawed, entirely unharmed, into a world of Oprah, “Reb (Jerry) Springer,” the “orgies of MTV” and a synagogue so progressive, the joke goes, that “it closed its doors on Jewish holidays.” The rabbi goes out into this America to restore the souls of people who “eat till their bellies swell by them like Goliath his hernia, and shop till their houses bulge from the electronic Nike and the Frederick of Hollywood balconette brassiere, but they ain’t satisfied.” Meanwhile, since defrosting the old man, Bernie has become strangely attuned to the mystical powers of faith and is experiencing out-of-body religious reveries for which he turns to the rabbi for explanation.
As a metaphor for the modern incongruity of ancient religious tradition, a frozen rabbi could be embarrassingly heavy-handed, but an actual frozen rabbi? That’s just funny. Page after page, Stern embraces every outrageous possibility, in lush, cartwheeling sentences that layer deep mystery atop page-turning action atop Borscht Belt humor. So while Bernie seeks wisdom, the rabbi goes in for all our modern culture has to offer, turning for salvation to Viagra, Botox injections and the Tantric Kabbalah group at his wildly successful New House of Enlightenment, where “I don’t like to embarrass with too much Jewish stuff the goyim.”
The rabbi has concluded that America’s ease and opulence make it a kind of heaven on earth: “Paradise is where already you are,” he announces. When Bernie assures him that this is definitely not heaven, the rabbi shrugs and says, “Is as good as” and goes back to pinching the bottoms of his growing retinue of female followers.
Of course, not everything Stern throws into the book (and he throws in a lot) works equally well. A few jokes are groaners, and a section from Bernie’s grandfather’s journal — translated from Yiddish as Bernie reads aloud to his quirky girlfriend — loses narrative steam and is eventually abandoned.
But this is like complaining about an extra mushroom on your kitchen-sink pizza. In all, it’s a fine performance: Stories are told, points made, conventions flayed, and the reader comes to care about what will happen to poor Bernie, earnestly seeking transcendence from a fallen prophet. Of course, as the Frozen Rabbi assures him, he shouldn’t worry; all the answers are in his book, ” ‘The Ice Sage,’ adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God . . . which it’s twenty-nine ninety-five retail.”
Walter won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel and was a finalist in 2006 for the National Book Award. He is the author of six books, most recently “The Financial Lives of the Poets.”
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Steve Stern thaws out
Is this wild, funny, rich novel the breakout for our ‘maybe unknown’ writer?
Reviewed by Cynthia Macdonald.
Globe and Mail Update
Published on Thursday, Jul. 22, 2010 4:21PM EDT
In praising one of Steve Stern’s earlier novels, one Web commentator said the author is “still not well known, maybe could be labelled unknown.†This idea – that maybe he is unknown – seems a perfectly Steve Stern way of looking at things: Kabalistic mystery hops in beside the bleakness of Ecclesiastes, and Rodney Dangerfield rides shotgun.
But the truth is that Stern is actually quite famous for being unknown. In the 25 years since he published his first book (Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter), younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick, and have, for some reason, reaped bigger returns. In Jonathan Safran Foer, you see Stern’s fanciful English, in Nicole Krauss his magic realism, in Michael Chabon his updated golems and gun-toting shtarkers. But Stern was there first, and with The Frozen Rabbi it feels like he may be last too: This is a novel so rich, full, funny, dense and exhausting, it feels like there may be no more Steve Stern books left to write – by him, or anyone else.
The Frozen Rabbi, by Steve Stern
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 370 pages, $31.50
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/review-the-frozen-rabbi-by-steve-stern/article1648832/
One afternoon in 1999, 15-year-old Bernie Karp finds a perfectly preserved shtetl rabbi encased in the ice of his family’s freezer. His father explains: “Some people got taxidermied pets in the attic, we got a frozen rabbi in the basement. It’s a family tradition.†He goes on to say that the “saintsicle†met his unfortunate fate a century ago, after tipping into a lake while in a mystical trance. After his initial adoption by Bernie’s great-great-grandfather back in the Pale of Settlement, the rabbi has been passed down through successive generations, an unwieldy heirloom trundled around the world as if he were a pair of sabbath candlesticks.
“He brings luck,†is the reason everyone gives. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong kind. The Karp family’s afflictions are legion, all of them detailed here. First, there is the tale of Salo Frostbissen, who dies rescuing his daughter from vicious assailants. That daughter is the ingenious but afflicted Jocheved, who disguises herself as a man and hauls the rabbi across the ocean to Ellis Island. In New York City, he is then passed to son, Ruben, who eventually becomes a haunted, angry Irgun militant and settles on a kibbutz before the birth of Israel in the 1940s. The final owner is Ruben’s son, Julius, a dull home-appliance salesman in fin de siècle Memphis.
During a power outage, the rabbi melts and is resurrected before the wondering eyes of Julius’s son Bernie, a chubby loner hungry for spiritual guidance. None, however, is forthcoming; wet and spindly as a newborn foal, Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr soon comes roaring to life, and, in a storyline reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Kugelmass Episode (Stern has his forebears too), goes from the pastoral sublime to the urban craptaculous. He throws himself into the world of strip malls, fast women and televangelism with increasing fervour, even as Bernie takes it upon himself to become an ascetic scholar, the just and learned sage he believes his “family pet†should be.
There is a vast amount of material here, and not all of it is handled perfectly. If the Bernie/rabbi bits ultimately leave one cold, it’s probably because all the amerikitsch feels too much like old home week for anyone who has basic cable, or remembers what Heidi Montag’s thighs looked like before her 16th liposuction. But boy, are there moments here: The rabbi’s first observations about television, while he still cleaves to the old ways, are pretty hilarious; “If a man to other men will sell his wife,†he asks, “is not obliged Reb Springer to cleave open his breast and tear out his farkokte heart?â€
Far better – brilliant, in fact – is everything else about this book. In particular, the coming together of Bernie’s great-grandparents is as touching a love story as any I have ever read. The colours of their Lower East Side neighbourhood are also vivid and sharp: the live chickens and dead con men, the sweatshops and stables and crowded tenements. And Stern is just as painterly elsewhere, whether he writes about Palestine or the Pale.
It’s perhaps unusual that a comic writer should also be such an astute historian, but Steve Stern – for all his doppelgangers in the literary world – is truly one of a kind. If good fortune favours him more than it does the Karps, this may finally be the book that marks him as a known commodity. Then again, there is something so achingly sad and funny about the non-fame he already has, and the lovely writing that has given rise to it. Why mess with a good thing?
Cynthia Macdonald is a Toronto journalist and fiction writer. Her freezer contains nothing more interesting than fish sticks.
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