The Angel of Forgetfulness
Heaven and earth engage in a tug of war over the Jewish soul in this sprawling historical bildungsroman. Stern (The Wedding Jester) combines three distinct but interlinked narratives. The first tells the story of Nathan Hart, a Jewish immigrant on the Lower East Side circa 1910 who woos young Jewish bohemian Keni by telling her the second narrative-a tale about an angel named Mocky and his half-human son, Nachman, both of them also living on the Lower East Side in self-imposed exile from heaven. The third narrative belongs to Keni's nephew Saul, a morose, lonely young man who embarks on an odyssey through the post-Vietnam sexual and psychedelic revolutions that takes him to a hippie commune and an avant-garde theater troupe before he settles down as a hermetic Jewish-studies scholar. The many intersections between the stories of Nathan, Mocky, Nachman and Saul suggest the timelessness of a certain Jewish variant of male alienation, as the protagonists struggle-and usually fail-to assimilate and find themselves torn between the carnal and the spiritual. The novel's greatest strength is its colorful depiction of life in a turn-of-the-century Jewish New York full of gangsters, whores, shopkeepers, socialists, artists and yellow journalists, which Stern renders with a piquant Yiddish inflection and a light dusting of magical realism. Somewhat out of place is the story of Saul, a Portnoy-esque figure desperate to lose his virginity, both obsessed with and repelled by the countercultural sexual carnival whirling around him. Stern serves up vivid characters and atmospherics and an often poetic picaresque, but never integrates the novel's complex structure into a satisfying whole.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.